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On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

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Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that the answer should be, at least in the shot term, for good managers to recognize the 40 hours "available" concept and provide more flexible schedules. No one gains from having an office full of workers surfing Facebook on friday afternoon. Let people be someplace else if it their queue is empty. From the outside, it seems like startups do this better than most.

> From the outside, it seems like startups do this better than most. As someone on the outside, hearing horror stories about mandatory 14 hour days and regularly working nights and weekends for startups I'd think they were doing it much worse. It's one of the things that has steered me away from working for a recent startup because I refuse to work more than 8 hours a week. I had an interview at a startup where I ask…

Perhaps "better than most" isn't the right way to say it. My less than clear point was that there is less idle time at a startup than in traditional offices and when you don't have anything to do you do not need to be in the office.

I could also just be making a bad assumption.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My SO has recently been on a kick about basic income, and I admit I have been skeptical. Could you elaborate on the pros/cons of basic income as you understand it please?

The main downside, in a nutshell, is inflation. There's simply no way to distribute the same amount to everyone in an economy and not have proportional inflation occur--because basically what you've done is dilute the value of every dollar in the economy. This is essentially what has happened with the cost of college. The more aid we give students, the more colleges soak it up...which leads to those who needed assist…

I don't think any of the BI proponents suggested to finance it by printing new money. More likely taxes, but keep in mind that they wouldn't be spent by the government. But speaking of inflation, in the eurozone, they can't seem to figure out how to increase it. Everyone seems to be anxious about the possibility of deflation. Which seems strange, because if they just printed money and distributed it to everyone, you'd think this would both produce inflation and increase consumption, no?

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#333

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.

Certain economic actors don't want it to catch up.

Yup. The right-wing Australian government have just moved the retirement age from 65 to 70. What a joke.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#334
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…

The two delivery driver jobs that I had both paid per delivery. I was not paid to wait around. I would expect that if a delivery driver was paid per hour, that they would be given other tasks if deliveries were slow.

I've done a couple of food delivery jobs prior to college - as a pizza delivery driver, I was paid to be available (I made boxes, did light cleaning and tried to look busy while I was waiting for a delivery) and got consistent ($4) tips per delivery (not to mention all the pizza my midnight b-ball crowd could eat).

When delivering food for a small Chinese restaurant I was paid per delivery but there was a set run (usu. 4-6pm) and I got to expense miles, etc. No sitting around.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is a hypocrite here? I thought you would be happy to hear I'm exploiting these evil big banks, too big too fail. I like Ayn Rand but don't agree on everything she said. But for the sake of argument let's say I agree with her 100%. So, then: I use the company's money and time to work on my own Projects. I selfishly exploit stupid and weak that should die in the natural capitalistic process, but democratically elec…

"I'm a parasite on the sick system because I want it to die. I don't see anything against Ayn Rand philosophy here." Oh, I agree with you completely. Most of her critics will say that her system is obfuscatory bullshit to distract from the fact that it's no more sophisticated than the plain old selfishness that you see in every preschool. It's just that Randroids don't usually admit that they are societal parasites,…

Well, she just says that people are selfish and following selfishness (your own) in the sphere of economy makes economic sense. You guys have your own delusions, like utopias were people are equal. And if not -- we will put them into reeducation camps, so they don't want to have more than their neighbor anymore. This never worked. What I like about Right is that it takes people as they are, the good, the bad, and the ugly and tries to build the system using what it has at hand. The Left usually expects people to be different than in reality they are. It's good to dream, but exchanging dreams for reality (i.e. utopias) ends up with tyranny. What, they still have private property? Shoot them! Bam, 7 million dead kulaks. What I don't like about Rand philosophy is that it is like the Left in the sense that it is a bit utopian, dream-like. People will go there and vote for nonsense, we need to remember that. We can't get pure capitalism as we can't get pure socialism too. But the important thing to remember is to know how the markets and economy work (Right). And to live and let live others (Left).

Then the rest of your rant really is, like, what do you mean? What did you expect? The government spending to be effective? To have people busy working in zombie banks or unionized companies? Sorry, turns out doesn't work that way. Socialism doesn't work, the only rational thing to do when working at zombie bank and is to put your time to more productive tasks. If a dreamer like you voted for that spending and is ready to spend his tax money on it... who am I to judge it? I'll gladly take it. Sure it is better than sweating 80 hour weeks at productive place like Apple. What did you think? Where Im coming from we have this saying: if someone wants to fight with you, run away. If someone wants to give you something, take it. Thank you! And don't forget to vote for even higher taxes and even more Government spending. 120k/year with all the slacking I do still doesn't get me the Land Rover I wanna have.

And if I can't afford the payment because the bank goes bankrupt next year. Please don't forget to support measures to "distress families with debt"... I mean I didn't want this car, bankers told me to buy it. We did that with housing, why not continue once this bubble pops? Raise taxes, pay even more, so I can still stay at the house I can't afford, driving a car I shouldn't have bought in the first place, all from your tax money already. But you don't care, as you know -- it is all bankers fault!!! - so bail me out brother! ;-)

Must be stinky rich to have this type of philosophy in life.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#336
post #44

> The answer clearly isn’t economic I beg to differ. I totally agree with the paradox (with the advances in technology, humans should be working less) but the problem, today, is economic: - In order to live you need money - In order to obtain money you need to work (except for the lucky too few) - Therefore, work needs to exist to provide people with money, to the point of creating "useless" jobs if needs be How are…

"The only answer is to decouple them, and introduce something like basic income"

It should be noted that BI is a partial decoupling of revenue from work, not a full decoupling.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#337
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is so wrong with giving the unemployed a JOB rather than just money? If you give them basic income, then the jobs can pay what the jobs are worth, and no one needs to be forced into economically inefficient make-work jobs that take time that could be used for focussed training, risky (but potentially valuable) self-initiated ventures, etc. Any such make-work jobs proposal is obviously paying a premium over the…

> Any such make-work jobs proposal is obviously paying a premium over the actual value of the work (which is why the same job isn't available in the market already) Wouldn't the government be providing these "make-work" jobs? The government regularly creates jobs, like research and infrastructure development, that would not be profitable for any private entity. Value can be calculated either from the perspective of t…

I don't know that dragonwriter meant to exclude government employment from "the market". If we include it, the question remains approximately as strong. If there is useful work to be done, we should employ them to do that work, but we should do that based on the work we see to be done, not based on some notion that people having freedom to choose how they spend their time is bad.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My SO has recently been on a kick about basic income, and I admit I have been skeptical. Could you elaborate on the pros/cons of basic income as you understand it please?

The main downside, in a nutshell, is inflation. There's simply no way to distribute the same amount to everyone in an economy and not have proportional inflation occur--because basically what you've done is dilute the value of every dollar in the economy. This is essentially what has happened with the cost of college. The more aid we give students, the more colleges soak it up...which leads to those who needed assist…

Careful. Aid to students isn't something we can turn around and spend on something else when prices go up. That is a very different dynamic than "dollars I can spend like anything else". People bidding on status symbols with someone else's money, versus people trading off their various wants against each other from their increased-but-still-limited pool of resources.

I think you would still see some inflation as typical demand for the marginal dollar falls, even if you don't increase the total number of dollars, but it wouldn't look like student aid.

For the record, I support a low (certainly <$15k, probably closer to half that) Basic Income.

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#339
post #44

> The answer clearly isn’t economic I beg to differ. I totally agree with the paradox (with the advances in technology, humans should be working less) but the problem, today, is economic: - In order to live you need money - In order to obtain money you need to work (except for the lucky too few) - Therefore, work needs to exist to provide people with money, to the point of creating "useless" jobs if needs be How are…

My SO has recently been on a kick about basic income, and I admit I have been skeptical. Could you elaborate on the pros/cons of basic income as you understand it please?

Not the OP, but I'd be happy to do this over a beer if you're in the Bay Area (or plan to visit soon).

Re: On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a lot of people have died or committed suicide in the UK recently, because the government decided to change the rules around disability and chronic illness. It hired a shill organisation to declare that the disabled, chronically ill, and dying were fit for work. So bedridden terminal cancer patients have had all benefits cut and told to look for work. This is not an exaggeration, by the way. Graeber has missed…

"What we have is a status economy" Which actually sounds rather like the original definition of "meritocracy": http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

How can a system dominated by posers be called a "meritocracy"? I am sure it looks superficially the same, but in essence is the exact opposite.
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