Bullshit jobs \ stacker news ~meta

1286 sats \ 33 comments \ @fernandoporazzi 19 Oct 2023 meta

"Bullshit jobs are jobs which even the person doing the job can’t really justify the existence of, but they have to pretend that there’s some reason for it to exist. That’s the bullshit element. A lot of people confuse bullshit jobs and shit jobs, but they’re not the same thing.

Bad jobs are bad because they’re hard or they have terrible conditions or the pay sucks, but often these jobs are very useful. In fact, in our society, often the more useful the work is, the less they pay you. Whereas bullshit jobs are often highly respected and pay well but are completely pointless, and the people doing them know this." - David Graeber

In your opinion, what jobs would fit the description of BS job above?

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418 sats \ 13 replies \ @orthwyrm 19 Oct 2023

In the UK, we have this thing called a TV license. It's as ridiculous as it sounds. People who watch state TV (BBC) must by law pay £159 / year.

As you can imagine, not many people cough up the money. The BBC is shit and the law is next to impossible to enforce. So if you're not on the TV license register, the government instead harasses you with angry little letters to try and scare you into paying. I hate these things so much that I ritualistically set fire to them whenever they land in my letter box, which is about every other month.

The longer you ignore the letters, the angrier they get. The first letter is just kind of stern. By the third letter they're screaming at you in big red capital letters about how you're under surveillance and breaking the law. By the fifth letter they threaten to send a "television inspector" to your address if you still haven't gotten back to them.

The inspector almost never comes. It's all hot air. But the fact that there is such a thing as a TV inspector in the first place blows my fuckin' mind. This is surely peak BS, right up there with the poor bastards who print the stupid letters out in the first place.

110 sats \ 0 replies \ @davidw 19 Oct 2023

"You will pay us to feed you propaganda ~~and you will be happy~~" I'm sure even the queen had enough of it

60 sats \ 2 replies \ @ek 19 Oct 2023

Sounds similar to what we have with the "Rundfunkbeitrag" in Germany.

It's like a tax disguised as not a tax because our public media should be independent but the state gives them the right to send every household a bill as long as they have any device which might receive the signals they broadcast.

So if you have a TV, Radio or just internet access, you need to pay.

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @nemo 19 Oct 2023

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71 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 19 Oct 2023

I never had to pay

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @MattInTech 19 Oct 2023

It could be worse. Italy is dealing with the same shit, but instead of sending you letters they literally force everyone to pay this nonsense tax, by coupling the amount to electricity bills. Yes, you heard that right, the government is colluding with private utility companies to enforce something that would be otherwise complete bullshit.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @orthwyrm 20 Oct 2023

That's bonkers.

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @TwoLargePizzas 20 Oct 2023

People who watch state TV (BBC) must by law pay £159 / year.

If I'm understanding this right they're expecting people to pay for something that is broadcast to them regardless of if they want it or not.

Or do they actually know that you're watching somehow? If you just tell them you don't watch the BBC are you still supposed to pay?

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @orthwyrm 20 Oct 2023

They have to know you are watching.

Inspectors have no right to enter your property without permission. So on the extremely rare occassion one does show up, you can say just say no.

It's next to unenforcable. The only people who pay are the elderly who don't know any better (and BBC enthusiasts I guess?)

Maybe a few decades ago where TVs were less common the law could actually be applied effectively. To give you a sense of how archiac this system is, the government generously lowers the fee to ~£60 / year if you only have a black and white TV.

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @2bithits 19 Oct 2023

lol

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @jgbtc 19 Oct 2023

Almost as stupid as the Stamp Act.

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @nemo 19 Oct 2023

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50 sats \ 0 replies \ @2bithits 19 Oct 2023

I'd love to be the TV Inspector. Bet it would impress everyone

50 sats \ 0 replies \ @tom335 19 Oct 2023

I could never imagine that level of absurdity. But coming from the state, everything is possible.

121 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jorj_X_McKie 19 Oct 2023

I worked in a medical lab for a long time. I often thought 85% of the tests were unwarranted and the results usually meaningless. It’s a big racket.

21 sats \ 2 replies \ @robbabuona 19 Oct 2023

I think notary is in my top5 bsJobs, in my country they could be easily swapped with an datacenter with database. Full stop. Average gross salary 200k euro.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @purpurato 19 Oct 2023

You just won a zap.

In my country it's a clear racket, the notaries themselves know it and it creates this pride of "being in" and not having to work but just collect from you.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @robbabuona 20 Oct 2023

I can feel you man! The nice things could be that we are not from the same country so this feeling is not just related to a specific place in the world.

54 sats \ 1 reply \ @siggy47 19 Oct 2023

US Senator

33 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 19 Oct 2023

Politicians. Yep

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @NigerianBitcoiner 19 Oct 2023

Pet Psychics :)

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @purpurato 19 Oct 2023

Everything done by bank employees. It's been fully automated long ago and Satoshi put the nail in the coffin on that trade by making it trustless.

Going to a bank is so depressing, I keep saying all the time "this doesn't make any sense, why are these poor people doing that job instead of being home with their wives/husbands and kids?"

20 sats \ 3 replies \ @02fa90fd41 19 Oct 2023

Personally I think that statement is oxymoronic.

Jobs exist for a reason. A bullshit job as you call it isn’t something that anyone can do. The way business works - as we are seeing with the constant layoffs is that the moment it’s not relevant it’s cancelled.

People may disagree with highly paid people for jobs they think are BS but that’s their opinion.

I could also be wrong tbf. Provide examples and I’ll provide a response

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @kepford 19 Oct 2023

This sounds oxymoronic until you realize that the government adds all kinds of modifications to business and free markets that require so much bs. Now, an argument can be made that these jobs aren't bs because they solve a problem. It is a problem that shouldn't exist but still.

In my experience the larger the institution the more likely there will be bs jobs and people milking money out of the beast. We often only focus on government agencies as being wasteful but there is plenty of waste in the business world. People have mentioned middle managers but there are more. The larger the company the easier it is to disappear.

I bet there are devs here including me that have spent months building applications for those apps to just be thrown away because of the whim of someone. Most people that work in large companies don't produce anything tangible and this can lead to people feeling like their job is totally bs.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TwoLargePizzas 20 Oct 2023

I heard a story the other day from one of the game developers that got laid off recently.

It wasn't that they'd lost their job that upset them the most. It was the fact that the project they'd spent years working on got cancelled and it felt like all those nights and weekends working overtime, missing out on time with their family had gone to waste.

On the other hand, these layoffs are most likely because the company took out a lot of debt and now they can't afford it at the higher interest rates. So when you think about it, it's not so much at the whim of someone else, but simply people acting rationally in their own self interest. Trace it back far enough and it's remarkable how many times it comes back to centrally planned government decisions.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DiracDelta 24 Oct 2023

Sounds like you are new to fiat money. Jobs exist for a reason under free markets, pull your head out of your ass and realize those don't exist under fiat. Yes, you are wrong, very deeply wrong, likely incurably.

1 sat \ 0 replies \ @WeAreAllSatoshi 19 Oct 2023

Middle management would often fit this description

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DiracDelta 24 Oct 2023

Jobs funded by fiat subsidies that lose money -- oh, you think it's a real job because you are an engineer designing in aircraft that actually is flying? -- run the numbers and think again. There is more BS than you realize under fiat.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jon_Hodl 20 Oct 2023

Being good at something that doesn't need to be done doesn't mean that job should be done.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @brandonsbytes 19 Oct 2023

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @gmd 19 Oct 2023

TransparentCalifornia.com is eye-opening. Type in nurse, police, firefighter etc. These are not bullshit jobs but government paying 2-3x market rate because it's California and no one here has ever cared about fiscal responsibility. It's mind-blowing.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @benthecarman 19 Oct 2023

At this point, the only jobs should be coding and sales. If you're not coding, you can use code to automate it, the only thing you can't automate is human relationships, so you need people for that.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 19 Oct 2023

lol. Call me when your plumbing stops working, or when you need a new home. I know some guys. I hope that was in jest.