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Yurie
11799 Posts
I do have non-essential expenses that eat up a lot of the rest of the money currently. Eating at restaurants. Travel, like going to Dreamhacks, ESL One etc. Edit, as for the topic itself. Both sides have a point. There are a lot of jobs I agree are bullshit, but until we get to a different solution it is the best compromise. | ||
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hypercube
Hungary2735 Posts
On July 02 2014 05:02 LingsAreBunnies wrote: of course some inefficiencies do happen to some extent, but its either in the minority, or something to be changed in the near future. no corporations, especially privately owned ones would be willing to pay for work if they are really that blatantly unnecessary if they were to be competitive. If the inefficiency is complying with complicated regulation that serves no social purpose then they don't have a choice. You have to pay that patent lawyer to check your design doesn't infringe on some random patent, but from a societal point of view an overly permissive patent regime is an inefficiency. But from the POV of the corporation the lawyer is a necessity else they would get sued out of business. There are also regulated industries where minimizing costs doesn't always increase profit because the regulated price is tied to provable costs. Power companies are the main example of this. Then there are government contracts employing a cost plus pricing model. Again, no incentive to ruthlessly eliminate inefficiencies. Then there's the health sector where in an apparent breakdown of our economic models hospitals can make money by providing services (especially ordering tests) that are probably unnecessary. And that's just the private sector, government agencies face no competitive pressure so there's that. | ||
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LingsAreBunnies
United States103 Posts
On July 02 2014 06:02 hypercube wrote: If the inefficiency is complying with complicated regulation that serves no social purpose then they don't have a choice. You have to pay that patent lawyer to check your design doesn't infringe on some random patent, but from a societal point of view an overly permissive patent regime is an inefficiency. But from the POV of the corporation the lawyer is a necessity else they would get sued out of business. There are also regulated industries where minimizing costs doesn't always increase profit because the regulated price is tied to provable costs. Power companies are the main example of this. Then there are government contracts employing a cost plus pricing model. Again, no incentive to ruthlessly eliminate inefficiencies. Then there's the health sector where in an apparent breakdown of our economic models hospitals can make money by providing services (especially ordering tests) that are probably unnecessary. And that's just the private sector, government agencies face no competitive pressure so there's that. its got nothing to do with social purpose, and efficiency is considered given the alternatives. I dont really know the exact details, but despite the inefficiencies of the patent regulations, its existence is necessary, and any changes seems to be more costly than the extra jobs. as for your other examples, again I dont know the exact details, but the result seems that people have concluded that at the current time its more efficient to keep to the current model than to make improvements, since its apparently more cost efficient to pay for more workers than changing the infrastructure. even without competitive pressure, theres no reason to accept extra costs, only notable difference might be that they are willing to pay a bit more than normal to avoid change. maybe I didnt word it correctly, but Im not really disagreeing that there are certainly flaws and inefficiencies in the current models, just that there arent any reasonable alternatives thats been suggested. also that the 15 hour thing doesnt really mean much, since that both ignores the cost to make changes to the infrastructure, and also measures against a seemingly arbitrary level of production. | ||
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hypercube
Hungary2735 Posts
On July 02 2014 06:50 LingsAreBunnies wrote: its got nothing to do with social purpose, and efficiency is considered given the alternatives. I dont really know the exact details, but despite the inefficiencies of the patent regulations, its existence is necessary, and any changes seems to be more costly than the extra jobs. IP legislation is changed all the time, usually to extend what can be patented. The goal isn't to create more jobs for patent lawyers of course, but to segment markets and support those who own strategic patents, but that's a whole other discussion. as for your other examples, again I dont know the exact details, but the result seems that people have concluded that at the current time its more efficient to keep to the current model than to make improvements, since its apparently more cost efficient to pay for more workers than changing the infrastructure. I'm pretty sure people (as in the electorate) concluded that it was too much work to follow all details of regulation to make sure their interests were represented. Other people (i.e the shareholders of the regulated entity) used the opportunity to argue for regulation that could be subverted. Again inefficient use of workforce was not the main goal. The main goal was to maximize profit. It just so happened that inefficiency was the most reliable way to achieve this. even without competitive pressure, theres no reason to accept extra costs, only notable difference might be that they are willing to pay a bit more than normal to avoid change. Maybe true for some programs, but not for others. The Space Shuttle is a government program that survived because it was inefficient not despite it. A large, strategically distributed workforce provided the necessary political power to keep a technically flawed concept alive. Some of the same political coalition survived and influenced the goals of the Constellation program and after its cancellation the design of the SLS. Now, these are fairly specific examples, but you need to know an area in at least some detail to see how people's work is wasted and ultimately only serves as a job program + payout for some contractors. If the Shuttle program is the exception I imagine it's not a very rare type of exception. maybe I didnt word it correctly, but Im not really disagreeing that there are certainly flaws and inefficiencies in the current models, just that there arent any reasonable alternatives thats been suggested. also that the 15 hour thing doesnt really mean much, since that both ignores the cost to make changes to the infrastructure, and also measures against a seemingly arbitrary level of production. I don't know. I guess the first step in deciding how things should be is understanding how they actually are. If someone actually believes that almost all of the work we do is crucial then they have no incentive to look for alternatives. They'll say the only alternative is to consume less and then dismiss that alternative as undesirable. If however we accept that a lot of the work done is strictly unnecessary then we can start to think about why this is and maybe actually find alternatives. | ||
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
On July 01 2014 20:56 L1ghtning wrote: Our governments are really adept at creating bullshit jobs. I don't think that your father's work was as useless as you claim, but jobs that are created by the government have a tendency to be a bit iffy. I know that there are a lot of slackers who have free market jobs too, but it's what they do when they're not slacking off that is bringing in money to the company that hired them. This is why the free market is superior. If you work in marketing for Samsung and you're unable to market their products to create enough sales to justify your salary, you get sacked, and if you're an engineer or a designer, and your new product ideas or your improvements of old products doesn't lead to enough profit, then you get sacked. Ppl who are not qualified or who serve a purpose that is out of date, tends to lose their job sooner or later, atleast if they work on the free market. Jobs that are supported by the government don't need to be profitable, because the government is not interested in profit. If the government lose money, they just increase the taxes, or if you're Obama, you loan money. If our governments shrunk in size, and they let us handle our money ourselves, rather than letting them squander our taxmoney, then the living standards would increase all across the board, except maybe for ppl who right now have jobs paid by the government, that wouldn't have an actual demand on the open market, but this is a good thing, because it would force these ppl to find jobs that actually helps our society prosper. The government is very inefficient, and even leftists would know this if they looked at the government objectively, but they don't see it, because they don't want to realize that the government might be the villain, because the government is necessary, in order to distribute wealth from the hard working and the brilliant, to the lazy and the stupid. The british coal miners controversy is a good example of how illogical the leftist point of view is. When our society started to favor other resources to create energy, because coal was ineffective and dirty, the british government realized that the government-owned coal mining industry was a money sink. So they cut it off, and they got a lot of flack for it from leftists. Why? Why should the tax payers pay for an industry that isn't sustainable, that isn't needed? The only thing that the leftists could see was that a lot of ppl lost their jobs, and noone denies that fact, but you need to look at the bigger picture. Rather than carrying on and leeching off of tax money, society benefited from shifting this workforce to other areas, where there was actually a demand. So, the government can do the right thing too and get rid of jobs that are more costly than they're productive, but the problem is that when they do it, leftists go nuts about it. This is another reason why the government should not own companies, nor should they fund jobs, because even if they manage to figure out that a job is inefficient or doesn't serve a purpose, the moment that they start sacking ppl, leftists will riot about it, and then they will lose voters. You can talk all you want about creating a society where we can automatically create things that covers the basic living standards, but the thing is, we have to work 8 hours a day so that we can produce all the necessities, AND also produce things like cars, iphones, computers and TVs, and if the average working day went down to 4 hours, then the amount of produce that our society could create would be halved. That means that cars would be twice as rare. Everything, including food would be twice as rare (which basically would mean that we would have to shift a lot of workers over to food production), which would hurt the production of luxury items even more. Just try working half-time today and see how it would affect your living standards. That is what reality looked like for full time workers, like 70 years ago. The reason why we have increased the living standards so much is because of the inventions of the 1%. This is why they're the 1%. All this talk about, if you remove all the uneccessary jobs, it wouldn't actually hurt the production, that's just nonsense. Anyone who isn't economically illiterate knows that it's nonsense. All jobs that exists on the free market have a purpose. The ppl who have these jobs may not always be as productive as they should be, but they tend to be more productive than those who work for the government, because there's more pressure on them to perform, and in the end, them slacking off just nets their employer less profit, which means less salary for themselves, so if they're slacking off they're just shooting themselves in the foot. But no matter what, they're always serving a purpose. You know this by the mere fact of their existance. Company owners are greedy, and they would never pay for someone who don't carry their own weight. You have no idea what you are talking about. Your post is rife with inaccurate assumptions. Your arguments nestled in sordid ideology. You have completely bought into the capitalist-consumerist ideology. Bold parts highlighted for hilarity. The first thing does not follow. The second thing has to be a troll; every feature on the iphone was created through decades-long government-funded research. The entire computer industry was subsidized by government-funded research for decades and decades. Almost every technological revolution we've had in the last half-century would never have come about in a closed free market system. The government has just as many examples of more efficiently run enterprises than the free market as the free market does of more efficiently run enterprises than the government:
You are a parrot regurgitating free market propaganda, and your economic indoctrination amounts to illiteracy. Assuming that private enterprises, which spend trillions of dollars a year on advertisements, spending which does absolutely nothing to enhance the use value of the products they are selling, are more efficient or more "productive" or -insert free market buzzword here- should be recognized as dubious on its face. Beyond that, your misanthropy bleeds through, staining every sentence you've written. You casually discard people's lives and livelihoods when it's not immediately profitable for whomever has put up the capital in an enterprise, as if the market value of an end commodity were the final arbiter on the worthiness of any endeavor. This is not only misguided, but grossly immoral, an affront to the entire range of human experience and meaning. | ||
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urboss
Austria1223 Posts
For CEOs and board directors it doesn't really matter if they drive a public company into the ground, they are gonna get paid their seven-figure salaries anyway. It's all a game of redistributing capital between shareholders, however on the whole the capital basically stays where it is. | ||
zatic
Zurich15325 Posts
On July 02 2014 15:19 urboss wrote: Yeah, you can see how efficient the current free markets operate when you realize that the average time a company stays in the S&P500 is only 15(!) years. For CEOs and board directors it doesn't really matter if they drive a public company into the ground, they are gonna get paid their seven-figure salaries anyway. It's all a game of redistributing capital between shareholders, however on the whole the capital basically stays where it is. This has nothing to do with "bullshit jobs", or efficiency for that matter. According to your theory "bullshit jobs" is a phenomenon across the entire economy so every corporation would be affected. Of course there is waste and gross inefficiency in private business. But that doesn't mean that that is intentional to keep people working, like your theory suggests, or that businesses aren't trying to fight it where ever they can. The Great Recession gives a great example where this actually succeeded, especially in the US. After significant layoffs, corporate profits are back at or higher than pre-recession levels. Yet hardly anyone has been rehired, and unemployment remains high. What you would probably call "bullshit jobs" have been cut, and those people are now free to pursue the dream of a 15 hour work week at minimum wage (*last part meant sarcastically). | ||
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urboss
Austria1223 Posts
The problem arises in the corporate world, where ownership of a company is discoupled from management. When a company goes public, it all of a sudden gets a shitton of money from investors. What do you do if you have shitton of money? You hire people and attain resources that are not necessarily required. There is a different kind of inefficiency when it comes to startups: 99 out of 100 startups do fail, so the work that was produced in those startups was basically for nothing. In addition, most companies are copycats (talk about the 100th social network), so the value that the world gets out of these companies is basically zero. | ||
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zatic
Zurich15325 Posts
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urboss
Austria1223 Posts
The whole conclusion of the article is that modern capitalism is not working as efficiently as advocated. It is inefficient in transforming the effort spent into tangible real world value. The bullshit jobs are an expression of that inefficiency. | ||
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zatic
Zurich15325 Posts
It first observes that we have automation, and that in the past the jobs replaced in manual labor by automation have been more or less been offset by the new ones created in the service sector. This is so far so good, but the entire argument that follows over whether a job should exist is not economical, but based purely on the philosophical idea that a job should "contribute to the world". The bottom line is that people have jobs primarily to get payed, not to contribute to the world according to some vague standard. The reality that people who are freed from manual labor and don't find another job end up in miserable poverty is comfortably ignored. But, if things continue like they go right now we will soon arrive at the utopia of the author: Right now we are seeing previously "safe" service sector jobs being replaced by automation, only that this time there won't be new jobs available for the newly unemployed. And again, I can't help but be sarcastic: We will soon have plenty of people in blissful poverty free to finally contribute to the world. | ||
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Simberto
Germany11465 Posts
On July 02 2014 19:06 urboss wrote: Not sure what you are getting at. The whole conclusion of the article is that modern capitalism is not working as efficiently as advocated. It is inefficient in transforming the effort spent into tangible real world value. The bullshit jobs are an expression of that inefficiency. That is definitively correct. However, it is also the most efficient system we have so far. Obviously capitalism isn't ideally efficient. Just take a look at advertisements, failing companies, etc, which are a major part of the system but also obviously waste effort and ressources. But pointing this out doesn't actually do anything. Because it is still the most efficient system humanity has come up with so far. (And here i am talking about capitalism as a whole, there are obviously differences between american style crazy capitalism and euro style social capitalism). What you need to do is not say "This is inefficient" but "This would be more efficient". If you can not do that, you are wasting everyones time. Because 100% efficiency is not really an achievable goal. Neither is it the only goal, the size of the delta in the distribution of the is also something that is very relevant, and a few other things too. And there is a very major danger when changing the core of the system to actually make it worse then before. | ||
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L1ghtning
Sweden353 Posts
On July 02 2014 10:31 IgnE wrote: Almost every technological revolution we've had in the last half-century would never have come about in a closed free market system. Closed free market? That's a oxymoron. It's you who want to have a closed market, with the government dominating the market. I want a open market, where the government can operate, but where it's dominated by smaller actors. And we're talking about how the government and the free market handle jobs here, not research. And it's a complete lie that the government is responsible for all technological progress. Our governments are the biggest capital-holders of all. That's why they have their name tagged to a lot of stuff. There's a lot of smaller sized private investors though, and you can bet that they've been involved in the computer industry as well. Private companies also does a lot of research, funded by their own profits. Any company that hire engineers or scientists have a research team. The free market is much more effective in investing in new technology. The government is one actor, while on the free market there are millions of actors. This is why the free market is superior. With more actors holding a smaller share of capital, capital becomes much more sensitive to trends, so it flows more smoothly. When the government invests prematurely in something, it's a huge money sink, and when they invest in something that will actually change the future, they tend to be very slow compared to the private investors. The government have a lot of bureaucracy, and ppl making decisions about things that they don't understand, and they also have a tendency to make decisions based on their ideology. The government can make good decisions, but they're less likely to do so. The more free and spread out capital is, the more smoothly it will flow. Letting one actor hold most of the capital is a very bad idea. The government has just as many examples of more efficiently run enterprises than the free market as the free market does of more efficiently run enterprises than the government:
That graph is hilarious. Is that your proof that public healthcare is run more efficiently? Typical leftist mentality. You cherry-pick things and put them out of their scientific context, to try and prove a point. That graph doesn't prove anything remotely close to what you claim. A government-run company that have negative profit can be subsidized. A free market company with negative profit goes bankrupt. This is the crucial difference and it's an important one. Free market enterprices have one goal, and that is to make money, and this encourages them to make their organization as efficient as possible. This is not the case for government-run companies. These companies don't actually get to keep their profits, and if they get into debt, the state can always save them. This discourages them from making their practices more efficient. There is not the same incentive to perform. Anyway, the main reason why companies gets privatized is because they were money sinks. This is why it's not fair to compare their prices and performance before and after, because when the government owned them, the government subsidized them with tax money, which enabled them to stay afloat. The government should not subsidize their companies, because then they start to compete on unfair terms, which makes it more likely that the company monopolizes the market, which is a bad thing. I don't oppose to the government subsidizing certain services, mainly health care and education, but if they do that, they should do it consistently, on even terms. I didn't bother to read about that energy company, because it's not very scientific to draw conclusions from 1 example, because they might be favored by the location, and if they get subsidized, it's a irrelevant example. Government owned companies can certainly in some cases be more effective than private owned companies, but if said company was sold off, then most likely it would become even better, especially going forward. | ||
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Shikyo
Finland33997 Posts
Of course, in the end it's partially paid for via taxes, but the amount of security you get and the guarantee you have that things will work out without needing all sorts of seperate insurances and packages and policies and all sorts of things in return for you never being screwed... Is in my opinion worth it. Just how much is money worth, anyway? After you can get by decently, there's minimal returns if you don't want to outright waste it on drinking or new cards(when your old one would do just fine). For example my friend who earns around 10k euros a month just donates most of it to charity because it's not that useful to him. | ||
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Simberto
Germany11465 Posts
And still in the US you have this weird system that costs 2x as much for worse care with higher inequality, and every attempt to change the system to something reasonably civilized like the rest of the developed world faces absurd amounts of resistance. Why do people oppose a system that is obviously better a) for society as a whole and b) for themselves specifically. This boggles my mind. Do they just plan off of "Yeah i'm not gonna get sick ever"? | ||
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-Archangel-
Croatia7457 Posts
On July 02 2014 19:26 zatic wrote: The article you posted is a crude mix of ideas and doesn't conclude anything. It first observes that we have automation, and that in the past the jobs replaced in manual labor by automation have been more or less been offset by the new ones created in the service sector. This is so far so good, but the entire argument that follows over whether a job should exist is not economical, but based purely on the philosophical idea that a job should "contribute to the world". The bottom line is that people have jobs primarily to get payed, not to contribute to the world according to some vague standard. The reality that people who are freed from manual labor and don't find another job end up in miserable poverty is comfortably ignored. But, if things continue like they go right now we will soon arrive at the utopia of the author: Right now we are seeing previously "safe" service sector jobs being replaced by automation, only that this time there won't be new jobs available for the newly unemployed. And again, I can't help but be sarcastic: We will soon have plenty of people in blissful poverty free to finally contribute to the world. There is a good solution and it is a mix of what Sweden does (progressive tax system that does not let anyone become unproportionally rich compared to everyone else) and what Switzerland recently tried to implement: Basic money income for all citizens no matter their status, age or employment (some like they have in Star Trek). This is a possible future and only one that will work. Other option is a bigger and bigger difference between poor and rich (and under poor I also put all the people working jobs they hate) and eventual class wars that will kill lots of people around the world. | ||
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Yacobs
United States846 Posts
* What is a "bullshit job" in the first place? No one has put forward a satisfying definition, instead resorting to anecdotes about a job they once did that maybe seemed bullshit. * Having the government pay for your basic necessities requires the government to have money. For the government to have money, you need taxes. For there to be taxes, you need commerce. If we dismantle capitalism, there is vastly lower amounts of commerce. Vastly lower amounts of commerce means the government has vastly lower amounts of money. So, young idealists, tell me -- where will the money come from? | ||
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urboss
Austria1223 Posts
On July 02 2014 22:58 Yacobs wrote: There are so many obvious practical problems with all of the "solutions" proposed in this thread, I can't decide if I want to laugh or cry. * What is a "bullshit job" in the first place? No one has put forward a satisfying definition, instead resorting to anecdotes about a job they once did that maybe seemed bullshit. * Having the government pay for your basic necessities requires the government to have money. For the government to have money, you need taxes. For there to be taxes, you need commerce. If we dismantle capitalism, there is vastly lower amounts of commerce. Vastly lower amounts of commerce means the government has vastly lower amounts of money. So, young idealists, tell me -- where will the money come from? Definition: A bullshit job is a job that only exists as a side product of the economic system and doesn't provide any tangible value to the world. That means, in an ideal world this job would not exist. The state wouldn't need to have money to cover the basic needs. This is because we can decouple the basic-need-system from the monetary system. You can think of a world wide union that guarantees the provision of basic needs. | ||
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JustPassingBy
10776 Posts
On July 02 2014 21:41 Shikyo wrote: Public healthcare is totally awesome. By the way, there's plenty of private doctors over here as well, but for example when I had to get a tooth removed and went to the public healthcare dentist, he just forwarded me to a private dentist who's an expert at the field. The entire thing went very smoothly and was super professional, and only cost me about 30 euros. Now, while the public healthcare doctors tend to not be amazing, they can still get basic things done and they can forward you to the experts who get things done for the same fee(the government pays the full fee to them here). Of course, in the end it's partially paid for via taxes, but the amount of security you get and the guarantee you have that things will work out without needing all sorts of seperate insurances and packages and policies and all sorts of things in return for you never being screwed... Is in my opinion worth it. Just how much is money worth, anyway? After you can get by decently, there's minimal returns if you don't want to outright waste it on drinking or new cards(when your old one would do just fine). For example my friend who earns around 10k euros a month just donates most of it to charity because it's not that useful to him. Wait, there are dentists who are experts in removing teeth? Isn't that a bread and butter thing for them that any dentist should be able to do? | ||
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Simberto
Germany11465 Posts
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