bendigedig

Or if you subscribe to David Graeber's bullshit jobs theory, if 80% of jobs are bullshit then what is the problem in reducing the amount of bullshit that needs to be done?

Four days of bullshit instead of five?

> - if people can do 5 days' work in 4, can they also do 4 days' work in 3? What's special about 4 days? Will work scope down until it becomes true that it could be done in 3 days, just as 5 days' work seems to have scoped down to be doable in 4?

My suspicion is that the time spent per week at work or 'doing' work is no longer the limiting factor for productivity in a vast swathe of knowledge economy jobs.

I have a theory that the human brain can only give-out so much creativity before it needs a bit of freedom to wander. I suspect that knowledge workers have big periods of time where their minds are effectively 'resting'/rejuvinating but these people are obliged to remain in the office and look like they are working.

Perhaps the four day week projects are showing that if people are given the choice, they can exchange some of that resting time for free time?

Isn't that exactly what he's saying? There will be times and ages when it will be ignored but it will keep popping back up again and again.

Got it: I was just following orders.

This is the kind of attitude that leads to revolutions.

It is amazing that an article purporting to claim that inequality is narrowing doesn't seem to show any kind of population distribution of wealth and champions stats averaged over a suspiciously long time, a century of all time periods!

We will only see more of this toilet paper the closer we get to the fall.

We are entering a time of great uncertainty and change. To me it is natural that people wish to discuss it here.

Sounds like exactly what happens when an empire is on its way to collapse. It eats its young.

Life is ephemeral.

I have plenty of experience doing code reviews and to do a good job is pretty hard and thankless work. If I had to do that all day every day I'd be very unhappy.

Thank you kindly, good sir.

Validating the outputs of a stochastic parrot sounds like a very alienating job.

But there is a world outside of the USA and some of the same problems are happening there too.

All of our rights have been created because of how people feel. How else would we decide what we collectively value? Logic is only logical if it is grounded in how we as humans feel.

Cool story. I think most accept that we are unlikely to achieve thr absolute state you have described above, but we can reduce the scale of the bureaucratic categorisation and the associated distorted trail we leave; there is no question that the volume of such data has dramatically increased over the past century and is undoubetdly accelerating.

But what about what the article hints to w.r.t. the right to never be recorded?

To be recorded is to leave an immutable trail of the self which prejudices how you (and others) view yourself. To be monitored is to be categorised which is to see yourself in an imperfect and distorting mirror.

Look at your distorted historical reflection and tell me that it does not prejudice the choices that you make and so alter the person that you choose to be next.

Not necessarily, it depends where you live.

Remember that market rents are higher than they need to be due to the artificial scarcity imposed by a NIMBY-friendly planning system and the inaction of successive Governments who have chosen to look the other way.

And who would do the cleaning and serve you coffee if social housing didn't exist? It might cost you a lot more.

Free home? What are you on about? You still have to pay rent in social housing.

> House price ratio has doubled since 2000 but over the last twenty years in the UK it’s flat. The doomsaying is not justified.

Now come on, data is data, if you want your arguments to live on the cite-able data, then you must accept that your arguments can also die on the cite-able data.

Take a look at a longer term view of the data and tell me you wouldn't be angry: https://www.schroders.com/en-gb/uk/individual/insights/what-...

And remember that this says nothing about the quality of housing, or its suitability for the needs of the household.

The housing crisis is not primarily one of homelessness (although many are forced to live in poor quality temporary accommodation waiting decades on lists for affordable housing), but of people living in the wrong accommodation for their needs; some of them forced to live in dangerous accommodation but unable to move, a greater number forced to rent, some people being forced to live with their parents; these are the things that happen when affordability decreases.

Do me a favour and do some real research on the topic before you dismiss other people's problems as nonsense. I think you owe them that.

> It means you can’t say something like “the numbers are only higher because more adults are living together”, as that is already being adjusted for. In theory.

I think it muddies the waters because it's possible that the numbers are higher because people are choosing to have fewer children (which may be driven by affordability), or more people are living in HMOs. It makes it much harder to argue about cause and effect. Are these equivalised incomes rising because people are having fewer children, because there are more people living in HMOs - or are more people doing these things because of a crisis of affordability?

> but the constant refrain of “living standards are collapsing” and “no one can afford a house” just doesn’t match the data IMO.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

The price of housing in England has doubled relative to the median income since 2000.

+1 for the citation, thanks.

The numbers do paint a picture of a fairly anemic 5-10% increase between 02/03 and 23/24 in 'inflation-adjusted' median household income.

However, I note that that the data is 'equivalised' which to me somewhat muddies the waters; the numbers are inherently tied into the population's demographics, and I'm not confident that I understand what effect things like demographic shifts (which are obviously ongoing) would have on these numbers.

Citations required plz

The one thing I think this post gets right is the idea of how self-alienating a tech job can be.

But I would argue that the desire is also part of an attempt to escape the unrelenting bureaucracy and lack of autonomy that can be so stifling in a tech job. Sometimes it feels like all of the decisions have already been made for you.

Perhaps someone wrote a playbook of how you should cope with common work situations you might come across and suddenly you aren't an intelligent human anymore, but an infantilised child stripped of agency, your independence micromanaged away by a thousand software engineers before you who thought that it would be a good idea to treat people like machines; because it reduces risk, right?

Perhaps someone doesn't like how you formatted some code, or named a variable, and you are held to randsom at the point of a PR review.

And then you might have to explain to a customer why something in a complex system you have build cannot be changed without consequences; and they cannot really understand why this is, but suddenly you have to cope with their frustration at their powerlessness. And you are stuck between the emotions they are permitted and the inhumanity of the work that you do.

Tech jobs can sometimes seem like a sadistic prison for the mind stuck between the human and the inhuman.

I think alienation is more of a bottom-up emotional experience than anything that a top-down argument can really impact.

Isn't this just an extension of the culture of asking for evidence to make future decisions?

If I go to the bank and ask for a loan they will ask me for evidence of product market fit and other signals that suggest to them that I will be able to pay them back. All of this evidence is ultimately based on what has been successful and dominant and quantifiable in the past.

IMO LLMs are just the next disturbing step of optimising for the status quo, limiting risk taking, and stifling innovation.

Yes. The only question is 'when'?

bananas are slightly more radioactive than background radiation

This is a complete fallacy. Car owners might pay for their cars but the annual emissions tax doesn't come close to covering the cost of roads and their infrastructure.

Road transport is subsidised to a far larger extent than rail travel is.

I use "meow", "woof", and "cheeseburger".

I'm not going to argue with you on this particular case as I don't know enough about the local area and can't be bothered to do any research.

However, my comment was really to provide context for some of the sweeping statements you were making, e.g.

> I find the recent religious switch towards worship of nature somewhat disconcerting... > ...a few sea birds, who, if they are bothered by the launches, can fly a few miles away and be content again... > Nature adapts to changes. It always had.

If you want my two cents, I think people are turning to nature because:

1. It's threatened with virtual annihilation by the externalities of our hegemonic economic system. 2. Many people have to deal with their (natural) human nature being ground down as they are forced to file off their rough edges to fit into the position of cogs in an uncaring economic/totalitarian machine. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people feel relatively powerless to do much about their internal personal situation, but see that analogous processes are destroying the natural world outside of themselves and feel that's something worth fighting for too.