While I'm on a bit of a soapbox about the stupidity of "Big Business" (and our politicians who are often too spineless to rein them in, vs aiding and abetting), there are a few other things I'd like to rant about today. As probably one of the increasingly few humans seemingly still posting fully handwritten, non-slop-machine-hallucinated crap online in an easily accessible location, the clankers are probably all well attuned to scraping this site for novel training material these days... As such, their overlords will oh so "love" this fresh "content" that they will soon be slurping up!
In this rant, I cover the following:
* 1) Take Obsession with "Number of Jobs" Created Metric
* 2) The Obscene Obsession with Chasing "Constant Growth"
* 3) That Inane "Me Too" Cult of "Everything Everywhere All At Once"
1) Fake Obsession with "Number of Jobs" Created
Is it just me, or does anyone else see and hate the absolutely insipid press-release babble that politicians always put out when the gloat about how some big new construction project generates "hundreds of jobs" for their constituencies?
That metric is almost always completely pointless, and wrong / misleading as, to be precise, those "jobs" they talk about are really just mere *short term construction tasks* that folks in existing roles get rostered onto doing!
You should only really be able to count something as a "job created" when that is a new *ongoing* and *tenured* role being created, that now employs someone in a substantial portion of the "proportion of their life that they are willing to devote to work" (aka "Full Time" (i.e. 1 FTE for most folks), or "Part Time" (i.e. "0.x" >= 0.5 FTE, when the individual doesn't want to work "Full Time" due to other commitments, but doesn't want to be forced to take on multiple roles just to survive)
Maybe some leeway can be made for legitimately "short term" / "time-limited roles" too (e.g. to count stuff like summer jobs that students take over peak holiday seasons, for example). But counting "construction task / body-count filling" stuff as "jobs created" just to pad out a press release to make something look better than it actually is in the long term is just wrong!
2) Obscene Obsession with Chasing "Constant Growth"
I've ranted previously about bean counters and other executive / MBA types always harping on about chasing, no *lusting* after unsustainable "double digit exponential growth" all the time... Constantly... Perpetually... 🙄
Well, it seems that even when they set their ambitions lower, the inane pursuit of "constant growth" - a rejection of "just lettings things be" and not trying to constantly force "growth and development" everywhere...
But NOOO.... somehow all these weirdos are always harping on about how we must keep preparing for ever increasing populations, and so forth... then saying we must all also adopt "AI" at increasing rates to "keep up" (if not "increase productivity", etc.)
Blegh!
3) That Inane "Me Too" Cult of "Everything Everywhere All At Once"
A major problem of the modern world is that when there is a big new shiny thing, *everyone everywhere* has to jump on the bandwagon and also do it.
Result:
* When a big blockbuster / major studio film comes out, every cinema screens it, with most dedicating the majority of their screenings to it, and very little of anything else
* When one food ingredient / recipe starts trending, now every cafe and restaurant is offering it (*ahem*, "Strawberry Matcha" and "Hot Honey")
* Every major city gets their own Ferris wheel... sorry "Observation Wheel"
* Finally, again, that stupid obsession with shoving "AI" into everything... as, "it's the future" or "inevitable" or shit like that.... All because execs get massive FOMO, and don't want to end up being the next infamous head honcho who goes down in the history as the next epic "CEO of Nokia" who "missed out on the next big thing"
Oh... on that point, this all ties into that stupid obsession with "silver bullets" and "magic solutions to rule them all" crap
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