Posted on 06/20/2024 3:44:34 AM PDT by davikkm
The phrase “Searches for ‘nothing to do at work’ skyrocketing” means that there has been a significant increase in the number of people searching online for information or activities related to having nothing to do while at work. This could indicate that many individuals are experiencing boredom or idle time during their work hours and are seeking ways to pass the time or find productive activities to engage in.
(Excerpt) Read more at citizenwatchreport.com ...
I wonder if these were.gov. IP addresses
Peter principle assisted living
Must be freaking nice!
I’ve been saying it for a long time — a lot of jobs out there are BS jobs. David Graeber wrote a book with that title in 2018. People get paid to sit around and wait for the phone to ring. People get paid to put little numbers in little boxes in spreadsheets that no one will ever look at. People get paid to do nothing.
Artificial Intelligence (just simple logical processing of low-level procedures) is a going to rock this world. People who are bored at work, people who can do their job remotely — these people are very likely to be unemployed in the next 5 years because of AI.
I see 50% unemployment as being a likely outcome. Maybe not 5 years from now, but soon. Society has to start thinking about what we will do when MOST of the population does not have the ability to contribute their labor to the economy.
This is not a trivial problem.
This is not about boredom at work.
And outside the government, I bet few blue collar workers were searching.
No question.
Even farming exhibits this.
Just as we now have more people employed as bureaucrats at the U.S. Department of Agriculture than there are farmers in the U.S., we will end up with huge numbers of people employed in the “business” of regulating and managing AI — for government, for corporations, for political advocacy groups, etc.
They're going to need them soon when they are fired for contributing nothing of value.
One of the causes of the Great Depression was automation of farming. Food prices went down, but it put farm workers out of a job, who thus couldn’t afford to buy the food, even at the lowered prices.
Back then, a much larger percentage of the workforce was in agriculture.
I think that gets to the essence of where we are.
I don’t have numbers, so I’ll use silly numbers:
How many farmers do we need in the US? Let’s say 100.
How many government bureaucrats do we need to oversee the farmers? Let’s say 300.
Now consider every industry to go in that direction: Insurance, banking, stock market, infrastructure.
This becomes like the meme of the road construction worker in a hole digging with a shovel while 10 supervisors stand around the hole and watch him work.
That may be where we’re going, but it’s not a final destination. It’s stupid. So it won’t last. At some point it will be “Atlas Shrugged” and the small number of real workers will not tolerate the vast number of government bureaucrats who desire to regulate and manage things they don’t understand.
Society has been moving in this direction for a long time. I don’t think they can continue in this direction forever. Something is going to explode and I think AI is the match.
Years ago at work, we suffered through the Deming Total Quality Process mania. What a waste of time and capital. Just about put Florida Power out of business. Right up there with DEI.
The *ONLY* thing useful out of all of it, to me, was the logic of one phrase: quality comes through prevention, not inspection. Meaning, for example, check and confirm the quality of the car on the assembly line at every point, NOT just at the end. Mercedes v Toyota was the best case study on this.
APPLICABLE POINT: What AI (really just more intelligent inspection tools) can do to eliminate the 300 overseers-for-every-100-workers scenario is to automate prevention of errors/ i.e. point by point inspection. THAT way ya know it’s done right because every step was done right. Theory anyways. We could reduce the number of inspectors by an order of magnitude.
I was an IT guy and n manufacturing.
Really didn’t apply to me since I had to be there all the time.
I was looking for at other jobs and still am.
We were told to grab a broom
No
The number of U.S. farms continues slow decline
In the most recent survey, there were 1.89 million U.S. farms in 2023, down 7 percent from the 2.04 million found in the 2017 Census of Agriculture.
USDA is made up of 29 agencies and offices with nearly 100,000 employees who serve the American people at more than 4,500 locations across the country and abroad.
Well, I can relate somewhat to this problem. I was a commissioned worker which meant if I had no work that day, I got no pay. I had some days like that, partially due to the way things were scheduled. Many days I was under-employed & had lots of spare time so would waste some time on computer games, crap like that. Let me say, it was not very profitable.
Some of us commissioned workers were berated many times for doing something unproductive during working hours. We just blew it off, as no work was scheduled for us & that was the reason we were idle. Couldn’t do anything about it & there was no union to help. Glad those days are well in the past & I am retired now. If I had to do it over..I wouldn’t.
Make Work or Busy Work jobs have been around forever. My father was in the Civilian Conservation Corp in the 30’s in South Dakota. He and thousands like him were put to work clearing dead trees and building fire watch towers in the black hills. The government created the jobs to get these young men off the streets and keep them busy and to help get money (paychecks)in circulation.
I was on inside technical sales for 32 years and before I retired, I never had any time to be bored. I was on the phone 8 hours a day and worked through lunch. I pretty much figure that these have to be government workers as I have never met any that actually do any work.
My current occupation involves a fair amount of idle time. Much of it I spend right here.
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