[Robotbeat]

Baker/cook: you're making food for people, either to nourish them or give them joy.

Farmer: you're making food for people.

Construction worker: you're making buildings for people to live or work or play in.

I think the problem is that many of our jobs are crappy, not that almost every human endeavor is equivalent to pushing paper around. Nurses, doctors, etc, are doing important work as well. The bad part is when it's 90% paper (common in healthcare in the US).

Find you a tech company that is actually building something physical, not just selling ads.

[emodendroket]

Curiously none of the jobs you mentioned are well paid (well, I guess it depends on who you mean to include, since owning a farm or being Mario Batali probably isn't bad). But besides that I think we could do the same thing, really. A cynic could say a farmer just grows surplus corn to collect subsidies on ethanol.

[Robotbeat]

Most farmers don't grow ethanol. And ethanol is a fuel, it isn't just paper, regardless of the subsidies.

As far as being well-paid: farmers are fairly well-paid. They have to work hard and use a LOT of what you might call automation (combine harvesters and the like).

But to your point: I sometimes am persuaded by the conjecture that we developed BS paper-pushing jobs for people since we've automated away farming, much of manufacturing, etc. Office Space comes to mind, too.

[emodendroket]

Well, a lot of people work on a farm who are not by any stretch of the imagination rich, and someone operating a large factory farm is probably not the image that comes to mind when you think "farmer," is what I meant to say.

As for the ethanol, it's a fuel, but without the subsidies and legal mandates would there be a good reason to use it? I'd always heard it's not really efficient and the environmental impact is negligible-to-negative, even though on the surface being renewable is good.

[Robotbeat]

Ethanol mandates really kicked off in the W administration. I think it's worth remembering that at the time, the primary motivation was probably more geopolitical than climate: ethanol is domestically produced, as are many of the energy inputs (such as electricity and natural gas). The US now produces a non-trivial amount of ethanol, enough that if it were removed from the market, we'd probably import significantly more foreign oil.

But I digress.