On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Works_Administration / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee

For the following reasons:

* It it proven and was highly successful during the previous depression.

* We actually do have a lot of infrastructure which needs rebuilding and projects which would make all of our lives better (high speed rail, mission to mars, etc.)

* People actually like to work - to feel useful. Basic Income will prevent the unemployed from starving but nearly ALL of them would rather have a guarantee of meaningful, stable, reasonably paid and respectable work than just getting paid to stay at home all day. The PWA provided that.

There is actually a good example of a public works program that was turned into basic income (Plan Jefes in Argentina). Unexpectedly, large numbers of the people who were part of it CONTINUED to work at the jobs (things like caregiving) even though under the new basic income rules they no longer had to go.

During cold war you could try to buy Moscow communists as much as you wanted so they allowed you open bank branch in USSR, but this would never happen.

You can try buy guys like Ron Paul all day long in attempt to get bailout, but you won't get it.

The problem is with the voter. If the feeling at the Capitol was that there will be severe punishment for the bailouts, our beloved Senators and Representatives would be too worried to loose their office to vote for that nonsense. Mind you they can sell their services to other industries too and make money in the process without the risk of loosing office (aka "everything"). The voter allowed them to do that. Because voter doesn't understand that bankruptcy and crisis are important parts of economic cycle. And are needed! To remove excesses from the system. To relieve workers from BS jobs too! So you can start over after 1-2 years in healthy economy without zombie banks. We didn't allow capitalism to work. Blaming capitalism for that doesn't add up.

BTW, I respect socialism and socialist movement. I'm liberal on social issues as liberal you can get. But for the economic issues Right just gets it.

This has always bothered me, even before I was old enough to join the "work force." I had a hunch back in the day and have subsequently confirmed it early in my career: working less promotes better, clearer thinking, and ultimately a higher volume of results (i.e. when I work less, I end up getting more done).

This is incredibly telling of our times:

Hell is a collection of individuals who are spending the bulk of their time working on a task they don’t like and are not especially good at. Say they were hired because they were excellent cabinet-makers, and then discover they are expected to spend a great deal of their time frying fish. Neither does the task really need to be done – at least, there’s only a very limited number of fish that need to be fried. Yet somehow, they all become so obsessed with resentment at the thought that some of their co-workers might be spending more time making cabinets, and not doing their fair share of the fish-frying responsibilities, that before long there’s endless piles of useless badly cooked fish piling up all over the workshop and it’s all that anyone really does.

I encounter this more often than I'd like to admit. Brilliant, talented, positive people finding their core competencies squashed under meaningless political bullshit. I constantly shudder at the idea of what these people might accomplish if they were given the resources and freedom to do what they were actually good at.

I've been reading Freedom From the Known by Jiddu Krishnamurti and this one excerpt really speaks to this problem:

For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, our saints. We say, `Tell me all about it - what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?' and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means that we live on words and our life is shallow and empty. We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear.

It REALLY isn't that hard.

>The job of lawyers isn't even to win legal battles, but to avoid them in the first place.

Right, they run the full gamut from avoiding legal battles with communities that are trying to shut down polluting factories that damage their health to avoiding legal battles with people who have suffered injury, incapacitation or even death from using their products. Using every trick available.

Their job is to make sure that large corporations are protected from us and they are paid handsomely for it.

You consider this 'social value'?