On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#271

Post by ejstronge » Wed, Nov 05, 2014, 5:57 PM UTC

georgemcbay wrote: post #259

mcguire wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ability to survive for 25 years of retirement is a relatively new phenomenon. The economy likely hasn't had a chance to catch up.

We only really live about 6 and a half years longer than we would prior to the industrial revolution on average. This relatively modest number is obscured somewhat by overall life expectancy averages which are buoyed by drastically reduced infant mortality. In any case, the political/economic response has been to move up the age of retirement, which isn't helpful to the long term knee health of the hypothetical farme…

  We only really live about 6 and a half years longer than we 
  would prior to the industrial revolution on average. This 
  relatively modest number is obscured somewhat by overall  
  life expectancy averages which are buoyed by drastically  
  reduced infant mortality.

I haven't heard this before - where are you getting your data?

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#272

Post by nevergetenglish » Wed, Nov 05, 2014, 5:57 PM UTC

If I had to cope with a bullshit jobs that required only physical capabilities, I should try to advance in my start-up or whatever high thinking I am doing. Newton created his gravitation law when the university was shut-down because the pest. Doing something really nasty make you enjoy a lot your mental work in your real passion.

Also, having your mind free but your arms working is a good way of thinking deeply.

Edit1: I should add I don't like bullshit jobs!

Edit2: Addendum For example you should try to learn and read a lot at night but just some core points, and the next day while working physically you should echo mentally all those material, discussing, analysing all in your head.

When I was younger I could reason without writing, now I should need to write thing down, anyway the desire to get out of a bullshit job is a great force, the most boring the job stronger the desire to escape from that job and greater the concentration you find to center into your real passion, your real job, the one you adore.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#273

Post by Animats » Wed, Nov 05, 2014, 5:59 PM UTC

This is the price of competition. It takes a lot of extra labor, over doing the stuff, to keep a competitive market going. There are a large number of items where the advertising and marketing cost exceeds the cost of production, from soft drinks to movies to pharmaceuticals. This is an overhead of capitalism, and it's a big one.

The financial system has especially bloated overhead. The US used to have a financial system with three big, independent sectors - commercial banks, savings and loan companies, and stock brokers and markets. The Glass-Stegall Act kept them separate. Trouble in one sector didn't crash another sector, because the sectors couldn't invest in each other. That ended in the 1990s. Trouble soon followed.

The whole hedge fund / "private equity" industry is a net lose. "Private equity" is really leveraged buyouts using equity-to-debt conversions to reduce taxes. It's an artifact of tax policy, not a real industry. In many cases, the money ultimately comes from low-cost borrowing by banks from the Federal Reserve.

With different tax and regulatory policies, the finance industry would be about as big as it was in the Eisenhower era, far smaller than it is now. This isn't a secret, but it's not something discussed in public much.

On the medical care side, the US spends about as much in public funds on medical care as the European nations with state-paid medical care do. But that's less than half of US medical spending. Find out what a "prescription-benefit management company" does, and how big they are.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#274

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Nov 05, 2014, 6:01 PM UTC

zo1 wrote: post #246

dognotdog wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

You can't have a government, which is by definition a monopoly backed by a military and police force. And then turn around and blame "pure capitalism" because it appears to have somehow influenced the government monopoly.

Sure you can. "Capitalism" has always been a name for a system in which governments exist, and by which governments structure property rights. Certainly, you don't think that the dominant economic system of the late nineteenth century for which socialist coined the term "capitalism" in their critique of that system (a term later adopted by defenders of that system) somehow didn't feature government as a prominent feature?

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#275

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Nov 05, 2014, 6:05 PM UTC

kissickas wrote: post #88

jahaja wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think those rationalisations hold ups. The facts of workforce expansion and productivity & efficiency gains can't simply be shrugged off by "overpopulation". This is intentional political policy, nothing else.

So you agree with this statement?: > The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s). I was with him until there... I'd like to believe things like that and blame it all on the "evil politicians," but I'm really not sure the "ruling class" is that organized. Th…

A group collectively realizing something and individually acting to prevent it, and those individual actions aligning, doesn't require much pre-existing organization (or even much after-the-fact organization, though if they are aware of each other, you'd expect some organizations as they also recognize the alignment of interests.)

So since organization isn't really necessary for the proposition at issue, I don't see your disbelief in the organization of the "ruling class" as even relevant to the issue, even assuming, for the sake of argument, that it is justified.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#276

Post by maxxxxx » Wed, Nov 05, 2014, 6:10 PM UTC

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…

I don't think it's fair to call bank bailouts socialism. Maybe call "socialism for the rich/well connected".

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#277

Post by ArkyBeagle » Wed, Nov 05, 2014, 6:14 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #116

furyg3 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure, that's certainly one of the things that he misses. The midnight pizza deliveryman has a 'bullshit' job where he does nearly nothing because the 1 hour of real work over an 8 hour period is worth it to his boss. Most professional/service work has a large component of this type of availability. But yet we still try to maximize for 40. If we automate the pointless bits, we don't scale back Bob's hours to 20 an…

My google-fu is failing me, but I believe there's a study out there that postulates that the most efficient utilization rate for a secretary is about 40% -- in other words, they should be idle about 60% of the time. The thesis is that the primary purpose of a secretary is to be available to do work. When the boss wants something done, an idle secretary can do it immediately whereas a busy secretary has to finish what…

Strange; Ethernet segments/collision domains start to have collisions at 40%. It's 1/e again, isn't it?

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#278

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Nov 05, 2014, 6:14 PM UTC

shkkmo wrote: post #139

byEngineer wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tea Party members voted against bank bailouts. Not democrats, not old-republicans. My point is, yes, you can buy democrats and some republicans to vote in favor of more government spending. But you apparently can't buy them all to do it. 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…

I was always sad the the Tea Party and the Occupy movement never managed to figure out that they were on the same side...

Many people in both movements correctly identified that they aligned on some issues -- particularly top-heavy bank bailouts. But, in fact, they generally were and are not on the "same side"; even ignoring for the moment any truth their might be the notion that one or the other movement is largely a front for right- or left-wing establishment interests (which opponents of both have made, more of the TPP being a front for right-wing establishment entities, but sometimes also of Occupy being a front for left-wing establishment entities), its pretty clear that there is a significant ideological divide and that TPP is right-libertarian in its overall ideology and agenda while Occupy, while decidedly less focussed, is more left-wing (spanning, really, from left-libertarian to more traditional democratic socialist).

One can imagine that if the US had a parliamentary system that, at their height of influence, the two movements could have each won seats and ended up in the same coalition because of alignment on issues with transitorily pre-eminent saliency, but the alignment was on a very narrow set of issues that were a very small subset of the issues that members of each movement cared about (and, especially in the TPP case, a very small subset of the issues that the organization as such cared about), and even then the alignment was mostly an alignment about opposition to particular policies rather than on what substantive policies should be in place.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#279

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Nov 05, 2014, 6:17 PM UTC

vectorpush wrote: post #242

shkkmo wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was always sad the the Tea Party and the Occupy movement never managed to figure out that they were on the same side...

They really aren't on the same side and were mostly orthogonal to each other. Of course, both movements share some common grievances against the government, but the concrete ideas of both groups are just about 100% incompatible. As a glaring example, consider the Citizen's United case; Occupy supporters would almost unanimously point to the Citizen's United ruling as extremely damaging to American democracy, Tea Part…

> As a glaring example, consider the Citizen's United case; Occupy supporters would almost unanimously point to the Citizen's United ruling as extremely damaging to American democracy, Tea Party supporters on the other hand overwhelmingly side with the government regarding the treatment of money as speech.

Side with the court -- the government (specifically, the Federal Election Commission) was the losing party in Citizen's United, so siding with the government would be the position you ascribe to Occupy, to wit, seeing the ruing as damaging to American democracy.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#280

Post by ArkyBeagle » Wed, Nov 05, 2014, 6:19 PM UTC

superuser2 wrote: post #266

furyg3 wrote: post #48

While there's a lot to debate in the article, kudos to Graeber for talking about a taboo. White-collar employees 'work' (periods of focused concentration) a lot less than 40 hours. There are exceptions, and HNers may deny this fact (because the demographic is different or because the taboo is more powerful in this circle), but Graeber's inebriated cocktail party confessions match my own discussions with friends. Howe…

There was massive outrage a month or so ago when some conservative pundit got hold of information that salaried IRS employees working from home had been doing personal business (laundry, childcare, etc.) during their 40 hours. I don't think our culture will ever come to grips with this.

The payload of conservative pundits is outrage as entertainment product. That might generalize to "all pundits"; perhaps the conservative ones just innovated and got there first.

I see more and more people taking Randall Noe's tone in blogs and stuff. Here's hoping.