7 ms·

A job is something people need to eat. Why should you need a licence to connect jobs to people? The law is wrong.

TulliusCicero 6y ago
People need food to eat; that doesn't mean that food regulations are wrong. People need healthcare to remain healthy instead of not dead; that doesn't mean medical licensing is bad. I have no idea whether these particular regulations for recruiters make sense or not, but just because something is fundamental to living doesn't mean regulating it is automatically a bad idea.
- cryptica 6y ago
  I disagree with the premise that regulations are necessary. They're bandage patch solutions. Artificially restricting the number of people who can go to medical schools by imposing ridiculous requirements is not going to make better surgeons; it will mostly just drive up prices like in the US. About food regulations; if a product uses dangerous chemicals (for example), in a proper free market, that should give alternative products a competitive advantage. The problem is not lack of regulations; it's the lack of a free market and free exchange of information. Regulations exist to prevent abuse. If companies couldn't get away with abusing their customers (without going bankrupt), we wouldn't need regulations in the first place. In any case, large corporations which essentially have immunity from the law usually find clever ways to work around the regulations without fixing the underlying problem. A better solution would be to stop propping up big corporations with infinite fiat currency; big corporations are riddled with blind spots and they are devoid of any sense of accountability due to inherent flaws in the concept of corporate personhood; big corporations are not meant to exist and they wouldn't exist if not for all that free fiat which is creating an artificial anti-competitive moat around them. Competition and churn is necessary for a proper functioning capitalist system. Our current monetary system is all about propping up zombie corporations by giving them unlimited free money which allows them to get away with everything. The way our economy works now is basically like a son who is CEO and who keeps getting caught doing drugs and getting in trouble and then rich daddy keeps bailing them out over and over again and then bribing journalists to keep quiet so that nobody finds out... Regulations are the equivalent of sending the son to rehab; except it's all a PR stunt and the son will be back to doing drugs and causing problems within a few weeks. The solution is to fire the spoiled brat and let someone else do the job; someone who is passionate about it and can do it right. Supply-side economics have distorted the way people think about the economy. Instead of figuring out what consumers need and working backwards from that, companies are constantly trying to figure out how to use up all available resources (e.g. capital, people, raw materials) and then resorting to advertising to convince consumers that they need whatever it is that they ended up producing. It's madness. All the talk about 'product-market fit' is delusional; it's mostly about fitting the customer to the product than the other way around. Advertising and A/B testing is not about improving the product to fit the user, it's about manipulating the user to buy the product.
  - 14u2c 6y ago
    > Artificially restricting the number of people who can go to medical schools by imposing ridiculous requirements is not going to make better surgeons; it will mostly just drive up prices like in the US. This is largely untrue. A recent debate: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k2ofqw/the_american_medical_association_acts_a_bit_like/gdwjzwg/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k2ofqw/the_a...
    - cryptica 6y ago
      This doesn't prove anything. One can always cherry-pick and refute certain peripheral points but that doesn't address the core premise of the argument. The only way to disprove such argument wold be exhaustively and that is simply not possible. For example, just off the top of my head, I can think of one aspect which was not mentioned; the number of years of training that are required to become a doctor; this is in itself a limiting factor which reduces the number of applicants and therefore graduates. Do doctors need so many years of training; who decides that? Maybe they could specialize sooner and still yield excellent results? Another aspect would be cost; it's likely that the high costs of education themselves are limiting the number of applicants. Unfortunately, these types of debates are always going to end up being a case of trusting authority versus trusting your own critical thinking (and common sense). Showing a bunch of arbitrary data doesn't mean anything unless you can prove that all the relevant aspects have been covered exhaustively and this never happens in practice. In practice, the main use of data is to lend credence to profitable narratives. The foundation of our modern economy is to draw attention towards convenient facts and suppress inconvenient ones even when both are true and equally relevant.
  - ryukafalz 6y ago
    > About food regulations; if a product uses dangerous chemicals (for example), in a proper free market, that should give alternative products a competitive advantage. The problem is not lack of regulations; it's the lack of a free market and free exchange of information. Absent regulation, how do you expect consumers to know about chemicals used in the product? We didn't get those nutrition facts and ingredients labels out of the grace of the manufacturers.
- sneak 6y ago
  > People need healthcare to remain healthy instead of not dead; that doesn't mean medical licensing is bad. In the US, you can legally go see a chiropractor (100% nonsense quackery), but getting $2 of antibiotics generally costs upward of $100 just for the office visit. I wouldn't personally be using this model of an example of a working system. Licensing systems frequently (usually?) do more harm than good. Look at optometry licensing and prescription control in the US, for example: it's 100% price fixing and protectionism. Same with hairdressers.
  - matthewmacleod 6y ago
    Let’s remember however that literally nobody will use the US as an example of a working healthcare system.
  - qntty 6y ago
    TulliusCicero says that regulation in general isn't automatically a bad idea. You're giving specific examples of purportedly bad regulation, which doesn't challenge the point that there exists some potential system of regulation for these industries that is better than no regulation.
  - alkonaut 6y ago
    This might vary between countries. Chiropractors here have a protected title (like doctors, lawyers), and a 5 year regulated training that isn’t exactly homeopathy. I rarely notice any difference between the surgeon general-approved naprapathy practitioners, and chiropractors. They do mostly similar treatment and charge similar money for it. I have never seen any new-agy or pseudoscience-like stuff come up in treatments. They just snap my spine into place and some times rough up a muscle just to prevent it snapping back out of location again. I too have heard people say it’s pseudoscience and humbug (usually e.g in the US) but could this vary? What are the pseudoscience parts? Could loose regulation in some countries have led to it becoming a market for pseudoscience whereas in other places it hasn’t?
    - TulliusCicero 6y ago
      > What are the pseudoscience parts? Honestly, "They just snap my spine into place and some times rough up a muscle just to prevent it snapping back out of location again." sounds pretty suspicious to me. What does "snap my spine into place" mean, exactly? Were you literally paralyzed or handicapped in some way until they did this thing? Muscles "snapping out of location"? How does that work?
nitwit005 6y ago
The law is probably a response to some sort of scam, to allow them to prosecute the scammers.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
mcherm 6y ago
Perhaps. In other countries -- the US for instance -- we have restrictions on connecting jobs to people. We prohibit, for example, job boards that are explicitly designed to favor (or be exclusive to) members of one race. Even if there are a lot of employers and employees who would appreciate such a service. If you don't think THOSE rules are wrong, then are you REALLY sure you want to criticize how Japan chooses to organize their own approach to the topic? They have chosen to license the people who do the connecting rather than introduce legal liability for those who discriminate (and are sloppy enough about it to leave enough evidence to prevail in court). I'm not saying control of discrimination is the reason that Japan licenses job recruitment, but I DO think that it requires a more thoughtful and open-minded approach that asks more about the benefits gained before dismissing out of hand the approach of requiring a license.
mjevans 6y ago
As a distinction between a communications service, and a "head hunting" service, I'm at least initially optimistic about regulation of professionals in this domain being a possibly good thing. Like how CPAs and Lawyers and Doctors are regulated. Though some of those regulations might go a bit too far towards monopoly power rather than quality and protection for consumers (and could thus use some market reforms).
rmrfstar 6y ago
Unemployment rate in Japan is is 2.3% and stable. The entire nation of Japan (population 130m) has half the total number of homeless people as the city of San Francisco (population 1m). Essentially all Japanese people have health insurance, while 30m Americans have none and many more barely have coverage. Maybe they are on to something over there?
- sneak 6y ago
  Unemployment isn't the figure to be looking at, it's level of wages. It's my understanding that most of Japan's workforce is massively underpaid in comparison to many other markets for similar jobs. Something's deeply broken, there, and it's not reflected in unemployment rates.
  - novok 6y ago
    In tech, it's more like the US pays well and the rest of the world, not so much... Even FB in London pays significantly less than FB in SF, and you can transfer somewhat easily and get that high pay if you move to SF.
    - hogFeast 6y ago
      FB is the place that everyone wants to work at in SF but in London you can make way more at other places.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  And the government debt is 300 percent of GDP and growing. Maybe they are on to something here?
  - formercoder 6y ago
    How’s inflation?
    - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago
CapriciousCptl 6y ago
There’s some nuance and history to this—- https://www.tokyodev.com/2020/10/01/recruiting-in-japan/ https://www.tokyodev.com/2020/10/01/recruiting-in-japan/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Geminidog 6y ago
Whenever you see pointless licensing it's usually a symptom of union or cartel like behavior used to limit supply by limiting access to the old boys club. If I were part of a union I would want to limit access to that union so that the supply stays low and my salary stays high. So you can think of what's going on in japan as a sort of recruiting union formed to keep out the rif raff and keep wages artificially high. Licensing does have a very good side however and that side is that it guarantees that the holder of a license jumped through the right educational hoops to get that license. For example nobody wants to get treated by an unlicensed quack doctor... so it's a case by case situation whether or not something should be regulated. Doctors are also a good example of the other side of the coin when regulation starts to produce a cartel where doctor supply is throttled. There's no other country that makes MD licensing harder to achieve than the US and by sheer coincidence doctors in the US are also one of the highest paid in the world. Also ask any doctor, they will tell you that 4 years of unrelated undergrad that includes all chemistry up to organic chemistry is all useless to the actual job along with the majority of stuff they learn in med school as well. Sorry for the unrelated rant on doctors but it's actually a very common phenomenon and is basically exactly what is happening here for recruitment in japan.

People need food to eat; that doesn't mean that food regulations are wrong. People need healthcare to remain healthy instead of not dead; that doesn't mean medical licensing is bad. I have no idea whether these particular regulations for recruiters make sense or not, but just because something is fundamental to living doesn't mean regulating it is automatically a bad idea.

cryptica 6y ago
I disagree with the premise that regulations are necessary. They're bandage patch solutions. Artificially restricting the number of people who can go to medical schools by imposing ridiculous requirements is not going to make better surgeons; it will mostly just drive up prices like in the US. About food regulations; if a product uses dangerous chemicals (for example), in a proper free market, that should give alternative products a competitive advantage. The problem is not lack of regulations; it's the lack of a free market and free exchange of information. Regulations exist to prevent abuse. If companies couldn't get away with abusing their customers (without going bankrupt), we wouldn't need regulations in the first place. In any case, large corporations which essentially have immunity from the law usually find clever ways to work around the regulations without fixing the underlying problem. A better solution would be to stop propping up big corporations with infinite fiat currency; big corporations are riddled with blind spots and they are devoid of any sense of accountability due to inherent flaws in the concept of corporate personhood; big corporations are not meant to exist and they wouldn't exist if not for all that free fiat which is creating an artificial anti-competitive moat around them. Competition and churn is necessary for a proper functioning capitalist system. Our current monetary system is all about propping up zombie corporations by giving them unlimited free money which allows them to get away with everything. The way our economy works now is basically like a son who is CEO and who keeps getting caught doing drugs and getting in trouble and then rich daddy keeps bailing them out over and over again and then bribing journalists to keep quiet so that nobody finds out... Regulations are the equivalent of sending the son to rehab; except it's all a PR stunt and the son will be back to doing drugs and causing problems within a few weeks. The solution is to fire the spoiled brat and let someone else do the job; someone who is passionate about it and can do it right. Supply-side economics have distorted the way people think about the economy. Instead of figuring out what consumers need and working backwards from that, companies are constantly trying to figure out how to use up all available resources (e.g. capital, people, raw materials) and then resorting to advertising to convince consumers that they need whatever it is that they ended up producing. It's madness. All the talk about 'product-market fit' is delusional; it's mostly about fitting the customer to the product than the other way around. Advertising and A/B testing is not about improving the product to fit the user, it's about manipulating the user to buy the product.
- 14u2c 6y ago
  > Artificially restricting the number of people who can go to medical schools by imposing ridiculous requirements is not going to make better surgeons; it will mostly just drive up prices like in the US. This is largely untrue. A recent debate: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k2ofqw/the_american_medical_association_acts_a_bit_like/gdwjzwg/ https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k2ofqw/the_a...
  - cryptica 6y ago
    This doesn't prove anything. One can always cherry-pick and refute certain peripheral points but that doesn't address the core premise of the argument. The only way to disprove such argument wold be exhaustively and that is simply not possible. For example, just off the top of my head, I can think of one aspect which was not mentioned; the number of years of training that are required to become a doctor; this is in itself a limiting factor which reduces the number of applicants and therefore graduates. Do doctors need so many years of training; who decides that? Maybe they could specialize sooner and still yield excellent results? Another aspect would be cost; it's likely that the high costs of education themselves are limiting the number of applicants. Unfortunately, these types of debates are always going to end up being a case of trusting authority versus trusting your own critical thinking (and common sense). Showing a bunch of arbitrary data doesn't mean anything unless you can prove that all the relevant aspects have been covered exhaustively and this never happens in practice. In practice, the main use of data is to lend credence to profitable narratives. The foundation of our modern economy is to draw attention towards convenient facts and suppress inconvenient ones even when both are true and equally relevant.
- ryukafalz 6y ago
  > About food regulations; if a product uses dangerous chemicals (for example), in a proper free market, that should give alternative products a competitive advantage. The problem is not lack of regulations; it's the lack of a free market and free exchange of information. Absent regulation, how do you expect consumers to know about chemicals used in the product? We didn't get those nutrition facts and ingredients labels out of the grace of the manufacturers.
sneak 6y ago
> People need healthcare to remain healthy instead of not dead; that doesn't mean medical licensing is bad. In the US, you can legally go see a chiropractor (100% nonsense quackery), but getting $2 of antibiotics generally costs upward of $100 just for the office visit. I wouldn't personally be using this model of an example of a working system. Licensing systems frequently (usually?) do more harm than good. Look at optometry licensing and prescription control in the US, for example: it's 100% price fixing and protectionism. Same with hairdressers.
- matthewmacleod 6y ago
  Let’s remember however that literally nobody will use the US as an example of a working healthcare system.
- qntty 6y ago
  TulliusCicero says that regulation in general isn't automatically a bad idea. You're giving specific examples of purportedly bad regulation, which doesn't challenge the point that there exists some potential system of regulation for these industries that is better than no regulation.
- alkonaut 6y ago
  This might vary between countries. Chiropractors here have a protected title (like doctors, lawyers), and a 5 year regulated training that isn’t exactly homeopathy. I rarely notice any difference between the surgeon general-approved naprapathy practitioners, and chiropractors. They do mostly similar treatment and charge similar money for it. I have never seen any new-agy or pseudoscience-like stuff come up in treatments. They just snap my spine into place and some times rough up a muscle just to prevent it snapping back out of location again. I too have heard people say it’s pseudoscience and humbug (usually e.g in the US) but could this vary? What are the pseudoscience parts? Could loose regulation in some countries have led to it becoming a market for pseudoscience whereas in other places it hasn’t?
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    > What are the pseudoscience parts? Honestly, "They just snap my spine into place and some times rough up a muscle just to prevent it snapping back out of location again." sounds pretty suspicious to me. What does "snap my spine into place" mean, exactly? Were you literally paralyzed or handicapped in some way until they did this thing? Muscles "snapping out of location"? How does that work?

nitwit005 6y ago

The law is probably a response to some sort of scam, to allow them to prosecute the scammers.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

mcherm 6y ago

Perhaps. In other countries -- the US for instance -- we have restrictions on connecting jobs to people. We prohibit, for example, job boards that are explicitly designed to favor (or be exclusive to) members of one race. Even if there are a lot of employers and employees who would appreciate such a service. If you don't think THOSE rules are wrong, then are you REALLY sure you want to criticize how Japan chooses to organize their own approach to the topic? They have chosen to license the people who do the connecting rather than introduce legal liability for those who discriminate (and are sloppy enough about it to leave enough evidence to prevail in court). I'm not saying control of discrimination is the reason that Japan licenses job recruitment, but I DO think that it requires a more thoughtful and open-minded approach that asks more about the benefits gained before dismissing out of hand the approach of requiring a license.

mjevans 6y ago

As a distinction between a communications service, and a "head hunting" service, I'm at least initially optimistic about regulation of professionals in this domain being a possibly good thing. Like how CPAs and Lawyers and Doctors are regulated. Though some of those regulations might go a bit too far towards monopoly power rather than quality and protection for consumers (and could thus use some market reforms).

rmrfstar 6y ago

Unemployment rate in Japan is is 2.3% and stable. The entire nation of Japan (population 130m) has half the total number of homeless people as the city of San Francisco (population 1m). Essentially all Japanese people have health insurance, while 30m Americans have none and many more barely have coverage. Maybe they are on to something over there?

sneak 6y ago
Unemployment isn't the figure to be looking at, it's level of wages. It's my understanding that most of Japan's workforce is massively underpaid in comparison to many other markets for similar jobs. Something's deeply broken, there, and it's not reflected in unemployment rates.
- novok 6y ago
  In tech, it's more like the US pays well and the rest of the world, not so much... Even FB in London pays significantly less than FB in SF, and you can transfer somewhat easily and get that high pay if you move to SF.
  - hogFeast 6y ago
    FB is the place that everyone wants to work at in SF but in London you can make way more at other places.
ekianjo 6y ago
And the government debt is 300 percent of GDP and growing. Maybe they are on to something here?
- formercoder 6y ago
  How’s inflation?
  - NovemberWhiskey 6y ago

CapriciousCptl 6y ago

There’s some nuance and history to this—- https://www.tokyodev.com/2020/10/01/recruiting-in-japan/ https://www.tokyodev.com/2020/10/01/recruiting-in-japan/

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Geminidog 6y ago

Whenever you see pointless licensing it's usually a symptom of union or cartel like behavior used to limit supply by limiting access to the old boys club. If I were part of a union I would want to limit access to that union so that the supply stays low and my salary stays high. So you can think of what's going on in japan as a sort of recruiting union formed to keep out the rif raff and keep wages artificially high. Licensing does have a very good side however and that side is that it guarantees that the holder of a license jumped through the right educational hoops to get that license. For example nobody wants to get treated by an unlicensed quack doctor... so it's a case by case situation whether or not something should be regulated. Doctors are also a good example of the other side of the coin when regulation starts to produce a cartel where doctor supply is throttled. There's no other country that makes MD licensing harder to achieve than the US and by sheer coincidence doctors in the US are also one of the highest paid in the world. Also ask any doctor, they will tell you that 4 years of unrelated undergrad that includes all chemistry up to organic chemistry is all useless to the actual job along with the majority of stuff they learn in med school as well. Sorry for the unrelated rant on doctors but it's actually a very common phenomenon and is basically exactly what is happening here for recruitment in japan.