Posted on 01/02/2011 2:53:00 PM PST by BwanaNdege
Drawing on his experiences picking up roadkill, feeding swine, and castrating a lamb with his teeth, Mike Rowe, host of Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs, discusses how modern American culture...
Video at the link. http://fora.tv/2008/12/12/Mike_Rowe_on_Discovery_Realization_and_Lamb_Castration
Very interesting talk on “work”. The first eight minutes are a bit rough, but hang in there. He has some astute observations on the value of work and the relevance of PETA, OSHA, etc.
If the first part leaves you squeamish, jump to the 11:00 time.
I’d vote for him, even though he is not running for anything.
bm
I loved this quote from Mike on the Dirty Jobs episode “Brown Before Green 2”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0eMuV-NliA
Wow, that’s a good one!
definitely worth watching
Very good.
I couldn’t make it play.
Yeah he’s one of my favorite television personalities.
Very intelligent with a firm grasp on reality.
He’s right that sometimes safety doesn’t come first. Sometimes safety impedes effectiveness.
He strikes me as being kind of a smug elitist type. I don’t know... I could be wrong.
When the taxpayers built our local “art colony” (low income housing) the proponents sold it as a way of losing our blue collar image. Rowe seems to understand that we’re screwed if we don’t start teaching our kids to build things and get dirty.
My uncle has access to our new governor who is a “green republican”. I sent the video to my uncle who is himself a liberal and asked that he think about what Rowe is saying and hope that he tries to get Rick Snyder to understand that green jobs and college degrees aren’t the only option. we need kids learning trades.
I love Mike Rowe, his show proves (over andover again) that there are no jobs that Americans won’t do.
Mine too. And he’s smokin’ hot in my humble opinion. :)
Have you ever watched “Dirty Jobs”? I don’t know what his politics are, but it’s hard to imagine a smug elitist doing any one of those jobs for even five minutes.
Just found an interesting article about him at http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2010/03/12/dirty-jobs-mike-rowe-works-hard-and-smart/ :
“I don’t know that a 4-year degree is the golden ticket anymore. I would never say anything against education,” he says. “But why is there the 4 year degree and everything else is ‘alternative’?”
On the jobs bill that is lumbering through Congress, Rowe doesn’t take a particular political stance, but he has a viewpoint. The Mike Rowe you see on TV is the same Mike Rowe in conversation. He’s chatty yet thoughtful, and definitely opinionated.
“I just don’t think you can create jobs. I think you can create opportunities. I think people will avail themselves of them. People on “Dirty Jobs” span the political spectrum but they see work in the same way. If [Obama] is going to create 3 to 4 million shovel-ready jobs, it would be nice to make sure those are jobs people want and not jobs people have been disparaging for the past 30 years.”
It’s drummed into our brains that college is how one earns higher salaries; there’s even a TV commercial (man buying wallet from Asians who are laughing at him as they hand him a tiny wallet). It may even be true that what was once considered a good high school education now requires at least the first two years of college to catch up to the old standard HS diploma. But a person who is willing to self-educate while they’re working is logically a better hiring risk to an employer.
My college degree helped in one job (but perhaps not as much as what the stars told my employer who believed in astrology). The job didn’t really require a college education; OJT was how one became proficient. At present, my degree apparently makes me overqualified for everything but unemployment, yet my bills don’t care how I earn what pays them.
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