Tag: business

Artisanal-Pickle Makers

this kind of work could offer a meaningful employment to the masses obsoleted by technology. most white collar jobs aren’t that hard to automate and will be soon, so the question has always been, what do you do when only 5% of the population has a job? creating artisanal products and getting really good at it, like the japanese, would fill the week with something interesting to do, and your local community would appreciate the results.

The transition to an increasingly craft-centered economy will not be without agony. Woehrle and Premo succeeded because both had access to investors and the innate ability to segue from the salaried confines of corporate life to a much riskier, entrepreneurial world. A craft economy is far less stable: those who succeed this year may fail the next, as their once-unique products become commodities made cheaply overseas. Still, this new world seems, to some extent, inevitable. Instead of rolling our eyes at self-conscious Brooklyn hipsters pickling everything in sight, we might look to them as guides to the future of the American economy. Just don’t tell them that. It would break their hearts to be called model 21st-century capitalists.

background reading:
Are we seeing the beginning of the end of work?
What will the economy of the future look like?

Who controls the world?

The work revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships. Each of the 1318 had ties to 2 or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20% of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60% of global revenues.

tl;dr: only one company in the top 50 actually produces anything at all (china petroleum), the rest is money launderers.

Bullshit jobs

The paradox is this. A job seeker is looking for a well-defined job. But the trend seems to be that if a job can be defined, it can be automated or outsourced. The marginal product of people who need well-defined jobs is declining. The marginal product of people who can thrive in less structured environments is increasing.

See also zero marginal product workers what fraction of the economy is pretend work, appearing to be busy?
2013-08-20: On the predicament of ZMP (0 marginal product) workers:

Huge swathes of people spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul.

2014-11-21: When the revolution comes, this will be very useful to smoke out people.
2018-06-07: A New Yorker take

Bullshit, like paper waste, accumulates in offices with the inevitability of February snow. Justification reports: What are these? Nobody knows. And yet they pile up around you, Xerox-warmed, to be not-read. Best-practices documents? Anybody’s guess, really, including their authors’. Some people thought that digitization would banish this nonsense. Those people were wrong. Now, all day, you get e-mails about “consumer intimacy” (oh, boy); “all hands” (whose hands?); and the new expense-reporting software, which requires that all receipts be mounted on paper, scanned, and uploaded to a server that rejects them, since you failed to pre-file the crucial post-travel form. If you’re lucky, bullshit of this genre consumes only a few hours of your normal workweek. If you’re among the millions of less fortunate Americans, it is the basis of your entire career.

2018-09-20: Scott Alexander looks into the topic

I write a note saying: To whom it may concern: I am a psychiatrist treating Mr. Smith. He tells me that he has chronic back pain (“lumbago”), and asks to be allowed to bring in his own chair to work. Yours, Dr. Alexander It’s too soon to have a good sample size. But it seems to usually work. I think it works because there is nobody at Mr. Smith’s workplace – maybe nobody in the entire world – who’s really invested in preventing Mr. Smith from bringing a chair into work. Someone wrote up a procedure for employees using special chairs, so that they’re not the sort of cowboys who make decisions without procedures. Someone else feels like they have to enforce it, so that they’re not the sort of rebel who flouts procedures. But nobody cares.

2021-03-06: It’s surprising that it took so long to automate extremely low value work like copying & pasting, and somehow requiring a college degree:

they do the dull-but-critical tasks that someone named Phil in Accounting used to do: reconciling bank statements, approving expense reports, reviewing tax forms. […] She’d known that her job was straightforward and repetitive, making it low-hanging fruit for automation. The experience was a wake-up call. She had a college degree and was early in her career.

2023-01-17: The race between bullshit jobs and automation

We escaped the original Malthusian trap with the Industrial Revolution, expanding capacity faster than the population could grow. A sufficient lead altered underlying conditions to the point where we should worry more about declining population than rising population in most places.

Consider the same scenario for a potential AI Revolution via GPT-4.

Presume GPT-4 allows partial or complete automation of a large percentage of existing bullshit jobs. What happens?

My model says this depends on the speed of adaptation.

The Anti Powerpoint Party

it is hard to exaggerate how awesome this is. where is the US version? of course the proposed solution is only slightly better. much better: really think hard if you need to present anything at all.

The Anti-PowerPoint Party (abbreviated APPP) is a political party whose aim is to influence the public with regard to limiting the phenomenon of unproductive use of time in the Swiss economy industry, in research, and educational institutions. Particular attention is being paid to the economic damage resulting from presentations using PowerPoint. The party aims to launching a national referendum to obtain a law forbidding PowerPoint during presentations.

On Burnout

Burnout is not its own category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It’s not something that can be treated pharmacologically; it is not considered the same thing as depression or a midlife crisis, though sometimes they coincide. The term was first coined by a psychotherapist named Herbert Freudenberger, who himself probably took it from Graham Greene’s novel A Burnt-Out Case. (“I haven’t enough feeling left for human beings,” the book’s numb protagonist, Querry, wrote in his journal, “to do anything for them out of pity.”) While working at a free clinic for drug addicts in Haight-Ashbury, Freudenberger noticed that the volunteers, when discouraged, would often push harder and harder at their jobs, only to feel as if they were achieving less and less. The result, in 1974, was the book Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement. Others soon followed. A subspecialty of psychology was born.

lots of bla bla on burnout

Fake Artisanal

is there a boardroom somewhere where a marketing and product design group is trying to figure out how to make your next Happy Meal toy, laptop, or Ikea table look like it was handmade by a MAKE reader, recycled from scrap, and sold on Etsy? Will we soon have Potemkin crafters whose fake, procedurally generated pictures, mottoes, and logos grace each item arriving from an anonymous overseas factory? Will the 21st-century equivalent of an offshore call-center worker who insists he is “Bob from Des Moines” be the Guangzhou assembly-line worker who carefully “hand-wraps” a phone sleeve and inserts a homespun anti-corporate manifesto (produced by Markov chains fed on angry blog posts from online maker forums) into the envelope? I wouldn’t be surprised. Our species’ capacity to commodify everything — even the anti-commodification movement — has yet to meet its match.

creating fake artisanal goods on the assembly line

Grammar improves sales

Zappois noticed that products with high-quality reviews are selling well. They used Amazon Mechanical Turk to improve the quality of the reviews posted on its own website. Given that Zappos spent at least 10 cents per review, and that they examined 5m reviews, the expected revenue improvement should have been at least a few million dollars for this exercise to make sense.

fixing grammar / spelling led to increased revenue for zappos.

The Satisfaction Paradox

a future where amazon and others sell the recommendations as a service but the actuals goods are free.

While it may be a long while before every adult is sharing art or innovations on a global scale, we can already see the abundance of good stuff piling up. Netflix has more great movies a click away — after I filter out the dross — than I can watch in my lifetime. What do I watch next? Spotify and other music streaming services will have more fantastic, I-am-in-heaven music available everywhere all the time than I can ever listen to. What do I listen to next? Google will have every book ever published only 125ms away, and collaborative filtering, friends recommendations and a better Amazon engine, will narrow down those stacks to the best 10K books for me. So what do I read next?

I believe that answering this question is what outfits like Amazon will be selling in the future. For the price of a subscription you will subscribe to Amazon and have access to all the books in the world at a set price. (An individual book you want to read will be as if it was free, because it won’t cost you extra.) The same will be true of movies (Netflix), or music (iTunes or Spotify or Rhapsody.) You won’t be purchasing individual works.