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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”

#111

Post by crdoconnor »

shiven wrote: post #102
crdoconnor wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mainly because being #1 for "doing business" often comes at the expense of customers and employees.

Low regulatory protection means stuff like this is deemed acceptable - http://www.tnp.sg/news/sim-lim-squares-phone-scam-makes-head...

It also means that stuff like this, which is regarded as a basic right in other countries, is deem jailworthy - https://sg.news.yahoo.com/singapore-bus-driver-strike-makes-...

This is what it really means to be top of that list.

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

#112

Post by zo1 »

cssmoo wrote: post #48
crdoconnor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that was good for you . I don't think anybody would argue that these jobs aren't good for somebody. The real question is whether they are contributing to society at large. I know somebody who hired a lobbyist too. Worked out great.

Yes. It was good for me and it was good for the other person too. Why? Because it enforces society's moral standards upon everyone. If there is no common ground it descends into anarchy because if someone owes me £1500 I'm going to pay £200 to smash his kneecaps if there wasn't a court and bailiff option...

I'm sorry, but if you think that is what a state-less society will turn to, then it says more about you than it does about other people. I, for example, don't not smash people's kneecaps because it's "against the law", just like most other individuals that inhabit this society.

On the other hand, you seem to be under the misconception that there can be no "common ground" in a society without a state-mandated "common ground". Here are some links to start you off on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispute_resolution_organization

#Note. Sorry for detracting from the main topic being discussed here. But I sometimes do feel compelled to enlighten individuals that seem to have some very "spoon fed" definitions about the possibility of a state-less society, and how it might look like.

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

#113

Post by zo1 »

crdoconnor wrote: post #10
qq66 wrote: post #6

Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see how these jobs are critically important for society. Take the list from the article itself, one of the "bullshit jobs" listed is actuary. Well, without actuaries, insurance would not be priced correctly, and would be prohibitively expensive or too cheap and insurance companies would go out of business. Either way, insurance would be less ava…

>Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see how these jobs are critically important for society. Ok, so that's one that you cherry picked. How about these? * Private equity CEOs * Lobbyists * PR researchers * Telemarketers * Bailiffs Tell us how the world would be worse off without them. You could argue that some of these are doing actual harm to society, actually.

Definition of bailiff:

    a person who performs certain actions under legal authority, in particular.

    North American:
    an official in a court of law who keeps order, looks after prisoners, etc.

    British:
    a sheriff's officer who executes writs and processes and carries out distraints and arrests.
It would seem that just by that definition, they serve a purpose. Are we looking at different definitions, perhaps

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

#114

Post by adventured »

xorcist wrote: post #108
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…

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.

I'd have to believe that a very small percentage of off-shoring from first world nations (economically speaking) ends up in classically corrupt countries.

Most labor off-shoring from the US has not gone to corrupt countries (if we're talking about corrupt being Sudan, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Somalia, etc).

Most of it has gone to India, Mexico, China, Philippines, Vietnam, etc. Rising, former third world nations. US companies obviously don't like to off-shore to countries like Sudan because those countries are neither safe nor stable for investment or operations. It does a company no good to build a factory in Somalia if it's just going to be arbitrarily nationalized or destroyed.

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

#115

Post by fwn »

glesica wrote: post #89
robbiep wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farming isn't a bullshit job, at least not if you love it. The same could be said of everything. What society, and by secondary intent technology should aim to do is to enable everyone to be capable of performing the job for which they have passion for. My parents are farmers, and love it. I love it too. It is far from a bullshit job. But for the average joe slaving away on a rice paddy in China, they may dream of so…

Yes, but we have to automate all the "bullshit jobs" before that can happen. Otherwise people who don't want to be doing them get stuck doing them. "Bullshit job" isn't a judgement against people who enjoy something, it is a judgement against the system that forces people to do "work", even when they aren't interested in it and it doesn't really contribute much to society.

> "Bullshit job" isn't a judgement against people [...] it is a judgement against the system that forces people to do "work"[...] and it doesn't really contribute much to society.

I know this is probably not what you've meant, but: I do think that this can be seen as pretty judgemental. Contribution (without parameters/scale) to society (without further specification) feels very subjective to me.

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

#116

Post by rayiner »

_abattoir wrote: post #19
qq66 wrote: post #6

Most people who criticize "bullshit jobs" simply lack the perspective to see how these jobs are critically important for society. Take the list from the article itself, one of the "bullshit jobs" listed is actuary. Well, without actuaries, insurance would not be priced correctly, and would be prohibitively expensive or too cheap and insurance companies would go out of business. Either way, insurance would be less ava…

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…

> 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, how soon do you think we could automate an entire industry?

This is naive techno-optimism.[1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/1425; "The title text mentions The Summer Vision Project and Marvin Minsky of MIT. In the summer of 1966, he asked his undergraduate student Gerald Jay Sussman to 'spend the summer linking a camera to a computer and getting the computer to describe what it saw' ([1]).... The project schedule allocated one summer for the completion of this task. The required time was obviously significantly underestimated, since dozens of research groups around the world are still working on this topic today."

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

#117

Post by zo1 »

aerocapture wrote: post #92

Instead of asking ourselves which particular jobs are "bullshit" and which are not, maybe we should ask why we need or want "jobs" at all. If every citizen received some minimum universal basic income, what might we do with our time instead of going to jobs we hate? I think the point might be that we've reached a state of technological progress where many of the functions of a modern civilization can be handled by a…

>"If every citizen received some minimum universal basic income, what might we do with our time instead of going to jobs we hate?"

I think you need to quantify what you mean by that. It seems that every time I hear this UBI idea being defended with a sentence similar to the one you made, the tone set implies that something "beneficial" will happen that does not because they go do jobs they "hate".

I.e. If we free ourselves from going to work we will... And then insert anything from "do art", "be creative", "come up with novel ways to improve the world", or something of the like.

(Feel free to correct me there, but that seems to be the implicit argument/idea behind that sentence you made)

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

#119

Post by [deleted] »

notahacker wrote: post #79
crdoconnor wrote: post #49

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". What Graeber seems to mean is jobs that serve the interests of some people at the expense of others and overall contribute very little, nothing, or actively work against the interests of society at large.

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…

[deleted]

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

#120

Post by polygon5 »

np422 wrote: post #29
ExpiredLink wrote: post #5

We are living in a post-industrial service economy. Many jobs are not unnecessary, just routine and unglamorous.

I live in Sweden and right now we are automating the service industry as well. You order fast food from a touch screen, you buy your train tickets from a machine and the supermarket cashier is being replaced with a self-checkout. Meanwhile I still have about 50+ working hours every week. I pay about 65% of the money I make in tax so the people that were laid off through service automation can receive unemployment ben…

I work in Sweden to, where do you work 50+ hour weeks and how much money do you make to get 65% tax?
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