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The rise of the pointless job

theguardian.com

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Re: The rise of the pointless job

#201

Post by chiph »

bamboozled wrote: post #162
foamflower wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When my family lived in Japan years ago, we noticed that when taking the train, approximately three attendants checked our tickets before we boarded a train. At least two of those jobs are "bullshit" in terms of producing wealth, but they are socially beneficial in a culture where the social contract requires near-zero unemployment. (I, apparently like you, can't help but remember this kind of arrangement when listen…

Never noticed this, visited Japan a few times myself. Often I had mine checked at the gate and on the train. Are you sure you’re not just exaggerating?

Could it be because you're a foreigner? I almost certainly got picked out on every ride on the Munich S-Bahn by a fare agent for a ticket-check because I was obviously not German.

Which I totally get - a tourist is way more likely to make a mistake than a local.

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#202

Post by monocasa »

pbrb wrote: post #178
monocasa wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just strip clubs in general. I was in the most ghetto strip club I've ever heard about (unpainted cinder block walls), but they had an attendant.

That's to keep ppl from rubbing one out my man.

Haha, that makes sense.

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#203

Post by chiph »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #137
lainga wrote: post #15

I have said this before, but I see some parallels between the modern world and Japan during the early Tokugawa era. Japan had pretty much reached a steady state by the time Tokugawa Iyeyasu came to power in 1600; most of the available land had been cultivated or settled, and, especially after the policies of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, society was locked in a rigid structure without much room for advancement or unrest. As a…

This is very similar to the situation that caused the Swiss to become the mercenaries of Europe. If you were the second son, you weren't going to inherit the farm and thus in a resource-poor country like Switzerland of the Middle Ages, your best choice was to go abroad and find some feudal lord putting together an army. Thus you became a "freelance" and hopefully found riches. I've always thought Machiavelli's dislik…

This is supposedly one of the ways the crescent got on the South Carolina state flag.

Under French heraldry, it indicates a third son (when they bothered to use cadency on their coats of arms). Since his chances of inheriting the family lands & fortune were low, many of them set out for Charleston to seek their fortune, following the southern branch of the Huguenots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_South_Carolina

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadency

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huguenots#North_America

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#204

Post by haywirez »

bamboozled wrote: post #162
foamflower wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When my family lived in Japan years ago, we noticed that when taking the train, approximately three attendants checked our tickets before we boarded a train. At least two of those jobs are "bullshit" in terms of producing wealth, but they are socially beneficial in a culture where the social contract requires near-zero unemployment. (I, apparently like you, can't help but remember this kind of arrangement when listen…

Never noticed this, visited Japan a few times myself. Often I had mine checked at the gate and on the train. Are you sure you’re not just exaggerating?

I recently visited and totally noticed a lot of minders, caretakers and other seemingly unnecessary jobs, mostly carried out by retirement-age employees or retired volunteers[0]. It was weird but seemed to make sense from a societal perspective, quite heartwarming.

[0] https://haywirez.com/tokyo-hong-kong-2018/

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#205

Post by egypturnash »

aristocles wrote: post #147
romanr wrote: post #29

This is another argument in favor of universal income. Bullshit jobs is one of consequences of progress, low cost goods, food and comfort. With increasing automation it’s going to be get incrementally harder to find bullshit jobs for people. until society understands that not everyone can and have to be employed.

UBI will lead to societal degeneration. Prices of essential services and goods would skyrocket; people would lose direction and the small amount of meaning they had. I call UBI gay-space-communism because it suggests that all human beings are capable of handling themselves outside of employment and daily routine. They are not. The market creates this drive in people, and if you remove it, people will degenerate fast.…

> Prices of essential services and goods would skyrocket

Base the UBI on multiple economic indicators such as the prices of essential services and goods, add more money to the money supply as needed.

> Opioids, UBI, and free-love for everyone. Yikes.

So a lot of people live a simple life on the basic income and hang out getting stoned and screwing. Oh no!

What's your hobby? What would you be doing if you didn't have to work for a living? Would you spend all your time getting stoned and doing the social maneuvering necessary to get laid on a regular basis? Or would you do something else with your time? Work on that programming project that's been on the back burner while you paid the bills, draw comics, join a comedy troupe, brew mead, figure out a way to automate something that drives you crazy, pick up the guitar you put down in favor of a sensible day job and start making music again... or whatever.

Personally, when I had a few years free from needing to work for someone else, I mostly spent them drawing a weird sci-fi comic using the skills I'd developed while training for the animation industry.

(The usual phrase, by the way, is "fully automated gay luxury space communism".)

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#206

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

thanatropism wrote: post #175
Faark wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> soul crushingly demotivating Probably a motivator to get a better / real job? I certainly prefer that over UBI

Either HN is decaying into downvoting-who-you-disagree with (which is not my recent experience), or the UBI hype train is out of control.

I think the downvotes are because the comment doesn't appear to be logical.

We have a lack of real productive jobs that makes a difference.

This results in the rise of the pointless job which is soul crushing.

The answer is not to just get a real productive job. Because the lack of those is the source of the problem.

It would be like if someone said they don't want to have chemotherapy because its painful. And you said... easy, if you don't want chemotherapy don't get cancer.

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#208

Post by hectorr1 »

expensivedrone wrote: post #80

I'm a programmer working at a big-tech company. I make ~$350k/year, even though my job could be done equally well by a college intern. I only do ~2 hours of productive work in an average day. My previous jobs were far more interesting and challenging, and I had apparently done extremely well in my interviews. Hence why I got an offer with an extremely good compensation package. However, the team that I go put into, i…

That sounds really boring and depressing.

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#209

Post by dragonwriter »

aristocles wrote: post #147
romanr wrote: post #29

This is another argument in favor of universal income. Bullshit jobs is one of consequences of progress, low cost goods, food and comfort. With increasing automation it’s going to be get incrementally harder to find bullshit jobs for people. until society understands that not everyone can and have to be employed.

UBI will lead to societal degeneration. Prices of essential services and goods would skyrocket; people would lose direction and the small amount of meaning they had. I call UBI gay-space-communism because it suggests that all human beings are capable of handling themselves outside of employment and daily routine. They are not. The market creates this drive in people, and if you remove it, people will degenerate fast.…

> UBI will lead to societal degeneration

No, it won't.

> Prices of essential services and goods would skyrocket

If you do a constant-value UBI and set the value too high, yes, that would happen in a positive feedback loop, but that's why UBI should be tied to a revenue stream with a value set by splitting the revenue stream with a reserve cushion to build a fund to allow preserving benefits in short-term revenue decline.

> people would lose direction

I don't see a credible argument for that replacing status quo means-tested social support with UBI would cause this, and indeed much of the motivation for UBI is to remove adverse incentives in present benefit programs that manifestly do produce this effect.

> I call UBI gay-space-communism

Which is dumb, because it has nothing to do with homosexuality or outer space or, as it retains private property, Communism.

> suggests that all human beings are capable of handling themselves outside of employment and daily routine.

No, it doesn't, not that that would justify your ludicrous label even if that was true.

Re: The rise of the pointless job

#210

Post by Zak »

chiph wrote: post #201
bamboozled wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never noticed this, visited Japan a few times myself. Often I had mine checked at the gate and on the train. Are you sure you’re not just exaggerating?

Could it be because you're a foreigner? I almost certainly got picked out on every ride on the Munich S-Bahn by a fare agent for a ticket-check because I was obviously not German. Which I totally get - a tourist is way more likely to make a mistake than a local.

It has been my impression, having spent a significant amount of time in Germany, that German ticket checkers aren't primarily trying to detect people who have made a mistake, but those who intentionally ride without paying.
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