Against who? Russia can't even fight Ukraine. China es calling for peace. This is a minor regional conflict. I feel sorry for the people of Ukraine and Russia that are going to suffer and die pointlessly for the delusional imperial ambitions of an old man that lives 75 years in the pass.
Putin is the new Mussolini, getting his ass handed to him while trying to invade Greece and for exactly the same reasons; mainly a low moral, low quality army that doesn't want to fight that war.
What the hell are you talking about??? Technological civilization arouse because our ancestors living in "small agrarian communities" were tired of living in a nightmare in which their children died like flies and the starved to death periodically every time the climate farted.
I'm tired on hearing entitled little sh1ts like you that have lived incredibly pampered lives and don't have a clue of what is like to have to live without a refrigerator, hvac or modern medicine.
> Technological civilization arouse because our ancestors living in "small agrarian communities" were tired of living in a nightmare in which their children died like flies and the starved to death periodically every time the climate farted.
This is what Daniel Quinn calls "living in the hands of the gods". We are not really fit to do anything else. Humans have survived for hundreds of thousands of years living off what the land provides them in its natural course. Civilization will probably not make it much past ten thousand years, if that.
So tell me again which is the bigger nightmare: living and dying according to the whims of nature, being one small part in a society that adapts and harmonizes to nature; or the death of billions, and the extermination of considerable amounts of other life, all because we wanted to rule in place of the gods and never learned not to shit where we eat.
If you go by that logic we are only fit to live in tropical savannahs in Africa where modern humans originated.
What I find supremely arrogant, though, is any Westerner who, while living in comfort and safety amidst high technology, proposes that everyone in the world should just be content with not having the comforts they are currently using (including some, like vaccines and modern medicine, which arguably have vastly less negative effects than PFAS and burning fossil fuels).
Anyone actually serious about this philosophy should try as much as possible to make their lifestyles like what they want for everyone. It probably wouldn't convince everyone, but it would certainly earn them a lot more respect.
Buddy Buddy WAKE UP, Facebook is not a public service, it's not there to serve a nobody like you, it's a private company that exist to make money. You can't use their service to trash them and promote their competition, that is not a reasonable business model for them. To finance you by giving you a free platform to promote their competition and trash them is not a good trade for them. DO YOU UNDERSTAND???
So, the author is surprised that a private business doesn't let him use their free platform to promote their competition at the same time that they trash them...
The level of delusion and entitlement of some people is simply to hard to understand for me.
Facebook isn't just a "private business" or just a "free platform", they're a gigantic global entity that have integrated their product into the lives of billions of people.
If it was a free service by a mom and pop shop with "use at your own risk" in the agreement, then yes, it would be entitlement.
However, there exist people, for whom 90% of their communication happens via Facebook or social media. And it's not even by choice, kids are born into it being the status quo, and if 100% of your friends are using it while you're growing up, chances that you won't use it too are slim to none.
Thus, the company needs to hold responsibility for providing open communication. Censoring posts about their competitors goes against that.
Given the number of articles from Facebook saying how they won’t censor speech (doing a basic Google search here) that all seems like false advertising.
Note: I don’t use Facebook so perhaps I’m missing something.
"... questions remain unanswered on Australia’s commitment to human rights for all when it comes to marriage equality, transgender people accessing birth certificates and protecting intersex people from harmful medical procedures,"
There is nothing new to this in Australia's culture, is was just aimed at the weak and vulnerable, but as the famous quote by Tucidides goes: "The tyranny Athens imposed on others it finally imposed on itself."
Yea it was really awful, got a few lectures on it during my psychology bachelor. I was horrified when I heard what they did. The people who've enacted these policies should be behind bars IMO. You can't displace children from their families because of "cultural integration" reasons.
After the Pegasus news that showed that a relatively small private company in a very small country could have complete remote access to your phone and sell it on the market, do you really think that a powerful government like China or the US can't already do it??? How could you be this naive? Especially after the Snowden revelations.
And about Apple's having a change of hearth in the future and using something like this against you. Have you stopped to think for one second and consider that they have complete control over the updates that your phone receives??
They can quietly do what ever they want without you ever knowing and you can't do sh*t about it. So drop the concerned citizen act. We all abdicate privacy a long time ago when we sold our souls for cool free services like google and sexy gadgets.
At the end of the day the "slippery slope" argument boils down to one thing: do you trust your institutions? Any law or service can be abused, and the only thing preventing that is the integrity of the people on your society and the institutions both public and private that they work for. The exact same law that is used to fight corruption in a great country like Norway or Denmark can be abused to persecute political opponents in a shitty country like North Korea or China.
If the answer is no, I don't trust my institutions and my people, then you have a far more severe and fundamental problem than an specific law or service. In that scenario, focusing in an specific issue is like trying to cover the sun with your hands.
If we don't speak up when they push the boundaries they will just continue pushing. The only thing stopping Apple from doing all of those bad things today is that they are afraid of bad PR. You should be happy that others speak up now rather than you waiting until what they do becomes bad enough that you feel the need to speak up against it.
I think the disagreement is whether this actually is pushing a boundary. To me, this is roughly identical to the ways that services have been checking for illegal material for years and years. All of the threats are the same.
Complete hogwash. Not everyone sold their privacy. There were and are loud and clear voices that warn against closed ecosystems. Any company is open to blackmail or pressure.
Also I don't trust institutions. This is axiomatic and why separation of power is essential. So
> the only thing preventing that is the integrity of the people on your society and the institutions both public and private that they work for
is plainly wrong in my opinion. If you let people abuse this, they will. Also I don't think that can meet with reality. Police departments alone have quotas they must match, so they have to find criminals... It doesn't take a genius to figure out the repercussions. But it is still practiced in many countries.
Separation of powers is plainly ignored for everything under the guise of safety and a disease infecting politics the last few decades. That is due to incompetent leadership. Another reason why you should not trust "institutions". Instead, you check them and burn their asses if they fail as often they do today. The reaction that trust is falling in press and public officials is completely rational on the other hand.
I still have the impression that Apple is trying to do the privacy-supporting best option in their toolkit. The FBI has asked them multiple times to provide a generic back door and Apple has refused to give them general access and asks for specific warrants. So the FBI comes to them with a lot of very specific warrants about child pornography and they build a system specific to that use case and only that use case.
There's definitely still a "slippery slope" argument here that in handling this specific use case they are going to feel more pressure to handle other specific use cases of government actors, but they are also setting the precedence that they still will not support a generic backdoor. That seems to me, at face value, a greater privacy win than a loss.
These whataboutisms are a distraction and in no way support the idea that people shouldn't be worried about Apple implementing a new client-side system that's ripe for abuse.
If things are already bad, we should be working towards making them better instead of rolling over and apathetically allowing them to get worse.
The author should change Walden for David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" and he would probably get a better explanation of the phenomenon.
"After being in the industry for 15 years, I still do not have a good short answer for what environmental consultants do."
That quote alone says it all. These people are not satisfied because they don't have a real job, they have a bullshit job, and they know it.
The others are more of the same, you have a "coach" of the obvious that even him doesn't practice what he preaches and a member of "multiple projects and committees" that complains about wasting time all day talking with no focus or clear purpose.
They get pay to pretend to work all day by pushing papers, write endless jargon-ridden nonsense and, of course, attending endless meetings.
"In his book, Mr Graeber relied heavily on surveys of British and Dutch workers that asked participants whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. This seems a high bar to clear; it is unsurprising that 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify. By contrast, the academics used the European Working Conditions Surveys, which by 2015 had talked to 44,000 workers across 35 countries. They focused on those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” applied to them “rarely” or “never”.
In contrast to the high share of bullshit jobs reported by Mr Graeber, in 2015 only 4.8% of respondents in the eu felt their work was useless. And this proportion had fallen, not risen, in recent years, from 5.5% in 2010 and 7.8% in 2005."
[edit] Link to the paper discussed by the article:
I agree it would be nice to have more concrete numbers, but this in itself is a pretty shallow criticism of the bullshit jobs idea.
Part of Graeber's argument, too, is that many of us are employed doing useful jobs in service of others who have useless jobs. Think of all the office staff, product designers, marketers, janitors, factory workers hired by Juicero, for instance. They all had meaningful jobs in service of a product that should never had existed.
I also don't think that Graeber's standard is unfair -- making a meaningful contribtion to the world is quite a low bar for something we spend our entire lives doing for 8hr/day.
Besides, a useless job may be done by an employee who is unable or unwilling to realize it -- "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it". It's really tough to find meaningful work that pays a living wage, so many of us try to find small amounts of meaning in the jobs that we have. It doesn't make our jobs any less useless, though.
Apologies for those who can't get around the paywal.
It gets worse for Graeber's thesis. The next paragraph from the ones previously quoted:
"Furthermore, those who work in clerical and administrative jobs are far less likely to view their jobs as useless than those who are employed in roles that Mr Graeber regarded as essential, such as refuse collection and cleaning. Indeed, the researchers found an inverse relationship between education and the feeling of usefulness. Less educated workers were likelier to feel that their jobs were useless. And student debt does not appear to be a factor. In Britain, where its level is the highest in Europe, non-graduates under 29 were twice as likely to feel useless as their indebted graduate peers."
So not only are his numbers pretty poor his thesis gets the numbers the wrong way around for those who feel their jobs are of little value.
Perhaps that's where my own theory of bullshit jobs diverges from Graeber's then. I'd say a job can be bullshit regardless of whether or not the person doing it agrees.
As for janitors feeling like their jobs are meaningless and office workers feeling meaningful, I'd say that's a reflection of our culture. Universities are full of administrators with fancy titles who probably feel very important, but it's not clear their presence furthers the very important goal of education.
>I also don't think that Graeber's standard is unfair -- making a meaningful contribtion to the world is quite a low bar for something we spend our entire lives doing for 8hr/day.
I'm aware of Graeber's work but haven't read it, so I'm sidestepping it and focusing on your comment here. So what is a meaningful contribution to the world? I've thought about that, and narrowed it down as best I can.
I have a simple list for defining meaningful work: 1) work that gives life-providing help to others (e.g., teachers or physical therapists); 2) working on problems of existence (e.g., medical research); 3) make art.
As I've outlined it, most of us are not doing meaningful work, myself included. Certainly, any criteria for meaningful work necessitates a bunch of not-meaningful work for support—"the office staff, product designers, marketers, janitors, factory workers," etc. you mentioned—but that comparatively low number of people actually doing meaningful work suggests (if my criteria are valid) it's a rather high bar.
The presumably rightful allegation of exaggerated numbers in Graeber's book does not necessarily render the existence of "bullshit jobs" untrue.
I see that the (alleged) empirical flaws throw a shade on his hypothesis, but they do not disqualify it in its entirety.
I would still write code if not paid for it. I just wouldn’t write code for you. I am paid to use my code writing interests for your goals.
I have no interest in ever being a toilet paper salesman and would never try to hawk toilet paper in my free time. You need to pay me a lot to do that.
"Meaningful contribution to the world" is now a high bar to clear? No wonder the suicide rates in the West are so high. We expect people to invest 90,000 hours of their life into a thing and are offended when they ask it to not be utterly point- and useless...
I couldn't read the article because of the paywall. Judging by the quote, there are significant problems with this report. First, “a meaningful contribution to the world” and “the feeling of doing useful work” are vastly different phrases. Comparing replies to them is meaningless. Second, the definition of a bullshit job is not if it makes “a meaningful contribution to the world”. Using replies to that phrase as the share of bullshit jobs is, therefore, wrong. A job is bullshit if the one who is doing it thinks it's bullshit according to Graeber.
> A job is bullshit if the one who is doing it thinks it's bullshit according to Graeber.
Sounds reasonable. My understanding is that Graeber's work concentrates on what Marx described as "alienation of labour", where people are sufficiently specialised that they don't draw satisfaction from their work any more. Some of these bullshit jobs are probably actually useful, but if it makes the worker feel like this then it still has the same ruinous effect on them, and to a point, society. In this case, feelings can trump facts.
Eh, I think the Walden aspect is spot on. I downscaled my career, but five years ago - however for precisely the reasons the author cites. I was burned out from needing to be available 24/7 for a decade - spending your life waiting for the sky to fall really takes its toll. My job wasn’t bullshit - it was my business, and I had real responsibilities to my employees, my customers, and my shareholders.
As to the “back to basics” movement, I followed this path, bought myself a laughably cheap home (<€50k) in a laughably cheap country (<€20 tax per year), and while I no longer have access to some of the services I once had, I couldn’t be happier. I do what the hell I want to, whenever the hell I want to. Agency is worth anything.
Over the past year, I have been contacted by a stampede of acquaintances, friends, their friends and acquaintances, who all want to do what we’ve done. Most work in tech, in meaningful senior roles. Rural property prices have suddenly rocketed both here and in my country of origin.
Yeah, it’s mostly apocryphal, anecdotal, idiosyncratic, but I think people are just realising that they are miserable, and spending time doing crafts and outdoorsy stuff has made them realise that these things feed the soul.
I've never had a bullshit job, but I have had a lot of rather pointless meetings through my career... If you do take a bs job, isn't that exactly to pass the time while you make money? Or are there also bs demands put on you that you cannot get away from? So you're forced to do pointless stuff through-out the day, that makes little or no impact on the business as a whole? I think I'd become really, really cynical if I had to work like that. Chances are also that I'd become "creative" in such a job, but not in a good way. Or perhaps there are ways to macro such jobs? I'm really curious about these things... :p The only way I can relate to jobs like these are really through movies such as Office Space or Fight Club.
Yea, that is bullshit. You can't harass people like that. Once you let the worst people in society get away with it, all bets are off.
I bet that if the guy had done the exact same thing to the judges he would had had a visit from the authorities in a second.