On June 29 2014 07:41 MoonfireSpam wrote: We have an "on call manager" at our A&E department. When the department is busy, he stands in the way of everyone and occasionally slows people down by asking "what are you doing or what do you need help with?" when it feels like physically getting in the way is not enough.
Of course he can't actually do anything you need help with, because he doesn't know anything about delivering healthcare or how to do other peoples jobs. If they hired an extra person to actually help with work during those periods it'd be better.
I think they spend they day trying to explain why some days in A&E are busier than others and then fail to implement any plans to deal with it.
That's one of those "bullshit jobs" - which I like to define as "if this guy died in the middle of the day, workflow would actually remain unchanged".
I think "hint: if someone is willing to pay for it then it apparently isn't a bullshit job in the current system, you just don't like it" doesn't always justify a job since I think a lot of these jobs have sprung up from managers trying to make things better, because if they don't make any change then they can't justify their own jobs.
It sounds like you're confusing 'bullshit employee' with 'bullshit job.' It's a common, and pretty critical mistake.
Reduction of work hours would enable people to spend more time to educate their sibblings, spend more time to remain active both physically and cognitively and take the time to cook proper meals. Time to invest in their community as well. Well being is not going to be the result of a new pill.
What sort of society do you wish for yourself and your contempories? Some sort of ladder where you prey upon those below you or some sort of pool in which everyone contributes to the well being of his peers? Its obviously hard (very hard) to connect or empathize with someone you never met or even heard of, certainly is for me at least.
Its even harder given the contradiction that abounds all around us, encouraging us to compete with one another, rewarding success with no concern for those who participated in the trial and error process. All this potential for innovation left unexploited, since we'd rather have people starving (or eating) to death in order to elevate us, rather than giving them the opportunity to think, design and create.
Given current level of science and technology, innovation is seldom the accomplishment of a single person.
I think everyone is familiar with corporate bloat. A major corporation has hundreds or thousands of marketing and business MBAs, there is no way all those people are actually providing a needed service. But, meh, collusion and fluff will always exist.
That the production industry has become exported to the third-world, and that the service industry is more automated, does mean less useful work for the population. I agree it's a problem. But we already know the solution to this problem: social safety nets. We just need to get over the "every man is an island" libertarian ideologies, and redistribute the wealth.
There is an inherent and very necessary desire for people to feel useful and to provide something -- this has existed since the dawn of man, not the dawn of capitalism. This desire for utility doesn't have to be tied to a paycheck (parenting being an obvious example of unpaid work). I also like the point the poster above me makes: let people use this time and energy to exercise their creativity, and society will benefit in more ways than one can imagine. But right now, we put too much pressure on putting people into careers in which they probably have no personal leverage or desire to achieve anything.
On June 30 2014 04:49 HeatEXTEND wrote: There are people that don't get pleasure just from having something, they get pleasure from someone else not having it.
This is obviously a problem -_-
No, people in reality simply get pleasure from having more than someone else. That's why even though poor people in the west can have cable, cars, cellphones, enough food to get fat on, etc. they are still unhappy because they don't have as much as other people. If you gave some peasant farmer in Russian from the 1700's cable, a car, a cellphone, and the food we have today, he would be the envy of every person he knows.
On June 30 2014 04:49 HeatEXTEND wrote: There are people that don't get pleasure just from having something, they get pleasure from someone else not having it.
This is obviously a problem -_-
Your worth is your value to society (aka all the goods and services that you can provide). If you have something and someone else does not, your value is higher because of rarity. If someone else has it and you don't, "someone else"'s value is higher for the same reason. This is perfectly explainable in terms of basic economics.
Excellent reflection. It's a topic I've been thinking about many times. The system is rotten but we can't seem to think about a better one (maybe it doesn't even exist).
On June 30 2014 04:49 HeatEXTEND wrote: There are people that don't get pleasure just from having something, they get pleasure from someone else not having it.
This is obviously a problem -_-
Your worth is your value to society (aka all the goods and services that you can provide). If you have something and someone else does not, your value is higher because of rarity. If someone else has it and you don't, "someone else"'s value is higher for the same reason. This is perfectly explainable in terms of basic economics.
Basic economics is the great quantifier. How much is a man worth?
On June 30 2014 06:39 Release wrote: Your worth is your value to society (aka all the goods and services that you can provide). If you have something and someone else does not, your value is higher because of rarity. If someone else has it and you don't, "someone else"'s value is higher for the same reason. This is perfectly explainable in terms of basic economics.
Must be great living with the acute awareness that your own "value to society" is infinitesimally smaller than that Khloe Kardashian.
On June 30 2014 00:03 Kickboxer wrote: To me it's pretty obvious that an universal basic income system that takes care of your food, health, housing & utility bills plus a little extra is the next step in human evolution. Economists have already calculated that such a system is feasible as it can replace major segments of the entirely obsolete and highly corruptible (this cannot be overstated) public administration sector.
You can easily incorporate unconditional income into a relatively liberal capitalist model to provide for the prestige incentives desired by the upper classes, and preserve the general rapid development driven by the good sides of capitalist competition.
A very small minority of people will choose to do absolutely nothing productive, but you should understand these are people who already do nothing productive now, or are petty criminals, or self destructive addicts.
Most people will simply do whatever they truly enjoy - since no functioning adult appreciates being bored or "empty". These activities can range from making art to coding shareware to exploring science for the greater good to hanging out with little children or the elderly, care for animals, or keep doing whatever economic activity it is that they do so they can purchase extra perks like bionic limbs, hair transplants, trips to Mars and ferraris if they need to satisfy their ego ^_^
On the other hand, not only are poor people no longer forced to choose between starvation and radically underpaid jobs / crime (making the job market actually work the way it's supposed to in the minds of libertarians), the added benefit of people working only because they want to creates workers who are drastically better at whatever they do.
This way, everyone wins. I'm especially tired of getting a shit service because the guy doing it clearly hates his job.
Make corporations respect the same laws individuals, and we're on our way to utopia and space colonization
A universal basic income system sounds great on paper. If you would somehow manage to force the whole world to implement such a system, there will be the following problem: The work necessary to cover the basic needs for everyone has to be done somehow.
Some examples of these jobs would be: Garbage Collector Doctor Construction worker Janitor Sewage plant operator Oil rig worker Driver/Pilot Plumber/Mechanic Teacher Farmer Butcher Police officer Lumberjack
There are several scenarios that ensure that this work gets done:
All the work required for the basic needs is fully automatized. Obviously, we are not quite there yet.
The people that actually do these jobs have the highest status in the society. They get several amenities like a big home, expensive car etc... This is already happening to some degree as fewer and fewer people become plumbers, the existing plumbers get paid a lot since the demand for plumbers is high.
Everyone needs to get their hands dirty in the form of working 1 week per year. You are required to slaughter pigs for one week per year, in turn you get all the basic needs covered. This is obviously quite inefficient since people have to be trained every time again, but hey, it's just about as inefficient as everyone working full-time bullshit jobs.
On June 30 2014 00:03 Kickboxer wrote: To me it's pretty obvious that an universal basic income system that takes care of your food, health, housing & utility bills plus a little extra is the next step in human evolution. Economists have already calculated that such a system is feasible as it can replace major segments of the entirely obsolete and highly corruptible (this cannot be overstated) public administration sector.
You can easily incorporate unconditional income into a relatively liberal capitalist model to provide for the prestige incentives desired by the upper classes, and preserve the general rapid development driven by the good sides of capitalist competition.
A very small minority of people will choose to do absolutely nothing productive, but you should understand these are people who already do nothing productive now, or are petty criminals, or self destructive addicts.
Most people will simply do whatever they truly enjoy - since no functioning adult appreciates being bored or "empty". These activities can range from making art to coding shareware to exploring science for the greater good to hanging out with little children or the elderly, care for animals, or keep doing whatever economic activity it is that they do so they can purchase extra perks like bionic limbs, hair transplants, trips to Mars and ferraris if they need to satisfy their ego ^_^
On the other hand, not only are poor people no longer forced to choose between starvation and radically underpaid jobs / crime (making the job market actually work the way it's supposed to in the minds of libertarians), the added benefit of people working only because they want to creates workers who are drastically better at whatever they do.
This way, everyone wins. I'm especially tired of getting a shit service because the guy doing it clearly hates his job.
Make corporations respect the same laws individuals, and we're on our way to utopia and space colonization
A universal basic income system sounds great on paper. If you would somehow manage to force the whole world to implement such a system, there will be the following problem: The work necessary to cover the basic needs for everyone has to be done somehow.
Some examples of these jobs would be: Garbage Collector Doctor Construction worker Janitor Sewage plant operator Oil rig worker Driver/Pilot Plumber/Mechanic Teacher Farmer Butcher Police officer Lumberjack
There are several scenarios that ensure that this work gets done:
All the work required for the basic needs is fully automatized. Obviously, we are not quite there yet.
The people that actually do these jobs have the highest status in the society. They get several amenities like a big home, expensive car etc... This is already happening to some degree as fewer and fewer people become plumbers, the existing plumbers get paid a lot since the demand for plumbers is high.
Everyone needs to get their hands dirty in the form of working 1 week per year. You are required to slaughter pigs for one week per year, in turn you get all the basic needs covered. This is obviously quite inefficient since people have to be trained every time again, but hey, it's just about as inefficient as everyone working full-time bullshit jobs.
But you're forgetting that for some, if not all of these jobs, people don't always exercise them for the money. Sure, maybe the majority does it for the pay, or because they have to, but there's still a vast amount of people doing the things they do because they're passionate about them. Think about people having a natural talent for mechanics and teaching. People who WANT to keep the order, people who WANT public health to stay where it is. Hell, I would even see myself doing janitorial work, simply because it's so peaceful. I do agree there are some really shitty jobs that most of the people wouldn't want to do and there would have to be some kind of ruling where everyone does like a community service kind of thing OR it would have to be largely automated like you suggested. Then ofcourse comes the problem of major infrastructural changes which can't be done overnight. I also think that alot of these ideas are feasible, but the planning and execution would be such a headache to deal with that it becomes nearly impossible to start a change this huge (at least without global unification).
On June 30 2014 06:39 Release wrote: Your worth is your value to society (aka all the goods and services that you can provide). If you have something and someone else does not, your value is higher because of rarity. If someone else has it and you don't, "someone else"'s value is higher for the same reason. This is perfectly explainable in terms of basic economics.
Must be great living with the acute awareness that your own "value to society" is infinitesimally smaller than that Khloe Kardashian.
In urboss's world Khloe Kardashian is an entertainer. That has infinitely more tangible value than most of the "bullshit jobs" that he beleives most people do.
I'm not sure I even understand the problem. In 1930 people had way less stuff. Be it variety of food available from all over the world, clothes, electronics, cars, telecommunication, power supply, whatever it is you name it. I'm fairly confident that one could easily live like a poor person lived in 1930 with working 15 hours a week if that was the goal and if enough people would choose to do so (so they can profit from mass automatization). Maybe close to that, as building machines, programming them and controlling them isn't for free either.
So while there are a lot of jobs that feel like bullshit if you had to do it all day every day, most of them are probably a luxury thing that enough people want to get, and focusing only on doing this luxury thing increases its efficiency, thus making it cheaper for all those who use it. And the bureaucracy comes with scaling of population. Maybe there is a lot of redundancy here, maybe somewhere there is too little bureaucracy, but for our current system we kinda need it to organize all the people and all the things to help make mass production and automatization and stuff like that work in the first place. There are people that are not directly generating any value, but they are needed for machines/other people to function or to be much more efficient in generating value. That doesn't make their job a bullshit job. I'm not saying there are no outdated/unneeded jobs, but those should be way in the minority and not blow up the way it is presented in the article.
And while we are at it, here are some more bullshit jobs (yes i went to extremes to reiterate my point): 1. Teacher - people don't need to have general knowledge of stuff that isn't directly tied to their 15-hour-per-week-job, so cut that luxury of education 2. Police officer - what a useless job, in essence it does nothing but cost us money. Anyone should follow the system anyway. 3. Doctor - people are most productive in their early years, so not dying early from diseases and stuff cuts into the efficiency. How dare we have the luxury of modern medecine and thus a potentially prolonged life.
You also don't need vacations or travel the world or have a car really. Enjoy your free time where you have just the bare minimum of what we call civilization. You most likely couldn't even read a book.
On June 30 2014 00:03 Kickboxer wrote: To me it's pretty obvious that an universal basic income system that takes care of your food, health, housing & utility bills plus a little extra is the next step in human evolution. Economists have already calculated that such a system is feasible as it can replace major segments of the entirely obsolete and highly corruptible (this cannot be overstated) public administration sector.
You can easily incorporate unconditional income into a relatively liberal capitalist model to provide for the prestige incentives desired by the upper classes, and preserve the general rapid development driven by the good sides of capitalist competition.
A very small minority of people will choose to do absolutely nothing productive, but you should understand these are people who already do nothing productive now, or are petty criminals, or self destructive addicts.
Most people will simply do whatever they truly enjoy - since no functioning adult appreciates being bored or "empty". These activities can range from making art to coding shareware to exploring science for the greater good to hanging out with little children or the elderly, care for animals, or keep doing whatever economic activity it is that they do so they can purchase extra perks like bionic limbs, hair transplants, trips to Mars and ferraris if they need to satisfy their ego ^_^
On the other hand, not only are poor people no longer forced to choose between starvation and radically underpaid jobs / crime (making the job market actually work the way it's supposed to in the minds of libertarians), the added benefit of people working only because they want to creates workers who are drastically better at whatever they do.
This way, everyone wins. I'm especially tired of getting a shit service because the guy doing it clearly hates his job.
Make corporations respect the same laws individuals, and we're on our way to utopia and space colonization
A universal basic income system sounds great on paper. If you would somehow manage to force the whole world to implement such a system, there will be the following problem: The work necessary to cover the basic needs for everyone has to be done somehow.
Some examples of these jobs would be: Garbage Collector Doctor Construction worker Janitor Sewage plant operator Oil rig worker Driver/Pilot Plumber/Mechanic Teacher Farmer Butcher Police officer Lumberjack
There are several scenarios that ensure that this work gets done:
All the work required for the basic needs is fully automatized. Obviously, we are not quite there yet.
The people that actually do these jobs have the highest status in the society. They get several amenities like a big home, expensive car etc... This is already happening to some degree as fewer and fewer people become plumbers, the existing plumbers get paid a lot since the demand for plumbers is high.
Everyone needs to get their hands dirty in the form of working 1 week per year. You are required to slaughter pigs for one week per year, in turn you get all the basic needs covered. This is obviously quite inefficient since people have to be trained every time again, but hey, it's just about as inefficient as everyone working full-time bullshit jobs.
I think universal basic income doesn't mean same income for everyone, or at least it shouldn't. It's one end of the spectrum, the other end being what we see now with the huge difference between poorest and richest. Everything in the middle is possible.
Here's what I would do given the chance. Basic income would exist, but only as a basis for further calculations, I'll call it X. Let's say 15 hours of standard (no variable applied to X) work would give you enough to fullfil your basic needs. This amount of work is required from every able person. After that it's all bonus to improve your lifestyle. Then we apply different variables (called Y) on this. A job is a bit dangerous (firefighter, oil rig worker, etc), then Y = 1.1. Another job is unpleasant (trash collectors...), same idea. This can apply, and stack, with many different elements, like environment (cold weather for exemple), repetitivity, whatever. The longer a job goes without being worked on by someone, the higher the Y. So, for an hour of work, one get paid X x Y.
This would mean that someone doing an unpleasant and dangerous job would meet his minimum in 10 hours of work per week instead of 15. This would also mean that someone that wants a high standard lifestyle could work 40 hours a week with a high Y, and get paid a lot. It also means that the difference between the lower and higher income would be entirely based on how much of himself a worker is willing to give.
This is just an amazing topic. It completely disregards some basic effects of competition in capitalism, doesn't provide any actual means for instituting change, and essentially passes off a moral view as objective fact. The author of the essay comes off as a whiner more than anything. Yes, a lot of jobs feel pointless. Yes, technology allows us to do more work with less effort. That does not mean that those jobs actually ARE pointless, though, or that technology should allow you to slack off instead of becoming even more productive than you were before.
we as the western society and as individuals are incredibly wasteful with goods (food for example) and often ineffective when it comes to administration. bureaucracy in big institutions and companies tend to grow without reason.
People can be so close minded. I will answer the OP's question in two words: "Office Politics".
Let's face it, most jobs nowadays can be easily done in less than 40 hours. You work 40 hours, maybe more, because you want to make it appear that you are working more than other people. Take a look back and see how much time you are actually spending working rather than documenting how much you are working and statusing somebody on what you are working on. There are people who are so good at looking busy at work that they have even fooled themselves into thinking they are really busy.
It doesn't matter if you are more productive than your coworkers. It doesn't matter that you are more efficient or that the work you do is more valuable. If you want to get paid, if you want to advance, you will put in the time. You have to compete with the people who are very good at looking busy. Those people will call countless meetings and will status so many managers about little things that are too trivial to bring to upper management. Then watch them get promoted because they are visible. Many of the so-called "bullshit jobs" mentioned actually have value to society. But those bullshit jobs have a lot of bullshit hours built into the jobs.
This is not a first-world, western society thing. It's even worse in East Asia and Southeast Asia. I will give you the example of Japan. In a standard white-collar workplace in Japan, employees who don't do overtime are viewed as lazy. What do people do during overtime? The boss doesn't want to leave until all his employees leave because he wants to appear the hardest working. No employee wants to leave until the boss leaves because it will leave a bad impression. So they sit on their desks reading the newspaper, doodling on scratch paper, tapping their pens and generally just loafing around after work all the way to midnight and beyond.
A bit off topic. Don't see why you include priests and shamans in the worthless category. They are psychologists that work mostly through group therapy. Priest education in Sweden includes a lot of psychology, there isn't as much stigma attached to talking to a group figure compared to a professional. If you talk to a psychiatrist there is a problem, if you talk to your group figure you might just be talking about going out to golf.
Edit, as for the topic. I think we will have an economic crash similar to the great depression within the next 50 years due to what is being discussed in this thread. People running out of bullshit jobs. The service will simply be high enough that the next step downwards in the pyramid doesn't add enough value compared to cost.
I think of the workforce as a pyramid. The top is what is needed, food, water etc. The next step is the things that makes that easier, the next makes that easier and onwards. Each step requires less % of the population for each year that passes. Once we run out of things to plug in at the bottom we face large unemployment.
On June 30 2014 22:26 AnachronisticAnarchy wrote: This is just an amazing topic. It completely disregards some basic effects of competition in capitalism, doesn't provide any actual means for instituting change, and essentially passes off a moral view as objective fact. The author of the essay comes off as a whiner more than anything. Yes, a lot of jobs feel pointless. Yes, technology allows us to do more work with less effort. That does not mean that those jobs actually ARE pointless, though, or that technology should allow you to slack off instead of becoming even more productive than you were before.
Could you elaborate on some basic effects of competition in capitalism?
Why should you want to become even more productive than you were before? To what end?
I didn't read any replies or everything in the spoilers so it's likely to have had some sort of answer/address already, but: Isn't the whole point of everyone having jobs so that everyone can actually earn money and remain at a reasonable level of living?
Unless people could somehow own/rent someone elses's robots/computers (which is problematic for various reasons), or be in some sort of communist utopia, I don't see how people could maintain their level of living without having a job.
On June 30 2014 22:26 AnachronisticAnarchy wrote: This is just an amazing topic. It completely disregards some basic effects of competition in capitalism, doesn't provide any actual means for instituting change, and essentially passes off a moral view as objective fact. The author of the essay comes off as a whiner more than anything. Yes, a lot of jobs feel pointless. Yes, technology allows us to do more work with less effort. That does not mean that those jobs actually ARE pointless, though, or that technology should allow you to slack off instead of becoming even more productive than you were before.
Could you elaborate on some basic effects of competition in capitalism?
Why should you want to become even more productive than you were before? To what end?
The reality of life involves having to thrive in order to survive. It's an unfortunate reason why individual regions/countries wouldn't necessarily work out too well if they abandoned any sort of attempt at growing economically. An analogy would be similar to that of human reproduction. While one can live a great life without having kids —and frequently the most successful people have little to no offspring— it results in in an overall plateau or reduction in that person's population while others continue to grow and eventually push out their peers.
EPT
