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> people need jobs I dislike this reductive reasoning because it basically turns predatory businesses into saviors by taking mercy on the poor fools who dared

by zanny 9y ago

> people need jobs I dislike this reductive reasoning because it basically turns predatory businesses into saviors by taking mercy on the poor fools who dared to find themselves with no means to feed or house themselves. It really reflects on the last hundred years of human history how we try so hard to perpetuate a facade of how we get everyone doing something valuable to justify their existence, when a large (and growing) percentage of people can outright admit their jobs are pointless, don't contribute anything, and aren't meaningful to anyone but bean counters and a machine bigger than any of them in isolation. So no, pointless bad jobs from Foxconn in Wisconsin are only beneficial as a means to kick the can down the road until society will wake up to the reality that it takes one person to feed a hundred and so long as the needs and wants of a population can be provided by only a subset of that population (and a shrinking subset as time and automation marches on) that there will be a growing fraction of people left surrounded by a glut of resources they are denied so long as they can't contribute anything back that satisfies those other producers. And it absolutely is a glut. What are the figures, some half of all food in the US is thrown out, there are multiple times more unoccupied homes than homeless, and the department of defense regularly "misplaces" billions of dollars? There is waste and excess in every gutter of the economy while children are food insecure and people are giving themselves heart disease from the stress of trying to scrape by in a society that holds them in ire for not being one of the few massive producers. Producers who are themselves often overworked and abused through the same mechanisms that pressure them towards efficiency. And I also despise arguments like an individual state cannot do anything. It doesn't require a heavy hand to create incentives to provide housing assistance, better utilize the food supply, and reduce the strain and stress on its workforce. Small changes like housing first initiatives or pot decriminalization have done wonders to reduce poverty and improve lives. What doesn't improve anyones life in the long term is giving Amazon tax immunity for building a headquarters in your city.

roenxi 9y ago
> I dislike this reductive reasoning because it basically turns predatory businesses into saviors by taking mercy on the poor fools who dared to find themselves with no means to feed or house themselves. I'm onboard with a big chunk of what you are saying; we would have more if we wasted less, and we shouldn't organise ourselves such that we need to work more than we enjoy leisure time. On to the part where I disagree - this lead sentence is absurdly one-eyed and anti-business. Employees have agency; it isn't a label applied at birth that they can't shake. It is as easy to quit as to be fired. Nobody is worse off if new sources of employment are made available. While on the subject, I'm going to take a flying leap and say that the ideas behind there being "predatory businesses" are going to be completely at odds with the ideas behind "their jobs are pointless". To hold both these ideas in my head at once requires the company management to literally be insane and evil. I'm going to opine that they are not both.
- redial 9y ago
  > Nobody is worse off if new sources of employment are made available. Sometimes yes and sometimes we are all worse, specially if the source of employment is the cause of a massive oil spill. > "predatory businesses" are going to be completely at odds with the ideas behind "their jobs are pointless" Again, not always. A "pointless company" (or government agency), however efficient, will always be full of people doing pointless jobs.
  - roenxi 9y ago
    You might have misread what I put between the quotation marks, "predatory company" not "pointless company". It goes a fair bit against the grain of stereotype to describe the government as a predatory employer.
    - redial 9y ago
      You misread what I said. Any company can be pointless, even predatory ones, and yes, even government agencies. And I never described the government as a predatory employer. The quotation marks I added to "pointless company" have no relation to the quotation marks on your comment, which seems to be the source of confusion.
IntronExon 9y ago
You make a litany of good points, but who wants to lose their job in the uncertain hope that society will “wake up” to reality? There is no real indication that such an awakening is imminent, so without the ability to earn poeple are deeply, horribly screwed. In the paradigm which persists, people really do need jobs because they won’t eat otherwise.
- zanny 9y ago
  When talking politics especially on the scale of a state or country you aren't talking microeconomics. Microeconomically of course you optimize to survive with the hand you are dealt. If a pointless job is going to pay you more money than one that creates meaningful production as long as you can bear or be ignorant to the fact your time is wasted take the free money. The problem is that the microeconomic reality at the personal level isn't reflective of macroeconomic reality. It is why political coordination and organization at the grassroots is so hard, and why the poor vote and participate so much less in government - you simply don't have the time to voice your discontent with the broken macroeconomic conditions when the micro keep you in a constant state of distress, anxiety, and uncertainty. All the figures on a national scale about waste or excess mean nothing to a child going hungry tonight.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    Maybe poor people just understand that when they try to describe their plight and seek assistance, they’ll be told that “sorry your microeconomic reality is too far divorced from the macroeconomic reality for us to care.”
aaavl2821 9y ago
I don't think you give people enough credit. There are a lot of people who view those "pointless bad jobs" as opportunities and who can and will work hard to make the most of them. Not defending the abusive practices of companies, but who are you to decide whether someone else' job is pointless and bad? When I was in college a sociology class showed a video on factory conditions in china in the early 2000s. The point of the video (and class) was that companies are evil and will exploit you with terrible jobs with no path for advancement etc The work conditions were terrible, but people chose to work in those jobs. They moved from rural homes with little economic opportunity and ended up contributing to one of the greatest periods of economic growth and wealth creation in history I know very little about china and am not defending workplace abuses, but for many people those terrible jobs were opportunities that paid off for them
- lovich 9y ago
  I too would choose to cut off my foot rather than cut off my head. It doesn't mean that the choice is a good one, or one that isn't forced on me.
jjeaff 9y ago
I dislike it when people state opinion as fact. Even if your job is to literally rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic, it may not be pointless at all for that person or for those who enjoy the fruits of the labor. People not only need jobs, they want them. Many people get great satisfaction in doing a good job, earning money, and supporting themselves and family. Pretty much anything you do is "pointless" by someone's subjective opinion. I mean, we are all going to burn up from sun exposure in a few billion years anyway.
- lovich 9y ago
  My job could be done by someone with maybe a months training right out of high school because 90% of it is applying our company specific css to create PDFs, and you can only learn once you are on the job. My company wants the prestige of being a "high tech" company, however so they've hired me at a 6 figure plus salary to do this job and in the interview pretended that it was going to involve the modern front end stack and building and maintaining containerization. It's a pointless job in that the work that is done doesn't give any benefit other than aggrandizing one of the managers in my chain to their own manager. Yes it has a point to someone, that literally being a singular someone, but is the waste generated by my job worth it? Why am I paid several times more than someone making minimum wage, when any random person can do the job, just to satisfy a single person? The answer is because they currently have the economic power to create and keep this position, but that's not a moral reason and it's not an efficient reason.
  - csomar 9y ago
    Thank you for voicing the truth. I experienced the same. I made most of my fortune doing practically nothing. I also did lots of real and "fake" work that produced me just "get along by" income. It's a shit show out there but people holding high income don't want to admit it. People on the other end either think we are stealing from them or we are wizards of the world. The truth is that we had an equal chance to fall on one bunch or the other. It is practically a random, hazardous distribution that happens to work better than socialism.
    - deleted 9y ago
CivBase 9y ago
Sounds great. Let's all drop the charade and serve the betterment of mankind! That's a wonderful ideal, but history has proven it to be folly. There may be an abundance of resources, but it's still a finite amount and humans are greedy. When a system like that scales, bad actors always take advantage. We all want resources, but we all want things to get better too. Mechanisms like capitalism and meritocricy are the best solutions we've found for serving those two desires at scale. They're not perfect solutions and their effectiveness is decreasing as humans are able to provide less individual value by the day. Still, we don't cling to them because we've fooled ourselves - we cling to them because nothing else has ever worked at scale for very long. Maybe a better solution exists, but we need more than an idealistic notion of "working for the greater good" to keep it stable.
- EliRivers 9y ago
  As an interesting aside, when the term "meritocracy" was created, it was a pejorative; something we should seek to avoid.
  - CivBase 9y ago
    Interesting. It obviously has its failings - hence this discussion - but I still haven't heard of anything better yet that hasn't been proven to fall apart at scale.

by zanny 9y ago

roenxi 9y ago

> I dislike this reductive reasoning because it basically turns predatory businesses into saviors by taking mercy on the poor fools who dared to find themselves with no means to feed or house themselves. I'm onboard with a big chunk of what you are saying; we would have more if we wasted less, and we shouldn't organise ourselves such that we need to work more than we enjoy leisure time. On to the part where I disagree - this lead sentence is absurdly one-eyed and anti-business. Employees have agency; it isn't a label applied at birth that they can't shake. It is as easy to quit as to be fired. Nobody is worse off if new sources of employment are made available. While on the subject, I'm going to take a flying leap and say that the ideas behind there being "predatory businesses" are going to be completely at odds with the ideas behind "their jobs are pointless". To hold both these ideas in my head at once requires the company management to literally be insane and evil. I'm going to opine that they are not both.

redial 9y ago
> Nobody is worse off if new sources of employment are made available. Sometimes yes and sometimes we are all worse, specially if the source of employment is the cause of a massive oil spill. > "predatory businesses" are going to be completely at odds with the ideas behind "their jobs are pointless" Again, not always. A "pointless company" (or government agency), however efficient, will always be full of people doing pointless jobs.
- roenxi 9y ago
  You might have misread what I put between the quotation marks, "predatory company" not "pointless company". It goes a fair bit against the grain of stereotype to describe the government as a predatory employer.
  - redial 9y ago
    You misread what I said. Any company can be pointless, even predatory ones, and yes, even government agencies. And I never described the government as a predatory employer. The quotation marks I added to "pointless company" have no relation to the quotation marks on your comment, which seems to be the source of confusion.

IntronExon 9y ago

You make a litany of good points, but who wants to lose their job in the uncertain hope that society will “wake up” to reality? There is no real indication that such an awakening is imminent, so without the ability to earn poeple are deeply, horribly screwed. In the paradigm which persists, people really do need jobs because they won’t eat otherwise.

zanny 9y ago
When talking politics especially on the scale of a state or country you aren't talking microeconomics. Microeconomically of course you optimize to survive with the hand you are dealt. If a pointless job is going to pay you more money than one that creates meaningful production as long as you can bear or be ignorant to the fact your time is wasted take the free money. The problem is that the microeconomic reality at the personal level isn't reflective of macroeconomic reality. It is why political coordination and organization at the grassroots is so hard, and why the poor vote and participate so much less in government - you simply don't have the time to voice your discontent with the broken macroeconomic conditions when the micro keep you in a constant state of distress, anxiety, and uncertainty. All the figures on a national scale about waste or excess mean nothing to a child going hungry tonight.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  Maybe poor people just understand that when they try to describe their plight and seek assistance, they’ll be told that “sorry your microeconomic reality is too far divorced from the macroeconomic reality for us to care.”

aaavl2821 9y ago

I don't think you give people enough credit. There are a lot of people who view those "pointless bad jobs" as opportunities and who can and will work hard to make the most of them. Not defending the abusive practices of companies, but who are you to decide whether someone else' job is pointless and bad? When I was in college a sociology class showed a video on factory conditions in china in the early 2000s. The point of the video (and class) was that companies are evil and will exploit you with terrible jobs with no path for advancement etc The work conditions were terrible, but people chose to work in those jobs. They moved from rural homes with little economic opportunity and ended up contributing to one of the greatest periods of economic growth and wealth creation in history I know very little about china and am not defending workplace abuses, but for many people those terrible jobs were opportunities that paid off for them

lovich 9y ago
I too would choose to cut off my foot rather than cut off my head. It doesn't mean that the choice is a good one, or one that isn't forced on me.

jjeaff 9y ago

I dislike it when people state opinion as fact. Even if your job is to literally rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic, it may not be pointless at all for that person or for those who enjoy the fruits of the labor. People not only need jobs, they want them. Many people get great satisfaction in doing a good job, earning money, and supporting themselves and family. Pretty much anything you do is "pointless" by someone's subjective opinion. I mean, we are all going to burn up from sun exposure in a few billion years anyway.

lovich 9y ago
My job could be done by someone with maybe a months training right out of high school because 90% of it is applying our company specific css to create PDFs, and you can only learn once you are on the job. My company wants the prestige of being a "high tech" company, however so they've hired me at a 6 figure plus salary to do this job and in the interview pretended that it was going to involve the modern front end stack and building and maintaining containerization. It's a pointless job in that the work that is done doesn't give any benefit other than aggrandizing one of the managers in my chain to their own manager. Yes it has a point to someone, that literally being a singular someone, but is the waste generated by my job worth it? Why am I paid several times more than someone making minimum wage, when any random person can do the job, just to satisfy a single person? The answer is because they currently have the economic power to create and keep this position, but that's not a moral reason and it's not an efficient reason.
- csomar 9y ago
  Thank you for voicing the truth. I experienced the same. I made most of my fortune doing practically nothing. I also did lots of real and "fake" work that produced me just "get along by" income. It's a shit show out there but people holding high income don't want to admit it. People on the other end either think we are stealing from them or we are wizards of the world. The truth is that we had an equal chance to fall on one bunch or the other. It is practically a random, hazardous distribution that happens to work better than socialism.
  - deleted 9y ago

CivBase 9y ago

Sounds great. Let's all drop the charade and serve the betterment of mankind! That's a wonderful ideal, but history has proven it to be folly. There may be an abundance of resources, but it's still a finite amount and humans are greedy. When a system like that scales, bad actors always take advantage. We all want resources, but we all want things to get better too. Mechanisms like capitalism and meritocricy are the best solutions we've found for serving those two desires at scale. They're not perfect solutions and their effectiveness is decreasing as humans are able to provide less individual value by the day. Still, we don't cling to them because we've fooled ourselves - we cling to them because nothing else has ever worked at scale for very long. Maybe a better solution exists, but we need more than an idealistic notion of "working for the greater good" to keep it stable.

EliRivers 9y ago
As an interesting aside, when the term "meritocracy" was created, it was a pejorative; something we should seek to avoid.
- CivBase 9y ago
  Interesting. It obviously has its failings - hence this discussion - but I still haven't heard of anything better yet that hasn't been proven to fall apart at scale.