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Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

david.newgas.net

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Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#431

Post by gottorf »

etc-hosts wrote: post #424
consensus1 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the opposite of a contradiction. PG&E must have its pricing and capital expenditures approved by the government. It is a borderline government entity.

PG&E still exists to maximize returns for its investors.

Only theoretically. PG&E's dividend yield is worse than savings accounts currently, and its stock price hasn't gone anywhere in 40 years. In fact, if you invested before the 2017 fires, you could have lost 85% of your money and, to compensate for your trouble, not even received a single red cent of dividend in six years.

"Borderline government entity" seems more reflective of reality.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#432

Post by scrubs »

GJim wrote: post #255
cobbzilla wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semantics. If the hobby business never makes a profit and is capturing losses for tax benefits, that’s a failing business. It can be failing indefinitely as long as there’s money to support it, but you can’t call it a successful business.

You appear to be suggesting that fun hobbies which don't make money are a 'failure' rather than a success. Not everything is judged by how much money it makes. Have you ever wondered why kids climb trees?

This wasn't a hobby. At least the head engineer and sales persons were constantly stressed by flagging sales and lack of customer acceptance.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#433

Post by ElevenLathe »

mingus88 wrote: post #12
wyldfire wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that feeling when you work on a feature for weeks or months and then something comes along and the feature is no longer needed or the project is cancelled? It's a pretty frustrating experience -- was it all for naught? Maybe it's useful to vent about it a bit.

I worked at a company whose product was truly boneheaded. Without giving too much away, it’s the kind of technology that would have been useful if we lived in a world where smartphones weren’t being carried around by literally everybody. I knew this, but took the job because I was burned out and knew I could spend a year or two coasting and padding my resume with some interesting things. I came to the conclusion that…

This attitude actually becomes the only viable strategy once you realize that the majority of the economy in the majority of the world is connected in some way with some kind of graft. Even honest salt-of-the-earth sewer workers or something are probably pawns in some larger fraud scheme. The "economy* is in some sense one large scam.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#434

Post by pseudohadamard »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #390
throwitaway222 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments should really get out of it's free money crap everywhere. Only people that care should be giving out money so that they can look at their investments and make sure they want to keep spending.

Why can't we, like, hire good people to oversee this stuff? Pay them competitive wages. If they're corrupt, prosecute the corruption. I feel like these discussions always devolve from "a government is doing a thing badly" → "governments always do things badly" → "governments should stop doing things". But governments are basically the only party that can act in the best interest of citizens rather than shareholders.…

> Why can't we, like, hire good people to oversee this stuff?

We already do. They're called grants committees and similar, and have been around for decades. They're slow, bureaucratic, and self-defeating since it's so much work and so little chance of winning a grant that everyone submits massively over-valued bids in order to make it worthwhile. However they do put a lot of effort into (trying to) make sure that only legit funding allocations are made.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#435

Post by W3zzy »

michaelt wrote: post #393
tsimionescu wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's hard to reconcile - that only involves people in industry moving to government, which is far less problematic.

What happens after the job they were hired to do is complete?

They're experts. There is no end to efficiency.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#436

Post by W3zzy »

bluGill wrote: post #337
tsimionescu wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The revolving door is a completely different phenomenon, and it is a problem for a completely different reason. It's about politicians in positions of power over an industry later becoming business leaders or highly paid consultants in said industry. This is a huge problem because it works as a long-term bribe: instead of paying for the politician today and inviting inquiries and problems, you make an implicit promis…

Not to take away from your point, but the revolving door is also good because the experts should be the ones who make the rules. There are too many details about every niche that smart non-experts will get wrong and so we need experts. Good luck reconciling these two conflicting points.

One of our government agencies has expert panels where people from the field and in different lecels of administration get consulted in group about legislativ or procedural issues.They call it round tables and they get organised about three times a year on different fields of expertise.

After these round tables the reports go to the cabinets and eventually the refined versions will be presented before the MP. They make new legislation bases on a structural review of procedures and law and that is how a government could operate without hiring expensive experts. You already have the experts on board, let them participate.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#437

Post by tsimionescu »

michaelt wrote: post #393
tsimionescu wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's hard to reconcile - that only involves people in industry moving to government, which is far less problematic.

What happens after the job they were hired to do is complete?

If you want to move from industry to public political power, that should be a one way street.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#438

Post by fgdgsdfgsdfdfgs »

xg15 wrote: post #18
girvo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was it all for naught? I accepted a long time ago that it is all for naught :) Enjoy our time on this earth, do what we can, focus on people and it'll be alright

Ok, but then honestly, spending 40+ hours/week in an office, doing work that's neither enjoyable nor useful doesn't seem like the best way to spend that time. It also feels like willfully abandoning the bit of agency you still have if you don't even try to understand why the world around you works like it does.

Work can be useless for society. I do useless work for example.

My clients are happy though and they pay and I receive money for tinkering with computers. It's a win-win.

I'm under no illusion this all serves some grander purpose. I don't think anything does.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#439

Post by fgdgsdfgsdfdfgs »

bartread wrote: post #11
wyldfire wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know that feeling when you work on a feature for weeks or months and then something comes along and the feature is no longer needed or the project is cancelled? It's a pretty frustrating experience -- was it all for naught? Maybe it's useful to vent about it a bit.

So much of what I’ve worked on in my career has proven to be utterly ephemeral. I’ve learned not to dwell on it too much, in part because one of software’s great strengths is its malleability[0]. However, I was quite surprised a few weeks ago, on a client project, to find in one of their repos a chunk of example code that I’d worked on 22 years ago. [0] Being real, a lot of the ephemerality actually stems from questi…

Our work is extremely ephemeral by nature. Many times I only value the communication that happened and the shared understanding that was built. The code is an .. artifact. Nice to hang on the wall.
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