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.
I dunno. There’s an inclusion officer at my kids school who’s sole role is to make sure kids get the help that they need to not get left behind academically. They don’t have “Diversity” in their title, so it may not be demographic driven which I’m guessing is the distinction.
Very controversial statement but really couldn’t be more true. Of course there might be exceptions but most of the time it’s a cushy job where you are paid exorbitant amounts to do practically nothing of value.
This is an interesting one that I hadn’t thought of before. I think the same could probably be said for any sort of corporate job where you’re coming up with stupid corporate nonsense speak. Like whoever’s job it is that’s seems to come.up with a million pointless acronyms for a company that they share with new employees at orientation for some reason.
Diversity and etc. is no doubt important, but should be strived for as a group.
I don’t know why people are so insistent it’s not a job rather than arguing that it’s a bad job, etc. Small landlords almost certainly put a lot of time into maintaining the property, handling occupancy, reporting income, etc. How is it any less a job than renting out bouncy houses. Sure some landlords might outsource all this, in which case it’s more akin to holding interest bearing assets, but for a small landlord it almost certainly is a job under any definition of the word.
Is a job a job only if it takes a certain amount of hours a week? dumb comment tbh
But to answer the question my friend who owns 2 properties spends probably anywhere from 10-30 hours a week. He mows the grass, takes trash to the dump, makes repairs himself, etc.
If a landlord is providing services like mowing the lawn and taking rubbish out etc, you can damn well guarantee that they’re charging extra for those services.
You honestly believe a landlord spends 15 hours per week maintaining a property? At that point, you’d be exceeding by far your tenants right to a reasonable expectation of privacy, so are you really that gullible or are you just on some really good shit? You’ve clearly never rented a property yourself.
He does not charge extra for those services. Idk what you are on about, I know for a fact maintaining his property takes a decent amount of work. I don’t respect some internet nobody telling me that isn’t true lol. 15 hours is not that much time.
That depends most startups are shit and fail but they still are useful. But the idea is VCs will just fund thousands of startups in hopes one is a unicorn and actually has a product worth selling.
But the founder is expected to use capital they don’t have to fund the business until it is attractive to people with capital. They are expected to market the product without marketing experience. They are expected to negotiate with people who are negotiating from a position of strength and who has much more experience. They are expected to be personally attractive to get interest from VCs. After they have gotten traction they are expected to be “coachable” and follow the advice of advisors that up until now have not been involved in the growth of the company.
The ecosystem is broken. Founders rarely get funding and when they do they end up losing most of the business they built. VCs are getting very few positive results.
If big VC firms were losing money in terms of net total they wouldn’t exist. Albeit most of them define success as being acquired by a big company like Google. As for independent VCs most of them are probably wasting heaps of money and just following the hype.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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