“Consultant” in IT is often enough a fancier sounding title for “rentable body”. You’re basically working as a contractor of some sort, but officially you’re a consultant.
They’ve largely subverted the occasionally useful profession of journalism. There’s a big difference between researching things your audience wants to know, and asking someone with a commercial agenda what they’d like to tell your audience.
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.
Honestly, can just be a different form of therapy. Worked with one in conjunction with a therapist through a service provided by my medical insurance.
The therapist was completely useless. The life coach had me questioning the way I thought about things, and got me to seriously reevaluate the ways I caused myself stress. All she did was ask questions, but they got me to see things differently. Helped a lot.
Yeah because we would definitely be motivated to manufacture fucking Hellfire missiles and landmines without the pressures of global capitalism… /s
Like I get it, getting rid of the defense industry ≠ getting rid of war, but it would be a much more daunting task to wage war if we didn’t have fucking weapons factories.
They abuse the technologies used by the stockmarket to buy and sell within milliseconds, so they can make a profit. They add absolutely nothing of value to the system, yet leech both money and talented employees from the market.
This is the real reason why companies are trying so desperately to camcel WFH. Covid revealed the truth (that we knew all along) that these people add no actual value to a company. They’re only there to act as a buffer between the C-suite and the peasants.
I am just thinking of my job. The client wants something stupid, I have to pick and choose my battles. When it comes time for me to hand over to fabrication I get yelled at. Never mind the fact that what the fabrication manager sees is the aftermath of my work. They had say 13 bad ideas and I got it reduced to say 6.
and why should that be any better? just because it appears democratic does not mean it makes it automatically “better” <- name 1 cooperation which has shown success for every 1000 “dictatorships”
democracies are plagued with slow reaction time which would take away your entire market edge. Also democries require transparency. If everyone knows the costing structure/ suppliers… you are done.
not really… even for publically traded companies the you cannot tell much about their suppliers and customers. Most of the customers of the Firm I work for have NDAs stating we cannot openly advertise.
Only in services/tech sector where product differentiation is large you are a bit isolated form these concerns.
Oh please my competitors are often using the same suppliers and they have the same type of beancounters we have. Especially in my industry where we have a bunch of overlap. Just recently I had a corporate partner put together a quote for something we normally buy but wanted them to buy it. They came back with a price within a few percent of what we normally pay.
There is a reason why the three letter agencies are so good at catching money laundering. They have data on what X type of business should be buying and selling at what markup.
I bet you can do it. Just start looking at your numbers.
go freelance. you don’t have to. since your consider yourself smarter than your boss try starting a business.
it’s a trade off between income fluctuation and stability.
since you didn’t address any of my points but chose to just respond with random statements, I take it you were convinced but too ingrained with your original statement to admit. It’s fine happens to many of us.
The financial industry is, ostensibly, about connecting people that need money to people that have more than they need. In practice it’s about skimming from the top of EVERYTHING in society.
Yeah but those aren’t groups I have to deal with unless I choose to. You really can’t get around the financial system. It’s not like I can take a 100 bucks and walk up to say a gas station and say “1 share please”. And before you say Robinhood keep in mind that you don’t actually own those stocks, they own them and you are just “managing it”.
I mean most are just greedy cuz the field attracts those kind of people. You’d be surprised how many people have next to no financial literacy and a GOOD financial expert can do legitimate good for these people.
On a certain level, if you can afford to pay lawyers to delay the process you can “get away” with anything, but there’s only so much creative accounting that can be done before it’s clearly a crime.
You can call them clear and obvious crimes or even chicken sandwiches if you want but it doesn’t actually matter what label we’d personally like to put on it if the government doesn’t prosecute it. Wealthy people and companies in our society have been successfully funneling money to sidestep tax law out in the open for as long as law and government itself existed and will continue to do so. It’s no secret that Apple pays no federal taxes. It’s acknowledged by both sides. Donald Trump publicly filed for bankruptcy several times despite making significant profits and walked away with huge write-offs and possibly even a huge refund. Hes openly bragged about it for decades now. He would love the opportunity to talk highly about himself by doing so again to a room full of IRS agents. Nothing will ever come of cases like these.
It makes me sick also, because I feel like Bernie was our last chance to stop it. But at this point to even get angry about it anymore is a waste of energy and time. I was around in 2011 when the occupy protests did dick all to stop wall street from getting away with financial crimes. They all yelled and screamed that it was illegal, and it at least partially was. But who gives a shit if it doesn’t affect anything? Wall street hasn’t changed in almost a century aside from automated trading. Several movies were made named wall street, several decades apart, and it was almost literally the same movie. Our options are: just fucking cope already, or go mental. It’s likely not going to happen, at least not for a long time, and by that time most of the ones that already did or are happening now that we know about will already have too much time passed to be legally persuable. We have to just let it go and persue another battle. Cope.
Lol it’s so funny how many bad takes there are in this thread. But saying that the government knows everything g you owe is one of the worst one.
No they fucking don’t. Sometimes they aren’t even sure that someone who got both his legs cut off needs disability, or that they can’t regrow their legs.
Or that a dead person can’t have a job.
Like, there are plenty of independent contractors and businesses that need to report their income, ecause how the fuck would they know that ?
I get that there are a lot of people with special types of jobs where their specific financial circumstances or the way they earn money is unusual. In that regard, I get why those people need to file their taxes.
But what about the remaining vast majority of people with standard jobs? The government absolutely does know how much I make and it makes zero sense for us to have to fill out a bunch of paperwork and not make a mistake on something that the government already knows the right answer to.
I’m going to catch some flak but I found myself in a position where H&R Block came in handy. It wasn’t for any services they rendered but because they have something akin to a protection plan where you pay a one time fee and they provide legal representation if any tax authority decides to come at you after filing.
The two times I used them were when I made an interstate move and the following year when I purchased a house. The place I moved to has a byzantine regional tax authority that collects local taxes on behalf of most - but not all - municipalities in the county (like I said - byzantine). This regional tax authority is notoriously disorganized and aggressive, opening investigations about years old tax debt that amounts to pennies only to discover that the debt was paid but their records were misplaced.
Both years I filed with H&R Block and signed up for their protection plan. Both years the regional tax authority opened investigations. Both years H&R Block paid for a lawyer to get on the phone and get the stick out of the tax authority’s ass.
This is a super niche case but until I have a year where I basically don’t do anything interesting (move, have a kid, change jobs, etc.) or the regional tax authority gets it’s shit together and chills out H&R Block is actually providing value to me.
Yes! It shouldn’t be difficult to purchase a house, but when we were looking, none of the seller agents would even talk to us until we had a buyers agent 🙄
Years ago my dad was fed up with realtors and you couldn’t list a property for sale without a realtor license. So he figured it’s probably as easy as it seems, seeing how many airhead realtors he’d met. He was right. He read a book and then went and passed the exam to get licensed. Sold his own property himself and never used the license again.
The agent we have used for several houses has been indispensable. He got us into our current house before it was listed, and before that he knew all the issues with every house we looked at because he’s been in the area for so long. You may have had bad agents, but some of them are really good at their jobs and add quite a bit of value.
In property markets where prices are reasonable they can be alright, but up here in Toronto where detached houses go for 3 million plus, there’s just too much incentive for greedy parasites
health insurance provides a legitimate service to society. not a bullshit job. i get you have political motives to project but it’s not a bullshit job.
If by “job” you mean being a middle man sucking money and effectiveness from people and getting in the way of actual health care, then I agree. It’s a “job” in that people show up and get paid, but it’s 100% a bullshit job.
All dicks and no holes. Just a big pile of fuckery and greed in a big circle. The fed fucks big pharma. So the pharma company fucks over the hospitals. The hospital turns around and fucks the insurance. And the insurance companies are legally justified to square the difference from out of your asshole. And since some of that comes from the fed via state run marketplaces, the cycle of fuckery is complete.
If anyone’s offended by my language there, I apologize and assure you, it’s an entirely gender neutral and accurate metaphor.
I like how an annual doctor’s visit and a biannual dental cleaning are supposed to be 100% covered by insurance.
But every time I go, I get a bill later on with the explanation that “the provider is asking for too much money for the services so we are refusing to pay the full amount”. Fuck off. That’s not how that’s supposed to work.
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