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Clark, I have also struggled to understand how there seems to be so many pointless jobs, like counting lamposts for a council.
Yet councils don’t seem to employ enough people to cut their hedges back from cycle lanes, so the cyclist gets ripped with out of control thorn bushes.
I would say dredging the oceans for Manganese lumps, to make batteries for electric cars, now that takes a very big biscuit, all pointless, while at the same time degrading every environment its fingers touch.Michael:
– Dog walking.
– How did that become a job?
Laugh out loud! Exactly! It’s like the electric monk from a Douglas Adams book. First they made dishwashers to wash the dishes for them, then they made video recorders to watch television they didn’t have time to watch themselves, and eventually they made electric monks to believe things for them, especially those strange supernatural things that are really hard to believe.Dog walking is meant to be a pleasure, but, in our mechanised, automated, digitised world, people no longer have time! And it’s been getting more that way for decades.
This leads nowhere good.
I’m not sure councils are permitted to employ people to cut hedges these days. You’d have to check the law, but for a lot of things, councils are required to tender contracts from the private sector, and aren’t allowed to keep a workforce of their own. Counting lampposts is probably different because it’s a one-off, and may even be considered “consultancy”. I am just guessing about that, but I do know councils hire in “consultants”, who sometimes charge what looks like a lot to me.
I know a lot about hedge cutting, the last twenty years of my working life was as a tree surgeon, a climbing tree surgeon but often the bread and butter is hedge cutting.
If you do not keep on top of them by trimming them twice a year, they grow like lunatics, sideways for the light, then you have to use a chainsaw, that costs a lot of money and you have a huge pile to get rid.
Little, quick and often, is the cheaper way.Clark, how to encourage people to be happy with less, that might be the nub?
Many People, seem to want, just a bit more, than they can afford.
Maybe, one of the reasons pensioners are often quite happy, especially if they stay moderately fit, is that they have stopped wanting new stuff.I’m opposed to seabed mining no matter what it’s used for. It destroys vast swathes of a vital part of the biosphere, upon which other life is dependent. It’s monumentally stupid.
But the whole economic system is based on making and selling and “throwing away”* more and more and more “products”. The rich can’t keep getting richer and more numerous without ever increasing “economic activity”.
* Where is this “away” where we’re supposed to “throw” so much broken stuff?
Clark, I am also opposed to it.
Phenomenally complex and life – chances, mostly little understood, although, the learning is happening fast.
100 years ago, we did not know about continental drifting. We did not know about Archaea.
We did not know about Whale Falls.
We did not know about cols Methane seeps.
We did not know about hot vents.
We did not know there were communities living of primary hot fluids, coming up from below.
We did not know Manganese nodules gave off Oxygen.
We did not know that whale falls are used by the chemosynthetic life sperm/eggs to spread a moderate distance from dying hot smokers.100 years ago, we did not know about subduction, and the deep time sequestration of Carbon.
We were babes in the woodsWe did not know about Methane Clathrates.
We did not know, that perhaps something like 50% of all Carbon/life in the oceans is based on Archaea.“And he determined all that he could see.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpnrfYA4aWQ&list=RD9QFuX-4Y8J4&index=2
brilliant trackI guess in the first place, science was the study of the natural world.
Looking, recording and thinking.Michael, there are several things in your list of recent science that I didn’t know about, and I expect there is more than I could learn in my remaining years about all of them.
But I have little time again. My conscience demands that I go do activism. So I’ll listen to your link when I get home. And for now, just briefly, you wrote:
– “If we can just for a while think of the U.K.”
In a globalised world, most things can’t be separated. On the matter of British ‘democracy’, the British government seems far more eager to please the Israeli government than the British voters, and the extreme Right of the Israeli government at that. Here’s some reporting done by a young man, but the old-fashioned way – following the minister down the street rather than a cosy pre-arranged press conference where advisors have approved the list of reporters and has seen all the questions so the minister can prepare his answers in advance:
RAF spying for Israel – Declassified UK, on YouTube, 7 min 33 sec.
And bullshit jobs. How much do you reckon these lawyers get paid? Substantially more than people who cut hedges, I’d put money on that. They’ve achieved the incredibly important and productive result of having medical staff banned from wearing badges. I expect that ultimately they’re paid out of US tax money rather than British (via military assistance to Israel), but then us Brits are paying for RAF Akrotiri used mostly by the US.
Here is a question for anybody.
Friedrich Merz wants to go to war with Russia.
Sir Keir Starmer wants to go to war with Russia.What percentage of people in Germany want to go to war with Russia?
What percentage of people in the United Kingdom want to go to war with Russia?I suspect the answer will be a small percentage.
