My wife knows someone who knew him. I didn’t know that’s how she got the story when I posted it.
As humans we are fragile biological entities who will die unless we take care of each other.
David Graeber
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Is it just when admins delete a post that it leaves no trace?
I say this with a preacher’s conviction that the 1 hour delete message is pointless, ghastly, and should be MIRV’d from orbit (just in case one warhead is intercepted).
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Apparently people have prosecco with breakfast at times.
Found an article about a small amount of alcohol having a a positive effect on brain function. Now I feel less bad about drinking it.
We had a 10 day break in Gran Canaria a year ago, at a decent quality hotel. Breakfast included a glass of Cava, which was doubly great for me because Mrs j gave me hers.
CNN uses the term “breaking news” very liberally.
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Possibly a dumb question incoming. When I leave my apartment for work I turn the AC up to 75. Usually turn it down to 70 at night. My apartment has a ton of large windows that get direct sunlight basically all day. Am I actually saving money by raising the temp or does that get negated when it has to run constantly in the evening to get back down to 70?
Wow this quote is like exactly how I feel about work and life, I tell people shit like this when they complain about working a 70 hour week and they look at me like I’m crazy. They’re like I need to work hard because I’ve been given a job that three people should be doing and I need my corporate overlords to recognize me and give me a few scraps from the master’s table, ok man whatever.
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Seems like that would apply to AC too.
Mimosa
You should read “Bullshit Jobs”. It’s not the greatest book - it started as a great article that got turned into a book because it got quite popular - and that shows a bit. But there was more research. Graeber was expecting to find people dissatisfied, but was still shocked at the extent. 37% of people self-report that their job makes no meaningful contribution to anything. There’s a lot in the book about how we view meaning in a job as part of the compensation too. People get mad a teachers who want more money precisely because they should be happy with less money if they get to have a meaningful job.
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You should probably test this, but I think the answer will always be that it’s more efficient to turn it off. Newton’s law of cooling is that the rate of heat loss is greater the greater the difference in temperature between an object and it’s surroundings. I think you could consider two bodies of air as object/surroundings and certainly the air and the mass of walls and furniture are object/surroundings.
Also, does the AC run more or less efficiently? Electric motors run less efficiently when hot and if your compressor is outside it should run less efficiently during the heat of the day than when you return after it has cooled down a little.
@zarapochka, what do you think?
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This is pretty interesting. In my life I’ve worked maybe 7-8 official “jobs”, and I think all but three of them have been meaningful in some sense. I sold lawn equipment at both Sears and Lowe’s, and neither of those jobs contributed anything to the world. Everything I knew about the products could have been learned in 5 minutes by the customers, and all I did was skim a small commission from each purchase and ring them up at the register. They’re jobs that had no reason to exist. I also worked at an elite tennis club in college, just working at the desk taking payments and answering phones. Again, totally meaningless, but Dikembe Mutombo sent his kids there for lessons so I got to meet him several times and it was worth it for that reason alone.
Beyond that I’ve made pizzas and washed dishes at restaurants, and had a bunch of legal or legal adjacent jobs, all of which contributed something to the world, even if some of those contributions were negative in my past legal jobs.
The psychological need to work is probably one reason why someone like Bernie Sanders supports a jobs guarantee over something like Andrew Yang’s UBI scheme.
I don’t think those sales jobs even get very far on the meaninglessness scale. Most of the jobs people hate because of lack of meaning are like admin/management jobs where the people know they literally do nothing to help the project or even their job just makes production or service more difficult. There’s a lot about how executives create fiefdoms where the number of people reporting to them is matter of status (and it is) and those people often end up having to make up work. As an academic he talks a lot about how that has happened in academia.
I sent that Graber quote to a Libertarian-ish friend and ex-colleague I’ve argued endlessly with for years:
“He has a point but I suppose you have to rise above it, and understand that it hasn’t mattered since we moved on from subsistence. We do it because someone is willing to pay us, not because the activity is worth it per se.”
He’s desperately unhappy in my old department (as I was) and gets bullied by managers left, right and centre to work weekends etc for free, generally caving out of fear of what they might do (as I probably would if I was still there and had no better options) because the managers are vile sociopaths.
I replied that people need to feel their time and effort is being used constructively in some way or else they become unhappy.
This is quite a typical argument with a Libertarian, I think. Everything is about supporting a “system” in which humans are mere robotic actors who shouldn’t be letting their silly feelings stand in the way of the march of capitalism. Gross inefficiencies that are to no one’s benefit (such as the ones Graber is referring to) are temporary and will be ironed out when better companies and/or practices replace the current ones.
When I ask him why, if that’s the case, these practices have multiplied in recent years, he has no answer.
It’s all just so much theoretical bullshit.
How do you figure that working the desk at the tennis club is totally meaningless but washing dishes isn’t?
(both are meaningful imo)
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I also think that alot of the messaging around finding meaning in work is pure corporate propaganda and it shows. Companies like retail banks are designed to channel fees from account holders to shareholders. Corporate managers get paid to make that happen, and employees are paid to execute the necessary steps. But the bank will loudly proclaim that actually their employees should Feel Like Their Work is Meaningful because, hey, we don’t just channel service fees to shareholders we Deliver Financial Wellness for our beloved customers! Its a total coincidence that the customers scrape by week to week and the shareholders have multiple homes and a boat!
Banks can both provide valuable services and be bad
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