Lockdown brought this home to some people and seeing those at the privileged end of society realise that teachers, nurses, checkout operators etc are what keeps their world turning was darkly amusing. It seems to be forgotten fast though, sadly.

Lol teachers? I don't know about where you live but where I live teachers couldn't get out of the classroom fast enough.

Few professions discredited themselves as much as teachers over the pandemic. Spent a good 2 years in many places screaming "We aren't essential, shut the schools!" never mind the impact on the kids.

Whatever your view on teachers, it’s pretty apparent that having kids at home 100% of the time makes parent’s life more difficult. This is part of the reason I was saying teachers are valuable.

My view on teachers not wanting to hang about or even leaving the job is that I would too if I was them.

Why stay in the plague pit for approximately minimum wage and the abuse they were copping from parents? They aren’t paid enough to care, but for some reason, most do. Parents were calling teachers from early in the morning until late at night, 7 days a week and wanted remote parenting over Skype.

I’ve been trying to talk my wife out of being a teacher, and the reasons pre-date covid.

Teachers aren't on close to minimum wage where I'm at. Try high 5 and more often than not 6 figure incomes.

Like I said, no profession has done as much to discredit their importance during the pandemic as teachers. Where im at the effect students has been catastrophic and still they endlessly bitch.

Because this is the coast guard, and like most other large services, most of the things can be centralized and standardized.

I live in the balkans, and the military here (during conscription times) had standardized everything... they took a few cooking-inclined conscripts, gave them the recipe and food items per person and they cooked the food. Everything was precalculated. Some people are still so fond of "military food", there are actual military cookbooks for sale, with recipes such as "military beans" (vojnicki pasulj): https://secanja.com/vojnicki-pasulj-po-receptu-jna/ (including the tables of nutritional info)

I don't think the problem here is a lack of centralization or standardization. The US's military logistics are well known for successfully (and unsuccessfully) applying both, and it's unlikely that USCG cooks are making custom three course meals for their ships.

This is a good question.

It's possible that the Coast Guard places high value on "good food" as part of their morale.

It's also possible that the nature of USCG operations prevent them from standardizing food onboard, since it sounds like part of this particular ship's mission brought it to various ports where supplies were not guaranteed.

This is a lot about how US society values service workers in general. The media quickly forgot about "essential workers" after lockdowns in 2020.

Don't be discouraged by the Eternal September.

Degrees != Training

4-year degrees are almost completely useless filler (think about it — that's 5000+ hours of potential training). Most "degree" requirements could be stripped down maybe 90% and contain the same or more job-specific content.

An intense 8-week course would prepare most people for most jobs better than a college diploma requirement.

Software and other STEM likely benefit for their degrees. And some other specific fields.

But if you were to ask other office workers how much of their degrees they use... It would likely come up as huge waste of time and resources.