Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Does Your Job Need To Exist?
An anonymous reader writes "PBS has an article about the growth of jobs that really don't need to exist. It includes an interview with professor David Graebner, who's known for his 2013 article 'BS jobs.' The premise is simple: as technology has automated huge portions of work that used to fill the days for millions of workers, many jobs simply involve less work. How often have you sat at your desk browsing the internet instead of being productive? If your company is such that you can aggregate that lost time across a bunch of workers, you could probably reduce the headcount significantly if everybody just stayed on task all the time. But that's not even an expectation at a lot of companies. Graebner ballparks the number of effectively useless jobs at around 20%. (It's not that the individual workers are useless, just that there are, for example, 12 people doing the work of 10.) So, how about it: how much actual productivity goes into your 40-hour workweek? What about your co-workers? How many people could your company fire if everybody just paid attention all the time?"
Obviously "work" fills other purposes for the human experience other than pure productivity. Just like the stated mission of school is academic education, but you certainly miss out if you don't mingle.
Yes, because human beings can totally stay 100% focused and productive during the entire day. Unless you're an unethical and lazy communist ofcourse.
I wonder how many CEOs actually believe in this drivel...
getting 40 hours of work out of a 40 hour week is what robots do
I once worked for a company that was always looking at a down hill spiral and could not afford to advance employees or give meaningful wage increases. The consequence was that workers mostly only wanted to work just enough not to be noticed or singled out. The rational thing to do was to pitch in and make things better but the workers almost universally refused to do much on the job. Worse yet some of the management had no clue as to how jobs could be improved or work output or quality improved. It is a shame to see a company that has been around for three decades go to hell in a hand basket.
If everyone was "productive" 100% of the day then they would burn out quickly. Having the time to browse the internet or slack off for a while is important. I'd even argue that for jobs that do not involve trivial tasks having these recreational periods helps improve creativity which improves overall productivity.
If my aunt had balls, he'd be my uncle.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
That 20% down time in paying attention is called not getting massive burnout. If everyone stayed on task at all times with maximum efficiency it would just be the pathway to massive turn over as people would lose their minds from stress.
WTF is that?
20% effectively useless jobs? The number seems to be on the low side as in my place there are more than that who have the word manager in their title. When you group them with all the other time wasters and incompetents, it must be nearer 50%, as a lot of those individuals only work to feed each others' roles.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If your company is such that you can aggregate that lost time across a bunch of workers, you could probably reduce the headcount significantly if everybody just stayed on task all the time.
Only if you're an idiot who doesn't understand that downtime is necessary for every job that involves even rudimentary cognitive skills, and doubly so if you want creativity, no matter if it is artistic or problem-solving.
The human brain is not designed to perform at 100% for extended periods of time. It evolved to run on a fairly lazy average level most of the time, and have reserves for bursts in times of need. Then it needs time to recover.
In simple terms for managers: If you condense workload to eliminate low-performance times, your top and average performances drop and you end up with the same or less total productivity.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
PHB's and meetings
How much time is lost to meetings and other filler other then real work?
The history of the past 30 years has been that all productivity gains from people working harder, etc. have gone to the corporate owners, not to employees. It's not in their interest to work harder or longer because they won't get paid any more.
Slackers unite!
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Should I be worried?
Has anyone studied the results of everyone giving 110%?
In the early nineties I was Director oif Development for a company that wrote and sold software to small telephone companies. We created a lot of automation into the process which allowed small companies to do much more than their staffing would otherwise allow. One prospective customer was a county owned telephone company. Their first response when we showed them all the features of our softwar ewas to ask if those capabilities could be turned off. Huh? Turns out that they viewed their primary role to be a provider of jobs within the county. Providing telephone service was considered secondary.
So there's nothing really new about these finds. Just that he's getting noticed for writing about them.
Do you want to be working 100% of the day doing the job of 2-3 people or have at say an 70%-80% day over 2-3 people that gives you room for the unplanned stuff + gives you a way to take some time off that the other people can cover?
Say some boss finds out that you can do work if you give it 100% all day that they don't need the other works and that also ends being that on your time off you are on call to do anything that comes up or that unplanned work is you better have dinner as an delivery as you are pulling at late nigher to day.
We could all just go back to being hunter-gatherers.
college has lot's of BS classes that not really need now days but the tech / trade schools have more of skills needed to do the job.
I'm off task probably half the day. Somehow I'm still able to be about as productive as my coworkers, who certainly seem to stay on task better than I do. Yay?
Graebner ballparks the number of effectively useless jobs at around 20%
This guy's kidding right?
Once you get rid of all the lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats, upper management, middle management you've lost 40%. Simplify financial laws you can get rid of accountants. Stop the war on drugs and "terror" and you can get rid of 90% of "security". Remove the military industrial complex and you can get rid of 90% of the military.
If our society was optimised and we spread the load around we could work 8 hour weeks no problem.
The problem is that if you do this, you remove all your slack. If you cut it to just enough people to do the work if they work 100% of the time, the first time someone calls in sick you don't have enough people to do the work. If you get a sudden spike in business because of a holiday or special, you don't have enough people to handle the extra work. If something goes wrong, you don't have anybody to assign to handle it without leaving you short-handed. And that's before you even get to the need for workers to take breaks during the day to avoid burning out.
It's the same problem that's plagued just-in-time delivery of inventory. Sure it saves money to have stock and raw materials delivered just as they're needed. But the moment a storm or a port strike or anything delays deliveries, you're in a world of hurt because you don't have any inventory on hand to tide you over. Sure it's saved you money, but it's made your business much more fragile and the costs of even one shut-down can easily eat up any savings.
Sure, there may be jobs that aren't filling up full-time (and, as some people noted, who can work 8 hours/day without a break?), but there are lots of jobs that take up more than 40 hours/week. Why aren't those part of the lede here?
There's also something to be said for some level of inefficiency in the economy. Too efficient, and, absent new industries to take them in, we end up with a large population of unwanted workers. Too inefficient and the economy itself gets a bit gummed up. So I can't find myself overly concerned that, taken in aggregate, we're wasting time on the job, so long as the job gets done correctly in the end, and on-time.
BOOP!
... seeing that it's twelve getting paid what 8 deserve.
This inefficiency is built in to handle workload fluctuations that happen in the course of business. It is cheaper to have someone who is familiar with the business processes on staff instead of bringing in temps or contractors to handle the load.
We can easily lop off the 80% of the top 20% of the management, and since they are the one pulling in 80% of the total wages of the company, you might reduce payroll by a staggering 64%. But rest assured, they would rather cut 10 low wage employees rather than let go one of their own, even if that one fired VP can save more money, improve morale and increase productivity.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
On the other hand, see it from the manager's side. How much productivity is lost due to lack of direction caused by lack of meetings to set priorities?
Several commenters have pointed out that humans don't stay on task 100% of the time, so the question, as phrased, is silly. HOWEVER, if you don't over-specialize, or encourage people to spend a little time on things other than their core job, they can be productive while taking a break from the routine, instead of spending time on Facebook.
For many years, I ran small companies. The companies did web security software and web hosting. A programmer could, however, take a break from programming and spend half an hour on industry related message boards, which was where most of our sales came from. Answering a support call, they might chat with the customer about all sorts of topics (customer relationships are important).
I've often worked 60+ hours without getting burned out by varying my work. Just for one project I might shop for RAID cards and other components online, customize the hardware with hand tools, assemble the servers, install & configure the OS, write custom software for that server, etc. That way I'm productive almost 100% of the time, but don't get bored like I would in a company where one person does all of the purchasing, another person assembles hardware all day, and another installs software all day.
I now work in a large agency, big enough that you'd expect specialization, but although I'm a programmer most of the time, I'm also invited to participate in other things - long term strategy discussions, designing the architecture of systems other departments are working on, etc. I don't spend any time at work on Facebook. I "slack off" by pitching in on projects that I'm not officially part of, doing work that's different from what I was primarily hired to do.
* Every once in a while, I do look at Slashdot while in my office. Then again, I find work-related news and discussion here, and I also pitch our excellent free cyber-security courses here, so even Slashdot is somewhat productive.
...because we're automating everything that we can automate.
...Err...I'm going to stop now, before I embarrass myself. :)
There are a few businesses that WILL boom in the future though, such as the fitness (sports) industry, as we...when we become less and less physically active, will need to find a way to keep ourselves fit. Many things will change in the future because of this. What I'm worried about though - is the coming mass-unemployment, the extreme difference between the rich & the unemployed. Human greed knows no bounds, we already know that from our own history. But we're also inventive and creative creatures, so we will find a way, but it's going to hurt before it becomes any good.
Another business that will only increase, is entertainment - and advertisement. People won't know what to do with themselves as we get less and less stuff to occupy ourselves with. I suspect the Internet will be highly regulated, constantly battling with hackers (hacktivists) & crackers, the richer will get richer and the unemployed masses will be desperate for entertainment (which is good for the powers that be...because it numbs them down and make their dull lives easier, from the chair/sofa).
Eventually the greedy will go to far, and the people will uproar and a civil war will arise from this. This is the "shift in our time", after that horrible period in time...with seemingly endless poverty and suffering, things will eventually even out and become MUCH better than we have now. Everything is automated, the need for money has been abandoned as we don't need to purchase anything. Everything we need will be produced by robots & automated food-plantages. Overpopulation will lead to further research into terraforming planets...
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Every IT job that I've had has been woefully understaffed. My current job is awesome, but even here we struggle to keep up with the workload.
That's not to say that there's not a fair share of screwing off - as has been mentioned (I'm sure), a brief break helps a lot of people be more productive, not less (of course, as long as it's not done to excess).
At other jobs I *did* spend far more time screwing off, but that wasn't because there wasn't enough work to keep me busy. It was because I worked for a miserable boss in a miserable environment and I was the only IT guy holding the place together. It helped that nobody knew if I was screwing off - after all, Slashdot is a "tech" site, right? Their ignorance was my bliss. But then again, they weren't the ones manning helpdesk phone 24/7 so I don't feel very bad about it.
Not to say that useless jobs don't exist, but I haven't had the good fortune to work in an overstaffed, under-workloaded department.
I tend to work in production-based environments and everywhere I've worked had too few people trying to do the job of several more. I'm utterly sick of the words 'six sigma' and 'leveraging'.
I understand my experience is anecdotal and statistically insignificant, but it's hard to believe what our dear professor is saying. At least I will agree with him that many of us find our jobs meaningless.
Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh - after that I sorta space out for an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Peter Gibbons: You see, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.
Bob Porter: Don't- don't care?
Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? And here's another thing, I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob Porter: Eight?
Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Turns out that they viewed their primary role to be a provider of jobs within the county. Providing telephone service was considered secondary.
If an organization thinks its role as a buyer of labor outweighs its role as a seller of services, that's when you break out the illustration of the broken window. If the organization's leaders refuse to understand the fallacy they've fallen into, complain to the local newspaper's editor.
With a little additional training I'm pretty sure David Graebner could handle, "can I super-size that for you?".
Unplanned work is a good point. Not all businesses can perfectly anticipate future load, especially not businesses with walk-in customers. They need to keep employees on standby to keep customer wait times down in case it gets a sigma or two busier than usual.
For another, if people were to split a responsibility, they'd have to switch between their present responsibilities and the new one, and switching between tasks that require concentration reportedly takes 15 minutes.
I'm told that's what you get if you're a shitty (in any or all ways) place to work.
The good people will leave. They always have options.
The shitty people without options will stay. The ones who are just good enough not to get fired but not good enough to move someplace else.
It's about bullshit jobs and bullshit tasks. We as a society basically have a HUGE overhead of dead weight jobs that do nothing of value for humanity. Your job whatever you are doing will at the minimum have tasks or aspects that are harmful or useless. The only people who fail to see this are the ones doing thoroughly useless jobs but can't see it because they play the game aspect of their jobs and believe the praise and dubious rewards they get.
Am I a slashdot editor? Am I Bennet Haselton?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Most American workers ranks are rather thin lots of us are doing the work of 2 or 3 people.
As long as people require money to be able to live, jobs that could be automated do have a very good reason to exist. I don't think it's a good use of resources, of course, but eliminating large portions of the workforce for greater profits is no real benefit unless it improves overall quality of life for our society. (currently added profit ends up going to people who already have more than enough)
Capitalism has a nasty habit of flushing out inefficient organizations, sooner or later. All the worse because we are now on a global scale where virtually every other country suffers a lower standard of living than us - which means they will work for less. If you are relaxed at work or looking for something to do, start worrying.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
If we actually paid any attention to the past 50 years we would have been engineering humanity out of a job, rather than inventing busywork for us to do.
Right...because too many employed people is the biggest problem facing society right now. Oh, wait...
-B-
I noticed it in 2008 when the economy crashed. Companies fired like crazy, and when the economy recovered they only did modest hiring but maintained the same level of productivity.
We're running out of work to do, but we don't have any socially acceptable way to distribute wealth w/o work. This should be fun.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This would work for some jobs, but not most IT jobs (and not an awful lot of other jobs). For example, I have had jobs (and know of others) that had a lot of downtime during the normal course of events. However, When things got busy, it was urgent that the problem got resolved as quickly as possible. If the company had cut employees so that the staff they had left were busy 100% of the time, when urgent problems arose, no one would have had time to address those problems while keeping the routine that was necessary to keep the company running.
The answer the type of person who does the studies in the article gives is to hire people to deal with those urgent situations when they arise. The problem with that answer is that those people will not know how the system is configured and will have to spend additional time figuring that out. No matter how well documented a system is, it will take someone who works with it every day less time to find their way around then it will someone coming in from outside.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
and if productivity keeps increasing they'll be more than enough of the ones that can to go around for the few jobs that're left...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
it's not like there are many aliens around that need to be killed....
There is, apparently, a huge shortage of English teachers.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
And that aside, there's the problem of things being tasked to capacity being unable to deal with surges when they happen. Like where I work we hire students to help (since we are a university). It is expected they'll spend a non-trivial amount of time sitting around, doing homework, etc. Why? Because when someone needs something done, we want to have a student to assign to it. If the students are working 100% of the time, well then anytime the workload increases, it means we have to delay things, we can't handle it then.
Of course it isn't like they'd focus on work 100% of the time, even if we did have them fully tasked.
There are just all kinds of reasons it doesn't work, and it is not unique to modern society. The past was NOT full of extremely hard working people who did nothing but focus on the job. That has never been true.
You are always going to need more people to do a job then if each person theoretically worked to 100% capacity 100% of the time. Since in most places work loads vary, that'll also make you need more people since you need enough to deal with the peaks, not the nominal amount.
This is life, this is how it has always been, and there's nothing wrong with it.
What do you have against Bachelors of Science??
and of course... This forces one to consider the next question... Do you need to exist?
I work part-time, maybe an average of 25 hours a week, make $40 per hour, and am quite happy. When I work, I really work. Most of my 40-hour-a-week coworkers make more money than I do, but they sit on made-up committees most of the day. I figure that bit of hell is punishment enough for their evil ways.
Most people on disability could work fewer hours, but HR a-holes demand that they work full time or "be loosers."
Full-time employees get benefits, so anyone who is sick (and can not work 40 hours per week) or who has kids (and needs to be home) begs for a 40-hour-a-week job.
I've learned to keep a job, I need to tell 2 lies:
(1) I want to work here full time, and
(2) I am not enjoying this.
For some reason, about a month after I openly show my secret enjoyment at work, and stop pretending to be terrified of my boss, I get fired.
I'm not even going to try to collect this into a coherent something.
I will say: HR IDIOTS ARE A WASTE OF O2.
Part of the problem is that really good workers create ways to make their jobs easier. Within a few months at a new job I usually have scripts and macros to do just about everything very quickly. It takes time and knowledge to build those, but once they're done you're in caretaker mode. A good boss will then give you more to do, gradually, while a bad one will complain that you seem to spend all your time on the internet.
In my last post
BS = Bullshit classes
Let me introduce you to toe concept of "necessary waste".
In your business process, there is some limiting factor that is directly tied to how much you can produce: if had some more of that factor you could produce more, and if you run out you produce less.Maybe it's some machinery for which you can't yet swing the financing to get more units; maybe it's a skill for which there aren't many people tried for yet. If you can't get more, then your next move is to make sure you are utilizing that limiting factor as much as possible.
That means that the other factors that are inputs or outputs of the limiting factor need to be ready and waiting to make sure the limiting factor is never idle. If you are an input you need to have work prepared but your average rate can never exceed what the limiting factor can consume. If you consume an output of the limiting factor you need to be ready to pick up what the limiting factor gives you.
If reduce the labor available for the inputs and outputs then you run the risk of creating artificial limits on your business process. You can actually be less productive when you try to eliminate idleness if you don't know WHY things were idle. Idleness isn't actually your target, it is productivity.
Of course, all of this flies in the face of the slashdot conventional wisdom that management provides zero contribution to productivity.
...if other programmers weren't so fucking ignorant.
When work comes in spurts and bunches you can look forward to the downtime in between. It can be a reward for getting stuff done. You can think that if I get this work done, I get a small break after or, if I work harder and faster to get it done sooner, I can have a big break. Think of roofers shingling a roof on a Friday. You don't see anyone standing around, they are on each others asses and by 2:00pm or so they are done the roof, packing up and starting their weekend early.
When you have a constant workflow that never ends there is no real incentive to work harder. You look around and see one guy doing the bare minimum and another guy doing 3 times the work load. Both get payed the same amount and the work never ends. The hard worker might think he is more likely to get a promotion but management thinks if we promote that guy, we would need to hire 3 guys to replace what he does. Lets keep him right there so we can keep our production numbers up.
The worst thing management can do though is fill an employees down time with more work. Basically you have punished a hard working person with more responsibility and work with zero pay increase. Unless you are trying to kill productivity.
BSc for Bachelors of Science is the usual
The fiat money system at work.. Most people have more debt then assets because tautology.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
BSc for Bachelors of Science is the usual
Not in the US nor increasingly in CA (Canada, for those thinking of California).
How often have you sat at your desk browsing the internet instead of being productive?
Who says I'm not being productive then? Some (many?) problems cannot be solved via by simply brute-force thinking them through - a linear left-brain methodology. Many times, especially for more complex things, I need to let things peculate awhile. Ever get the solution to a vexing problem (an "ah-ha!" moment) while taking a shower? That's your right-brain solving something non-linearly.
Going off and doing something completely different is a strategy for allowing a left to right brain shift -- keep the (usually) dominate left brain busy on something completely unrelated to the task at hand giving the (usually subordinate) right brain time and space to chime in. (read the book: "Drawing on the Right Side of The Brain" - and others on left/right brain)
How many people could your company fire if everybody just paid attention all the time?
Perhaps manyt, but how long would those people last/stay before burning out? There's more to work than "paying attention all the time".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Well there you have it. As consumerism continues its long rise, bullshit is ultimately produced in ever-increasing quantity. It became significant in the 20's, was rocket-fueled in the 50's, and has dominated the economy for a few decades now. Bullshit is the fastest-growing industry and more and more media, politics, and government is devoted to it.
"If you're not passionate about your operating system, you're married to the wrong one."
as one more example? I work in I.T. as a computer support analyst. What does that title really mean? In my situation, it means I'm the only computer guy in the office, both for our office (where all of the finance people reside, as well as H.R., the company president, and another floor of "creative" folks who work directly with our clients), and for a second office in another city nearby. (That office has only about 10 employees, and a couple of them generally work from home, so they don't need a lot of attention. But it's my job to run down there when something does go wrong or needs upgrading/changing.)
Our company has several other offices around the country, and we have two more I.T. guys who generally do what I do. All of us work together as a team to handle incoming trouble tickets for any of the offices, but it makes the most sense for us to do the vast majority of the support for the offices we're located in or close to.
When you factor in that our little group also does all the support for an additional 100 or so people who work freelance for us on random projects (they all get their own company email accounts and so forth), I'd say we're actually stretched pretty darn thin. Things would quickly deteriorate if any one of us was cut out of the picture. (We know this by watching what happens when someone leaves on vacation for a week or two.)
Despite that? I can assure you that all of us "waste some time" on the internet, posting silly things on Facebook, reading the latest tech. news and so on. At any given time, one of us is probably coming in an hour late or taking an extra long lunch here or there, too. You know what though? We are ALSO dedicated to getting things done correctly and in a timely manner. There's so much stress and "I need this yesterday!" that comes in random bursts, you can't reasonably expect a person to handle that without compensating with some downtime or laziness mixed in. As long as nobody tries to micro-manage us - it all comes together pretty well for us. When we come in late, it's because we have a pretty good grip on the ebb and flow of the I.T. issues at hand and feel confident it's a time window where we don't have to be sitting in front of a desk to keep things going. We're also known to take tickets and fix issues on a Saturday or Sunday night, even though none of us are officially "on call" -- simply because one of us may not have anything better to do at that moment in time. We'd rather knock an issue out than have it hanging over our heads on Monday, sometimes. We also may NOT take those tickets, because we have family lives and want to get away from work sometimes. It's more productive than I think we'd be if we were micro-managed and someone was actually ordered to be "on call" on weekends to take those incoming tickets, etc.
Indeed. My boss, and particularly her boss, is awesome in that way. He takes care of all the politics and also makes sure we get what we need, so we can focus on the task at hand.
He also reads Slashdot, so "hi Tony, and thanks."
Ca. CA.
If I paid attention 40 hours a week, I'd be braindead within a month.
I actually tried working 6.5 days a week when I first started my "real" software development career job - going into the 3rd week it became painfully obvious to me that I was making less real progress (mistakes, rewrites) though the overtime pay was nice...
I do the work of three men.
Moe, Curly and Larry.
Have gnu, will travel.
If 12 people spend 40 hours each doing the work of only 10 people, there are two ways of eliminating the wasted time.
They think two people have jobs that don't need to exist. A better solutions appears to be that all 12 people spend less hours at work.
How would society benefit from having two more unemployed people instead of having 12 people that can spend more time with their kids (or doing whatever they want to do instead)?
The full noun phrase was "take a break from programming", so yes, I consider reading Slashdot or some other message boards to be a break from programming.
I don't know if I've ever seen anyone actually do NOTHING, staring, mouth agape, at the wall, not even thinking about anything. I HAVE seen plenty of people watch cat videos on YouTube. That's fine, I suppose. I might get the same refreshment from watching an entertaining TED video instead of a cat. I've seen alot of people chat with their co-workers about sports. It's refreshing to talk to other people. Rather than sports, I like to talk to my co-workers about interesting plans they have for work projects. I get to socialize AND feel productive at the same time, and it's definitely a break from staring at code.
My job has mutated over the years such that that I am now tasked with doing work on I don't actually know how to do, on custom systems I don't understand. As a result, I suck at it. I have told management this many times but they blink and look at me like I am speaking Martian and basically think I don't WANT to work.
Anyway, I end up with a pile of work I can't do and a few things I can do and it is often a struggle to stay awake. I mean a serious battle between me and gravity pulling my head down to the desk. Snacks doesn't help. Three cups of coffee does not help. Even walks don't help: I am very good at falling asleep in motion.
Yeah it scares me too. Terrifies me.
The combination of boredom, lack of mental stimulation, and lack of ability to do the work leaves me physically devastated.
I am told I am the least productive employee in the whole company so I am waiting around now to see if they will fire me, at which point I will go home and take a nap.
Sig for hire.
I've read David Graebner's study and this has very little to do with it. The study set out to discover where our increase in productivity went to. He concluded that we created whole new classes of jobs that didn't exist before and aren't strictly necessary to produce goods which chewed up the productivity gains. IT/programming jobs were classed in the bullshit category. It was more along the lines of marketing, HR, etc. He also pointed out that the more crucial the job was to production the less likely it was to be well paid and the more likely the workers were to be over worked. He also pointed out that the pay rate and/or staffing is usually under active assault.
Three of his examples of this were teachers, garbage men, and firefighters.
At the same time bullshit jobs (like marketing and public relations) were well funded and the workers usually only put in 30 hours out of an expected 40 hour work week.
It has nothing to do with how workers spend there time and everything to do with the creation of waste in a capitalist system that should be driven to efficiency.
Well, that's certainly a quite revealing non-sequitur.
What does it matter that we pay 12 to do what 10 can do just as easily when we've been told repeatedly by recent statistics that productivity has increased dramatically more in recent years than the increase seen in wage growth (see epi.org, etc)? At the end of the day, people making the wages in the areas where these productivty statistics are really seen probably deserve the break afforded by the splitting workloads into smaller portions.
Try applying that 100% to RNs. How are you going to predict patients that get worse, that get better, that crach, etc. Impossible to predict workload of an individual patient. So impossible to get that mythical 100%. You need slack to be there when multiple codes hit a single ICU or unit, or when a big motor vehicle accident hits the ER and surgical staff. The article is written by some idiot efficiency expert who apparently has no idea how you need some sort of reserve to draw upon, both staff-wise and personal-wise. Running flat out for a full shift is enough to wreck even the greatest surgeon or nurse if done too often. Same goes for coders, having been both (RN and Sr SW Engr)
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
That very common view results from some large places that can afford to have clueless management because they can hire enough assistants to fill the gap. It's depressingly common in places that are a near monopoly. Edsel Ford, the clueless inheritor, instead of Henry Ford is seen as the ideal manager in far too many places. It's the idea of a benevolent King idly holding court saying "make it so" instead of an active manager setting things up and assigning tasks. Sharks like Rupert Murdoch do not fit this role and consume such useless types for breakfast.
Of course smaller places cannot afford to have a parasitic idle nobility so their managers have to actually run things. I think we have a demographic here of people mostly in larger place so they don't see that.
So how about reducing regular work hours by 20%, so everyone has a job. The top of the foodchain already makes more than what they can spend in a century. Then maybe spend 2 hour of education or gym-time, or community gardens.
Yeah .. how about that. Maybe this place wouldn't such that much ...
This is what causes a lot of airline delays these days. No excess pilots sitting around, so if a pilot calls in sick, or can't get to the airport because the plane flight they were on was delayed, there's noone to keep the system going, and it snowballs.
Asimov and others predicted a future where there wouldn't be enough jobs to go aroundubt they saw that as a GOOD thing. Humanity was clever enough to build machines to do all the work, and now we can kick back and enjoy some leisure time. George Jetson had a three-hour workday. But that vision can only work if we view our increased productivity as a benefit to *everyone*, and compensate everyone accordingly: a dividend for being a member of the clever human race (or if you want, a dividend for being a citizen/resident of a first-world nation).
As more jobs are automated, it seems to me that there are three options: 1) we share the wealth, either with a guaranteed income or by raising wages while simultaneously cutting the number of hours people work; 2) we make a lot of fake jobs so that we can pretend that people are earning the money they need to live, and avoid the horrors of socialism (horror! horror!); or 3) a LOT of people drop into poverty.
Many people noted nobody can stay focused 100% of the time, and that productivity gains always go the the same. I would like to add a point on managing the unexpected
Having too many people for a given task means there is some extra work capacity. This is required to handle unexpected situations. If anything unusual strikes and require extra work while there is nobody left idle at any time, then the company is doomed to fail the unexpected event.
Anybody who has done this long enough (and I think I have), knows that IT isn't like making widgets. We spend a large part of our time sitting around doing "nothing", (which usually involves hours and hours of reading and learning and generally being prepared for...), BAM!!! Something is broken!!! FIX IT 5 MINUTES AGO, AND IF YOU DON'T, YOU'RE GOING TO BE FIRED!
I don't even know how you can truly measure *efficiency* in IT. If you have lots of customers and lots of employees and if neither have complaints very often, your IT department is probably doing a good job.
The only way to know for sure is to go ahead and just fire us. If the SHTF, you made a bad choice. If not, you didn't.
IT has been important enough for LONG enough, that most companies probably KNOW which is the best solution. If you are just now trying to figure it out, you've probably already missed the boat.
?
Go to the USPS site for example and see California listed as "CA".
There would be explosions with massive loss of lives and property damage. Believe it. I'm one of the very few dedicated people who do natural gas leak surveys. I find gas leaks that are, or could be, dangerous. If you live in one of the Southeastern states, there's a good chance I've walked through your yard or driven past your house at some point over the past 38 years.
I've tried to come up with a way that my job could be automated, but I can't think of any. It requires boots on the ground, so to speak. Maybe one day somebody will come up with a small drone equipped with a laser that can fly through yards and over fences and behind bushes and dodging bad dogs, but I'm not holding my breath.
we'd only need to work a few hours a day to produce the food and housing needed to take care of everyone on the planet. all the effort above that is the oligarchs coercing us to pool our labor so they can accumulate even more.
If we start with the premise that a 40-hour worker doesn't put in 40 hours (and I assume this is not talking about smoke breaks and bathroom breaks and such, but just really "browsing the internet to kill time" stuff)... how about shortening the work week?
And BTW: We *need* BS jobs. If we got really efficient, you can start to expect unemployment >20%.
Though if some of the BS jobs at my work would stop being sending me advertising in my email (seriously: in my building, which is only a few hundred employees, there are at least 4 whose full-time job seems to be telling me about hockey tickets, charity events, company socials, and Disney on ice)
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apk
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apk
I have yet to meet someone who is great at problem solving that doesn't need a lot of down time.
I'm an I.T. hardware tech/purchaser. I'm good. I'm the centralized purchaser of computer hardware for a couple hundred stores. I'm also one of the hardware support people for the call center my office is in. Now do we have needless people at my company? Oh I know we do.
80% of "BS" classes in college teach critical thinking in unique ways. I was naturally good at critical thinking, read: problem solving, prior to college, but those general classes helped me a lot. Alas, most people don't care about critical thinking, so tech/trade school is good enough.
100% busy / 0% idle is not really good.
The best that you could achieve is something like 80% busy / 20% idle.
Having 100% cpu busy / 0% cpu idle is not really good.
Max that you should achieve is 80% cpu busy / 20% cpu idle.
A class in the Peloponnesian War does not teach a lot of critical thinking - mostly laborious reading of texts written by self important academics trying to find a way to make themselves relevant in a world that doesn't need their skills. Sure, at West Point, such a class might make sense, but most of us are not training to figure out how to apply ancient war strategies and tactics to the modern battlefield with drones being operated halfway around the world by guys in Missouri who work eight hour shifts five days a week.
Critical thinking is figuring out why the bare iron you just loaded your microcode on doesn't work -- sorry, there's no debugging tools below you. Sure, you could flash a light on the console from your code, but that would probably change the timing and give a register time to settle from a load from memory that you forgot to issue a WAIT for (or, in this case, NOT). You, a bottle of scotch, a listing of your microcode w/hex microcode shown (a luxury actually), the behavior you don't understand, and a platform reference manual (that, in the end, this version of the iron actually doesn't quite implement as it should). Been there, done that. That's critical thinking. (Turned out the machine hadn't implemented the spec correctly and it hadn't been reported (or fixed) in the ten years since the machine was built/loaded -- the current version of the machine had the same bug!
You could teach someone else how to do what it is you do. Introduce them to your clients, increase interaction, show them how you sell shit, how you found people, etc. etc. Of course then they could easily go behind your back, steal all your customers, offer better services etc., but then your job wouldn't need to exist...
A surprising number of middle management type jobs exist only to prop up the cost of project and process management software that would replace them. Let that sink in for a minute.
Automation is great and all, but ultimately it already exists and is easier to implement for someone just pushing / processing paperwork and acting as a "facilitator" than it is to mechanize the process of flipping burgers. Then take a nice look at the software that is really powerful and really automates process oriented work.
One of the side effects of pricing software exclusively based upon demand (because supply is infinite and creation costs incredibly scalable) is that sometimes, demand will be artificially created. I work in IT, and it's incredibly annoying to look at how terrible Cisco's CLI and GUI configuration tools are compared to their competitors, yet Cisco certs are exceptionally valuable. By making ASDM a steaming pile of shite, Cisco has made people who can configure the relatively simple product of an ASA 55xx very valuable.
...if you really want to increase productivity, just block all web traffic except over lunch hour. :)
I'm sorry, I don't see how a discussion of the fiat money system and debt is Offtopic? The main reason we have to work as hard as we do is we are paying back debts that can never be repaid to companies who can magically create money out of thin air. There is a whole systemic problem on top of that, but in the end most of us work for money which is needed to allow us to live pleasant lives. (And oddly enough to pay taxes to the government, who, if they didn't outsource it, could print their own money.)
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Or to snobby Europeans [like me!] Ca-CA
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Seriously, how does an extra "N" make its way in there, and how has nobody in the first 140 comments used the right name yet?
marketing, HR, quality control... yeah. Actually I had a gf in the HR resources, back around 2005 and she told me they often killed their time hearing radio and calling in for stupid contests (they are/were plenty...like guess how many items we have in our purse). Sad.
There could be other reasons for this situation, like untreated mild depression. You should probably see a doctor to check on this.
there are some people that need significantly less downtime, even a few that need none whatsoever.
There is no human being on this planet that needs zero downtime when doing any kind of job that involves more than physical presence for an extended amount of time.
Keep in mind they're very, very productive.
Really? The "very, very productive" people in every company I have ever visited were just creating a very good illusion of being busy. busy != productive. The really productive people are quite often the ones where everyone is wondering wtf they are doing all day. Maybe you were never lucky enough to work in a good environment, but I have. I've worked with people that I rarely saw doing anything, but that always had every task finished on time. They had plenty of downtime, because they could manage time and priorities and the fact that downtime is essential to extreme performances is really not a secret. It actually works the same for both muscles and brains - recovery time is an essential part of the process.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Does Your Job Need To Exist?
Only if it's in a country that maximizes business friendliness to the detriment of its own population.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Tell that to my graduating class that had to take "Film and Theatre" to get their Bachelors of Technology. I'm sure at some point my job will require me to analyze a polish political film and compare its characters to those in Mother Courage...
everyone needs a little slack off during work to boost the productivty while working. assigning all the hard tasks to one person won't work out.
But telling everyone to cut an hour per day off and work the rest with max. power, won't work either. You need to be there to make sure you will pick up work again, when you feel like it. Its much more likely if you're browsing the internet than when you went home and come back at the next day.
Everyone on the B ship, basically.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Warning: this is a long and rambly reply.
Your job probably won't. Your life probably won't either, well not that specifically. Being British, not American (as I assume you are), we don't do university in the same way. Courses are basically just what you sign up for, so I don't have the same direct experience as you.
However, English classes in school were much along the same lines. We were required to write endless essays (which curiously, no one ever bothered actually teaching us *how* to do) on bizarre analyses of the author's inner thought processes while he (was all he in this case) was writing the book we happened to be analysing.
Not only did it utterly suck the life out of the books a good deal of it was probably outright wrong or at least deeply misguided. Oh and it utterly put me off the idea of analysing things.
The thing is, fast forward 20 years or so and I reently had a complete about-face. My SO is as a hobby an aspiring author. As part of this there are various writing forums out there, and much like tech ones have a range of characters form n00bs to experienced (to total nutjobs---it is the internet after all). Anyway, as you might expect a common topic of discussion is what makes bad writing, and exercises etc to help spot that and avoid it in your own writing.
Anyway to cut a very long story merely long, I've been offering moral support and doing some of these as well. Turns out it has all the same facets as literary analysis, but because it's being done by people for fun, they've figured out how to make it fun and interesting.
This is not to say your course on Polish film analysis falls into this camp: I strongly suspect it's the opposite.
However, I now feel a greater appreciation for certain things. One, and I've found this particularly entertaining, is when I end up reading a book I don't enjoy very much, I now generally understand *why* I don't like it and not only that, I can rant and rave about it in a semi-coherent manner.
Likewise, there's a lot of things in film and TV that can feel awkward and clunky or pull you out, and it's just plain interesting to be able to see why it's happening, and in many cases what they were clearly trying to achieve.
Is it useful to work? For me, certainly not. Is it fun? Yeah, definitely. It's basically added a layer of nuance and entertainment to already entertaining activities. The sad thing is, I got so damaged by my schooling, it took 20 years and a *LOT* of gentle prodding to get me get me to appreciate such things.
What I appreicate now is clearly what we were meant to be learning, but is to completely alien to what we were actually "taught" as to e essentially unrecognisable. I guess my conclusio is that it's good to do things like the thing you were complaining about in general (not for a job, just for the hell of it and ejoying life better), though in 99% of cases they are do so badly as to e actively damaging.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
What was that in English? I couldn't even read half of those sentences.
It's more like what little progress has been made towards satisfying the human condition. Blame it on whatever -ism, but regardless the spirit of real progress and hope of meaningful existence has/is being stifled. Maybe because those whom devote their lives to studying us (anthropoligists, sociologists, futurists ...) are not taken seriously at all ("academic twaddle .. conversation starter"). In fact they hold great value about how we can observe things objectively by describing how things are. Quo vadis?
Sure I'm not constantly productive, but ...
1. Who can get away with working only 8 hous? I'd rather see employers going back to paying for hours worked than have fewer people with more unpaid overtime.
2. I'd be a lot more productive if I didn't have to baby sit the offshore team. I wonder if the PHBs did a full accounting of how much "cheap labor" actually costs.
You didn't have a choice of which 'English' class to take?
Not all subjects worth learning are well taught.
Not in my Canada
Yeah. That's it. Pathologise exploitation.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apk
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apk
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apk
Let's let TOM speak shall we:
"I'm having great conversations on this site with one of my alias accounts" - by Tom (822) on Monday April 07, 2014 @02:29PM (#46686259) Homepage FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
APK
P.S.=> Tom *tried* to libel me & failed after I destroyed him in a technical debate on hosts files... result?
Tom ended up "eating his words" here http://slashdot.org/comments.p... spiced with "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" + HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH
... apk
That's a classic symptom of depression. I'd urge you to do all the things people usually urge you to do in this situation.
I have one other suggestion, however - and I have no desire to undermine you, but it's entirely possible that you believe you have communicated your need to be trained succinctly and clearly, when in fact you haven't.
That's the kind of thing to put into writing (and get a friend to proof-read for you). Approach your line-manager pro-actively, rather than waiting for your next annual review. If you're no good at thinking on your feet in those meetings, you can try two things. One is asking if you can bring someone else along to help represent you; another is to make a checklist of things that you want to say, and things that you want to happen, and ensure that they get dealt with. (*this* is what union reps are good for.) Tick them off as you go, and take notes - it's easy to walk out of a meeting and realise that you've not actually covered what you wanted to say until it's too late.
If it comes down to it, this is hardly a career-limiting action. The worst that can happen is you get let go - but it's entirely possible that you'll be surprised.
You spend the majority of your waking life doing this. It behooves you to do what you can to get to the point where you're enjoying it - or at least, can tolerate it.
Slashdot?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Nobody's claiming the depression isn't exogenous, but the diagnosis sounds plausible. It doesn't matter which way around cause and effect are - what needs dealing with is the current situation.
Actually, none of it is. Apart from the liquid, everything you mention is domain knowledge and specialist skills.
Critical thinking is a process.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If I didn't send out the TPS reports, the people whose job it is to read the TPS reports wouldn't be able to do their job, which is reading the TPS reports.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This kind of discussion seems really insignificant next to the entire industries which are useless, obsolete and/or indefensibly harmful, yet remain entrenched and defended by politicians. I'm talking about taxis, coal power, disposable plastics, real estate agents... I'd rather see engineers working at 60% efficiency on solar power than the best team of coal miners on the planet.
This post is terribly written. I'm also unable to write as well as I want to, but you need to keep practicing.
Being able to understand why you do or don't like something doesn't seem valuable. I find the "hnuh" micro-epiphanies of amateur critics pretentious and pathetic. It could even make you a worse audience. Slightly different things could be good. For example it would be valuable to like or hate stuff more strongly because then your life would feel more passionate. It'd be valuable to know how to find stuff you like. Knowing how to produce things you like would also be great because, even if you don't make books or movoies, most people tell extemporaneous stories all the time. but knowing _why_ you like or hate something when you already like or hate it? what the hell for?
I think the value of writing skills doesn't depend on being in a relationship with a writer. It's a talent that can help you organize thoughts. For example, in your post you've done as we all do, reflected on your short, ordinary life, given a rambling list of uninteresting stuff that barely happened to you as if any of us care in the slightest about you, which we don't, and distilled from it a poorly-supported and nearly irrelevant conclusion: "litcrit good, mm'kay?" I don't know what else is in your comment. "Be a total follower and appreciate whatever you're told to because you're probably wrong about stuff you think is a waste of time"? "Opinions change, so you can appear more mature than you actually are by pretending you appreciate everything"? "Poland is irrelevant"?
Obviously we use language to communicate, but conscious thought also happens partly in language, so I think a mastery of at least one language can make you functionally smarter, if not actually smarter.
My big worry is that the opposite might be true: that ADD might spread from slashdot comment-writers to the people who read them. I'm really struggling to keep attention under control, and reading stuff like this makes me want to scream because I basically _have_ to skim it. There are so many reversals, qualification-phrases, parentheticals, and partially-bound pronouns in this awful bickering internet-comment-writing that I have to either read everything five times or skim.
"I wrote this in a very obscure British lefty magazine called Strike Magazine, going out on the Internet, and within three or four weeks, I think it had been translated into 14 different languages"
Strike Magazine is even more obscure now. See where it's been disappeared from the web and been replaced by a similarly sounding fashion and lifestyle mag.
www.strikemag.org
archived
strikemagazine.co.uk created: 06-Jun-2013
Imagine a beowulf cluster of English teacher shortage!
Please login to access my lawn
I work at wal-mart, many people will say "walmart needs to hire MORE people because staffing is low". While sort of true, the real problem lies in that most of the jobs currently available, don't need to be. Most of it is management. We have 30 people who work overnights (depends on time offs/callouts +-6 every night). We have Three bosses. You don't need 2 of them with the $40k+ a year they make. They literally just walk around making sure people are doing jobs already assigned to them from the computer, and deal with disciplinary stuff for missing days/etc. All this can be done by just a hourly supervisor.
It gets worse. The staffing is suppose to be done on a computer, but it is never right. I could write a book on all that is wrong with staffing at walmart but you get the idea. They even have TWO Customer service supervisors on night shift. Not needed.
unfortunately you can't always figure out which were the useless classes beforehand
Does Your Job Need To Exist? Sometimes No, but often it or something similar NEEDS desparately to be done and done well for fairly good pay. But that is not the issue!! We all need meaningful and rewarding work; even asking such a question shows the bankruptcy and foolishness of our "betters" who seem determined to keep us down, while they gloat with questions like these.
Nope, our's is pretty much the only post-secondary institution in western Canada that still uses blackboard. Blackboard technically doesn't (as in, doesn't have the technical ability to) support students choosing their own electives. Every other institution around here has switched to newer technology because the entire system is dated and broken.
I'm from western Canada. But I believe our college curriculum's (aside from us not having both a major and minor) are fairly similar to US university degrees.
My issue is that you could say the same thing about an astronomy, chemistry, cooking or architecture class and make the same argument. Yes, learning interesting things is good and makes you a more well-rounded person (usually). It still doesn't make having us take the class in the first place any more sensible. I (and most of my class) would have much rather taken a liberal arts class that at least stood a chance of being useful (or at the very least interesting) such as a historical look into the past of procedural mathematics. At least we would have known what the hell we were talking about!
There is, apparently, a huge shortage of English teachers.
But, there, is, no, shortage, of, redundant, commas.
This space for rent.
You never had discussions about history and hypothetical situations? If your history classes was nothing more than lectures and you had to regurgitate facts that you learned, then you best get your money back. You should have gotten a nice high quality state education for $100/credit.
without a work requirement: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ma...
http://www.basicincome.org/bie...
Yes, it is true -- we thought computers, AI, and robots would liberate us, but instead they are being used to spy on us, to micromanage us, and to force us to work like robots or else.
On depression and such, look into vitamin D deficiency, eating more fruits & vegetables, and getting more Omega 3s. Also, look into a treadmill workstation or a standing desk to help with ergonomics and joint pain.
Good luck! Hope you can find some way to make your work more meaningful -- even if just by practicing skills you can use on other projects in your spare time, like perhaps to make free software the world really needs?
Maybe contact this Dutch guy (in Toronto at the moment though) for some good ideas of stuff that really needs doing, including with Squeak:
http://nl.linkedin.com/in/cdeg...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Correct. You were referring to your own post, I presume?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Googling on your drone suggestion: http://e360.yale.edu/mobile/fe...
"Zondlo recently developed a methane sensor mounted on a remote-controlled aircraft built at the University of Texas at Dallas. In October, the aircraft was used to quantify emission rates from well pads and a compressor station in the Barnett Shale region. Zondlo has been partnering with other groups that fly drones over fracking areas to detect leaks.
Robert B. Jackson, an ecologist and energy expert at Duke University, also has been testing drones to detect fugitive methane emissions. The main drawback, he says, is the payload. "Carrying a big camera or methane sensor, a drone might be able to stay in the air for 30 minutes," says Jackson. "It's difficult to screen a shale play with that kind of time."
Engineers are trying to develop lighter sensors that will allow drones to stay in the air longer. "I'm very bullish long-term on using drones to measure leaks," Jackson said. "Are we there yet right now? No."
In the Pinedale Anticline natural gas field in Wyoming, Shane Murphy and Robert Field of the University of Wyoming recently outfitted a Mercedes Sprinter van with a mass spectrometer and other high-powered scientific instruments to measure volatile organic compounds and methane. When combined with meteorological instrumentation and sophisticated software, these technologies can detect methane plumes and quantify emission rates from specific sources -- all from inside the van. The equipment records readings every half-second, which allows it to be used on the move. "This approach can cover a lot of ground," Field said."
And also:
http://www.reuters.com/article...
"No pilot was required when the Aeryon Scout took off into the leaden skies of Alaska to inspect a stretch of oil pipeline. The miniature aircraft was guided by an engineer on the ground, armed only with a tablet computer. The 20-minute test flight, conducted by BP Plc last fall, was a glimpse of a future where oil and gas companies in the Arctic can rely on unmanned aircraft to detect pipeline faults, at a fraction of the cost of piloted helicopter flights."
Also (see page 3):
http://www.seattlepi.com/local...
"Though the project has a modest half-million-dollar budget, the goal is to develop and field test a portable low-cost instrument that can measure gas odor in parts-per-billion quantities and "replace the human nose for leak detection," according to the study prospectus.
When the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration launched the project with industry financial support in 2010, it said it would be completed in September of this year. Recent changes in the federal agency's research program could delay projects currently underway, according to a transcript of an Aug. 2 meeting between federal research officials and technical advisors.
The federal government is also working on pipeline surveillance devices, which would search for leaks, including another cooperative research project launched by the federal government to mount a gas detection device on a pilot-less flying drone.
Until these devices are proven, however, experts say the industry will heavily rely on the gas customer's nose, which is not all that reassuring."
At CMU 25 years ago, I was part of a small group led by Red Whitaker where we discussed making robots that rove through gas pipelines to inspect them from the inside. So, that's another option, too, although putting anything inside a pipeline has its own risks.
Of course, if electricity gets cheaper (like from hot or cold fusion or cheaper solar panels), natural gas demand may fall quickly. But whether that leads to less leaks in the s
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Having programmed for about 30 years, including with Smalltalk, I'm fairly convinced that 99%+ of software (including most computer languages and libraries) is redundant clutter and that most programmers (usually unintentionally) are just making life harder for all the other programmers (with adhoc code, generally which is not very good). By extension, 99%+ of programmers are redundant, too. :-) This great waste is also driven in part by issues about secrecy and copyrights and going up learning curves -- plus a lot of programmers enjoy reinventing the wheel. For example, why did we need Open Office Writer and Microsoft Word and AbiWord and WordPerfect and WriteNow and MacWrite and TeXShop and Emacs and vi and so on for who knows how many word processors and editors when they all so almost exactly the same thing? Why do we even need so many CPU instruction sets? Wasn't the orthogonal 6809 set a great one that could have been scaled up instead of x86? Why did we need DOS and BIOS when we had Forth? Why did we need Windows NT or even Linux when we had the far superior QNX way before either of them? Does C++ really need so many incompatible string libraries? Does JavaScript need so many different module libraries each with different ways of loading modules or looking up a DOM node? And in many ways, the IBM System 370 with VM and related portable-in-a-virtual-hardware-sense languages had all of these beat. Why do we need so many web browsers all slightly incompatible and extended in different ways? Why do we need a relational database engine other than PostgreSQL and maybe SQLite?
The problem is getting everyone to agree on what 1% (or less) of software to keep and standardize on, since everyone is going to defend their version of some application or language, or not want to slightly adjust their business processes to use a standard (but extensible) accounting package and so on. So, in practice, like with life on Earth, we get a huge diversity of options. There may be security benefits to avoiding a software monoculture of course, but that is not really why we have so much redundancy.
Java is a prime example of a completely unneeded language given VisualWorks Smalltalk -- unfortunately ParcPlace refused to give Sun reasonable licensing terms when Sun wanted to use it for set top boxes, and so Oak/Green got the go ahead that became Java. Over the years, Java basically got more and more of Smalltalk's features (including Just In Time compiling and generational garbage collection) until it is not half-bad. But Java was still a huge waste and a cause of great amounts of needless suffering compared to everyone just switching to Smalltalk, even with its flaws:
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/...
PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, Java, JavaScript, and so on -- all pointless, really. The previosuly existing C, Smalltalk, and Scheme languages would have been good enough for everything they all do -- at least, that which, say, Erlang could not handle. But instead I had to learn most of those languages and related libraries to keep up -- which was often fun, but still a waste of time for the most part compared to just using better existing tools like C, Smalltalk, and Scheme and a few good libraries. Yes each of those could have been improved (C with fixed size types and better strings, Smalltalk with optional typing and better modules, Scheme with better libraries) -- but that would have been far easier than creating new language ecosystems. PHP obviously is by far the worst of the bunch -- yet it now runs so much of the web (often badly, being such an inconsistent mish-mosh of a language).
All that said, programming can be fun. I don't begrudge people making new languages and libraries as experiments or for the inherent joy of it. A lot of good ideas may come out of it, so there is R&D value in the diversity of experiments. Also, it is good in a democracy dependent on technology if more people know
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"I hope someone else remembers this article and still has the link?"
Related, By Bob Black from 1985: http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."
I have a list of alternatives collected here, some positive like a basic income or a gift economy, some negative like more prisons, more schooling, and more war: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The unfortunate fact is that if you were to cut a lot of these 'meaningless' jobs, you would have a much larger segment of the population dependent on government handouts, or on the street. Until you can come up with an economy where everyone can live comfortably and not have to work, those jobs are needed.
I believe generous https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... is the solution to prevent social unrest
Casteism
In Globalization, MNC = Pyramid Scandal
Casteism
Unless you have hired a bunch of morons they will quickly figure out they need to somehow replace the functions that you brought to the table. If we assume there isn't a single invidual there to step up to the role of combined sales/management/architect, they will somehow share the workload. In a week I'd wager nothing has happened. Clients would not have noticed you are gone. In a year some clients might have been lost, some gained, and the company might be in a pretty decent shape again. Nobody is irreplaceable. Not even the CEOs of small companies. Let alone large ones. A huge company might happily continue doing what it's doing without a CEO for a year or more, assuming the next level just kept doing their thing.
Assuming you both started you working career at 20 years old, and retire at 65, that lazy french bastard has had over 20000 hours more than you to enjoy life rather than work. Winner: the lazy french bastard.
Work less, not more. That means more people are needed to do the same amount of work, and collectively you get paid more. That means collectively you have to share less to the ones without work, because more people have work. Economy likes this too, because collectively there is more money in circulation rather than piled up in the form of mansions.
Lets assume we have 100 persons that are a bit slow, stupid, or otherwise not very well employable. Basically you have to clothe and feed them anyways (unless you just leave them to die. Not many developed countries do this). For the sake of easy maths lets assume those people need $1000 money per month. You can either pay them directly, or make them do the work 10 persons and some expensive machinery could do. Those ten persons would require more pay, because they could get better pay from elsewhere. The machinery would also cost extra. Even if when the combined cost of 10 smart persons and machinery is less than those 100 would cost, you'd still have to take care of the 100. So the final total would be more. Also, if you don't employ those 100 people you have an idle hands problem.
It seems the USA has decided to fix this problem by locking those 100 persons in prison and make them work there. This is bad for several reasons. Their upkeep and work actually costs more when inside of a prison. Only the money goes directly to private owners. You create outcasts, a slave class that realizes they are not part of your society. If instead of working in prison they were employed in a phone company they woudn't realize their state. They would belong.
It seems 9 out of 10 comments to this story are about 'this article is dumb, you need to have slack so you can deal with unexpected emergencies'. This is true. It also is only very slightly related to the original article that this so called story is based on - linked as BS Jobs in the summary. I urge you to read it. Maybe this will help: it uses corporate lawyers as the example job that produces nothing of value and should not exist and apparently even corporate lawyers believe this.
It's partyly true but therein lies the problem.
In 1980 for example, if you were to try to "design" something, you'd most likely have a single meeting of an hour or maybe two hours or hell maybe even a day, then you'd work the rest of the 40 hour workweek designing a *single* drawing on a draftboard. If it needed significant revisions it'd take weeks. And then you'd get it to *if you're lucky* 50%-80% of what the customer really wanted.
So fast forward to today: We can do the drawing *in the meeting* LIVE and have a gazillion meetings to discuss and iterate to perfection. Sure we have 10 people doing the job but the end product gets to 98%.
Quality my friends. That's what the modern world is all about.
And that point is this: You have 12 people for a 10 man job because you aren't working a 40 hour week anymore. You are now called most nights and weekends, so in order to have a fresh, bright eyed team of 10 available to work, you need the additional 12. At any point, you can expect someone unavailable due to PTO and comp time, or just out from working all night because some arse deleted those useless exe files (I'm not an executive, so I don;t need those anyway sort of thing).
But, there, is, no, shortage, of, redundant, commas.
William Shatner, is that you?
idle hands problem
Or let me put it in words that a geek might understand: Inefficient employment by the state soaks up excess unskilled labor to keep it from causing an analogous problem to excess mana in the card game Magic: The Gathering prior to 2010.
Not yet. Well, not children yet.