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“So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

theguardian.com

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Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#101

Post by notahacker »

crdoconnor wrote: post #82
notahacker wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what Graeber aims to describe - he's even specifically written about how technology has undermined "meaningful" employment in agriculture and manufacturing - but the problem is his arguments against "bullshit jobs" conflate jobs which don't serve society with jobs whose employees feel they're worthless because they much preferred being poet-musicians. The latter argument, and Graeber's vision of "Hell is a co…

>he's even specifically written about how technology has undermined "meaningful" employment in agriculture and manufacturing Wasn't how I read it. He mentioned that technology "freed up" people from working in the field, though, meaning they could then be put to work in bullshit jobs. >his arguments against "bullshit jobs" conflate jobs which don't serve society with jobs whose employees feel they're worthless becaus…

One of the key differences between poet-musicians and lawyers is that if the former group do something that benefits you, you quite literally hear it. Corporate lawyers talking the board out of doing something damaging to the public because of potential legal ramifications do so behind closed doors. And lawyers for public companies are often quietly propping up the value of an awful lot of ordinary people's savings even when defending frankly indefensible acts. Similarly, the public is only indirectly picking up the tab for the production and distribution of unpopular music albums.

Shareholder return isn't an especially useful gauge of the redeeming features of sleazy corporate lawyers or artistic merit of moderately unsuccessful musicians either, but calculations of social benefit are a lot more complex than they first appear

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#102

Post by shiven »

crdoconnor wrote: post #70
slyall wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every seen those ratings of countries as "Good places to do business"? Part of that is how well contracts are enforced and debts paid. Countries where it takes 10 years to force a company/person to pay a debt are not highly ranked and thus people are a lot less willing to do business or invest in them. Eg You little startup won't be able to lease office furniture if the hiring company doesn't think it can at least se…

Not only have I heard of it, I live in #1. Would you like a detailed list of reasons why it's not a list you want to be at the top of or would you rather take my word for it?

Please do share. I am nonplussed as to why someone (on HN, the bastion of entrepreneurial culture, nonetheless!) would have problems with a societal framework that is #1 for doing business.

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#103

Post by phesse14 »

David Graeber pointed out on his article "The answer clearly isn’t economic: it’s moral and political"

I don't agree. The answer is strictly economic. There are bullshit jobs just because people want to amass fortunes. The problem is not to have a guy working as a "legal consultant" or as a "ska drummer" but to have thousands of them doing the same thing. There's a point when a 101 legal consultant adds no value, but the job still exits. Why? because companies in that industry need to grow and to do so they expand beyond the target to whom they add value. This is it, they expand where the service is not actually needed.

So services/products expanded to targets to whom they add no value is when bullshit jobs are created, and the reason behind this is just to make more money instead of solving problems to the world.

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#104

Post by adventured »

crdoconnor wrote: post #81
WalterBright wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said the article was incoherent. Not the topic of PE.

So explain, in your own words, then, how you think Ares is more efficiently allocating capital now that they're in charge of GC. Because it sure seems to me that all they are doing is squeezing their employees and vendors ever harder as per the Bain "how to run a company into the ground" handbook.

And why wouldn't you attribute it to incompetence, rather than malice?

A successful company is worth vastly more than a destroyed one, or one that has had its assets stripped.

The ideal LBO is one in which you take an undervalued company private, maximize its operations, and then spin it back out at a time when you can achieve maximum return (eg when the market is high).

If Guitar Center is such an amazing business, how did they end up in a shark's mouth to begin with? It's precisely because they were a poorly run business that they were consumed by Bain. If Bain sells pieces of the business, who does that harm exactly? If Bain maximizes profitability and spins GC back out, who does that harm? Fired employees? Well it's business, not charity, nobody is entitled to a job; most businesses exist to generate a profit, not employ people. I find that most people dislike that fact, however that's how every economy works, on profit not charity (which derives from having earned a profit in the first place).

Not to mention that even if you were right, and a company is extremely valuable and all Bain does is destroy good companies, that opens up vast opportunities for good competitors to grow and hire new employees.

Your response might be: and how about the employees of said destroyed company? Sure, and how about the employees of a million businesses that go under every year due to incompetence, we should obviously outlaw bad business operators and entrepreneurs. If you're an employee of any company, anywhere, you're assuming risk of employment, that your employer may go under, weaken, or restructure. There's no avoiding that risk.

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#105

Post by crdoconnor »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #87
crdoconnor wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Off-shoring is a wonderful example of private equity types reducing global inequality Pitting third world workers against first world workers isn't good for either of them in the long run. The same threat that hangs over US workers (we will offshore your job if you unionize and demand higher wages) actually hangs over 3rd world workers too (we will reshore your job if you unionize and demand higher wage). It's a win…

The rent captured by us workers is the price delta between a competitive market and one with barriers to trade. Only part of their wage is rent - if deepika earns 10k rs/month and Danielle earns 100k rs, the rent is 90k. As for income (not wages, which is a subse of income), data is easily googleable. http://m.research.stlouisfed.org/fred/series.php?sid=COMPRNF...

>The rent captured by us workers is the price delta between a competitive market and one with barriers to trade.

Oh really. What is the price delta between a logically-impossible perfectly competitive market and the current labor market?

>Only part of their wage is rent - if deepika earns 10k rs/month and Danielle earns 100k rs, the rent is 90k.

Assuming deepika and Danielle are the same person.

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#106

Post by stillsut »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #46
_abattoir wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When most people say "bullshit job", it seems to me like they really mean "job that could be solved by a well-built machine". Farming used to be a bullshit job until we built gigantic combines and automated watering systems and agricultural data storage systems, and now our farming problems are electronic, not logistic. (except for water, but that's another story.) So for the example of an actuary, ideally their job…

So for the example of an actuary, ideally their job would also be automated by an advanced program...If we took every actuary working 9 to 5, and instead threw all of their tens of thousands of daily working hours at coding a program to do their job... What, exactly, do you think actuaries do during their 9-5? Do you think they manually compute actuarial tables with a TI-89?

Actuary here: only 5% of billable-hours go into the concept of the math and probability behind setting appropriate price.

95% of the work involves translating the messiness of real-world into the model-based world. This is the type of thing that's obliviously difficult to automate: e.g. more difficult to build a robot-nurse than a robot-surgeon.

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#107

Post by Roritharr »

spydum wrote: post #93
_abattoir wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When most people say "bullshit job", it seems to me like they really mean "job that could be solved by a well-built machine". Farming used to be a bullshit job until we built gigantic combines and automated watering systems and agricultural data storage systems, and now our farming problems are electronic, not logistic. (except for water, but that's another story.) So for the example of an actuary, ideally their job…

> The moral of the story is we should automate jobs that people don't like doing. who decides what jobs people dont like doing? Just because you might not like being a taxi driver, farmer, actuary, etc, doesnt mean you should demolish the job with automation -- plenty of people find these jobs provide a fulfilling workday and are passionate about them. any automation there would deprive them of doing them as a profes…

I've programmed since i was age 11 and i have been waiting for that research to be published ever since.

Programming is often times fun, but at the end of the day I program to get a job done, back then to develop a game, not because i love solving Sudokus.

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#108

Post by xorcist »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #50
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why we have off-shoring, and stagnant or dropping real income for that segment of the population that still has a job. Are these good things? Is it a good thing when a private equity investor starts stomping around your startup demanding you treat your hires like exploitable assets and not like friends or colleagues you respect?

Off-shoring is a wonderful example of private equity types reducing global inequality, helping the poor, and helping consumers. It's true that the wealthy Americans who formerly collected rents due to an accident of their birth might not be happy about it, but so what? Real income is rising, BTW. It's only real wages (i.e. income excluding benefits) in the US which have not due to a shift of comp from wages to non-wa…

Not all off-shoring is the same. Some of it moves labor from sustainable economies to corrupt ones, and some of it uses slave labor. Neither of those is a net positive for global equality.

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#109

Post by tormeh »

crdoconnor wrote: post #57
yummyfajitas wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off-shoring is a wonderful example of private equity types reducing global inequality, helping the poor, and helping consumers. It's true that the wealthy Americans who formerly collected rents due to an accident of their birth might not be happy about it, but so what? Real income is rising, BTW. It's only real wages (i.e. income excluding benefits) in the US which have not due to a shift of comp from wages to non-wa…

>Off-shoring is a wonderful example of private equity types reducing global inequality Pitting third world workers against first world workers isn't good for either of them in the long run. The same threat that hangs over US workers (we will offshore your job if you unionize and demand higher wages) actually hangs over 3rd world workers too (we will reshore your job if you unionize and demand higher wage). It's a win…

>Wages are rents now are they? That's doubleplus good doublethink.

I'm born to the middle class in Norway. I have done little productive with my life and yet I enjoy better personal financials than 95% of the world's working population. After I'm done with my education I could go into unemployment and be even better off. All because of where I was born. I'm just collecting on the rest of the world's wealth because... Norwegian passport. I am clearly collecting rent.

>Pitting third world workers against first world workers isn't good for either of them in the long run.

>The same threat that hangs over US workers (we will offshore your job if you unionize and demand higher wages) actually hangs over 3rd world workers too (we will reshore your job if you unionize and demand higher wage).

Unionisation's purpose is to increase workers' bargaining power and thus change the wealth distribution in favour of workers. 3rd world workers' problem is that there isn't all that much wealth to be redistributed. 3rd world workers have more to gain from the industrialization of their countries than from unionisation. Your emphasis on the different factors is way off. Eventually we will need international unions to deal with mobile multinationals, though, but it doesn't make sense as long as the income inequalities across borders are as high as they are.

Re: “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”

#110

Post by crdoconnor »

adventured wrote: post #104
crdoconnor wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So explain, in your own words, then, how you think Ares is more efficiently allocating capital now that they're in charge of GC. Because it sure seems to me that all they are doing is squeezing their employees and vendors ever harder as per the Bain "how to run a company into the ground" handbook.

And why wouldn't you attribute it to incompetence, rather than malice? A successful company is worth vastly more than a destroyed one, or one that has had its assets stripped. The ideal LBO is one in which you take an undervalued company private, maximize its operations, and then spin it back out at a time when you can achieve maximum return (eg when the market is high). If Guitar Center is such an amazing business,…

>The ideal LBO is one in which you take an undervalued company private, maximize its operations

When you get down to details, this is basically a euphemism for what I just wrote.

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