Some local governments have rules that X must be done by someone in that area. Usually the mayor’s nephew. To get around it they are made into a rep for the company that does the actual work. No value whatsoever to the project, the users, or the taxpayer.
We could very easily vote on most issues ourselves using the wide array of technology at our fingertips, with a similar or possible better sense of security than what politicians currently provide.
But the only way for that to happen is for politicians to make it happen, and who would vote to eliminate their own job? No one.
Hmm… I’m not sure I agree with this completely despite politicians obviously being problematic. At least at its core, the rationale is that the significant majority of people aren’t aware enough of all the contentious (or even mundane) issues in society, so we elect people we trust to make our decisions for us. I just checked Canada’s recent bills in Parliament, and the voter turnout for something like this would be almost nothing:
Bill C-16 - An Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the federal public administration for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023
Obviously our current system is very easily corruptible and that needs to be addressed, but getting rid of politicians altogether wouldn’t necessarily fix our society, despite how terrible they’re making it right now.
Who would draft new legislation? I know it’s not just politicians that do this but their staff helps a ton. I just don’t see a good system of John Everyman drafting a bill that makes sense. That said I would like to see politicians get fixed cause the system is clearly broken.
Well, the second problem would be figuring out who curates the system. If you’ve ever voted on a referendum you’ll probably know what I’m talking about. You can make any proposal sound awesome/horrible if you leave out the right details.
If you’ve ever organized to resist a referendum you’ve probably also experienced the “we’ll just rephrase this and try again later” effect, wherein special interests just need to stubbornly keep pushing until the opposition voters get sick of participating in the polls.
I don’t think these are unsolvable problems, but they do inherently require setting up a representative beaurocracy of unelected technocrats – an apparent oxymoron. It’s gotta be someone’s job to run the machine and ideally you want them to be looking out for the people above all else.
So, how to play kingmaker? Well, if we take literal kings & elected representatives off the table, what remains is a model akin to academia, wherein credentials & seniority are prioritized above most else. It’s not a bulletproof system (none are), but if you squint hard enough the EU sort of exemplifies what this model could look like – just replace the delegates with smartphones, essentially.
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.
Therapists used to be the most helpful thing in the world (or so I’ve heard), now they’re so unhelpful they have to rely on the state to get us to use them and have so many different indie-based projects and programs competing with them, like BetterTherapy (which isn’t bad tbh). The old joke is they’re paid friends but now I see they’re just paid, you could be in a genuine situation where something obliterates the quality of your life (e.g. custody battles) and they’ll be like “does lithium sound good” (which by the way, lithium is outdated by two thousand years, so if it’s recommended right away to you, run). The reason they’re not set up like lawyers where you only pay them “if you win” is because they know this would destroy them.
I fear the medical profession is also going down this path.
Government and lawsuits are totally regulating everyone to death. Doctors used to be knowledgeable and creative (and they still are) and had the freedom to prescribe whatever they thought would be the best.
Now, they can only follow conventional wisdom and the exact recommendations of the regulators. If they deviate just a little to find the perfect fit for your case, they risk themselves and their livelihoods.
It’s primarily private insurance (at least in the US) that drives that. The doctor can prescribe something and then a “doctor” who works for the insurance company can take a 10 second look at it and deny it outright in favor of a more profitable treatment.
When it comes to costs, yes, but there is also another angle.
Sometimes doctors will prescribe expensive, patented drugs when cheaper, better, out-of-patent alternatives exist.
This is not to the benefit of the insurance companies.
Rather the pharma industry and regulators act in a concentrated rap battle: the regulator covers their ass by only approving in accordance with the latest, most comprehensive studies (“evidence based practice”) and the pharma industry only bankrolls new studies on their most profitable medications.
[A]lmost the entire banking system of Ireland went on strike after an industrial dispute in 1970. The strike lasted nearly six months, yet the economy escaped unscathed.
People used cheques to manage large payments and, while the banks were closed, risk of default on the cheques was shouldered by neighbourhood pubs.
Here's the Bank of England's Ben Norman and Peter Zimmerman:
How did payees manage this risk for such a prolonged period? Notoriously, local publicans were well-placed to judge the creditworthiness of payers. (They had an informed view of whether the liquid resources of would-be payers were stout or ailing!)
For example, John Dempsey, a publican in Balbriggan, near Dublin, was “…holding cheques for thousands of pounds, but I’m not worried. The last bank strike went on for 12 weeks and I didn’t have a single ‘bouncer’. … I deal only with my regulars … I refuse strangers. I suppose I’ve been able to keep a few local factories going.”
It reminds me of what makes me continue to be bearish on BitCoin.
I worked at a pretty advanced technical place, with a woman, let’s call her Janet.
If the system misplaced 2 cents, Janet would hunt you down and make you find it.
All that tech could melt down tomorrow, and I would still do business there, as long as Janet was there.
If the entire world economy collapses, I will still bank with Janet.
If Janet is using pen and paper, I trust that’s good enough for me. If Janet is using one massive Excel file, fine by me. If Janet starts accepting payment in weirdly shaped rocks, I will accept weirdly shaped rocks as payment, too.
And when Janet adopts BitCoin, then I’ll be all-in on BitCoin.
My apartment complex uses a package delivery service that basically acts as a middle man to receive your packages and deliver it to you. They use contractors who pick up packages from their warehouse and deliver them door-to-door. As expected, it’s common for packages to get lost/stolen. Instead of getting your package on the date/time promised, you have to wait several more hours for it to actually arrive. If it gets to the warehouse late in the afternoon, you’ll get it the next day. If you have Amazon next-day delivery, you essentially negate it with this service. If you’re expecting perishable items, good luck getting it fresh. If your package is large or heavy, you’ll have to wait several days as they only deliver oversized packages on specific days. All these are mandatory with a fee ranging from $10 to $30 on top of rent.
So the rumor is the owner is related to one of the big apartment companies, that’s why the service is being pushed hard to a lot of apartment complexes in my city.
Mine rocks out with his cock out. I get a little annoyed with him constantly pressing us to find better ways of working, when we’re already the #1 team.
But still, the man really knows his shit and has turned a lot of things around for the company. He’s a good person to approach when you’re having a problem, of just about any sort.
OTOH, before we had him, we were floundering around trying to play agile and not actually accomplishing anything.
Never met a scrum master yet who was actually a driven motivated individual. Its almost like it’s a default job you just fall into if there’s nothing else for you
I’ve seen at least two SMs who were really motivated and they can actually be a tremendous help.
My last project was complete chaos, and that one lone SM managed to get it all streamlined and efficient. Then he was pulled from the project and everything collapsed again.
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