Jobs With One Foot In The Grave

                                                                     

The New America Foundation just recently released a report that says 47% of all American jobs will disappear in the next 24 years.  Of course they base that on job losses attributable to rapidly advancing technology.  (But don't you find that "47%" rather strange, since it coincides with the exact same percentage of folks who are on some form of government relief.)

Anyway, the foundation says the first jobs to go will be those in the fast food industry, typists, telemarketing, clerical workers, and real estate professionals.

We can easily see how robotic ordering kiosks are going to make fast food counter jobs obsolete.  And, if I'm going to be bothered by a telemarketer, it may as well be a robot I hang up on.  As to real estate sales, I've never understood why many of them can't be replaced by simply matching buyer with seller online.  It seems absurd to pay from 5 to 7% of a home's sale price to a brick and mortar matchmaker.

I'd like to add a few to this list.  It seems glaringly obvious that we could do away with America's university system.  College campuses today seem nothing more than an excuse to have toga and pizza parties and find safe spaces to hide from reality.  And at an average of $50,000 a year for tuition, I can easily see how some company like Apple (they already have their Apple University and podcast classroom lectures via podcasts) couldn't hire, oh say, pretty boy George Clooney, and have him read the professorial script, and do it far better, and far cheaper than those $300,000 dollar university professors haul in today.  Pay George a million dollars a class, to lecture to a hundred thousand students nationwide, and you'd be millions of dollars ahead.    We'll let the universities keep their labs, but then we'll lay off those professors who come in once a week, the rest of the time relying on graduate assistants to run their classes.  So scratch those liberal hotbed university campuses and we can boost family income and save billions of federal dollars.

Another institution not mentioned in this latest report is the newspaper businesses.  Those folks are hanging on by a thread now, their readership down by 70 percent since the golden 50's.  Though I love the tactile pleasure of holding a newspaper in my hand, I don't much care for the editorial bias, especially those hundreds of papers nationwide owned by the liberal Gannett Corporation.

I welcome your comments, dear reader.  I'm sure you can come up with any number of jobs on the chopping block in the very near future.