Looking around, there are plenty of zealots on all sides of this issue.

If we all bow down and worship the medical professionals for their opinions on all things medical, we are fools.

I have heard, from a recently minted M.D., the opinion that "it doesn't matter if breast cancer screening causes breast cancer, because once we detect it, we can treat it." I, lacking a medical degree, am obviously not smart enough to fathom this reasoning, how we should go around breaking people because we think we know how to fix them later?

The delusion here, with any public figure who reaches tens or hundreds of millions of people, is that you are dealing with "a person."

Think about "Joe the Plumber" - he was just a guy who got a microphone stuck in his face, spoke his mind, and had it spread out on a national stage. The professionals don't operate like that, they've got "hive mind" at work with people monitoring public opinion in the various "markets," script writers carefully choosing words that balance the varying perceptions of those words, and "message managers" that emphasize, and de-emphasize, the various messages to various groups. People who attempt to be public figures at a national level without that kind of support are eaten alive by the ones who do it competitively.

Bands that promote themselves through YouTube have "a chance" to gain some popularity, but I haven't seen any of these garage phenomena reach Nirvana proportions, and, in my opinion, that's a good thing. McCarthy is at Nirvana scale, and Obama makes her look like a sad side show.

McCarthy, and her PR team, have a well reasoned, defensible position, including the last line re: measles vs. autism - even if there is no scientific proof of a measles vaccine / autism link, it is still a valid statement.

The McCarthy PR campaign also projects a strong sense of the "whatever pleases, or resonates with, the most people right now" - taking that same message and emphasizing different perceptions of it at different times.

Personally, I think the McCarthy "message" is being promoted first and foremost to benefit the McCarthy team (her, her publicist, and the whole crew that make a phenomenon like that happen....) There might have been an inkling of a heartfelt idea at the core of it, but it's been blown up way beyond that.

Because that's their job?

Seriously, upgrading the server or refactoring the software? Why does IT always have such drama, can't they just scale up and down like Sales?

No modern "career job" is useful after an Apocalypse. If you are involved in any kind of competitive (free market) industry, you are using the infrastructure to its best advantage. "Modern" farming knows little to nothing about how to farm without fuel or pesticides. Similarly, modern medicine isn't about basic hygiene or simple infection control.

If you want to be useful after an Apocalypse, take up survivalism as a hobby, learn to grow your own food, make your own tools, including weapons for hunting / defense, and do construction without power tools. But, don't think you can make a living in the real world with these skills, unless you are a promoting your hobby and selling it as a service to others - which takes: modern technology to effectively do your advertising and customer handling, competitively.

Also, the dominant early Apocalypse survivors will be all about Max Max style scavenging of whatever is leftover, you won't get down to the true basic skills until the stores are picked clean and structures have fallen to rubble - and the "natural world" may not resemble anything familiar... adaptability is key.

I believe their major malfunction centers on "sense and avoid" - that's the standard for human piloted aircraft and they want drones to do it before they turn them loose.

Problem is, drones range in size from gnats to 707s, and there's absolutely no standardization of sense and avoid tech that works, or even has a chance of working across the spectrum of players.

It does vary by industry, but "my part" of Florida, lately, has been North Central - quite a bit closer to the Heart of Dixie than South Florida, especially Miami, but even Naples -> Ft. Myers is more populated from the NorthEast than Georgia / Alabama.

First rule of Florida, nobody is from here. I'm sort of an exception, both my parents, myself, my brother, my wife and my first child were born in Florida. Even rarer is that we were born and lived most of our lives in-state, but we haven't all been living on "the family land" since the Indian Wars.

But, you might teach 'im to be a judge:

http://youtu.be/Grg5tULy0tY

I suspect the "strength of bias" I am observing has to do with my location, in the U.S. South.

In that electronics factory, some interesting things came into play regarding productivity. First, our shop in Florida was non-union. Minimum wage was $3.35/hr then, and most of us made about $5.80/hr, plus time and a half for the 5 hours of semi-mandatory overtime most Saturdays. We had a sister plant in Ohio, union shop. Ohio had twice the number of people, working in 4x the square footage, making $11.50/hr to start with faster raises and better benefits. Our department consistently turned out 2x the amount of product as Ohio did, at 1/4 the cost. But, to get to your Asian reference, a few of the production girls were Vietnamese, their son (named Hung, can't forget that), interned the same summer I did. The industrial engineers established "rate" by test assembling a few things while they timed themselves. I watched over the guy's shoulder a few times while he did this. If he could make 4 parts in 15 minutes of focused effort, he'd set rate at about 50pcs per hour - his answer to my question on his math was "you'll get better with practice." Well, the Americans in the factory never did "make rate" on anything, but Hung could beat rate, sometimes by a factor of 2 or more, doing leaded component PCB stuffing.

So, we were the American factory with the occasional Asian sprinkled in, and while we were all incompetent compared to him, we still beat the crap out of the union shop in Ohio.

And you wonder how a circuit breaker for the B2 bomber could cost $1500?

Plumbers can make considerably more money than garbage collectors, and as GP pointed out, it's not particularly hot or heavy work.

Something I've encountered recently is an age discrimination / bias, working in a University town with a couple of firms heavily staffed with recent grads, there's a disconnect between the 25 year old idea of "proper work/life balance" and the 35+ year old perception of that concept.

It's not really so much age based, but as you say, when the kids are born, and then again when the kids enter school. My solution was to move out of the scrappy-graduate-company town and start working more with people my own age.

Sheeple are herd animals, and most kids starting out in the working world are sheeple.

If there's a heavily male dominated arena, women will shy away from it, and, strangely enough, vice versa.

I am well aware how unpopular this next statement is, and a major University admin had to resign not too long ago for saying it, but there are certain sex differences in raw ability - men are, on average, better at math, and women, in general, have superior "people skills." This should, and does, influence self selection of career roles. I certainly didn't choose Engineering school during my heavy hormone years because of the abundant babes there, I did it because I'm good at it, it takes me less effort to compete in that arena and come out on top, compared to say Psychology, Education or Business Administration.

But, back to the opening statement: these natural biases are magnified by the "following the crowd" effect, and reinforced by mentors and guidance counselors who dispense advice based on prejudice rather than the individual... that's what should be stopped, but it's an imperfect world, and a whole lot cheaper to pay $100 per female head than it is to "do it right, for all the right reasons."

My 1988 Engineering gradating class was more than 2/3 male, then most of the females went into MBA / management roles.

Worse than just the US, the Southern US - mostly Florida, also Texas.

40 years ago, the kids were still calling "Nigger" and meaning it with hate... we are making progress, but it's slow.