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On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

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Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#171

Post by deelowe »

dognotdog wrote: post #117
byEngineer wrote: post #108

I work at a large bank in the US. We build websites. Internal websites. The company employs maybe 300k people in the US alone. None of the websites gets more than 10 hits a day! There are 5 websites. And we have 40-50 people to support just that! If all these websites disappeared overnight there would be no difference to the bank. And to the society. The best part: the bank has been rescued by tax payer money. If it…

Don't take it out on socialism! Under those principles, the banks either would not have existed in this form in the first place, or been allowed to go bankrupt just as you suggest. What happened with the bank bailout was pure capitalism, the banks simply bought the government!

s/capitalism/corporatism

Many capitalists (myself included) tend to not support corporatism. Capitalism assumes individuals owning smallish businesses. The minute a business becomes large enough to influence the federal government, things get weird and I'm not sure the system works as intended.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#173

Post by backlava »

aaron695 wrote: post #148

Lol Take something everyone thinks and talks about (Like all childish thought games) put a crappy explanation on it and people buy in. > The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger Seriously... and man didn't land on the moon. Conspiracy's happen, but it's about broken processes and complicated feedback. This is a interesting topic, it's a r…

I agree. When he started talking about how capitalism shouldn't create these BS jobs, I assumed a reasoned economic argument was coming. Then this passage. It's a cabal of elites who have decided to spend their own money occupying the masses. What a joke. He could have just as convincingly claimed it was space aliens creating the jobs.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#174

Post by TeMPOraL »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #74

As hammerzeit mentioned, a lot of bullshit jobs are there because of an arms race. Your competitors have marketers, lobbyists and corporate lawyers, so you need them too. If everybody fired 90% of their marketers, marketing dollars would go 10x as far, and things wouldn't change much. Just take a look at marketing. It's an industry that's so big it props up newspapers, television, Google and most of the rest the web…

> but there are plenty of bad side effects like the invasion of privacy, cluttering up urban spaces, breaking up TV shows, et cetera.

I will add another set that is often missed in discussion - electricity, fuel and man-hours. We are heading for a crisis in supply of the former two in part because of wasting a big part of them on those bullshit zero-sum jobs.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#175

Post by oldmanjay »

tedks wrote: post #166
padobson wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I walk through a Home Depot, I think "Man, the people that use this stuff are really MAKING things." Inevitably, my next thought is, "And a place like Home Depot could never operate without software making it work behind the scenes."

Home Depot existed long before software. It'll exist long after software, too. Remember that we live in a bubble.

There isn't going to be an "after software" with any sort of meaningful human civilization still around.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#177

Post by jessaustin »

byEngineer wrote: post #108

I work at a large bank in the US. We build websites. Internal websites. The company employs maybe 300k people in the US alone. None of the websites gets more than 10 hits a day! There are 5 websites. And we have 40-50 people to support just that! If all these websites disappeared overnight there would be no difference to the bank. And to the society. The best part: the bank has been rescued by tax payer money. If it…

This is capitalism, not tax funded corporations.

I feel your pain, but we've got to let go of this word. "Capitalism" has meant exactly "tax-funded corporations", and all the other bullshit that you and I don't like, for such a long time, that this is the accepted meaning now. I don't think the phrase "free market" has been spoiled yet, but if we have to have an -ism then we need to come up with a new one. Avoid the adjective "true", because that just opens one to Scotsman accusations.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#178

Post by arethuza »

innguest wrote: post #112
dirktheman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that definition the whole of Western Europe would be a socialist state. Government services like these do not equal socialism. I live in The Netherlands, a pretty liberal kingdom with excellent social security and unemployment benefits. But don't be mistaken, it's not a socialist country. Not by a long shot. The biggest political parties are liberal-conservative and social-democrats. The latter lean towards the le…

Ok, let's use the dictionary definition: "A political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole". Most countries are like that, the US and European countries included: those countries own the means of exchange (they decree the fiat money they own as the only legal currency) and they regulat…

Germany has been running a trade surplus for quite a while and now runs a trade surplus quite a bit higher than even China's:

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/09/30/germany-replaces-c...

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#179

Post by jessaustin »

oldmanjay wrote: post #175
tedks wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home Depot existed long before software. It'll exist long after software, too. Remember that we live in a bubble.

There isn't going to be an "after software" with any sort of meaningful human civilization still around.

Yeah I suspect "after human civilization" will happen sooner than "after software".

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#180

Post by Cthulhu_ »

randlet wrote: post #126
VBprogrammer wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you're getting at, but I'd be reasonably confident in speculating that there is just as much slacking off on construction projects as any other employment. Some of it maybe genuinely waiting for something to happen (crane to move something, cement truck to arrive etc). I'm not sure whether you'd count that as slacking off but it's certainly not working.

It probably varies. In my experience working construction this was absolutely not true. There was definitely some down time here and there but the majority of days we worked close to flat out from 7-4:30 (2 15min breaks + 30min lunch). Ditto for summer I spent working on an assembly line where there was even less downtime (although it was not nearly as physically demanding). Frankly, working a manual labour job would…

Definitely, and probably better for their health, too. Government workers should IMO also have worked a physically demanding job at the same (low) pay rates, to go a bit off-topic here. People shouldn't be allowed to decide for others if they haven't stood in their shoes IMO.
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