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When my family lived in Japan years ago, we noticed that when taking the train, approximately three attendants checked our tickets before we boarded a train. At
by foamflower 8y ago
When my family lived in Japan years ago, we noticed that when taking the train, approximately three attendants checked our tickets before we boarded a train. At least two of those jobs are "bullshit" in terms of producing wealth, but they are socially beneficial in a culture where the social contract requires near-zero unemployment. (I, apparently like you, can't help but remember this kind of arrangement when listening to "jobs guarantee" rhetoric from various politicians.)
- bamboozled 8y agoNever noticed this, visited Japan a few times myself. Often I had mine checked at the gate and on the train. Are you sure you’re not just exaggerating?
- 2RTZZSro 8y agoKeep an eye out for people guiding traffic in Tokyo. It's much more than in Europe
- astrange 8y agoThey’ve fixed it, but Japan used to have a very high pedestrian death rate from being hit by cars.
- jstanley 8y agoI visited Japan recently and although I think the tickets were only actually checked by one person, there did seem to be an awful lot of superfluous staff associated with any sort of transport.
- chiph 8y agoCould it be because you're a foreigner? I almost certainly got picked out on every ride on the Munich S-Bahn by a fare agent for a ticket-check because I was obviously not German. Which I totally get - a tourist is way more likely to make a mistake than a local.
- Zak 8y agoIt has been my impression, having spent a significant amount of time in Germany, that German ticket checkers aren't primarily trying to detect people who have made a mistake, but those who intentionally ride without paying.
- cobbzilla 8y agoThis information may be a bit dated, but I visited Berlin circa 2008 and my friend (American expat) who had been living there for 10+ years insisted that we not pay at the subway, because no one checked. Following his guidance, I never paid for the subway, and was never fined. This was just within the city of Berlin, though.
- tormeh 8y agoThis varies in place and time. I think close to 50% of my travels on a recent trip were checked.
- haywirez 8y agoI recently visited and totally noticed a lot of minders, caretakers and other seemingly unnecessary jobs, mostly carried out by retirement-age employees or retired volunteers[0]. It was weird but seemed to make sense from a societal perspective, quite heartwarming. [0] https://haywirez.com/tokyo-hong-kong-2018/ https://haywirez.com/tokyo-hong-kong-2018/
- WJW 8y agoIs visited the USA just once (in 2003), but there was an old man that took my bag off the end of the luggage belt at the airport and handed it to me. I could easily have picked it up myself, but he was there for those 30 centimeters of bag travel. I remember being amazed about it and remarking the pointlessness of that job to my coworkers.
- cema 8y agoStrange experience indeed. I do not think I have ever seen that in any of USA airports, large or small.
- ReverseCold 8y ago> the pointlessness of that job to my coworkers What if you were older/disabled and had trouble lifting a medium-large suitcase? Seems like not the most useless job in the world, especially since it helps keep things moving in the airport and reduces congestion by getting people their bags slightly faster.
- ctime 8y agoI've never once seen this in my life (I typically have over 100k miles of airline travel per year) and have been traveling for work in the US since 2000. I don't understand how this scenario would play out, does he just grab a bag at random and hold it over his head? Read off the tag? Most people I know would be incensed if someone else were to grab their bag off the luggage belt. You might be confusing this with curb side check in, which is a service airlines use as a convenience to customers checking bags (so they don't need to go to the ticket counter with heavy/numerous bags ).
- michaelbuckbee 8y agoIt's something that has disappeared over time (like elevator attendants). If I had to guess it was a holdover from before there were actually conveyor belts and porters manually pushed out cards of luggage to stops and helped people with them.
- baxtr 8y ago
- bomb199 8y agoA Job's Guarantee is a real movement, and a reasonable idea for this reason. Not having a job puts you in a lower social caste - might as well have them doing SOMETHING. Even if it's not especially productive, the small positive affect is better than nothing.
- tom_mellior 8y agoNo. Eight hours of soul-crushing boredom every day keeps people in such jobs from doing... anything they want. Like learning stuff that might help them contribute to society in other ways (in a more useful job, maybe). > Not having a job puts you in a lower social caste This is a stupid societal expectation that should be fought rather than supported in the way you say.
- dantheman 8y agoWork should create value and in fact most of these make work jobs destroy it by slowing things down or requiring more meetings etc. There is always valuable work that can be done. It can be improving the maintenance or cleanliness of places, etc.
- OtterCoder 8y agoShout-out to the Civilian Conservation Corps. We should bring that program back.
- briandear 8y agoWe could bring back Workd War II and create even more jobs — assuming that’s what we are trying to do in an America with 3.9% unemployment.
- lallysingh 8y agoIt leaves people lots of time to think of better jobs to get. They are also less likely to go to crime. And they can quit. I mean, a job guarantee isn't directly a requirement in the same sense.
- ausvisaissues 8y agoMost gates are automatic now in Japan (with a conductor sometimes checking tickets on Shinkansen after gates). When I was in the US there was a guy handing me a towel in the bathroom. That is an incredibly meaningless and superfluous job!
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> When I was in the US there was a guy handing me a towel in the bathroom. That is an incredibly meaningless and superfluous job! On the other hand, most Americans live their entire lives in the US without ever seeing such a guy. Are you mind-bogglingly rich?
- throw_away 8y agoYou too may experience this "luxury" by going to pretty much any club (dance or strip) on pretty much any weekend in pretty much any major US city. The opulence wears off quickly, as it is made clear that you're expected to tip and all you want to do is wash your hands like a decent person.
- dominotw 8y agoOh. Gp made it sound like it was a common thing in America.
- ConceptJunkie 8y agoI'm 53 and the only time I've ever seen a washroom attendant was in Mexico.
- nojvek 8y agoIt is a common thing in US if you go clubbing.
- selimthegrim 8y agoTheu don’t just hand you towels, they usually have OTC type things if you’re feeling ill - you’ll never be more thankful for them until it happens to you when clubbing
- nikanj 8y agoIn Japan, there are people whose job is to stand on the station holding a “shinkansen this way” sign. In the US, many people get their living from holding a “anything helps, homeless vet” sign at the train station. Coming back home from Tokyo is always a major shock.
- Legogris 8y agoI was also thinking exactly this during my couple of years in Japan - that having a huge amount of "bullshit jobs" is one way of keeping unemployment low in an increasingly automated economy where growth is stagnating. In an economy where having a job (or somehow having attained large sums of money because of luck/previous endeavors) is necessary to not be an outcast, this is one way of mitigating this or at least pushing the larger problem forward. We would very likely have a huge crisis if all bullshit jobs were to disappear overnight.
- lkrubner 8y agoAn economy can not be increasingly automated and increasingly stagnant. It’s one or the other. In the USA the economy has been fairly stagnant since 1973 because the post war boom ended in 1973. The move to automation also collapsed in 1973. Please see productivity trends here: https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet You can control what years are shown on that page. I sugggest you look at 1950 to 2018. Although the data is noisy, you can see it has declined. Also note that the era of occasional double digits advances ended decades ago. The 14% in 1956 and the 12% in 1971 have never repeated this side of 1973. The economy is stagnant because the trend toward automation has died out. Although people in tech keep predicting a robot revolution, there is no evidence of it in the productivity numbers.
- freekh 8y agoThis is the same feeling I have when visiting the us. Remember coming into a Starbucks staffed by 5 people but only one doing something. At an airport there was a bunch of people whose job was to make sure I had my passport open prior to going through security. And so on and so on. It might just be my cultural shock though when going there. When you go to a different country you sometimes pick up 'strangeness' and generalise it to the whole country...