[Newfie]

Yes, I agree. My favorite example is medical billing clerks. Growing up my Drs. Office had 1 person, a Dr. I see this here in the Caribbean. A hospital Emergency Room with 1 intake staff and she dies vitals and initial assessment as well. A Dr. office may have 1 staff ir nine. Now my Dentist has a financial consultant.

In the USA our federal security guards at airports at TSA, Thousands Standing Around. Which is not entirely true, they steal an enormous amount of stuff from luggage.

Some “jobs” though have some hidden social function. I used to deride hair dressers and nails people. We still have far too many but their function is really to provide some communal meeting space which helps with social cohesion. So there is that.

But in the main I strongly agree with your point.

[AdamB]

Yes, I agree. My favorite example is medical billing clerks. Growing up my Drs. Office had 1 person, a Dr. I see this here in the Caribbean. A hospital Emergency Room with 1 intake staff and she dies vitals and initial assessment as well. A Dr. office may have 1 staff ir nine. Now my Dentist has a financial consultant.

No allowance for bureacratic bloat growth to keep up with increasing bureacratic bloat growth in rules and regulations?

[theluckycountry]

NOTE: THIS IS THE THREAD OPENING POST, IT IS OUT OF ORDER. Newfie

A major part of social control is simply keeping people occupied, be that in work or bread and circuses. I read an article a while back that said the main problem with the US and other advanced nations was that they had too many people for the jobs available, the figure was 20% for the US if I remember. When women entered the workforce en-mass back in the late 1960's and 70's, oil was cheap, interest rates were going up, and Growth was still a rational plan for nations like mine. So how many additional workers were added then, an extra 50%? 60%?

Running a nation, balancing everything out would be a bitch of job, I wouldn't want it. And look at the people tasked with the job today. Corrupt, senile, and under them the real thinkers, the entrenched senior bureaucracy who have lived their whole lives in what amounts to a sheltered workshop, mostly detached from the realities of live in the street. I have met a few of these in my travels, they live in expensive digs close to the center of power, the capital, live and breath the idea of politics as the solution to everything.

[Newfie]

Offensive post removed.

[theluckycountry]

The opening article was offensive? Remove the thread then, it's meaningless without the context of the first post.

[Newfie]

The offense was NOT you nor the thread nor the topic.
Please carry on as you have.

PM me if you desire clarification or this further info.

[Newfie]

The opening article was offensive? Remove the thread then, it's meaningless without the context of the first post.

Lucky,

After your above comment I went back and checked and I had removed your opening post by mistake. I got removed with another post.

I have restored your post but it is unfortunately out of order. I apologize for that. If I can figure out how to fix it I will.

[theluckycountry]

The offense was NOT you nor the thread nor the topic.
Please carry on as you have.

PM me if you desire clarification or this further info.

lol, no, that's ok. I can imagine whose the offensive post was

[theluckycountry]

Some “jobs” though have some hidden social function. I used to deride hair dressers and nails people. We still have far too many but their function is really to provide some communal meeting space which helps with social cohesion. So there is that.

Interesting, I never thought of that aspect. Certainly in the old days, the days of the village square etc, there was a lot of social interaction. That of course is all gone in our mega-city ignore your neighbor lifestyle so yes I can see where these interactions would be a real lifeline to the socially isolated. I have always made connections, even in the city but now in the country hardly a day goes by without a lengthy chat with a neighbor. They are all pretty diverse people too to but I learnt through share-housing in my younger days to get along with all types. Except the angry hater types like the AdamB's of this world. I give them the big flick, they don't even get past first base.

House sharing in your teens and early twenties was always a big thing here in Australia though I don't know how it goes now under the information technology cloud. We used to party together, gamble together around the kitchen table, watch the idiot box together and share home cooked meals together. We became 'instant family' and I experienced that in a dozen or more rental homes as I traveled around the nation. Arrive in a city, grab the local paper and by nightfall you'd be settled into a new home. And they were Homes too, not just places to sleep. How that works with everyone staring at their cell phones I can't imagine lol.

But as for the BS jobs well I think of dog-washers and driveway cleaners and even cleaning ladies (because they are always ladies) These jobs and dozens more; -personal trainers- home gardeners -house sitters, they are all part of the Home Services industry that really sprung up in the past two or 3 decades. Jobs people used to do themselves basically, all outsourced and the number of people engaged in these 'gigs' is huge. I can't see those jobs being recession proof myself. So it's not just the endless ranks of mouse-pushers and the millions of fast food staffers that are unnessesary.

[Newfie]

It may be worse than you think. Bertrand Russell wrote the below linked little tome well before the computer age, late ‘30’s or so. His math works out that we should now have a lot of free time. I think he goes off the rails when he imagines how we will use that time, but his basic math is correct.

https://files.libcom.org/files/Bertrand ... leness.pdf

Russell did not understand that “helping” is a fundamental drive in humans. We are social critters and we need to feel as if we are contributing to the tribe. If we don’t then we get very insecure and have mental issues. So we invent jobs to do, or the government invents them for us. Idle hands doing Devils work and all that. The government is invested in keeping us “employed”. The gov does not consciously understand this, but works this way.

In any case Western society has gotten pretty screwed up because we don’t understand this simple fact. We need some kind of general reorganization.

Bad News: AI will only make this worse.
Good News: The demographic collapse is not as bad a problem as we think, if we can adapt.

[theluckycountry]

In praise of idleness eh, I have a scan through it. I wonder how much the discovery of Oil and it's obvious utility had to do with his conclusions? It was all possible too, but I think the jury is out on what people do with too much idleness, the millions of welfare recipients have proved it leads to anti-social behavior and general degradation.

I listened to an interesting pod recently where Aldous Huxley discussed behavioral controls implemented by government. He compares his own Brave New World novel with the work of George Orwell in (1984) The writings of both, he claims, were influenced by the immediate past history. Basically they projected into the future what had been the immediate past and the current state of world affairs. (1984 ) was basically Hitler's actions and the 'then' current Stalinist regime extrapolated out into the future. We humans do that all the time, especially in financial matters. We assume the future will be a replay of the recent past.

Brave new world, that Huxley wrote in the 1930's, was written from the backdrop of the roaring 20's with all the technological innovations and freedoms that came about back then. Basically he said in the Podcast, a vintage recording of a 45 minute speech made on from 20 March 1962 at UC Berkeley, that we are being enslaved by mutual consent. That we love our servitude and that this model of the future lined up better than the 1984 book about a global totalitarian dictatorship . Very prescient according to the introduction and our current compliant society.

http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/archive/ ... ur1mix.mp3
And the page.
https://www.unwelcomeguests.net/639_-_G ... itarianism)

There are some real Gems on this site.

[Newfie]

Thanks for the links, I will look them over.

IMHO Huxley was far more prescient than Orwell. Not to dismiss Orwell, he had some great observations. Huxley just got the details amazingly correct.

Jack Lindon is well know for his adventure novels, and Sea Wolf had some interesting commentary (lousy ending.) But some of his lessor known works were deep social commentaries about how we devalue people.

[theluckycountry]

Jack Lindon is well know for his adventure novels, and Sea Wolf had some interesting commentary (lousy ending.) But some of his lessor known works were deep social commentaries about how we devalue people.

All through history there have been great social commenters, all the way back to Greece, and all of them ignored. I don't think it's a case of cynicism to ignore their solutions as pointless, they are pointless because they will never be enacted. Their descriptions of the reality of the world we live in though are very useful as they provide us with a roadmap of what to expect, and allow us time to prepare.

Throughout history these elites groups destroy civilizations through their collective greed for power and wealth, but on the bright side they themselves often get disenfranchised. I think of the Russian Elites that were tossed aside by communism, of the ranks of the German aristocracy that was decimated when Hitler and his thugs took control. It must have been galling to have been high in the power structure and then watch as these ignorant upstarts came in and took control of every aspect of the nation's life. Especially under communism where to be wealthy was as good as a death sentence.

The history of human affairs is a morass of mass murder and oppression, quite at odds to the typical belief that we are the pinnacle of evolution, destined to seed the stars

[Newfie]

Been reading a bit of that history recently. Latest was Marcus Areulius “Meditations.” Now working on “Swerve”. It does not argue for our intellectual evolution.

It makes the movie “Idiocracy” seem prophetic.

[AdamB]

The history of human affairs is a morass of mass murder and oppression, quite at odds to the typical belief that we are the pinnacle of evolution, destined to seed the stars

Not "we". Exceptional folks in exceptional countries...the kind that have private citizens that can launch more spacecraft than all the insignificant countries of the world combined. You know the kind, can't build cars, or nuke subs, hand over their natural resources to the first low bidder that comes along. I recommend exceptional citizens in one exceptional country when it comes time to, as they say in the oilfield, "Get'er done".

[mousepad]

The history of human affairs is a morass of mass murder and oppression, quite at odds to the typical belief that we are the pinnacle of evolution, destined to seed the stars

Not "we". Exceptional folks in exceptional countries...the kind that have private citizens that can launch more spacecraft than all the insignificant countries of the world combined. You know the kind, can't build cars, or nuke subs, hand over their natural resources to the first low bidder that comes along. I recommend exceptional citizens in one exceptional country when it comes time to, as they say in the oilfield, "Get'er done".

what?

[AdamB]

what?

who?

[theluckycountry]

Been reading a bit of that history recently. Latest was Marcus Aurelius “Meditations.” Now working on “Swerve”. It does not argue for our intellectual evolution.

It makes the movie “Idiocracy” seem prophetic.

I couldn't watch more than 5 minutes of that movie, but it's interesting that it portrays the future morons as being friendly and inoffensive lol, a far cry from the insane violence that is endemic to the nation today. Marcus Aurelius was a wise man, not many like him today, a real statesman. I must admit I don't spend a lot of time reading works like that, too busy with my hobbies and kicking back in retirement.

You get to a certain age where you just don't care about what the world is doing outside of your own little patch. I have reached that place recently, probably soon after I moved out of the city for a rural town life. Politics means nothing out here, the faked up Covid scare was similarly ignored. I understand why they did that though and I agree with their motivations, in there place I would have done it too. The time of letting people do as they please is passed now and the only way to manage the world as it moves into energy constraints will be by authoritarian measures.

The average person of course rebel's at that thought, but it's coming. You can't change the wind, but you can change your sail