531–540 of 576 posts
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I am not glossing over things. Nobody would want to live in the world like 100 years ago or even way before in time. We are just acting as spoiled brats.
I know plenty of people who would rather live as we did back in the 1950s than as we live today. I happen to disagree, but there is a growing pervasive sense that society (at least the US) peaked decades ago, and our best days are solidly behind us.
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It's not that these jobs are bullshit jobs, it's that commonly they are wrapped up in bullshit procedures . These procedures typically appear when there's an initiative to reduce costs. The easiest and cheapest way to employ an unskilled person to do a skilled job is to hand them a book of 'procedures' on their first day and say "Everything you need to do and know is in this Book". No time consuming cross-training re…
I think you're right, but I have a somewhat less dire view on this. I think that large companies optimize for a fundamentally different outcome than smaller companies, like startups. Large companies became large by applying a successful business model, something that startups are still lacking. If you have a working business model and stable cashflow, any change is potentially dangerous and can take down the company.…
People fall into rituals and procedures for reasons that are not necessarily obvious to them. Why should we expect to be able to determine what is and isn't "bullshit"? Wouldn't you need to know where the whole endeavour ends up, before you can pass such definitive judgement? I'm not questioning any individuals feelings (your job may certainly feel like bullshit to you ), but whether something is sustainable and make…
> Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time You'd probably like the Selfish Gene by Dawkins. He makes a strong case that societies evolve very differently from cells/species. Edit: Thought I'd provide an example. Suppose there is a herd of animals hunted by a predator. Imagine it was possible for a single member of the…
In reality, an "individual" and his social context are inseparable. You and your environment are one, the separation is entirely linguistic, devised by that talking homunculus between your ears. "Individual" and "society" are just words that suppress some nuances of physical reality in favour of a more actionable world representation; a useful skill that evolved over time, not a fundamental property of the universe. Physically speaking, there's no such thing as a gene, animal or society: they're useful language abstractions, simplified models of the world that exist in your brain and that we learned to encode/decode across brains.
You don't even need suicide terrorists to illustrate this non-separation. Why do individuals (genes, animals, societies, whatever) die at all? Wouldn't you choose to live forever, instead of dying on the altar of "reproduction and evolution"? Who gives a shit about evolution, at their own level of survival?
And yet, as far as we know, all individuals go out of business, across all levels of complexity. Death is a strange "unselfish choice" they all make, if you accept this artificial separation. It's precisely your "a single member of the herd (maybe the oldest/weakest) to sacrifice itself and save the rest of the herd from taking additional casualties"!
It's the same principle in action. From the universal perspective, the "herd" is a net decrease in free energy, and something's gotta give for the show to go on. They must all obey the laws of thermodynamics. In order to increase entropy over ever larger spans of space and time, local pockets of orderliness have evolved that we call life (matter, culture, whatever). These pockets trade a local temporary decrease in entropy for a long-term global increase, cf Maxwell's demon. A global net acceleration, rather than an exception.
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There are no bullshit jobs. I like David Graeber very much, but he is wrong on this. If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed. Government or public institutions may be less subject to the market, but even they are subject to it. Procedures and rules are critical. Most tech people make the fundamental mistake of thinking that because their companies are smal…
The adverts on TV are a clear indicator that bullshit jobs exist, they are simply not necessary. Further, much of modern society is not necessary. Fast food is stuff you could make at home, but you're too busy at your advertising job. And so bullshit jobs beget more bullshit jobs. What's happening in western countries is that trade deficits - the slow bleeding of wealth - are happening while much of the upper middle…
Isn't it hilarious that the governments are the largest purveyors of bullshit jobs and resource extraction?
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Programmers are not researchers; lab techs are not researchers; many other people who do work for the academics are not 'academic staff' (and can't be paid as such). It's not hard to imagine what that sort of structure leads to.
They’re also not admins.
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So why is this different from the patient claiming to suffer from chronic back pain?
Because the main symptom of back pain is the patient reporting "My back hurts". If the patient instead reported "I have this lump in my testicles that wasn't there last week", I'd certainly think it's likely he might have cancer, and some good medical advice would be "go and ask a GP about that".
By phrasing the recommendation the way he did he made sure that it is understood that a) he is treating the patient for an unrelated issue, b) he isn't in a position to diagnose back related problems and c) he never examined the patient's back problems.
Okay, I wasn't going to comment, but I thought this would be extremely relevant : I've been getting paid for free for the past four months. I've been turning up to work, reading novels all fucking day, eating at the company cafeteria, and leaving. I generally spend 4-6 hours at the office. For 4 months now. Let that sink in. What happened is that I transferred from a 'public' team to a 'private' team, which means tha…
Bear in mind that this makes you an pretty expendable employee, if management decides they need to get rid of people, you are a prime candidate. One of my past employers was a consulting firm that would have people "on the bench" for weeks to months at a time between clients. When the time comes to get leaner, those who have been "on the bench" the longest are the ideal ones to get rid of, because they're the ones wh…
Reality suggests the opposite. They're having OP hang around doing nothing for fear of being without them at some unknown point. If they're an expendable employee, what is management waiting for? They're literally throwing money down a hole.
> The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.
Does the author really mean that if you don't work you still deserve something in return? That one kinda sounds like bullshit. Has that been expanded upon somewhere?
Also, the author mentions that this was already attempted during the 60s and that it ended in a disaster but doesn't tell what that was. I am not from America, so I don't really know the history of the country during the 60s. What happened?
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I'm reminded of procedures in the [US] defense industry. A "good step" in a given procedure would be absolutely clear in mind-numbing detail. "Pretend you're writing for a sailor" may be half a joke but it is also very real; sometimes word does get back to you about how something was unclear and a piece of equipment got buggered [or whatever], you look at the section in question, and all you can think is "How can you…
Not necessarily it being insulting, with Navy sailors, there is a very real chance that when they are needing to read that manual, they are under attack, and thus don't have the time or ability to think through what the step is actually trying to say. Making it extremely clear means that even when being fired on, the correct thing can be done.
Handbooks are read during downtime not primetime.