Want fries with your job? The good news: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s latest job growth prediction, the US economy will add millions of jobs for Americans with only a high school diploma.
According to the BLS, there will be 20.4 million more jobs in 2020 than there were in 2010. About 12.8 million of those jobs will require a high school degree or less. Many of those will be clustered in services. The country will need more healthcare aides to look after a rapidly aging population. There will be more work in food preparation, retail, and office administration. The graph below depicts the occupations requiring a high school degree or less that are expected to add the most jobs (from left to right).
What’s more addicting than alcohol, tobacco, and coffee? Apparently, your desire to check social networks and to stay employed trumps all else, including urges to sleep and have sex.
People’s daily desires make it harder to resist the urge to check social networks like Facebook and Twitter for updates than to turn down an alcoholic drink or a cigarette. Sleep and sex were the two things people most longed for during the day, but the urges to keep on top of social networks and work were the hardest to resist.
Researchers from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business fitted 205 participants between the ages of 18 and 85 with BlackBerry devices in and around the German city of Würtzburg. Seven times a day over 14 hours for seven consecutive days, the participants were asked to message whether they were experiencing a desire at that moment or had experienced one within the last 30 minutes, what type it was, the strength of it, whether it conflicted with other desires, and whether they resisted or went along with it. 10,558 responses and 7,827 “desire episodes” were reported.
Alcohol, tobacco, and coffee prompted much lower levels of desire despite their addictive properties. Furthermore, people were relatively successful at resisting sports inclinations, sexual urges, and spending impulses. Resisting the desire to work (when it conflicts with other goals such as socialising or leisure activities), which was the hardest along with checking social networks, may be difficult because your job defines your identity, dictates many aspects of your life, and invokes penalties if important duties are not completed.
This footage was caught on January 25th, 2012 in the backcountry near Montezuma, Colorado. It features pro snowboarder Meesh Hytner being caught in a sizeable (~class 3) avalanche and deploying her BCA Float 30 avalanche airbag before taking a long ride.
You probably missed this among the CES clusterskgjhaskjgh: the Simpsons made fun of Steve Jobs on this week’s episode, titled Politically Inept, with Homer Simpson. As Homer is being interviewed on TV, “Steve Jobs unveils iGhost” crawls across the news ticker.
In the episode, Homer becomes a Glenn Beck type after Bart uploads a video of him having an Alec Baldwin-ish airplane meltdown moment. At one point, he gets interviewed in a Fox News program. At that point, the news ticker runs several funny fake headlines, like “Europe puts Greece on eBay,” “Congress postpones end of the world to 2013,” “Satan tweets support for Santorum” and the aforementioned “Steve Jobs unveils iGhost.”
The episode is actually funny (surprise!) but is it too early to make fun of Jobs?
