Earlier quoted context omitted.
The industry is over half a century old by now, barring some absolute catastrophe, it's not going anywhere.
Big solar flare would do it. Probably not worth worrying about though, not much we could do about it.
Common Jobs in a Medieval City
171–180 of 193 posts
Re: Common Jobs in a Medieval City
#172It surprises me that all 10 jobs still exist, while there are several more recent occupations that no longer exist (albeit they were not that common): Milkmen, Elevator operator, Switchboard Operator, Ice Cutter, Bowling Pin Setter, Film projectionist, Lamplighter, Leech collector, Alchemist, Bematist, Redsmith, Daguerreotypist, Town crier
I have a milkman in Seattle in 2021 - works great!
Re: Common Jobs in a Medieval City
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
The industry is over half a century old by now, barring some absolute catastrophe, it's not going anywhere.
Big solar flare would do it. Probably not worth worrying about though, not much we could do about it.
Solar flare would be awesome for coders. Some huge percentage of enterprise applications no longer have source code (they're just binaries with the code lost to the ages).
All those binaries destroyed with the disks and insufficient disaster recovery would have to be rewritten!
Re: Common Jobs in a Medieval City
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
I figured as much. But I don't agree with the premise of the book. Sure, we all "know" the jobs are bullshit, and yet they aren't. Let's go over the wikipedia summary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs >flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, makers of websites whose sites neglect ease of use and speed for looks; They ser…
> providing value That's the crux, isn't it? What kind of "value" are we talking about? The argument doesn't hold unless we start defining this in concrete terms. That's where you'll find that there are many different ways to attribute value. Inevitably, value attributing is inherently human and therefor subjective. "value", such as it is, is a social construct. Sure, many of the "bullshit jobs" "provide value to emp…
> So, what makes a job a "bullshit job"? Well, the defining criteria would be that they only exist to the benefit of their employer. They don't generate any value as far as the stakeholders of an employer is concerned: clients, customers, members, patrons, patients, visitors, other employees, etc.
Lets not forget the most significant stakeholder from many business's perspectives, investors. Many of these "bullshit jobs" enable businesses to operate at the scale required for continual economic growth. Except for very tiny businesses, execs are generally going to be too busy to answer the company phone line or greet guests.
Graeber sees these as inefficiencies, leaning on his experience as an academic lifer, but academia is a very different, if adjacent, market to the capital-driven industrial world. He seems to miss his own point that so many of these jobs are in the service of ever-increasing economic expectations.
Re: Common Jobs in a Medieval City
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I figured as much. But I don't agree with the premise of the book. Sure, we all "know" the jobs are bullshit, and yet they aren't. Let's go over the wikipedia summary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs >flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, makers of websites whose sites neglect ease of use and speed for looks; They ser…
> providing value That's the crux, isn't it? What kind of "value" are we talking about? The argument doesn't hold unless we start defining this in concrete terms. That's where you'll find that there are many different ways to attribute value. Inevitably, value attributing is inherently human and therefor subjective. "value", such as it is, is a social construct. Sure, many of the "bullshit jobs" "provide value to emp…
> So, what makes a job a "bullshit job"? Well, the defining criteria would be that they only exist to the benefit of their employer.
That makes the definition pretty useless though.
To use an example from the comments, the charcoal maker takes wood and turns it to charcoal, and a blacksmith takes charcoal and turns it into iron.
Okay so two friends organize a charcoal making scheme both doing the same thing making charcoal. They sell to blacksmiths so they are providing them with value so their jobs are not bullshit.
One day a blacksmith asks if one of the friends would make charcoal for him, and he'll pay for what they work, and that friend agrees. The other continues on her own. So now one friend suddenly has a bullshit job despite not doing anything much different, and the other friend's job is not bullshit despite doing almost exactly the same thing as the bullshit job.
I haven't read Bullshit Jobs, but if that really is his definition then it sounds like it's just some unhinged anti-employer rant that fails to understand what value is or how organizations work.
Re: Common Jobs in a Medieval City
#176"Town Crier" suggests by name that a town needed only one. And, maybe, tolerated only one.
I guess "gossip" was everybody's job, like textile production, so nobody's. According to ACOUP, all female members ("the distaff side") of almost all households spent any time not devoted to other tasks on spinning thread or yarn, albeit less so after the spinning jenny spread after 1200.
Re: Common Jobs in a Medieval City
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen arguments that most people were literate. Learning to read and write is not hard, and it is a useful skill. Of course literate was relative: before the printing press there wasn't much to read (book took months to copy by hand). You were reading and writing short notes. Spelling wasn't standardized so you phonetically spelled things and had to figure out what the other person meant. Good enough for letters,…
Learning to write is difficult. You need paper and pen, and free time, and some reference, and probably a teacher
Paper is easy to make from bark. Charcoal pencils are easy to find (or make) in rhe common fire. Parents can teach their children.
Re: Common Jobs in a Medieval City
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if the blacksmith was making his own charcoal, or exchanging the wood for charcoal from someone who specialized in that. My Dad's village was about 250 km from this village [1] where people make charcoal even these days (one of the last remaining charcoal burning sites in the world). It's possible back in the day there were much more numerous such sites, so one would not have to travel far. But even if t…
While it might be one of the last charcoal burning sites locally, large-scale charcoal burning is an active problem - https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/charcoal-burning... .
Last I heard, fully half the air pollution in the Los Angeles basin was blamed on barbeque restaurants. It may be a higher proportion, now, as the cars have got cleaner, but the leaf blowers may have taken up the difference.
Re: Common Jobs in a Medieval City
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen arguments that most people were literate. Learning to read and write is not hard, and it is a useful skill. Of course literate was relative: before the printing press there wasn't much to read (book took months to copy by hand). You were reading and writing short notes. Spelling wasn't standardized so you phonetically spelled things and had to figure out what the other person meant. Good enough for letters,…
It kind of seems like your job as someone making the claim to come up with a reference?
I don't know how to do that.
Re: Common Jobs in a Medieval City
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Secular doctors were also terrible: before the late-19th century, seeing a doctor was more likely to shorten your lifespan than lengthen it. Unless you needed surgery, which meant that you were in serious trouble anyway, so even with the extreme likelihood of infection your odds were a bit better than just leaving it alone. As far as I can tell, before like 1880 they prescribed mercury for everything. Even though the…
> before the late-19th century, seeing a doctor was more likely to shorten your lifespan than lengthen it Medical malpractice is the third-leading cause of death. (After cancers and cardiovascular problems, aka "old age".) This is inevitable as we can't really experiment on people and do real science.
An unknown, but large fraction of all three trace, lately, to sugar, among British subjects and its former colonies. It is probable that declining US life expectancy traces to sugar exposure.