ive worked in psych/mental health for almost a decade. i can confidently say 99.9% of homeless people are not homeless because they want to. many of the alternatives, like shelters, are in abysmal/dangerous conditions, usually have extremely strict rules (ex: closing the doors at 6pm, but your job ends at 530pm and the bus was late), and are run by churches (problem for lgbt, atheists, etc). often these places are worse than living on the streets in terms of safety and stability.
not everyone on the street is a drug addict, and for those that are many are either self-medicating because they cant afford meds they need (or cant keep appts due to transportation, not having a phone, etc), or because being homeless is boring and brutal and unkind so what else do you do? forced rehab objectively doesnt work and is often more dangerous than letting them use drugs. most homeless folks have nowhere to store their belongings, nowhere to go to the bathroom, nowhere to shower or bathe or clean their clothes, nor do they have a physical mailing address required by virtually all jobs for tax reasons.
you want to stop the “homeless epidemic”? treat them like people, pay people more, control rent prices to keep them affordable, demand universal healthcare, and demand funding this s**t.
Not everyone who works in fast food is:
– A teenager trying to make some fun money, or trying to save up for school or a car.
– “So stupid they couldn’t get a real job”
– A felon who couldn’t get hired anywhere else
– Lazy and entitled and “wants $15 an hour to play on their phone all day”
Most people who work in fast food are:
– Hard working, honest folks who want to be able to pay their bills and take care of their family.
– Fed up with you assuming they’re too lazy or dumb to get a “real job”
Edit: Lmaooo this one really got some people riled up, huh?
All buildings require a hefty amount of maintenance and most commercial buildings would be unusable in less than a month without a team of janitors and sanitisers.
We are constantly on our feet and there’s always something that needs fixing, so even on a quiet day, I walk around 30k steps.
Television and film portray some professions in a more positive light, and others are portrayed more negatively. Sales-related professions usually have it the worst. Think Wolf of Wall Street, where the characters are money-grabbing, coked-out, and ruthless anti-heroes. On the other side of the spectrum, there’s The Office, where salespeople are often incompetent and spend their workday pranking each other.
Architects and engineers are the most positively portrayed professions in film and television. A member of the profession, Andrew Hawkins, writes that the media usually portrays them as “mentally unstable to comical to starving artists.” He takes Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother as a good example of an architect in the starting stages of their career.
“I think that some of Ted’s personality traits are similar to architects in the real [world]; sometimes pretentious, a stickler for semantics, full of random information, and small amounts of obsessiveness; all character traits I see all the time in myself and my colleagues.”
Researchers at the Southern University of California analyzed data from 70 years of media subtitles and film in the UK and the US. They found that manual labor and military occupations were mentioned a lot less over the years.
The professions that get the most attention nowadays are STEM, arts, sports, and careers in entertainment. This correlates directly with what professions are popular at the moment.
They also found that there were more negative sentiments in the media towards lawyers, police, and doctors as the years went by. At the same time, TV shows and movies stopped lumping doctors and nurses into a monolith.
There are increasingly more mentions of specialized medical professions: cardiologists, gynecologists, and neurologists. On the other hand, attitudes towards astronauts, detectives, therapists, musicians, singers, and engineers became more positive.
Inventory is all controlled and monitored via computer systems these days. Management would have a mental fit if our inventory system showed that we had stock of an item and can’t account for it.
Edit
When you ask us to check in the back. I used to take a small break because I know how our inventory system works and there’s no sense for me to make an effort to look for something that I know we don’t have instock.
We probably don’t have a “route” per se. We fly a type of plane and we bid for “trips” each month which depending on the plane you’re currently flying could vary enormously.
If you’re senior enough you could bid a “route” let’s say weekday Miami to New York and back 10 times a month and that’s all you choose to do.
The Plane flies itself. This one isn’t really true. The autopilot is a tool to reduce workload but we still have to “tell” the plane what to do and understand the rules around when, why, and how to do it.
Bass players are failed guitarists.
Most of us can play guitar too. We just prefer bass.
Can it be fun? Yes.
Is it a touristy, sightseeing trip? No.
Don’t get me wrong, we respond to plenty of true emergencies and there are definitely people out there who are appreciative and doing the right thing when it comes to taking care of themselves.
However, for every one, actual, emergency there is *at least* one 400lb type 2 diabetic on the third floor apartment who hurt their knee two weeks ago and now suddenly during a snowstorm they want us to take them to the hospital because they ran out of hydrocodone and never followed up with Ortho like they were supposed to.
I worked at a dealership where the parts markup was less than 10% and we undercharged customers constantly. We were still accused of being scalpers, or at least too expensive for no reason, with the usual reasoning being that our officially licensed dealership was not as cheap as a private shop ran by a 27 year old guy who opened it after apprenticing for 3 years and dealt in stolen parts.
Also, yes. We could have given you a much better product. It just would have cost more than you would be willing to pay.
Counselling. We can’t fix everyone. You can’t force someone into counselling. It doesn’t matter how much relatives want someone to do it (eg a wife forces a husband or mother forces a child to go) unless they want to, there is nothing we can do. They need to be willing to engage. Even then it’s not a fix all, for example with bereavement you won’t stop being sad, we just give you tools to learn to carry on with your new normal.
Already, I’ll bite. I’m former Air Force Intel, 14NX. Laser guided bombs and bombs of any type are not pinpoint accurate. There will always be some sort of deviation whether it be 200 feet or 1500. Even dumb bombs are not accurate with the on-board bomb calculator that most bombers have.
Pilots are f*****g tiny. I could have qualified to be a fighter pilot because I’m 5’ 9”. Pilots are also some of the biggest nerds out there since you need to be an officer to fly and all officers have some sort of college degree; even those going into OTC.
Military grade quality advertisements are not what you think. Military grade means made by the cheapest bidder and low quality. The quality is only good enough to be picked up by a 18 year old kid and not break.
Humvees suuuuuuuuuck. The AC barely works, it leaks more than a geriatric alcoholic with a badder infection, and the armor is non-existant.
Most of us don’t fly. My line of work was talking to English speaking locals and drawing up maps for soldiers in the field to use. (Lots of villages that have “disappeared.”)
The Middle East isn’t all deserts. There’s actually a lot of farms and a number of (somewhat) friendly people. One of our translators was actually a guy from north Lebanon who played a lot of video games. He was a big fan of Fallout.
T-55 is a better tank than the M60’s we still had in service. Not because of their features or gun or armor; M60 is superior there, but the T-55 was most likely to start up and work first try every try.
Scientist who does animal testing. We can’t just do experiments that we want to. We have to get ethical approval for it first and then report back to the ethics committee every year. Violating animal ethics will get you placed in prison.
Journals that we publish in (because we MUST publish) will reject your paper if they suspect ethics violations.
People doing the experiments don’t enjoy hurting animals and there are no meta-studies assessing the impact of conducting animal studies on mental well-being.
Most of the studies I’ve seen in the lab I’m at and others I’ve worked in are very necessary research. Addiction studies, sleep studies, pain studies, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s studies. You’re not going to get better drugs and surgeries without it being successfully performed in animals first. And no, cell studies and computer models are nowhere good enough to replace all animal studies.
EDIT: or girl
edit. for my second job. as an light director i don’t choose the songs the DJ play
That you get to help people (mental healthcare).
Make no mistake; you can’t help anyone. They have to choose to want help. More often than not they don’t want help but are there because they have to be.
Freelance writer/editor here, but I’m here to talk about freelancing in general.
All those stock images of being on a beach with a laptop while sipping coconuts are so stupid. How? For starters, it would be risky exposing your only way to earn money to sand, salt water, and the occasional theft.
And when we want to sit by the beach, the last thing we want is to bring work with us. I literally do not know anyone in my 9 years of doing this who willingly sunbathes with a laptop. What would the tan lines look like?!
What if you want to go for a swim? Do you just *leave* your stuff and trust that nothing bad happens to your only connection to money in a country where English isn’t well-spoken?
Not to mention blue-screening/forced shutdowns thanks to overheating.
When you ask a freelancer the best place to work, it’s almost always in our airconditioned hotel rooms or rentals, on top of our bed in our undies.
Pediatrics: we don’t get any money from pharmaceutical companies. Don’t even get the fancy dinners that some subspecialties get. Pharm companies don’t care about us because we don’t use expensive/new drugs (heme/oncology being the exception but I’m pretty sure they don’t get fancy dinners either)
Pharmacy technicians do more than count pills and put a label on it.
We do a lot of work with your insurance company too on the retail side. I work at hospital where I make IVs for the OR. I basically am a chemist in that regard. And I’m supposed to be able to do it under the pressure of patient crashing and about to die.
If you don’t know how IVs are made. In many cases I’m given a powder form of a drug and I have to add a diluent to it. It could be NS, sterile water, D5, albumin, etc. And then I have to manipulate the drug to get it into a liquid form. Sometimes the drug creates a lot of heat or sometimes a lot of negative or positive pressure and I have to be able to get it out of the vial. Often times under a lot of pressure to get it done as fast as possible.
I work in electric utilities
The big thing I wish people knew? **Electric utilities don’t make money by selling power, they make money by building new stuff.** Electric rates are set through a regulated process, and the utility is only allowed to charge enough to make a regulated amount of profit (usually around 10%) based on the capital investments they made that year. There is ZERO incentive for a utility to be against energy efficiency, they actually would love to install as much new stuff as they can justify to their commission.
Also just because I work in utilities does not mean I can make them get your power back any faster or make the trucks come less often or make the trees magically not grow into the lines
I’m not out to get you or fire you. I do not have the ability to fire you out of nowhere. I’m just here to file the paperwork and to keep the company from doing illegal s**t.
I sell guns at a gun store in the US.
1) there is no such thing as a “gun show loophole” for dealers. If we sell a gun at a gun show, we must run a background check.
2) there is no “boyfriend loophole.” That’s just a straw purchase and it’s already illegal.
3) A small gun is terrible for self defense and is hard to shoot accurately and safely. Rifles are a better option and are generally less likely to over penetrate walls.
ive worked in psych/mental health for almost a decade. i can confidently say 99.9% of homeless people are not homeless because they want to. many of the alternatives, like shelters, are in abysmal/dangerous conditions, usually have extremely strict rules (ex: closing the doors at 6pm, but your job ends at 530pm and the bus was late), and are run by churches (problem for lgbt, atheists, etc). often these places are worse than living on the streets in terms of safety and stability.
not everyone on the street is a drug addict, and for those that are many are either self-medicating because they cant afford meds they need (or cant keep appts due to transportation, not having a phone, etc), or because being homeless is boring and brutal and unkind so what else do you do? forced rehab objectively doesnt work and is often more dangerous than letting them use drugs. most homeless folks have nowhere to store their belongings, nowhere to go to the bathroom, nowhere to shower or bathe or clean their clothes, nor do they have a physical mailing address required by virtually all jobs for tax reasons.
you want to stop the "homeless epidemic"? treat them like people, pay people more, control rent prices to keep them affordable, demand universal healthcare, and demand funding this s**t.
- A teenager trying to make some fun money, or trying to save up for school or a car.
- "So stupid they couldn't get a real job"
- A felon who couldn't get hired anywhere else
- Lazy and entitled and "wants $15 an hour to play on their phone all day"
Most people who work in fast food are:
- Hard working, honest folks who want to be able to pay their bills and take care of their family.
- Fed up with you assuming they're too lazy or dumb to get a "real job"
Edit: Lmaooo this one really got some people riled up, huh?
All buildings require a hefty amount of maintenance and most commercial buildings would be unusable in less than a month without a team of janitors and sanitisers.
We are constantly on our feet and there's always something that needs fixing, so even on a quiet day, I walk around 30k steps.
Television and film portray some professions in a more positive light, and others are portrayed more negatively. Sales-related professions usually have it the worst. Think Wolf of Wall Street, where the characters are money-grabbing, coked-out, and ruthless anti-heroes. On the other side of the spectrum, there's The Office, where salespeople are often incompetent and spend their workday pranking each other.
Architects and engineers are the most positively portrayed professions in film and television. A member of the profession, Andrew Hawkins, writes that the media usually portrays them as "mentally unstable to comical to starving artists." He takes Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother as a good example of an architect in the starting stages of their career.
"I think that some of Ted's personality traits are similar to architects in the real [world]; sometimes pretentious, a stickler for semantics, full of random information, and small amounts of obsessiveness; all character traits I see all the time in myself and my colleagues."
Researchers at the Southern University of California analyzed data from 70 years of media subtitles and film in the UK and the US. They found that manual labor and military occupations were mentioned a lot less over the years.
The professions that get the most attention nowadays are STEM, arts, sports, and careers in entertainment. This correlates directly with what professions are popular at the moment.
They also found that there were more negative sentiments in the media towards lawyers, police, and doctors as the years went by. At the same time, TV shows and movies stopped lumping doctors and nurses into a monolith.
There are increasingly more mentions of specialized medical professions: cardiologists, gynecologists, and neurologists. On the other hand, attitudes towards astronauts, detectives, therapists, musicians, singers, and engineers became more positive.
Inventory is all controlled and monitored via computer systems these days. Management would have a mental fit if our inventory system showed that we had stock of an item and can't account for it.
Edit
When you ask us to check in the back. I used to take a small break because I know how our inventory system works and there's no sense for me to make an effort to look for something that I know we don't have instock.
We probably don’t have a “route” per se. We fly a type of plane and we bid for “trips” each month which depending on the plane you’re currently flying could vary enormously.
If you’re senior enough you could bid a “route” let’s say weekday Miami to New York and back 10 times a month and that’s all you choose to do.
The Plane flies itself. This one isn’t really true. The autopilot is a tool to reduce workload but we still have to “tell” the plane what to do and understand the rules around when, why, and how to do it.
Bass players are failed guitarists.
Most of us can play guitar too. We just prefer bass.
Can it be fun? Yes.
Is it a touristy, sightseeing trip? No.
Don't get me wrong, we respond to plenty of true emergencies and there are definitely people out there who are appreciative and doing the right thing when it comes to taking care of themselves.
However, for every one, actual, emergency there is *at least* one 400lb type 2 diabetic on the third floor apartment who hurt their knee two weeks ago and now suddenly during a snowstorm they want us to take them to the hospital because they ran out of hydrocodone and never followed up with Ortho like they were supposed to.
I worked at a dealership where the parts markup was less than 10% and we undercharged customers constantly. We were still accused of being scalpers, or at least too expensive for no reason, with the usual reasoning being that our officially licensed dealership was not as cheap as a private shop ran by a 27 year old guy who opened it after apprenticing for 3 years and dealt in stolen parts.
Also, yes. We could have given you a much better product. It just would have cost more than you would be willing to pay.
Counselling. We can’t fix everyone. You can’t force someone into counselling. It doesn’t matter how much relatives want someone to do it (eg a wife forces a husband or mother forces a child to go) unless they want to, there is nothing we can do. They need to be willing to engage. Even then it’s not a fix all, for example with bereavement you won’t stop being sad, we just give you tools to learn to carry on with your new normal.
Already, I’ll bite. I’m former Air Force Intel, 14NX. Laser guided bombs and bombs of any type are not pinpoint accurate. There will always be some sort of deviation whether it be 200 feet or 1500. Even dumb bombs are not accurate with the on-board bomb calculator that most bombers have.
Pilots are f*****g tiny. I could have qualified to be a fighter pilot because I’m 5’ 9”. Pilots are also some of the biggest nerds out there since you need to be an officer to fly and all officers have some sort of college degree; even those going into OTC.
Military grade quality advertisements are not what you think. Military grade means made by the cheapest bidder and low quality. The quality is only good enough to be picked up by a 18 year old kid and not break.
Humvees suuuuuuuuuck. The AC barely works, it leaks more than a geriatric alcoholic with a badder infection, and the armor is non-existant.
Most of us don’t fly. My line of work was talking to English speaking locals and drawing up maps for soldiers in the field to use. (Lots of villages that have “disappeared.”)
The Middle East isn’t all deserts. There’s actually a lot of farms and a number of (somewhat) friendly people. One of our translators was actually a guy from north Lebanon who played a lot of video games. He was a big fan of Fallout.
T-55 is a better tank than the M60’s we still had in service. Not because of their features or gun or armor; M60 is superior there, but the T-55 was most likely to start up and work first try every try.
Scientist who does animal testing. We can’t just do experiments that we want to. We have to get ethical approval for it first and then report back to the ethics committee every year. Violating animal ethics will get you placed in prison.
Journals that we publish in (because we MUST publish) will reject your paper if they suspect ethics violations.
People doing the experiments don’t enjoy hurting animals and there are no meta-studies assessing the impact of conducting animal studies on mental well-being.
Most of the studies I’ve seen in the lab I’m at and others I’ve worked in are very necessary research. Addiction studies, sleep studies, pain studies, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s studies. You’re not going to get better drugs and surgeries without it being successfully performed in animals first. And no, cell studies and computer models are nowhere good enough to replace all animal studies.
EDIT: or girl
edit. for my second job. as an light director i don't choose the songs the DJ play
That you get to help people (mental healthcare).
Make no mistake; you can't help anyone. They have to choose to want help. More often than not they don't want help but are there because they have to be.
Freelance writer/editor here, but I'm here to talk about freelancing in general.
All those stock images of being on a beach with a laptop while sipping coconuts are so stupid. How? For starters, it would be risky exposing your only way to earn money to sand, salt water, and the occasional theft.
And when we want to sit by the beach, the last thing we want is to bring work with us. I literally do not know anyone in my 9 years of doing this who willingly sunbathes with a laptop. What would the tan lines look like?!
What if you want to go for a swim? Do you just *leave* your stuff and trust that nothing bad happens to your only connection to money in a country where English isn't well-spoken?
Not to mention blue-screening/forced shutdowns thanks to overheating.
When you ask a freelancer the best place to work, it's almost always in our airconditioned hotel rooms or rentals, on top of our bed in our undies.
Pediatrics: we don’t get any money from pharmaceutical companies. Don’t even get the fancy dinners that some subspecialties get. Pharm companies don’t care about us because we don’t use expensive/new drugs (heme/oncology being the exception but I’m pretty sure they don’t get fancy dinners either)
Pharmacy technicians do more than count pills and put a label on it.
We do a lot of work with your insurance company too on the retail side. I work at hospital where I make IVs for the OR. I basically am a chemist in that regard. And I'm supposed to be able to do it under the pressure of patient crashing and about to die.
If you don't know how IVs are made. In many cases I'm given a powder form of a drug and I have to add a diluent to it. It could be NS, sterile water, D5, albumin, etc. And then I have to manipulate the drug to get it into a liquid form. Sometimes the drug creates a lot of heat or sometimes a lot of negative or positive pressure and I have to be able to get it out of the vial. Often times under a lot of pressure to get it done as fast as possible.
I work in electric utilities
The big thing I wish people knew? **Electric utilities don’t make money by selling power, they make money by building new stuff.** Electric rates are set through a regulated process, and the utility is only allowed to charge enough to make a regulated amount of profit (usually around 10%) based on the capital investments they made that year. There is ZERO incentive for a utility to be against energy efficiency, they actually would love to install as much new stuff as they can justify to their commission.
Also just because I work in utilities does not mean I can make them get your power back any faster or make the trucks come less often or make the trees magically not grow into the lines
I’m not out to get you or fire you. I do not have the ability to fire you out of nowhere. I’m just here to file the paperwork and to keep the company from doing illegal s**t.
I sell guns at a gun store in the US.
1) there is no such thing as a “gun show loophole” for dealers. If we sell a gun at a gun show, we must run a background check.
2) there is no “boyfriend loophole.” That’s just a straw purchase and it’s already illegal.
3) A small gun is terrible for self defense and is hard to shoot accurately and safely. Rifles are a better option and are generally less likely to over penetrate walls.
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