[paulgerhardt]

http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...

Stick with it...(especially in the middle and towards the end)

I'm still very much trying to digest the contents of this article rather than regurgitating the usual flippant answers.

Not everyone can get a job in at their local Google datacenter, even if they train for 2 years. (There was an amazing NPR story recently to this effect.) And while I have moved multiple times, and across two hemispheres to get to Silicon Valley (and yet still can't call myself local to anywhere) I feel some obligation to satiate something I which appears as burgeoning task vacuum in rural America.

That is, there is a tremendous amount of idle "Turking" power going to waste in the heartlands - lifetimes of mechanical acuity being thrown away on television rather than say another Wikipedia/Github for rapid-prototyped goods .

[protomyth]

Mr Rowe was pretty much right on. There is a certain class-ism that seems go along with manual labor. I have heard people call plumbers and carpenters "unskilled labor". That is so much crud, it is unbelievable.