Good request. I would also like to know, especially for geopolitics / Ukraine / Middle East. A lot of the people I follow (followed) on xitter haven’t moved over yet.
I usually use ddg to search for sites, lurk there for a while to see what the questions and answers are and after a while either ask a question myself, when I like the site and haven’t seen the questlon with appropiate answer in search results. That is, when I’m not member of a RL club and they have meetings/a site I can find the answer.
not exactly what you're asking, but banks and insurance companies are the majority of what I call "the beaurocracy of money". they don't produce anything of value, and are basically just a sinkhole for labour.
Administration in general. There are so many jobs in (public and private) administration whose entire job is, to fill out forms or write reports, that nobody will ever read.
The same is true for countless middlemanager positions. It’s not a full-time job to manage 10 employees who are not directly working with you. No idea how this is called in other countries, but in Germany we call it Matrixorganisation, and it’s often as absurd as it sounds.
I’m in administration and part of my job is filling out forms and reports that no-one will ever need unless there’s a problem in which case they become very important indeed.
In today’s business environment we tend to forget that redundancy = resilience.
The company I work for now has very much this attitude for the last 50 years.
As a result they have 3 locations, no sops, and no accountability.
Over the last 6 months is been my job to put us back in compliance with local and federal reporting requirements and develop SOPs. The feedback from the bottom up is that it’s wonderful to have consistency, different bosses giving the same answers to questions, auditors being able to complete audits in expected and appropriate times, and in compliance with reporting regulations.
Can companies go overboard and employ people like me who do busy unnecessary work? Absolutely. But it is definitely appropriate to have a couple of administrators.
Rules and procedures are always a trade-off. However, I would argue that the vast majority of organizations have way too many of them and produces way too much busy work.
Just look at your own example - I’m 90% sure, that the different locations did have procedures and did document stuff, just not in a consistent way. So their documentation was scattered and their reports practically useless.
Huh? I can go almost anywhere in the world and wave my phone at a register and take whatever I want home. Without a bank Id have to carry a lot of everywhere.
No. No you wouldn’t. We don’t need banks to implement the concept of currency in a society and you’re myopic for not understanding that but instead pretending to be some sort of authority on the matter.
🙄 uh huh. I prefer a currency backed by something with some longevity and not petted by grifters who keep getting arrested for fraud over and over again, or hacked and cleaned out with little to no recourse.
I’m no economist, but banks are pretty useful from how I understand it. Lending out money people don’t use is like creating money out of thin air. Helps people buy houses and everything. I tried looking for the video I saw on this topic, it’s something like “how banks create money out of thin air”.
I hate capitalism as much as the next lemming but banks and insurance companies, at their base level, definitely provides a service. Banks help you spread the cost of things over time at the expense of interest, and insurance companies do something similar with risk.
Its only when they do warped shit like lend money at zero interest or force consumers to pay for insurance (thereby negating the need to be competitive) that they start to leech off the system.
I would distinguish between providing a service & creating value. the service that banks and insurance provide is useful, but only in the context of a money-centric society. they don't create anything that has a purpose deprived of context, it's only the moving around of numbers.
But we do live in a currency-based society. That’s like saying food only has value in the context of a chemical-energy based society. It’s a pointless semantic argument here.
perhaps it is, but I'm not convinced. if food, eating, whatever were an unnecessary and wasteful system then the growing of food and processing, production, etc would likewise be a waste of resources, human labour included. a lot of our work does go towards food production, supply, processing, etc - if you could switch to an alternate system that dispensed with food but didn't otherwise alter our lives, that would surely be massively preferable. it's hard to imagine because eating is such a fundamental need, but that's just a limitation of this comparison.
if we could dispense with money but otherwise have society look much the same (or better, which I think it undoubtedly would be), that would be an improvement, to me, just by virtue of freeing up the labour of all the people who work solely in the overhead of the system. to imagine how else we might function as a society, I think it's useful to identify ways in which the present system is inefficient.
For long drives/commutes I love listening to podcasts, banter/discussion-heavy streams, or audio books. Also love a bit of karaoke in the car.
If I’m at home, I’d often get into something for bit. Maybe try a new game for a week or two before I grow bored or maybe try out a niche hobby for a while like figurine painting.
I’m not the type to do much productive things at home so my main hobbies are usually outside. Golf, kendo, gym, bouldering - anything that I can sink time into and gradually get better and meet new people is my jam. I also spend the idle time at work or at home learning or researching more on the hobbies I enjoy.
I’d recommend giving audio books a try. There’s so much to choose from and you can find whatever book to match your mood at the time.
When I think about these things, I like to think about COVID as a reminder what the world could accomplish when banding together - and that we will do it again, if shit hits the fan.
We would do the same to other threats if they get serious enough.
We will not. If anything COVID taught me people will actively fight against anything that minimally hurts their comfort and entrenched vision of reality.
This time we were taken by surprise and governments were surprisingly quick to act and impose things and we were lucky to have a 90%ready tech developed precisely for this kind of event (mRNA vaccines were in late stage of development in 2020, they just speeded up finishing touches, trials and roll-out).
In 2023 the general vibe is " we know that lockdowns, mask mandates, travel bans were the right thing to do, but we also know we won’t let them happen again". So it’s better to stay quiet, do nothing and act surprised when the next pandemic hits. Except this time those in power will know that mitigation won’t float and societies will happily sacrifice the old and the weak on the altar of economy.
On an unrelated note, “climate mitigation” will probably never happen.
I was spacing out and thinking of a really funny joke from Cold Ones, i was starring at what seemed to be the window of an empty car while laughing my ass off, then suddently the sun came out, it shined on the window, inside the car was a girl, she starred at me with the most horrified expression ever, also know this, i was laughing my ass off for 2 minutes straight while starring at the window, before the sun came out
The Office (US version) went downhill in seasons 8 and 9 without Steve Carrell. But the ending of the show was satisfying. They brought back Steve for that.
Historically, we’ve always been pretty awful to each other. A lot of our cutting edge science has revolved around ways to hurt and kill each other since the first human realised it was easier to kill the person pissing him off with a rock than their hands.
In the last 100 years or so however, those weapons have become powerful enough to end us as a species and I think you’d be hard pressed to find a type of weaponry that, once invented, hasn’t been used and I’m not sure we’ve evolved enough empathy to prioritise not killing all of us over not killing the country/group who are currently annoying us.
It’s pretty understandable therefore to have a realistic fear that there’s a very good chance we’ll bring about our own end.
Like £25k for a photography degree from 15 years ago. I moved to the US and paid bits of it back (it’s means tested so you just tell them what you earn and they base it on that). I’ve been ignoring their letters because idk, I don’t really want to pay it back? I remember the mandatory classes where we applied for ucas, so I feel like it’s on them for shoving 18 year olds through the loan system for profit.
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