On Wed, 22 Sep 2010 08:34:10 -0400, "J. Clarke"
wrote:

On 9/22/2010 7:26 AM, J. D. Slocomb wrote:
On Tue, 21 Sep 2010 20:25:38 -0700 (PDT), rangerssuck
wrote:

On Sep 21, 9:38 pm, J. D. wrote:
On Tue, 21 Sep 2010 10:25:43 -0500, Don Foreman





wrote:
On Tue, 21 Sep 2010 04:47:26 -0700 (PDT), Jessica Wabbit
wrote:

Not a lot of jobs other than medical or oilfield work here in
Taft/Bakersfield
Nearly all the jobs need serious college degrees.

Gunner

Bakersfiled is a college graduate community? No Walmart, no Mc
Donald, ...?

Unemployed PhD's have about the same income as unemployed dropouts.

In the recession of '71, a lot of CA aerospace engineers were flipping
burgers and pumping gas. Unfortunately, there are no longer any
gas-pumping jobs.

I had an interesting conversation with an ex-Boeing employee. If you
remember there were articles in the Sunday papers about the poor
wretches who, after 10 years with Boeing as an aerospace engineer were
now relegated to driving taxi's and drawing unemployment.

I asked the bloke "what about all the skilled craftsmen, the
machinists, welders, etc.?" He says, "Oh, they all moved to other
cities - plenty of work for those kind of chaps."

Cheers,

John D. Slocomb
(jdslocombatgmail

Years ago (I don't remember exactly when, but sometime in the early
1990s, I think) my brother was in electronics tech school. Many of his
classmates were former engineers from a recently closed defense
contractor. They had gone to tech school to learn a marketable skill.


A fellow I knew at Edwards AFB had an interesting theory. When his son
graduated from high school he told the kid to go learn a trade -
welder, machinist, bull-dozer driver - any skilled trade and when the
kid had that under his belt toe old man was willing to put him through
collage. The theory being a skilled craftsman can always find a job.

The up-shot was that the kid went out and learned the butcher's trade
and then talked the old man into fronting up the cash to open a
butcher's shop instead of paying for a collage education. It seems
that a really, really, high end butcher's shop that trades only in
properly aged beef and gets written up in the L.A. newspapers so that
people drive, or send the servants, clear across town to shop can be a
somewhat better investment then a collage education :-)

Yep. I went to college because my parents insisted on it, not because I
had any particular career path in mind. Wasted a lot of time and money
and can't see where it really did me much good in the long run.

The problem is that Collage/University is basically just another form
of apprenticeship - i.e., it trains one to do a specific job and
certainly if one plans a career as a doctor, lawyer, engineer, it is a
distinct advantage as it crams a lot of knowledge into one's head very
quickly. On the other hand, if one is not to work in one of the
specialized career fields I wonder whether it is not highly overrated.
I wonder whether collage really was an advantage to Warren Buffett's,
who initially dropped out of collage saying that he knew more then the
professors. Bill Gates, who famously, dropped out of Harvard and Steve
Jobs who attended only one semester.

Cheers,

John D. Slocomb
(jdslocombatgmail)