It’s disgusting to work with people who spend more time avoiding work, or their supposed purpose at their place of employment. I was taught and raised to work hard. This was to show accomplishment, appreciation, and value of work. This creates character. This fake work attitude shows an abysmal decline in character. I’ll stick with my hard-earned work ethic and be proud that it was passed down to my sons.
Very true Ruth. This is what gave life meaning and purpose. To work hard and have something to show for it. To be tangibly connected to one's labor and see the fruits of it. Technological displacement and corporate drudgery have rendered work an apparition, with no emotional or psychological connection for the worker. This is why the homesteader, the small farmer, the self sufficient, even the tradesmen and women will have the best opportunities not just for survival, but to reconnect with one's labor and enjoy the true value of it personally.
I worked for a mid-sized corporation for three years, the first and only time in my life, having been self-employed for years. It was great for a while but then the work began to dry up in my team, mainly through managerial bungling. I was sitting around twiddling my thumbs and slowly going mad with boredom. I watched co-workers play computer games, watch sports or scroll through mainstream media sites as they wiled away their day, all for the sake of collecting that pay packet. Eventually I went to the CFO and asked for a redundancy, but she told me they didn’t do voluntary redundancies and she was sure they could find things for me to do. They moved me to a different team and I was happily engaged in work again. A few months later there was a ‘restructure’ and, as I’d put myself on the radar, I was made redundant. The manager of the team I had been moved into was so sad to lose me, she pulled a few strings and brought me back as a contractor from July 1st 2019. That, and the redundancy package, facilitated us moving out of the city to now living on 3.5 acres in the bush. And I’m still contracting to the same company, amongst a few others, nearly five years later. So that is where a strong work ethic got me. As you say Ruth, hard work builds character, and it also opens doors that laziness will never encounter. Now, off to collect the eggs from my delightful flock of free ranging, hard working chooks!
GC, have you ever read the essay "Feminism, The Body And The Machine" by Wendell Berry? Take a moment to do so if you haven't. I think it was written over 40 years ago now.
Of course there are machines out there that are very useful to us, but it's amazing how little wonder people have for how sophisticated our physical bodies are. Not to mention that they are intricately tied into our equally amazing minds.
Berry seems to have little in the way of exposure in the "online "community"". I'm surprised you've heard of him. His canon of work is deep and wide, and he is eminently quotable, though I prefer not to do it to the point of rendering his thoughts in snippets.
Have you read his treatise on "racism" in the U.S. - "The Hidden Wound"? It is sensitive and sophisticated, subtle and nuanced, and spoken from the voice of an authentic denizen of "The South".
I discovered Berry back in the 00's, and he made a pretty big impression on me because while I have not heard or read anything from him in years, his name called out to me from your comment.
I remember that Berry was not impressed with the Internet - he preferred (and presumably still does prefer) to stay in the "IRL" lane.
It's a funny coincidence that you have reminded me of Berry's preference for personal contact over "e-contact." Katie Hopkins talks about the same thing in this interview she just gave... she's largely talking about free speech, but about a third of the way into the video she says that she thinks social media is getting "old" and that people are going back to gathering in person. (Apparently, she won't even do zoom - which is interesting since she is a pretty big social media influencer.)
"Social media", besides being anti-social, is a planet-wrapping estrangement/panopticon machine. Am I the only one, aside from maybe Steve Cutts, who notices that there is no "social fabric" left, and everything here in "The West" is tantamount to an internecine war?
(And I utterly resent the "Like" button!)
Cheers to you and yours in this festive season nonetheless!
The problem today is that for the people who are willing to work hard they often are not rewarded for their work ethic. It is now all about DEI (DIE) and trying to get replace workers where possible. I worked as a night stocker for a large grocery chain for a few months before I had to resign for personal reasons (surgery). They reduced my hours from ft to pt. They continued to give me extra duties because I was the only one with a work ethic.
I finally said f**k it. Two years later I self-published my first book. I'm now starting to make money from that. Knowing what most employers are like now, I don't want to work more than pt since getting my next book out is most important to me to increase my income, etc and leave the US.
Ruth, have you worked for a large corporation in the past 10 or 20 years? If so, you would have been outed by many of the DEI crowd, for being selfish, violating our safe space with your white privilege and stepping over minorities to advance basically, HR would cast you out to a remote job and or a field job, where you will rot away deleting “to all” emails, where we welcome Sheila, formerly Michael and the environmental impacts of having multiple gender bathrooms….
Yup. The days of honest work for honest pay are over. In clown world there are only two types of people...suckers, and those who refuse to be suckers any longer.
That sounds a lot like what Ayn Rand said, except that her 2 types of people are "the moochers and the producers". Which now we see are the parasites and the hosts, and we know where the moochers and parasites are concentrated.
This was a great thought experiment, so it would be great to also extend it to 'living from nowhere' to gain multiple residencies in multiple countries without being refused by any one of them? Understandably, that is much more difficult unless you are an illegal migrant invading here or the EU, but there might be a way to turn that around in our favor too?
Let's ask the illegals being welcomed here with no resistance, and prepaid EBT cards and transportation what their advice on this might be?
So very true, fortunately I retired 8 years ago before the truly craziness overcame reality. I honestly don’t know how people can keep up with what to say or what’s not allowed. Don’t get me started on pronouns🤦♀️, the height of stupidity when this began, only to be outdone by ‘gender-identity.’ What a dysfunctional world we live in.
Assuming that you meant for this to be taken at face value, I, for one, will take a hard pass. Morality aside, I take great pleasure in doing actual work. I've spent my life building, designing and remodeling homes. I'm not rich, but the money I have has been earned honestly. I work exclusively with actual humans who appreciate my efforts, and sleep well at night. Dirty hands, clean money.
That's good honest work. Noble and meaningful. But let's be honest, now the rarity. Most people took a different route, and technology will soon make them pay. While this was half troll, someone out there will do this. Maybe many people. I see it as completely victimless, and an excellent opportunity to cash in for the ballsy enterprising individual since the AI will be doing a better job than most middling coworkers at these companies who hate their jobs anyway.
It'll be pretty easy for TPTB to suddenly and unexpectedly put a whole lot of "useless eaters" out of a job, with absolutely no real-world skills, and nothing to do but depend on the government for every bite to eat....
I suspect that the 'useless eaters' that the governments want to eliminate are the ones on the government dole with no skills. The dead wood moochers and parasites. That does include the 'useless eaters' in governments too, so there is the conundrum! Most or all governments are moochers, parasites and useless eaters too. Are they not?
I've been working in the IT sector for years and with each new generation of tools it brings with it automation and less need for personnel. What once took a team of developers can now be handled by one of two programmers and with LLM it can be handled by one.
With all that being said I think the future belongs to those with hard skills such as plumbers & electricians, those who can come up with creative solutions to problems and can bring new products to market, and those who can create passive income through investing.
It's definitely going to get interesting as AI now starts culling the employment of the white collar workers.
Good points WC. The machine is now coming for those in white collars who thought they were indispensable and who celebrated the machine. It's the tradesmen and craftsmen that can't be replaced. Not yet anyway.
Paul Harvey said decades ago that the future will need just that, craftsman, skilled service providers such as plumbers, electricians, and the like and recommended young adults head in that direction.
I'm not good with my hands, but I think it will be difficult for machines to replace the true human experience that can be done in creative writing, story telling, and writing in general. It just lacks the human emotion and connection. My experience with Chat GPT is that it is widely generic responses.
I talked to someone a few months ago who said they thought there would also be a break in the arts: generic AI and things created by real people.
Having put in multiple decades at a couple of soulless corporations, I will say there's only one thing worse than the project managers . . . and that's the dept managers who actually allowed the project managers to run the department's projects. "Hey Fred, I realize you barely know where I sit, and have no idea what we do here, so I'd like you to work with IT to design the new system that we're going to use from now on. Design it, test it, sign off on it, then let me know when it's ready to go."
Fast forward 3 months: "Hey Fred, nice features you designed here. But since we don't have any place to indicate the name of the customer, or the product they're buying, we can't do any business."
If you think I'm exaggerating, I'm not. I've seen this scenario play out, with different details but the basic fundamentals being the same. Not the PM's fault . . . the fvcking manager's fault for being too lazy or too stupid to take control of his own future.
Same skill set, right MM? As Andy Rooney once said of consultants, you loan them your watch so they can tell you what time it is. Same with PM's and counselors. "Ah yes, Mr and Mrs Millennial, come in for a meeting and I'll tell you whether or not you should stay married."
Ironically enough, that same person told me he is thinking about possibly starting a consulting business. They are the exact opposite of me. Top 20% of public speaking and soft skills. I learned the hard way about these types of people in my early 20s. The problem is Americans like talkers. They get rewarded on YT, etc.
One of the Wall Street firms I worked at loved to bring in McKinsey consulting, drop $5 million bucks on them to conduct a study so that senior management could have a report to show the board of directors to get some new initiative approved. You'd think for 5 bills you'd get some pretty experienced people, right? Nah, bunch of 22 year olds who'd have a hard time making a bowl of cereal. And what went in the study? Whatever we told them. As if we couldn't have done this ourselves and saved the $. But the board would lap up anything that came from an outside consultant. Total circle jerk. I'm sure someone was getting their palm (and probably their dick) greased.
My pops worked for the Department of Energy for twenty-five years before switching to the private sector and doubling his pay. There were guys at the DOE who would do crossword puzzles in the morning, eat lunch, go sit on the toilet until the afternoon and go home. One guy would nap in his cubicle until the end of the day. Nobody could ever get fired.
I worked in commercial power generation for my entire career. One of my friends who traveled around the industry as a consultant once took a job for a year working at a DOE facility. He was astonished at the low productivity expectations there. He told me they gave him at least a month to get a task done that facilities in the private sector would have expected him to complete in a day or two. He also said that when he finished a task and turned it in, it would take weeks before he would be given more work unless he went to ask for it.
tldr; this is only possible in a narrow range of jobs and if you're job is susceptible to this it probably shouldn't exist.
Interesting article as usual sir but some of the points made with respect to the nature of engineering work will only work with a certain type of role. In my 25 years experience as a safety and reliability engineer in the robotics and transportation industries (aerospace and rail) the type of fraudulent "faking it" you are suggesting would be almost immediately revealed and detected by colleagues and customers. I have been working 100% remotely for the last three years and I am required every single day to think quickly on my feet in order to solve a vast array of varied technical issues on embedded software and control systems ranging from avionics to rail signaling and control. These problems are almost always urgent as they are related to potential or actual hazardous situations. One simply couldn't fake performance of my job or be mentally or physically absent without detection and AI isn't nearly up to doing any of the technical analysis related to my work yet. Someday maybe but that day is still probably at least a decade away. Things like error and failure consequence analysis, real time troubleshooting and fault detection and correction of complex embedded systems is still beyond the capabilities of AI. I have a hard time imagining that many other industries such as power generation, automotive and other manufacturing aren't similarly difficult to fake. What you are suggesting has a narrower application I believe than what you are suggesting. I agree on all points about corporations and the meaninglessness of most work in them. For myself, I don't work for the corporation I work for the people in my team and in the hope that I am making safer vehicles and systems. It's not much but it's honest work LOL! I'm just not sure what you're proposing is as broadly possible as you are suggesting in many industries. My own outdated sense of morality would also render my guilt intolerable with such a scheme. For those who are willing and capable of pulling it off, I wish you the best of luck!
hahahahaah, absolutely love this GC! I'm one of the hated work from home laptop class, never asked to work from home but since they forced me I'm sticking with it(was supposed to go back to the office 2 years ago but never did, one of the benefits of my boss being 1,000 miles away) solely because fuck them, that's why. Soulless corporations who care only about power and profit, while paying as little as possible to the employees who make it happen(last year my employer spouted platitudes about how they were going to factor inflation into our "merit" increases, ended up with a whopping 3% increase while the DIE department grew exponentially), fuck us all in the ass so why not do it to them, without lube. Creating AI personalities in order to collect multiple paychecks sounds like a fine plan to me, if I wasn't such a Luddite I'd probably do exactly what you suggest. Those who say "I take pride in working hard" don't understand that almost everyone feels that way, we all need a sense of purpose, but when your hard work is for corporations that are out to destroy us and our ways of life then maybe it's time to work hard on screwing them over while increasing the amount of coin you possess.
I fault nobody for working from home, with the exception of Blue State teachers ruining kids' lives. If a company is so large and absent and people can get away with working a few hours a day by simply logging into a machine, more power to them. They're getting paid to do other things with all that free time, and to potentially pivot to something they really love. And yes, screw the corporate machine with its DIE assholes, and overpaid racist commissars. Nobody owes any corporation anything. In fact, they'd be better off doing everything they can to use and abuse it in the same way it would them the second the board decides some people need to go and they start deciding that based on race and not merit. So, as you say, screw them. Every chance you get.
You are absolutely correct about using free time for finding ways to pivot to what you love. The only good thing that came from the plandemic, for me, is it helped me to discover my love of making art, anything from graphite pencils to oil painting, and a lot of the time I've spent learning is due solely to working from home. I've long thought that one of the things our wannabe overlords disregarded with the plandemic is it gave a huge amount of free time to those who never truly had it before and I'm willing to bet there are others like me who used that time to discover their hidden talents. Would be awesomely funny if their love of lockdowns is what causes their downfall in the end, due to someone sitting around at home suddenly discovering they have the leadership ability of King Leonidas.
Probably your best yet, G.C. The legal mafia grants corporations two nice gifts: (1) Limited Liability (2) Eternal Life. Who says the legal industry isn't a racket?
This is hilarious. Ironically, already happening over at Reddit.. the act is called 'OVEREMPLOYED'. Lots of people are succeeding with 3+ jobs... wild...
I think that's where I read the story of the Google guy. Ended up with three jobs during the plandemic, while working all of them less than full time for one job.
Haha, check it out if you got time to kill. There's lingo and support. Money is tight and surprisingly, the fuck corporation attitude is rearing its way to mainstream.
It’s disgusting to work with people who spend more time avoiding work, or their supposed purpose at their place of employment. I was taught and raised to work hard. This was to show accomplishment, appreciation, and value of work. This creates character. This fake work attitude shows an abysmal decline in character. I’ll stick with my hard-earned work ethic and be proud that it was passed down to my sons.
Very true Ruth. This is what gave life meaning and purpose. To work hard and have something to show for it. To be tangibly connected to one's labor and see the fruits of it. Technological displacement and corporate drudgery have rendered work an apparition, with no emotional or psychological connection for the worker. This is why the homesteader, the small farmer, the self sufficient, even the tradesmen and women will have the best opportunities not just for survival, but to reconnect with one's labor and enjoy the true value of it personally.
I worked for a mid-sized corporation for three years, the first and only time in my life, having been self-employed for years. It was great for a while but then the work began to dry up in my team, mainly through managerial bungling. I was sitting around twiddling my thumbs and slowly going mad with boredom. I watched co-workers play computer games, watch sports or scroll through mainstream media sites as they wiled away their day, all for the sake of collecting that pay packet. Eventually I went to the CFO and asked for a redundancy, but she told me they didn’t do voluntary redundancies and she was sure they could find things for me to do. They moved me to a different team and I was happily engaged in work again. A few months later there was a ‘restructure’ and, as I’d put myself on the radar, I was made redundant. The manager of the team I had been moved into was so sad to lose me, she pulled a few strings and brought me back as a contractor from July 1st 2019. That, and the redundancy package, facilitated us moving out of the city to now living on 3.5 acres in the bush. And I’m still contracting to the same company, amongst a few others, nearly five years later. So that is where a strong work ethic got me. As you say Ruth, hard work builds character, and it also opens doors that laziness will never encounter. Now, off to collect the eggs from my delightful flock of free ranging, hard working chooks!
Awesome and truly awarded 👍🏼
GC, have you ever read the essay "Feminism, The Body And The Machine" by Wendell Berry? Take a moment to do so if you haven't. I think it was written over 40 years ago now.
https://religioustech.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Berry-Wendell-Feminism-the-Body-and-the-Machine.pdf
Here is a brief little excerpt:
"My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and
our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that
we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order,
ultimately, to replace ourselves.
The danger most immediately to be feared in “technological progress” is
the degradation and obsolescence of the body. Implicit in the technological
revolution from the beginning has been a new version of an old dualism, one
always destructive, and now more destructive than ever. For many centuries
there have been people who looked upon the body, as upon the natural world,
as an encumbrance of the soul, and so have hated the body, as they have
hated the natural world, and longed to be free of it. They have seen the body as
intolerably imperfect by spiritual standards. More recently, since the beginning
of the technological revolution, more and more people have looked upon the
body, along with the rest of the natural creation, as intolerably imperfect by
mechanical standards. They see the body as an encumbrance of the mind—the
mind, that is, as reduced to a set of mechanical ideas that can be implemented
in machines—and so they hate it and long to be free of it. The body has limits
that the machine does not have; therefore, remove the body from the machine
so that the machine can continue as an unlimited idea"
Have never read it. Looks interesting. Will check it out. Thanks!
Great words from the great Wendell Berry.
Of course there are machines out there that are very useful to us, but it's amazing how little wonder people have for how sophisticated our physical bodies are. Not to mention that they are intricately tied into our equally amazing minds.
Thanks for the link!
Berry seems to have little in the way of exposure in the "online "community"". I'm surprised you've heard of him. His canon of work is deep and wide, and he is eminently quotable, though I prefer not to do it to the point of rendering his thoughts in snippets.
Have you read his treatise on "racism" in the U.S. - "The Hidden Wound"? It is sensitive and sophisticated, subtle and nuanced, and spoken from the voice of an authentic denizen of "The South".
I discovered Berry back in the 00's, and he made a pretty big impression on me because while I have not heard or read anything from him in years, his name called out to me from your comment.
I remember that Berry was not impressed with the Internet - he preferred (and presumably still does prefer) to stay in the "IRL" lane.
It's a funny coincidence that you have reminded me of Berry's preference for personal contact over "e-contact." Katie Hopkins talks about the same thing in this interview she just gave... she's largely talking about free speech, but about a third of the way into the video she says that she thinks social media is getting "old" and that people are going back to gathering in person. (Apparently, she won't even do zoom - which is interesting since she is a pretty big social media influencer.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulO7M704fjQ
I have not read The Hidden Wound... but I will keep it on my wish list for used books. Thanks for the recommendation!
"Social media", besides being anti-social, is a planet-wrapping estrangement/panopticon machine. Am I the only one, aside from maybe Steve Cutts, who notices that there is no "social fabric" left, and everything here in "The West" is tantamount to an internecine war?
(And I utterly resent the "Like" button!)
Cheers to you and yours in this festive season nonetheless!
Yes...'tis a pity how little wonder we appear to have left in us.
Very well stated 👏👏
This sounds like the AI bot you just described
My comments are AI automated. The machine knows me better than I know myself.
The problem today is that for the people who are willing to work hard they often are not rewarded for their work ethic. It is now all about DEI (DIE) and trying to get replace workers where possible. I worked as a night stocker for a large grocery chain for a few months before I had to resign for personal reasons (surgery). They reduced my hours from ft to pt. They continued to give me extra duties because I was the only one with a work ethic.
I finally said f**k it. Two years later I self-published my first book. I'm now starting to make money from that. Knowing what most employers are like now, I don't want to work more than pt since getting my next book out is most important to me to increase my income, etc and leave the US.
Kind of a rant but I think it is relevant.
Ruth, have you worked for a large corporation in the past 10 or 20 years? If so, you would have been outed by many of the DEI crowd, for being selfish, violating our safe space with your white privilege and stepping over minorities to advance basically, HR would cast you out to a remote job and or a field job, where you will rot away deleting “to all” emails, where we welcome Sheila, formerly Michael and the environmental impacts of having multiple gender bathrooms….
I kid you not….
Yup. The days of honest work for honest pay are over. In clown world there are only two types of people...suckers, and those who refuse to be suckers any longer.
That sounds a lot like what Ayn Rand said, except that her 2 types of people are "the moochers and the producers". Which now we see are the parasites and the hosts, and we know where the moochers and parasites are concentrated.
This was a great thought experiment, so it would be great to also extend it to 'living from nowhere' to gain multiple residencies in multiple countries without being refused by any one of them? Understandably, that is much more difficult unless you are an illegal migrant invading here or the EU, but there might be a way to turn that around in our favor too?
Let's ask the illegals being welcomed here with no resistance, and prepaid EBT cards and transportation what their advice on this might be?
Don't forget "mental health days".
So very true, fortunately I retired 8 years ago before the truly craziness overcame reality. I honestly don’t know how people can keep up with what to say or what’s not allowed. Don’t get me started on pronouns🤦♀️, the height of stupidity when this began, only to be outdone by ‘gender-identity.’ What a dysfunctional world we live in.
My strategy is to make enough money from my online business, mostly via self-publishing, then to retire somewhere that costs less than the US.
Hahaha, yes. At the same job I referenced above their was a co-worker who wanted to be identified using she/her. I couldn't take it anymore...
Pick that cotton faster, slave.
Assuming that you meant for this to be taken at face value, I, for one, will take a hard pass. Morality aside, I take great pleasure in doing actual work. I've spent my life building, designing and remodeling homes. I'm not rich, but the money I have has been earned honestly. I work exclusively with actual humans who appreciate my efforts, and sleep well at night. Dirty hands, clean money.
That's good honest work. Noble and meaningful. But let's be honest, now the rarity. Most people took a different route, and technology will soon make them pay. While this was half troll, someone out there will do this. Maybe many people. I see it as completely victimless, and an excellent opportunity to cash in for the ballsy enterprising individual since the AI will be doing a better job than most middling coworkers at these companies who hate their jobs anyway.
It'll be pretty easy for TPTB to suddenly and unexpectedly put a whole lot of "useless eaters" out of a job, with absolutely no real-world skills, and nothing to do but depend on the government for every bite to eat....
I suspect that the 'useless eaters' that the governments want to eliminate are the ones on the government dole with no skills. The dead wood moochers and parasites. That does include the 'useless eaters' in governments too, so there is the conundrum! Most or all governments are moochers, parasites and useless eaters too. Are they not?
For sure. I'd say that for the time being they're "useful idiots", but once they are no longer useful they'll be abandoned.
I can't wait till teachers, artists, musicians, plumbers, and firefighters (who cannot be duplicated by AI) command a premium in the market.
I'm glad I read more than the first few lines, because my first reaction was to comment: 'I hope you didn't pull a Toobin'.
Your plan sounds great, but what about the old Boomers like me who can barely muster constructing this on a computer:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/pNyLbEZSJNyq/
I've been working in the IT sector for years and with each new generation of tools it brings with it automation and less need for personnel. What once took a team of developers can now be handled by one of two programmers and with LLM it can be handled by one.
With all that being said I think the future belongs to those with hard skills such as plumbers & electricians, those who can come up with creative solutions to problems and can bring new products to market, and those who can create passive income through investing.
It's definitely going to get interesting as AI now starts culling the employment of the white collar workers.
Good points WC. The machine is now coming for those in white collars who thought they were indispensable and who celebrated the machine. It's the tradesmen and craftsmen that can't be replaced. Not yet anyway.
Paul Harvey said decades ago that the future will need just that, craftsman, skilled service providers such as plumbers, electricians, and the like and recommended young adults head in that direction.
I'm not good with my hands, but I think it will be difficult for machines to replace the true human experience that can be done in creative writing, story telling, and writing in general. It just lacks the human emotion and connection. My experience with Chat GPT is that it is widely generic responses.
I talked to someone a few months ago who said they thought there would also be a break in the arts: generic AI and things created by real people.
Having put in multiple decades at a couple of soulless corporations, I will say there's only one thing worse than the project managers . . . and that's the dept managers who actually allowed the project managers to run the department's projects. "Hey Fred, I realize you barely know where I sit, and have no idea what we do here, so I'd like you to work with IT to design the new system that we're going to use from now on. Design it, test it, sign off on it, then let me know when it's ready to go."
Fast forward 3 months: "Hey Fred, nice features you designed here. But since we don't have any place to indicate the name of the customer, or the product they're buying, we can't do any business."
If you think I'm exaggerating, I'm not. I've seen this scenario play out, with different details but the basic fundamentals being the same. Not the PM's fault . . . the fvcking manager's fault for being too lazy or too stupid to take control of his own future.
Unreal. The incompetence is everywhere. The guy working from nowhere would do a better job.
I know someone who is a project manager. They are now considering becoming a counselor. Sounds about right.
Same skill set, right MM? As Andy Rooney once said of consultants, you loan them your watch so they can tell you what time it is. Same with PM's and counselors. "Ah yes, Mr and Mrs Millennial, come in for a meeting and I'll tell you whether or not you should stay married."
Ironically enough, that same person told me he is thinking about possibly starting a consulting business. They are the exact opposite of me. Top 20% of public speaking and soft skills. I learned the hard way about these types of people in my early 20s. The problem is Americans like talkers. They get rewarded on YT, etc.
One of the Wall Street firms I worked at loved to bring in McKinsey consulting, drop $5 million bucks on them to conduct a study so that senior management could have a report to show the board of directors to get some new initiative approved. You'd think for 5 bills you'd get some pretty experienced people, right? Nah, bunch of 22 year olds who'd have a hard time making a bowl of cereal. And what went in the study? Whatever we told them. As if we couldn't have done this ourselves and saved the $. But the board would lap up anything that came from an outside consultant. Total circle jerk. I'm sure someone was getting their palm (and probably their dick) greased.
Thumbs up for quoting Ryan Bingham
Now let’s contemplate on how this work habit is employed by the ever growing and wasteful federal government
My pops worked for the Department of Energy for twenty-five years before switching to the private sector and doubling his pay. There were guys at the DOE who would do crossword puzzles in the morning, eat lunch, go sit on the toilet until the afternoon and go home. One guy would nap in his cubicle until the end of the day. Nobody could ever get fired.
I worked in commercial power generation for my entire career. One of my friends who traveled around the industry as a consultant once took a job for a year working at a DOE facility. He was astonished at the low productivity expectations there. He told me they gave him at least a month to get a task done that facilities in the private sector would have expected him to complete in a day or two. He also said that when he finished a task and turned it in, it would take weeks before he would be given more work unless he went to ask for it.
Sounds like the principal of a school I once worked at.
tldr; this is only possible in a narrow range of jobs and if you're job is susceptible to this it probably shouldn't exist.
Interesting article as usual sir but some of the points made with respect to the nature of engineering work will only work with a certain type of role. In my 25 years experience as a safety and reliability engineer in the robotics and transportation industries (aerospace and rail) the type of fraudulent "faking it" you are suggesting would be almost immediately revealed and detected by colleagues and customers. I have been working 100% remotely for the last three years and I am required every single day to think quickly on my feet in order to solve a vast array of varied technical issues on embedded software and control systems ranging from avionics to rail signaling and control. These problems are almost always urgent as they are related to potential or actual hazardous situations. One simply couldn't fake performance of my job or be mentally or physically absent without detection and AI isn't nearly up to doing any of the technical analysis related to my work yet. Someday maybe but that day is still probably at least a decade away. Things like error and failure consequence analysis, real time troubleshooting and fault detection and correction of complex embedded systems is still beyond the capabilities of AI. I have a hard time imagining that many other industries such as power generation, automotive and other manufacturing aren't similarly difficult to fake. What you are suggesting has a narrower application I believe than what you are suggesting. I agree on all points about corporations and the meaninglessness of most work in them. For myself, I don't work for the corporation I work for the people in my team and in the hope that I am making safer vehicles and systems. It's not much but it's honest work LOL! I'm just not sure what you're proposing is as broadly possible as you are suggesting in many industries. My own outdated sense of morality would also render my guilt intolerable with such a scheme. For those who are willing and capable of pulling it off, I wish you the best of luck!
hahahahaah, absolutely love this GC! I'm one of the hated work from home laptop class, never asked to work from home but since they forced me I'm sticking with it(was supposed to go back to the office 2 years ago but never did, one of the benefits of my boss being 1,000 miles away) solely because fuck them, that's why. Soulless corporations who care only about power and profit, while paying as little as possible to the employees who make it happen(last year my employer spouted platitudes about how they were going to factor inflation into our "merit" increases, ended up with a whopping 3% increase while the DIE department grew exponentially), fuck us all in the ass so why not do it to them, without lube. Creating AI personalities in order to collect multiple paychecks sounds like a fine plan to me, if I wasn't such a Luddite I'd probably do exactly what you suggest. Those who say "I take pride in working hard" don't understand that almost everyone feels that way, we all need a sense of purpose, but when your hard work is for corporations that are out to destroy us and our ways of life then maybe it's time to work hard on screwing them over while increasing the amount of coin you possess.
I fault nobody for working from home, with the exception of Blue State teachers ruining kids' lives. If a company is so large and absent and people can get away with working a few hours a day by simply logging into a machine, more power to them. They're getting paid to do other things with all that free time, and to potentially pivot to something they really love. And yes, screw the corporate machine with its DIE assholes, and overpaid racist commissars. Nobody owes any corporation anything. In fact, they'd be better off doing everything they can to use and abuse it in the same way it would them the second the board decides some people need to go and they start deciding that based on race and not merit. So, as you say, screw them. Every chance you get.
You are absolutely correct about using free time for finding ways to pivot to what you love. The only good thing that came from the plandemic, for me, is it helped me to discover my love of making art, anything from graphite pencils to oil painting, and a lot of the time I've spent learning is due solely to working from home. I've long thought that one of the things our wannabe overlords disregarded with the plandemic is it gave a huge amount of free time to those who never truly had it before and I'm willing to bet there are others like me who used that time to discover their hidden talents. Would be awesomely funny if their love of lockdowns is what causes their downfall in the end, due to someone sitting around at home suddenly discovering they have the leadership ability of King Leonidas.
Indeed. Put well The Reverend G.😎
All of our systems have been corrupted. No one trusts systems of government, media, food, medicine, academia, voting, or even science anymore. This is the most important solvable problem on Earth. Here is how we can fix corrupt government it in 3 simple steps: https://open.substack.com/pub/joshketry/p/how-to-fix-corrupt-government-in?r=7oa9d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcome=true
BRILLIANT GC!
Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. 🤣😂
Probably your best yet, G.C. The legal mafia grants corporations two nice gifts: (1) Limited Liability (2) Eternal Life. Who says the legal industry isn't a racket?
This is fucking brilliant. I’m too old to try this, (boomer), but if it had been available a few years ago I would be all in. Funny as hell to boot. 🤣
Bleed. The. Beast.
This is leaning towards ultimate troll, GC! It shows how far we've fallen with a financialized economy.
This is hilarious. Ironically, already happening over at Reddit.. the act is called 'OVEREMPLOYED'. Lots of people are succeeding with 3+ jobs... wild...
I think that's where I read the story of the Google guy. Ended up with three jobs during the plandemic, while working all of them less than full time for one job.
Haha, check it out if you got time to kill. There's lingo and support. Money is tight and surprisingly, the fuck corporation attitude is rearing its way to mainstream.