Ask Lemmy

I hate capitalism as much as the next lemming but banks and insurance companies, at their base level, definitely provides a service. Banks help you spread the cost of things over time at the expense of interest, and insurance companies do something similar with risk.

Its only when they do warped shit like lend money at zero interest or force consumers to pay for insurance (thereby negating the need to be competitive) that they start to leech off the system.

Administration in general. There are so many jobs in (public and private) administration whose entire job is, to fill out forms or write reports, that nobody will ever read.

The same is true for countless middlemanager positions. It's not a full-time job to manage 10 employees who are not directly working with you. No idea how this is called in other countries, but in Germany we call it Matrixorganisation, and it's often as absurd as it sounds.

Huh? I can go almost anywhere in the world and wave my phone at a register and take whatever I want home. Without a bank Id have to carry a lot of everywhere.

They exist to take the blame. “PwC says we have to close down the plant, those damn bean counters!” - CEO who told PwC she wants to close down the plant

In fairness, some companies, especially the big ones, won't accept a hard truth until a third party agency tells them directly. This is primarily because the grunts of the workforce often have the most knowledge of the systems but whose opinions are easy to dismiss.

If you can be the CEO of multiple companies at the same time, then you're probably not doing much in that position.

All dicks and no holes. Just a big pile of fuckery and greed in a big circle. The fed fucks big pharma. So the pharma company fucks over the hospitals. The hospital turns around and fucks the insurance. And the insurance companies are legally justified to square the difference from out of your asshole. And since some of that comes from the fed via state run marketplaces, the cycle of fuckery is complete.

If anyone’s offended by my language there, I apologize and assure you, it’s an entirely gender neutral and accurate metaphor.

Now, that, is a postage tax.

Managers of people can be good.

Managers of managers are almost always useless.

lazy trope.

who hires middle managers ? Execs. Why do they hire them ? to keep a layer between themselves and the workers.

so whenever you think your manager is useless, remember he's not there for you.

Mine rocks out with his cock out. I get a little annoyed with him constantly pressing us to find better ways of working, when we're already the #1 team.

But still, the man really knows his shit and has turned a lot of things around for the company. He's a good person to approach when you're having a problem, of just about any sort.

OTOH, before we had him, we were floundering around trying to play agile and not actually accomplishing anything.

The way I learned agile scrum master was a role that everyone on the team rotated through, not a specific person.

"Consultant" in IT is often enough a fancier sounding title for "rentable body". You're basically working as a contractor of some sort, but officially you're a consultant.

As evidence I present the Irish Bank Strike:

[A]lmost the entire banking system of Ireland went on strike after an industrial dispute in 1970. The strike lasted nearly six months, yet the economy escaped unscathed.

People used cheques to manage large payments and, while the banks were closed, risk of default on the cheques was shouldered by neighbourhood pubs.

Here's the Bank of England's Ben Norman and Peter Zimmerman:

How did payees manage this risk for such a prolonged period? Notoriously, local publicans were well-placed to judge the creditworthiness of payers. (They had an informed view of whether the liquid resources of would-be payers were stout or ailing!)

For example, John Dempsey, a publican in Balbriggan, near Dublin, was “…holding cheques for thousands of pounds, but I’m not worried. The last bank strike went on for 12 weeks and I didn’t have a single ‘bouncer’. … I deal only with my regulars … I refuse strangers. I suppose I’ve been able to keep a few local factories going.”

I think 'producing something tangible' is hardly a fair metric.

A therapist doesn't produce something tangible, but many of them provide value to their clients.

A guitar teacher (or any teacher for that matter) doesn't produce something tangible either, but they again provide value.