Rov_Scam
2d ago
If the bureaucracy is being imposed from within the corporation, it's one thing, but it's totally different if it's a necessary response to legislation. At that point it's less about the job itself being bullshit and more about disagreement with the underlying policy. If the job performs the function of complying with the law, it's a fairly large value add compared with the penalties that would be imposed if the work weren't done. To give an example of a regulation that can come across as bullshit to some people, the EPA requires erosion and sedimentation (E&S) permits for construction projects that involve disturbing a certain amount of earth. Depending on the size and location of the project, you may need to apply for a permit, not need anything, or need to have an E&S plan on site but not need prior approval. This third category can come across as bullshit to some people, because it involves paying an engineer thousands of dollars to publish a report that no one is going to read, especially if the conclusion is that no special precautions involving erosion need to be taken.
You could just as soon not get a plan and no one would be the wiser. Except if runoff from the jobsite ends up washing onto your neighbor's property and he asks to see the plan and you don't have one. If you end up getting sued over excessive runoff causing damage, not having a plan to deal with erosion is a pretty big matzo ball to have hanging over the litigation. Sure, the government could eliminate E&S requirements entirely, but that only means that when a problem happens you get to spend several years litigating it. The tradeoff is that you minimize erosion problems on all projects from the beginning, and if you do get sued it's nice to be able to say that you had an E&S plan.
The problem I have with the bullshit jobs theory in general is that somebody who isn't familiar with a business presumes that they know how to run it better and knows what work contributes value and what doesn't. This is the fundamental issue I have with AI gurus saying that LLMs are going to take your job. Really? Because chances are they have no idea what you actually do, let alone what value it provides the company. They think of everything in terms of outputs and assume that being able to generate the output is the beginning and end of the value the employee provides to the company. It's a prime example of Rory Sutherland's Doorman Fallacy: A consultant to a hotel company sees the doorman's job as opening the door, and he tells the hotel that they can save a ton of money by replacing the doorman with an automatic system. But the doorman does more than open the door. He calls cabs, he deals with package deliveries, he provides a certain amount of security, he gives the hotel a degree of prestige, etc. Since it's impossible to quantify how much business you're getting as a result of these little services, it's easy to fall into the trap where you believe that automating away the doorman is an automatic windfall, especially when nobody is ever going to say in a customer survey that the existence of a doorman played any role in selecting the hotel.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
And you're just figuring out now that he's full of shit? Sure, he has Vance, but he also has Rubio and Hegseth, neither of whom have reputations for peacefulness. I can't say I would have predicted the war, but I'm not surprised by it, and I'm not surprised that most of his supporters are in favor of it.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
Joe Kent is a clown who was grossly unqualified for his position and only obtained it because of an unsuccessful political career based on undying loyalty to Trump. In the time since his resignation he's latched on to the Tucker Carlson/Candice Owens/Alex Jones cadre of wackaloons to cash in on his brief fame and maybe prime himself for another failed crack at a congressional seat. His statements on Iran's nuclear program are indicative of this schtick in general where it's not enough to suggest that going to war with Iran was a bad policy decision, or that the threat of an Iranian nuclear program is overblown; no everything has to be a huge conspiracy knows that there is and never was an Iranian nuclear program and the whole thing was some kind of manufactured consent for a war that nobody is in favor of anyway, apart from the roughly 30% of Americans who comprise the Bush/Mendoza line, for whom if Trump shot their child they'd assume he had a good reason to do so.
This is all part of a larger storyline where Carlson et al. have to account for why they spent so many years singing the praises of Our Lord and Savior Donald J. Trump under the delusion that he was some kind of swamp-draining peacenik when anyone with half a brain could tell you that the only thing that ever concerned him was having the biggest dick in the room and that if anyone who didn't have nukes pissed him off he wouldn't pass up the opportunity to use the full force of the United States Military to make you bend to his whims. And that the cadre of morons who put poster board signs in their yard about how they shouldn't have to pay school taxes since they don't have kids and who regularly attend township supervisor meetings to complain about how their neighbor's retaining wall violates setback requirements actually gave a shit about the anti-war stuff even though they'll still tell you that Obama pulled out of Iraq too early.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
I wouldn't call 2 ships in 2 days evidence that Iran doesn't have a good grip on Hormuz. The problem for Trump is that Iran's actual ability to block the strait doesn't matter because commercial ships won't transit it so long as they say it's closed. All Operation Project Freedom proved is that they won't be able to get the 1600 ships that remain stuck in the gulf out before Trump's term ends at this pace, which requires a non-negligible amount of mobilization, let alone get the strait open to normal commercial traffic. In other words, the only thing likely to get the strait open is an end to the war.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
There's a cycle where oil prices go up, Trump makes an announcement that they're "very close" to a deal and that there's a 10/14/9/12/23/746-point plan that's on the table, the details of which are never disclosed, oil prices go back down slightly, then something happens that makes it clear Iran is nowhere near ready to sign a deal, people start firing and blaming the other side, and oil prices start to go back up. Unfortunately for Trump, oil prices and gas prices are directly correlated, since the former are based on speculation about the supply in a month's time, and the latter are based on current supply and demand. So while oil prices have fluctuated gas prices have been steadily going up. In my neck of the woods, within the course of a week they jumped from $4.19/gallon to $4.99/gallon; they were a little over $3/gallon at the time the war started. Some of this may be a switch to the more expensive summer blend, but that happens every year and the price doesn't jump that much.
The only time Trump's actions had any effect on the actual price of gas was when the initial ceasefire was announced, when they dropped by about a dime before continuing their march upward. The reason I'm focused on gas prices here is because this is the only reason the war has any political salience. If gas prices stayed the same most people wouldn't give a shit about the war because it was something happening halfway around the world that didn't have any immediate effect on their lives. But keeping gas prices low is important here, because not only does everyone have to buy a lot of it but it's the only such product where there one is constantly bombarded with signs advertising the price.
I agree, but I don't think that's what Graeber was referring to; hell, I started reading the book before deciding that the whole idea was dogshit and he didn't mention anything like that when describing his categories of bullshit jobs. All that did was show that he has no idea what adds value for a company. For instance, one of his canonical examples was companies that have receptionists even though they only get a couple calls a day. He then shows his hand by saying that the only reason they do that is so they can put on airs for the few customers they actually have. But that can be a source of prestige, and if it ends up being a bad use of money, that's a business decision for the company to make. I"m in law, and it's typical for most firms to only post a general phone number for the company and route all calls through the secretary (though they do other important work as well). I mostly have corporate clients who schedule Zoom calls on the rare occasions they want to speak, so I don't get many normal phone calls. But I do get some, and when I do the secretaries always act suspicious and reluctant when they ask me if I can put them through, as though it would be a huge imposition for me to have to talk to some rando.
Imagine you're running a small law firm that does probate work. It's just you and a secretary who also helps out with the business end of things. You'd like to take all your calls personally, but sometimes you're meeting with a client or at the courthouse and won't be available, and your secretary may be in client meetings with you or running other errands. You may only get two calls a day, but if they're from prospective clients each one could be worth thousands of dollars. You can automate this system and use voicemail or some kind of electronic scheduling service, but when confronted with this, most people will just hang up and call someone else. The receptionist can at least answer basic questions about what the firm does and if you're only tied up for another 20 minutes might be able to get that client in your office that same day.
Graeber seems to think that it's all part of a status game, as if it were all a bunch of greedy capitalists trying to impress each other with how much money they spend. But if you're a client who was actually able to get me on the phone and you show up at the office to a waiting room that's still empty after five minutes because the attorney is either with another client or just doing work, how is that going to affect your impression of the firm? People don't usually show up to law offices for fun reasons, and even something as simple as having someone to tell you to have a seat and the lawyer will be out in a few minutes and would you like some coffee in the meantime adds a lot of value. I'm not saying that it would necessarily make sense for our solo practitioner to do this, just that if a solo told me that he did I wouldn't think it was that unusual.
Which brings me to my final point, which is that Graeber's entire explanation for the phenomenon is bullshit itself. I could sympathize with him more if his theory was that bullshit jobs exist because of legacy practices that haven't been updated, or that some people are bad at business, or that executives are so far removed from the operations of their company that they don't know where value is being created, or that there's excessive regulation. To the contrary, he argues that it's all part of a capitalist system that requires the attorney to chain a young woman to a desk for 8 hours a day in exchange for barely enough money to survive because the system demands control.
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