<story><title>The rise of the pointless job</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/04/i-had-to-guard-an-empty-room-the-rise-of-the-pointless-job</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jopsen</author><text>In the US you often see people holding a sign saying &amp;quot;slow&amp;quot; next to construction or road work.&lt;p&gt;This is a job that could literally be automated with a pole :)</text></item><item><author>WJW</author><text>Is visited the USA just once (in 2003), but there was an old man that took my bag off the end of the luggage belt at the airport and handed it to me. I could easily have picked it up myself, but he was there for those 30 centimeters of bag travel. I remember being amazed about it and remarking the pointlessness of that job to my coworkers.</text></item><item><author>foamflower</author><text>When my family lived in Japan years ago, we noticed that when taking the train, approximately three attendants checked our tickets before we boarded a train. At least two of those jobs are &amp;quot;bullshit&amp;quot; in terms of producing wealth, but they are socially beneficial in a culture where the social contract requires near-zero unemployment. (I, apparently like you, can&amp;#x27;t help but remember this kind of arrangement when listening to &amp;quot;jobs guarantee&amp;quot; rhetoric from various politicians.)</text></item><item><author>lainga</author><text>I have said this before, but I see some parallels between the modern world and Japan during the early Tokugawa era. Japan had pretty much reached a steady state by the time Tokugawa Iyeyasu came to power in 1600; most of the available land had been cultivated or settled, and, especially after the policies of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, society was locked in a rigid structure without much room for advancement or unrest.&lt;p&gt;As a result, the samurai class, especially Tokugawa&amp;#x27;s bannermen and &amp;quot;inner&amp;quot; families, sort of lost their purpose. There were no more wars to fight - not when peace lasted &amp;quot;as long as the waves roll&amp;quot; - and the strongest rebels they could expect were peasants who could not own swords.&lt;p&gt;Because they couldn&amp;#x27;t just revoke the lands Iyeyasu had distributed (without very good reason), and to give the samurai &lt;i&gt;something&lt;/i&gt; to do, the Edo government expanded constantly, creating dozens of superfluous or sinecure bureaucratic roles, so that the second and third sons of samurai families wouldn&amp;#x27;t just sit around at home. I believe this pattern was repeated across the various daimyo han at each castle town. Further, the samurai household &lt;i&gt;themselves&lt;/i&gt; created redundant job openings just to get more peasants out of unemployment. This was how every samurai ended up with six porters. Even as certain samurai families sunk into abject poverty in the 1800s, as the shogunate neared its end, this policy continued: your grandfather had increased the number of household retainers from five to six, to give someone&amp;#x27;s fourth son a job; and it had become hereditary, and now that fourth son&amp;#x27;s grandson was &lt;i&gt;your&lt;/i&gt; sixth retainer, and you couldn&amp;#x27;t destroy the position even if you could barely afford to pay him.&lt;p&gt;When I hear politicians talking about &amp;quot;creating jobs&amp;quot;, I think of the shogunate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dizzystar</author><text>You&amp;#x27;d be surprised. Cars will burn a sign, but they&amp;#x27;ll stop dead when they see a person holding a sign.&lt;p&gt;You also have to watch for the pedestrians walking around and so on. It&amp;#x27;s actually a lot more involved than you think.&lt;p&gt;I did it a few times. Not hard, but it does matter a lot, and definitely not pointless.</text></comment>
<story><title>The rise of the pointless job</title><url>https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/may/04/i-had-to-guard-an-empty-room-the-rise-of-the-pointless-job</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jopsen</author><text>In the US you often see people holding a sign saying &amp;quot;slow&amp;quot; next to construction or road work.&lt;p&gt;This is a job that could literally be automated with a pole :)</text></item><item><author>WJW</author><text>Is visited the USA just once (in 2003), but there was an old man that took my bag off the end of the luggage belt at the airport and handed it to me. I could easily have picked it up myself, but he was there for those 30 centimeters of bag travel. I remember being amazed about it and remarking the pointlessness of that job to my coworkers.</text></item><item><author>foamflower</author><text>When my family lived in Japan years ago, we noticed that when taking the train, approximately three attendants checked our tickets before we boarded a train. At least two of those jobs are &amp;quot;bullshit&amp;quot; in terms of producing wealth, but they are socially beneficial in a culture where the social contract requires near-zero unemployment. (I, apparently like you, can&amp;#x27;t help but remember this kind of arrangement when listening to &amp;quot;jobs guarantee&amp;quot; rhetoric from various politicians.)</text></item><item><author>lainga</author><text>I have said this before, but I see some parallels between the modern world and Japan during the early Tokugawa era. Japan had pretty much reached a steady state by the time Tokugawa Iyeyasu came to power in 1600; most of the available land had been cultivated or settled, and, especially after the policies of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, society was locked in a rigid structure without much room for advancement or unrest.&lt;p&gt;As a result, the samurai class, especially Tokugawa&amp;#x27;s bannermen and &amp;quot;inner&amp;quot; families, sort of lost their purpose. There were no more wars to fight - not when peace lasted &amp;quot;as long as the waves roll&amp;quot; - and the strongest rebels they could expect were peasants who could not own swords.&lt;p&gt;Because they couldn&amp;#x27;t just revoke the lands Iyeyasu had distributed (without very good reason), and to give the samurai &lt;i&gt;something&lt;/i&gt; to do, the Edo government expanded constantly, creating dozens of superfluous or sinecure bureaucratic roles, so that the second and third sons of samurai families wouldn&amp;#x27;t just sit around at home. I believe this pattern was repeated across the various daimyo han at each castle town. Further, the samurai household &lt;i&gt;themselves&lt;/i&gt; created redundant job openings just to get more peasants out of unemployment. This was how every samurai ended up with six porters. Even as certain samurai families sunk into abject poverty in the 1800s, as the shogunate neared its end, this policy continued: your grandfather had increased the number of household retainers from five to six, to give someone&amp;#x27;s fourth son a job; and it had become hereditary, and now that fourth son&amp;#x27;s grandson was &lt;i&gt;your&lt;/i&gt; sixth retainer, and you couldn&amp;#x27;t destroy the position even if you could barely afford to pay him.&lt;p&gt;When I hear politicians talking about &amp;quot;creating jobs&amp;quot;, I think of the shogunate.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ouid</author><text>Those signs say stop on the other side and are used in conjuction with someone on the other end of the construction holding up the opposite sign so that a single lane can be used to handle traffic in two directions. That job would need to be automated with a traffic light.</text></comment>