61–70 of 499 posts
TLDR: serving in the military is a bullshit job for "goons". The Guardian really is a parody of itself sometimes.
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?
It's the autobiography of Katsu Kokichi (Musui is another name he was known by), a samurai born in the early 19th century to a very low-ranking family. It's a firsthand account of life at the very lowest fringe of Shogunate society at the very end of that system, and is quite entertaining because Katsu is a lazy good-for-nothing who can't even get one of those pointless bureaucracy jobs and survives by doing "lowly" merchant work. I think it would make a pretty funny TV show because the protagonist is such a hapless loser.
Many things designers and graphics developers do is goon-ish. Design is mostly an arms race. Employees of big companies create new design languages and at some point the rest has to adapt or be left behind. Of course, marketing is 99% bullshit anyway, and that's where a good deal of the design goes.
I doubt games are more fun now than 10 years ago because graphics has gotten better. If anything, games from 10 years ago have gotten worse because we're used to more complex graphics.
Almost everybody here is a duct-taper. 95% of our time is spent dealing with technical debt. We're using decades old technology that was never designed to solve the problems we face now. Take the twitter password problem on the front page: This would've never happened had we just adopted a more sane approach to authentication. When you wait for hours on your windows updates, think of the poor souls who know that none of this is necessary but can't entangle the mess that makes this necessary (apparently). And think of the poor souls in testing who can't report the real bug that is a broken code architecture which makes automated or more fine-grained tests impossible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because 1) he made a valid point. 2) It’s noise to whom? You? Not me per se. 3) You’re claiming authority over what is acceptable on HN.
>Then just ignore the comment! We don’t need any more HN comment policing. Sounds more like you're claiming authority over what is acceptable on HN...
In this particular case, I felt the parent to my comment was basically invaliding the honest feedback of its own parent comment. To me, that comes off as "conversation shutdown" and that's somewhat unsettling.
As an aside, the more educated the arena, the worse conversation shutdown seems to feel to me. My city, for example, has a major upper-end university at its heart, and it's very on-edge right now. You can feel it, and people are talking about it (and fighting). It really affects me and seemingly the student population too. It's as if we're not allowed to be honest with each other, or audible about what's happening.
I'm also wondering if these forums are worth visiting these days, for the sake of conversation. It's hard to have open, honest discussions and sometimes I get frustrated and lash out. That's my own fault. (Moreover, I'm not sure if there's much constructive conversation to be had at the moment.)
Oh, the times we live in. Guess I'll log off and read some Dickens.
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.
Some would argue that this metaphor better describes finance industry professionals though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I die inside. But any suggestion of "mincome" or the like is met with such a harsh reaction... What, effectively, is the difference between goon-bloom and mincome? Is it just that one is too obviously a subsidy?
I honestly don't think it would be a bad thing if there were ten times as many lawyers, so that the cost of using the legal system became affordable to the vast majority of the people living under it.
TLDR: serving in the military is a bullshit job for "goons". The Guardian really is a parody of itself sometimes.
Incorrect. They're saying that the military is a "goon" type of job, in that it involves aggression, and you have to do it because others will plow over you otherwise. It has nothing to do with the character of soldiers. This same underlying logic also applies to corporate lawyers and advertisers.
Even if you subscribe to the standard litany of lefty anti-person-in-uniform grudges, the notion that militaries around the world exist primarily to guard against other militaries is misguided. A much bigger motivating factor for the existence of large standing armies is the general desire of illiberal regimes, be they on the right or on the left, to keep the young male population (ie the backbone of a potential revolution) occupied on a daily basis.
Honest question: how much of our work is not absolutely necessary? It's easy to write a piece of software once and share it with everybody. The product you are working on - what unique value is giving to humanity? (I mean beyond "it pays the bills" and "it uses $popular_thing_of_the_year") I believe we reached a level of productivity where - in rich countries - we are all keeping each other busy with loads of unneces…
In the US, I think it largely stems from our individualistic natures. Our fierce independence comes at a cost to the greater community; we often don't interact, and in the worst case outright loathe, our neighbors. People would rather bitch on NextDoor about a loud party down the block instead of confronting them directly about it. We solve disputes not by working it out with the other party, but with subpoenas. Publ…
1) You blame your "individualistic natures" for the appearance of pointless jobs. Now, I haven't lived in the US, but that seems odd to me. I live in Romania, a society that is profoundly focused on the community, and the abundance of pointless jobs, particularly in the communistic years (communism being a profoundly anti-individualistic ideology) was absolutely staggering.
It just seems to me pretty self-evident that, as you move the focus from the individual, and his own happiness, he will find less motivation to do a meaningful job, and be contempt with a pointless, but simpler job.
I may be missing something important here, as, again, everything I know about American culture I know from the internet, so, if I am, please feel free to tell me.
2) "Public jobs are low-paying and staffed with people who couldn't find jobs in the private sector, resulting in little incentive to do more than the absolute minimum."
I'm afraid I just don't follow here. Wouldn't the low pay motivate people to work at pulling themselves out of those jobs and into the private sector?
3) You claim, quite rightly, that companies are not concerned with the public good, just with their survival and/or success, and consider jobs given out as "saintly privileges".
Firstly, all of the modern advances of mankind, from the industrial revolution, to the ridiculously cheap products provided by Rockefeller, Edison, and the like, to the supercomputers almost every human in the civilized world carries with him in his pocket, were made, not in the interest of "the greater community", but in those people/companies' self-interest.
Secondly, which worker do you think is more productive? The one that says "I am owed this job by my company"? Or the one that says, "My job is nothing but a privilege given onto me by the company, and I must prove every day that I deserve it?"
In any case, I'd be really grateful if you could explain these points to me. Thanks in advance!!