[ExI] jobs

[spike]

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace
Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2017 9:01 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: [ExI] jobs

 

When the German engineering company Siemens Energy opened a gas turbine production plant in Charlotte, N.C., some 10,000 people showed up at a job fair for 800 positions. But fewer than 15 percent of the applicants were able to pass a reading, writing and math screening test geared toward a ninth-grade education.

 

----------------

 

9th grade?  Who do they think we are?  Awhile back the Jackson MS city schools' recent graduates read at the 4th grade level.  Of course that's probably in the range of the lowest in the USA  (no, I don't want to Google it)

 

Education - basic literacy and numeracy - is still the answer to many job questions.

 

bill w

 

 

 

 

 

Ja.  Another approach is to design jobs for less literate and less numerate people.  One example is eliminating fractions in aerospace assembly jobs.  The tolerance for wire lengths was often +/- 60 milli-inches, so we just created wire measurement scales in 16th of an inch.  Now no need to work in either fractions or decimals: just make up some special rulers where they were numbered in 16th of an inch, with slightly bigger marks every ten 16th.  The rulers looked weird, but now all we had to tell the assemblers is measure to within one mark.  Didn’t need to tell them what those units were.

 

So instead of searching for smarter more expensive assemblers, we engineered dumber jobs.

 

spike

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20170131/f454ecaa/attachment.html>