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Extropia DaSilva Profile
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Registered: 12-2017
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Re: What will the Singularity mean to ‘Bullshit Jobs’


I think inefficiency is part of the reason why there are bullshit jobs. But you have to understand that sometimes this inefficiency is not an accident or a result of bad planning, it is intended.

In my rather long essay ‘Bullshit Jobs and the New Feudalists’, I referred to David Graeber’s point that some jobs in the ‘services’ economy are not involved in the kind of work the term ‘service’ applies....

“Advertisements for banks really push the message that they are but humble servants helping customers protect and manage their money. And with talk of ‘markets’ and ‘products’, the financial ‘industry’ likewise presents itself as doing the traditional work of making useful stuff and providing much-needed services. If you believe the propaganda, the primary purpose of this sector is to help direct investments to those parts of commerce and industry that will raise prosperity, while earning an honest profit in the process.

But while this kind of thing does happen, it’s very misleading to portray the financial sector as being mostly concerned with such services. We can see this is so by looking at where the money goes. A piffling 0.8 percent of the £435 billion created by the UK government in quantitative easing (ie money printing) went to the real, productive economy. The rest went to the financial sector.

As David Graeber explained, what this sector actually does is as follows: “the overwhelming bulk of its profits comes from colluding with government to create, and then trade and manipulate, various forms of debt”. In other words, what the FIRE sector mostly does is create money from ‘nothing’. But, the thing is, there actually is no such thing as money from nothing. If somebody is making money out of thin air, somebody somewhere else is being lumbered with the cost. So, really, financialisation is the subordination of value-adding activity to the servicing of debt.

It is under such conditions, in which work is morphed into a political process of appropriating wealth and the repackaging and redistribution of debt, that the nature of BS jobs (which seems so bizarre from the traditional capitalist point-of-view) actually makes sense. From the perspective of the FIRE sector, the more inefficient and unnecessary chains of command there are, the more adept such organisations become at the art of rent-extraction, of soaking up resources before they get to claimants”.

Graeber quotes from people who have admitted to doing such jobs. As I recall, Spiko dismissed claims that these were BS jobs on the grounds that they were making profit, and making profit is the whole point of running a business. But this does not refute the BS job argument, which is that jobs providing no value-adding benefit to society overall are BS.

The proliferation of gig jobs could be an indication of job optimisation, but we should be wary of proclaiming an end to BS jobs. We have seen optimisation before, in the mergers and acquisitions frenzy of the 90s. But only for parts of the workforce, as Graeber explained:

“the same period that saw the most ruthless application of speed-ups and downsizing in the blue-collar sector also brought a rapid multiplication of meaningless managerial and administrative posts in almost all large firms. It’s as if businesses were endlessly trimming the fat on the shop floor and using the resulting savings to acquire even more unnecessary workers in the offices upstairs...The end result was that, just as Socialist regimes had created millions of dummy proletarian jobs, capitalist regimes somehow ended up presiding over the creation of millions of dummy white-collar jobs instead”.

So we don’t know if, once more, the savings being made by creating a precariat workforce (a combination of precarious and proletariat, applied to workers taking on the insecure forms of work that typifies gigs) won’t be used to create more BS jobs ‘higher up’.



7/23/2018, 1:11 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
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Re: What will the Singularity mean to ‘Bullshit Jobs’


>That is criminal activity. Criminal activity can not be considered in any discussion about the usefulness of legitimate jobs.<

It is a pity you had not read David Graeber’s book, cuz if you had you could have quoted him saying fraud is an act, not a profession, thereby supporting your argument that criminal activity should never be equated with a job.

I differ from Graeber somewhat on this issue. To me, no BS job is a legitimate job. Legitimate jobs (or just plain ‘jobs’) are involved in activity that creates value for society as well as profit for the owners of that business. A BS job does not have to be harmful, it just has to be useless to society overall, such that were the job to disappear, nobody would care because it would make not one jot of difference to anyone other than the few who might be profiting somehow from its existence.

And if the job is harmful and outside the law, why should that make the BS job label inapplicable? We are talking about something run very much like a business, with people who are very much like employees, working for wages or commission, doing work very much like call centres. It looks like a business, the people working there appear to be employees, and may even BE employees in the sense that they took this job on as they had no other means of earning a living (they are not the fraudsters, they are employed by the fraudsters) but this is all a lie. That’s what the term BS means, right? “Bullshit!’, as in ‘Liar!’, or ‘Don’t believe it!’.

7/23/2018, 1:52 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
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Re: What will the Singularity mean to ‘Bullshit Jobs’


>That is government. Government is about 99% BS jobs. I readily concede that.<

It seems rather strange that Spiko should hold the position that “BS jobs are a myth” while at the same time claiming that ‘government is about 99% BS jobs’. Since there are quite a lot of public-sector jobs out there, we have two mutually incompatible beliefs. After all, it really cannot be the case that 99% of all that public sector work is BS jobs while, at the same time, apparently, there are no BS jobs and it’s all a ‘myth’.

This comment does increase my suspicion that Spiko is refusing to believe in the existence of BS jobs because he thinks this is a Leftist attack on capitalism itself, and that to agree that there are jobs in both the public and the private sector that have no legitimate reason to exist but persist nonetheless is to take a stance against capitalism and a step toward being a commie, heaven forfend.

But a proper reading of Graeber’s book would reveal that this is definitely NOT an attack on capitalism. He never blames capitalism for this state of affairs. No, he claims that there has been a corruption of capitalism, such that the likes of Adam Smith and other free market heros would hardly recognise the system in place today. This is a point that arch-libertarian Stefan Molyneux agrees with, calling what we currently have ‘crapitalism’.

Graeber has shown that it is overly-simplistic to claim the existence of BS jobs is all the fault of the public sector. In ‘crapitalism’ there is no simple line that can be drawn between the private and public sector. For example, most people probably think the NHS is entirely public but it actually contracts a lot of work out to private companies. And, in the US, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were quasi public-private organisations. Maybe you would never get BS jobs in a true free market but we don’t have a true free market, so why wouldn’t we have BS jobs?

7/23/2018, 2:07 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
Spikosauropod Profile
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Registered: 06-2007
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Re: What will the Singularity mean to ‘Bullshit Jobs’


quote:

It seems rather strange that Spiko should hold the position that “BS jobs are a myth” while at the same time claiming that ‘government is about 99% BS jobs’.


You could apply the same observation to government jobs that Graeber applies to fraud: government work, in general, is an act, not a profession. Government acts; it does not work. No work is done by government.
7/23/2018, 9:05 am Link to this post PM Spikosauropod
 
Doctor Forbin Profile
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Re: What will the Singularity mean to ‘Bullshit Jobs’


quote:

You could apply the same observation to government jobs that Graeber applies to fraud: government work, in general, is an act, not a profession. Government acts; it does not work. No work is done by government



So let's have your definition of "work".
7/23/2018, 3:57 pm Link to this post PM Doctor Forbin Blog
 
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Re: What will the Singularity mean to ‘Bullshit Jobs’


Of course, this definition applies only to work in the economic sense. It does not apply to physics. It may require more work:

Work - proprietary activity undertaken to cultivate value or trade
7/23/2018, 4:23 pm Link to this post PM Spikosauropod
 
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Re: What will the Singularity mean to ‘Bullshit Jobs’


I like that definition, although I would refine it a bit so that it reads ‘Work- proprietary activity undertaken to cultivate trade and create value for oneself or loved-ones’.

The reason for this refinement is that it allows us to distinguish between true work (in the economic sense) and those jobs which are more about rewarding remote strangers than rewarding those who, collectively, do most of the work. By applying the term ‘work’ to all jobs regardless of how minimally rewarding to the person(s) doing it, or even regardless of whether society truly benefits from the existence of such jobs, we diminish the value of work itself.

I believe that it is this over-generalisation of the word ‘work’, applying it to all jobs no matter how unrewarding the job may be, which is responsible for the paradox whereby people are obviously meant to work (we have hands evolved to create with, language evolved to facilitate complex cooperation, and bodies and minds that are healthiest when we are productive) yet at the same ‘work’ is often thought of as something unpleasant that you wouldn’t do if you had a choice. This really should strike more people as very odd, as strange, say, as finding a creature like a dolphin that was obviously meant to be aquatic but which hates water and tries to avoid it whenever possible.

Our weird attitude to work does make sense, however, when you realise that a lot of jobs should not be thought of as work as I have defined it.

7/24/2018, 1:08 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 
Doctor Forbin Profile
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Re: What will the Singularity mean to ‘Bullshit Jobs’


quote:

Work - proprietary activity undertaken to cultivate value or trade



Well, since you believe all government jobs are BS (which by the way contradicts what you said earlier about there being no such thing as a bullshit job), I'd like to see you tell an NTSB airline crash investigator that what he or she does is not work and is of no value. And then think about that the next time you or a family member or friend is traveling on a plane.

Most of the people who believe that government jobs are bullshit have never worked a day in government in their lives. I can tell you I have worked in both government and the private sector, and the only bullshit job I had was in the private sector.

Now explain to me how a receptionist as a publishing company whose only job duties are answering the phone once a day, keeping a candy dish of mints full, and winding a grandfather clock in a conference room once a week, does not have a useless job. This is another example of a bullshit job in Graeber's book, which you are not interested in reading.

Last edited by Doctor Forbin, 7/24/2018, 4:49 pm
7/24/2018, 4:26 pm Link to this post PM Doctor Forbin Blog
 
Spikosauropod Profile
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Re: What will the Singularity mean to ‘Bullshit Jobs’


quote:

for oneself or loved-ones


I had hoped to cover that aspect with the adjective "proprietary".

quote:

I'd like to see you tell an NTSB airline crash investigator that what he or she does is not work and is of no value.


It is government oversight. I might tell them that they have an important function.

quote:

Now explain to me how a receptionist as a publishing company whose only job duties are answering the phone once a day, keeping a candy dish of mints full, and winding a grandfather clock in a conference room once a week, does not have a useless job.


Receptionists give a place class...as in, "Wow, this is a classy place. They have a receptionist and a grandfather clock in the lobby!"
7/24/2018, 4:47 pm Link to this post PM Spikosauropod
 
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Re: What will the Singularity mean to ‘Bullshit Jobs’


>I had hoped to cover that aspect with the adjective "proprietary".<

Oh, I didn’t realise the word covered all that. If it does, then your original definition is fine as is.


7/25/2018, 10:42 am Link to this post PM Extropia DaSilva Blog
 


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