31–40 of 499 posts
Pointless jobs like being paid to write an article about pointless jobs? Edit: For those to whom the humor didn't come across, I'm just teasing. This isn't an attack on the author.
Calling for the elimination of the army and corporate lawyers is sophomoric, but probably deliberately so.
Most of this falls directly in the category of "not my problem" that is eating everyone's soul. Because more and more people subscribing to "not my problem" we are creating perfect systems that need bureaucracy. The opposite structure is more people doing the hands-on-work (that is reported on) and more of those people being involved directly in decisions and are stakeholders on firing. Everyone has a sense of how much work is being done and who the slackers are so there is no more a need for upward reporting and downward decisions.
Now the argument being made is that AI is replacing jobs so you could say - well this upward reporting job is all that we have left! So I say boo-fuck to that. We don't have spaceships going into space on a daily basis, we don't recycle 100% of what can be recycled, we don't have clean freeways, we don't have technology that perfects our pollution, we don't have AI.... so there are A FUCK TON amount of work to be done, but no one wants to do it because of our "not my problem" attitude.
Heck if what we're facing is a training problem, then heck, I see a hell of a lot of jobs right there!
I have said this before, but I see some parallels between the modern world and Japan during the early Tokugawa era. Japan had pretty much reached a steady state by the time Tokugawa Iyeyasu came to power in 1600; most of the available land had been cultivated or settled, and, especially after the policies of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, society was locked in a rigid structure without much room for advancement or unrest. As a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then just ignore the comment! We don’t need any more HN comment policing. And academics don’t have a monopoly on making criticism.
Asking someone to be constructive isn’t policing. Why should poor behavior not illicit a comment? Keep HN high signal to noise! Edit: The crowd is free to use downvotes judiciously if calling out the disingenuous is frowned upon. That’s what they’re there for.
It's a mostly free system. Why is someone paying someone to do these "pointless" jobs".
Hint: the answer is this that is bullshit. Surprisingly, companies like nothing more than accumulating money. Paying people to do nothing gets in the way of this goal and so generally it doesn't happen.
This doesn't mean everyone personally feels their job has value and it doesn't mean there aren't pointless jobs in a large corporate environment but as a systemic thing, valueless jobs aren't exactly our most pressing concern.
Not every value providing task in the world induces the person doing it to instantaneosly reach nirvana because it is so wonderfully fulfilling. Many jobs are mundane. It doesn't mean they are valueless. Why would someone be paying them to do it otherwise?
Keynes was a little more direct: "The government should pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn’t a constructive comment be more useful than attacking an educated academic making an observation?
You’ve employed some sort of inverse ad hominem here. Credentials don’t mean we should take someone seriously. Their words should stand for themselves.
I have said this before, but I see some parallels between the modern world and Japan during the early Tokugawa era. Japan had pretty much reached a steady state by the time Tokugawa Iyeyasu came to power in 1600; most of the available land had been cultivated or settled, and, especially after the policies of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, society was locked in a rigid structure without much room for advancement or unrest. As a…
This sounds pretty interesting, can you recommend any books on Japan about this particular period/topic?
Pointless jobs like being paid to write an article about pointless jobs? Edit: For those to whom the humor didn't come across, I'm just teasing. This isn't an attack on the author.
Wouldn’t a constructive comment be more useful than attacking an educated academic making an observation?