Dean Kamen, Manual Laborers, and You

[Laremere]

Dean was talking *to* the kids, yes, but he was talking *about* the economy as a whole. He specifically said that we don't want the old jobs back (which is hard to hear when you know a lot of people who would really, really, REALLY like to have their old jobs back -- there's a lot more pride in swinging a hammer than being on welfare).

I took it that he was saying it's much better to create new jobs which increase our quality of life than to bring back old jobs which due to the increase in our levels of technology are no longer required.
It's something I've thought about myself, it seems that whenever a large amount of jobs are no longer needed, people who worked in those jobs should now be able to work in new jobs which increase our quality of life. The problem with this is that someone is needed to create those new jobs, a fine challenge considering the crowd.

As for Dean's comment about nobody wanting to be a manual laborer, I didn't notice during the speech, but I agree that he is incorrect about that statement. I know I don't want to do manual labor, I bet Dean doesn't like manual labor, but I know plenty of people who enjoy it, and I try to not take for granted said labor which makes our quality of life possible. It is my firm belief that the diversity of people is one of our greatest strengths as a people, however one problem is people may not see that they have the opportunity to pursue what they love to do as a career or even that such an opportunity exists. I find FIRST great in it's ability to inspire people who may be people which make great engineers and mathematicians, however I don't think everyone wants to be one, nor should everyone be one.