One more comment, and then I'll totally move on to Regina (later on today).
Here's my take on it from my own life experiences. My first job was at 6, I was feeding cat food to kitties. I got maybe a few dollars of spending money. It was not minimum wage, but I had no real need for it. It was a quiet job and sorta fun for a kid. My second job, I was maybe 13 or 14 (it was under-the-table). I was helping a neighbor pull weeds and fix his house. I worked about 60 hours (over several weeks), and he shorted me, as at the time minimum was was maybe $5 or something. I wound up with $200 for my trouble, the math didn't add up and I've been slightly cynical about work since. I've done alot of gardening jobs where I worked maybe 3 hours a day, $10/hr, maybe 2-3 days a week. In other words, pfffft crappy wages. I had other job, some of which we on call and sucky hours, some of which were fulltime, some like Amazon were overtime. Some like Walmart were shifting schedule. Whenever I started to really hate my job, either my work would suck and I'd get fired, or I'd begin to work less hours for one reason or another (maybe I'd get sick, maybe the boss wouldn't need me, maybe I'd ask for more flexible schedule).
The point in all of this? We, as humans, take jobs based on what we think we deserve. I have also noticed that we tend to take lovers based on what we think we deserve (explaining why I'm still single). So, the natural progression of these suck jobs is that without a demand for them, people find other ways to do them. If people hate the tipping system, either waitresses start demanding real wages, or formal dining goes the way of the dodo. Likewise, if people are tired of fast food, the industry collapses, and there is only traditional restaurants. If people eat at home, we have neither. An industry only needs to exist if If people stopped depending of conventional farming, we would have hydroponics businesses. Or if we stopped liking other people making money from food, we'd all have home farms or labs where we grew our own food. Nature abhors a vacuum, and something fills the need. But no, the need as such is not fixed in stone (someone gets food to the public, someone grows food, someone delivers water and other necessities, but the method this happens is NOT fixed). So no, there is never a need to do such jobs. We just convince ourselves that is what we are worth. It's a self-punishment.
I'm a librarian, because I like dealing with customers but I don't like selling people stuff. When I finally understood that I was better than these crappy jobs that were like SELL SELL SELL, I started being able to move towards even halfway decent work. Are there days when work sucks? Yes. But these are days when I realize that I've been feeling bad, and this reflects itself in the choices I make.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmN2RL4VJsEYou can take this guy with a great of salt, but effectively, positive thinking does impact outcome. So, when we feel ashamed about our job options, we only get drudge work with no option of promotion. You see alot of money, maybe, but like for Amazon, I was making tons of money, but other costs would eat it up. "Someone has to do these jobs" I used to think. If someone has to do them, why aren't they valued more? Truth is, they can automate many of the jobs, as I said before. This would leave many people out of a job, but this would leave more people time to think about their own businesses. Jobs that use creativity and the mind are valued more because you need an actual person making a decision. Grunt work is expendable.
It isn't just preference for a teller. The ATM can pull in and pull out money. It cannot license changes of name or address, approve loans, or decide ANYTHING, it cannot instruct people in the exchange rate of foreign currency, give stock advice, or whatever else a banker can do (my knowledge on that is limited). There are specific instances where you need someone caring at the other end, and this is where purely automated stuff loses out. A computer can do some of our work at the library like searching titles, cataloguing, and checking in and out. It cannot show people where the W2 form is. It can't help people with computers, or advise on resume writing. It can't help people log in to the right WiFi connection, or help them print their phone stuff to a copier. It can only do repetitive stuff.
The labor is freed up, yes. That labor can go on begging other employers for scraps only to have them say "hmmmm, based on your (previous service/criminal record/driving record/other stupid piece of paper), I can't hire you." Or the labor can say, "well I guess if we aren't good enough, we can walk to somewhere we we are good enough." When I have been self-employed, that wasn't an issue so much as making sure the work was good. And when I wrote a book, well, nobody ever bought it, but it was completely my own time.
The organic farming is often done with a minimum of chemicals and pollution. Many of the organic farmers insist that diesel fuel gets absorbed by the crops and taints the flavor. Or pesticides, or other fumes. This is why it's more expensive, because it's done using alot of trained workers. The jobs I have worked at, they didn't have 500 acres of land plowed by big tanker tractors/sprayers/other stuff, they had alot of people that were weeding by hand, and it was very hard work.
Likewise, while some of mining can be done in 5 min using a digging machine, getting an intact vein of gems tends to be more of a skill than a mechanic. These are things that need expertise, otherwise you have nothing but tiny fragments, rather than a giant statue at the end waiting to be carved into an emerald woman (which you would get if you mined a vein out perfectly.
We don't need these untrained grunt jobs. We need for people to think hard about what they actually want. There is an oversupply in jobs, because people all head like sheep into the city, where they all compete for the same jobs. If you're a minister, for instance, many of them won't take jobs on the outskirts, so these churches struggle. But there are plenty of openings there. Want to work in a small town, and got IT experience? You can set up better network lines there, but *gasp* out in the boonies. Where you can, duh, order stuff online anyway.
People aren't honest about what they really want. "I 'should' go out and get a conventional job. I 'should' commute to the city." Really, should you? Because it seems like the commute is killing you. Not that everyone is suited for the country either.
But if MSN News says "all the openings are now in nursing" everyone gets retrained as a nurse, where are there likely to be no openings? Nursing. If wewere instead to stop being ashamed of doing something more like us, suddenly, we would find our niche. Some would work at comic shops, some would work at burger and fry places because they like the whole fast food culture. But you wouldn't see this desperate job culture because people were there because they
wanted it. If you've ever seen someone who loves their job, it's a whole different deal than the guy doing it for money, and I think you'd even see the difference.
I would also recommend the book ReWork. You're locked into a certain business mindset that is not really true.
Now, about Regina... Looks like I'm out of time. Suffice it to say, the whole nudity issue is precisely because you view being naked as an invitation to sex. There is such a thing as topless feminists, people who see there as a double standard that guys can go shirtless but gals can't. Being nude, around other nude people means they see everything. That hot girl you're talking to? She knows you like her, if you know what I mean. If everyone was nude at a restaurant or even a majority of the people, they really would be blind to it.
http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1609417!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_970/nude12n-2-web.jpghttp://www.nickscipio.com/pod/media/2012/10/Church-flashers-Unorthodox.jpg(Contains nudity. Because duh we're talking about nudity)
Compare picture 1 & 2. The first has a guy not giving two shits what others think, the second has a bunch of oversexualized girls flashing, when actually they are ashamed of baring all (because for them it is sexual).
"Weird bodies", huh? Pffft.