Notes to Self on the Value of Jobs

These are some notes to myself on the value of jobs:

 

There is no such thing as unskilled, just unpopular skills. 

 

Some unpopular skills are unpopular for good reason, but there are also a lot of things people do to hold society together that they can't get people to pay them to do.

 

The longer I live, the harder it is for me to find truly lazy people. It is easy to find people who, for various reasons, waste a lot of energy doing things that don't add value to the world, but many of those get paid a lot for what they do anyway. (And then we find ourselves back at the question of why some skills are popular.)

 

Money is a proxy for value. It's a poor proxy, but it isn't money itself that is the problem until the causality inverts and money starts defining value. 

 

Also, it is hard to have things of value unless you can exchange them, and it's hard to exchange them without a proxy of some sort.

 

And it is impossible to contact without interfering. You can't move without contact at some level. Not interfering is not really an option.

 

Refraining from exploitation is closer to being possible, but that requires understanding one's own value system, and it is the lack of understanding the value system that causes problems with proxies for value.

 

Was Kyle Rittenhouse an Underage, Out-ofstate Imported Gun-nut Vigilante?

Here are some things i have been able to find out:

According to evidence at trial, Rittenhouse's father lived in Kenosha at the time. Kyle Rittenhouse lived with his mother in Illinois and worked as a lifeguard in Kenosha, something like a half-hour away. He was not an outsider, even though he was repeatedly portrayed as such.

He has been portrayed as a white supremacist without evidence. Many real things about him have been mostly ignored, including that he was a cadet in a firefighting/EMT program.

The morning before he killed two men and seriously injured another, he had gone downtown with his sister to see what damage had been done in the protests the night before. He spent some time cleaning up graffiti at a high school.

The weapon was not carried across state lines, and it was legal for him to carry it in Wisconsin. This is a technicality, and you can argue about whether Wisconsin law should allow a seventeen year-old to carry even a long-barrelled rifle of that sort. You can argue about the morality of a friend buying and keeping the gun for him -- apparently in Wisconsin, since he did not carry the gun across state lines after all. 

But he has been portrayed as carrying it illegally, and that is not true.

These facts make a difference when you start trying to talk about him as a "gun nut" or an imported underage vigilante.

You can argue about whether he should have been out there that night trying to help his friends and relatives keep damage from the protests from escalating further. You can argue about whether carrying the gun openly was wise.

The evidence shown at trial does not show that he was out there looking for a fight. Far more, unless the evidence was seriously manipulated, it definitely shows that he was attacked, and can be interpreted without any contortions that he was attacked for trying to defend his friends' and relatives' property. 

(Notes to self:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must-learn-covington-catholic-story/581035/

Andrew Coffee IV

Ahmaud Arbery)