Jobs that either don’t contribute in any meaningful way or jobs where one would be better off if they were paid to be on call.
Tax prep software companies and tax prep services in general.
Yep.
Government already knows everything you owe.
They just cant tell you
Cause Tax prep lobbying said it would be unfair to their business.
So you gotta play the whole complicated game of figuring out your taxes, because H&R Cock wants your refund.
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Saved me $3000ish last year
There’s all kinds of esoteric rules the typical tax software doesn’t know how to handle
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No, that’s not how it works.
On a certain level, if you can afford to pay lawyers to delay the process you can “get away” with anything, but there’s only so much creative accounting that can be done before it’s clearly a crime.
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Lol it’s so funny how many bad takes there are in this thread. But saying that the government knows everything g you owe is one of the worst one.
No they fucking don’t. Sometimes they aren’t even sure that someone who got both his legs cut off needs disability, or that they can’t regrow their legs.
Or that a dead person can’t have a job.
Like, there are plenty of independent contractors and businesses that need to report their income, ecause how the fuck would they know that ?
I get that there are a lot of people with special types of jobs where their specific financial circumstances or the way they earn money is unusual. In that regard, I get why those people need to file their taxes.
But what about the remaining vast majority of people with standard jobs? The government absolutely does know how much I make and it makes zero sense for us to have to fill out a bunch of paperwork and not make a mistake on something that the government already knows the right answer to.
I’m going to catch some flak but I found myself in a position where H&R Block came in handy. It wasn’t for any services they rendered but because they have something akin to a protection plan where you pay a one time fee and they provide legal representation if any tax authority decides to come at you after filing.
The two times I used them were when I made an interstate move and the following year when I purchased a house. The place I moved to has a byzantine regional tax authority that collects local taxes on behalf of most - but not all - municipalities in the county (like I said - byzantine). This regional tax authority is notoriously disorganized and aggressive, opening investigations about years old tax debt that amounts to pennies only to discover that the debt was paid but their records were misplaced.
Both years I filed with H&R Block and signed up for their protection plan. Both years the regional tax authority opened investigations. Both years H&R Block paid for a lawyer to get on the phone and get the stick out of the tax authority’s ass.
This is a super niche case but until I have a year where I basically don’t do anything interesting (move, have a kid, change jobs, etc.) or the regional tax authority gets it’s shit together and chills out H&R Block is actually providing value to me.
The entirety of the health insurance industry
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I like how an annual doctor’s visit and a biannual dental cleaning are supposed to be 100% covered by insurance.
But every time I go, I get a bill later on with the explanation that “the provider is asking for too much money for the services so we are refusing to pay the full amount”. Fuck off. That’s not how that’s supposed to work.
health insurance provides a legitimate service to society. not a bullshit job. i get you have political motives to project but it’s not a bullshit job.
If by “job” you mean being a middle man sucking money and effectiveness from people and getting in the way of actual health care, then I agree. It’s a “job” in that people show up and get paid, but it’s 100% a bullshit job.
Exactly! Apparently being irritated by being directly affected by this bullshit this is a political agenda? 🤣
Real estate agents
Yes! It shouldn’t be difficult to purchase a house, but when we were looking, none of the seller agents would even talk to us until we had a buyers agent 🙄
Years ago my dad was fed up with realtors and you couldn’t list a property for sale without a realtor license. So he figured it’s probably as easy as it seems, seeing how many airhead realtors he’d met. He was right. He read a book and then went and passed the exam to get licensed. Sold his own property himself and never used the license again.
Absolute madlad
Wow I didn’t know this. How fucking stupid. Why is there this for a house but I can sell anything else
The agent we have used for several houses has been indispensable. He got us into our current house before it was listed, and before that he knew all the issues with every house we looked at because he’s been in the area for so long. You may have had bad agents, but some of them are really good at their jobs and add quite a bit of value.
In property markets where prices are reasonable they can be alright, but up here in Toronto where detached houses go for 3 million plus, there’s just too much incentive for greedy parasites
Anybody working in SEO / “search engine optimisation.” Complete bottomfeeding scumfuck grift. The only reason it’s not considered fraud is because the government hasn’t caught up to it yet.
I’m learning web design, and one of those topics I need to learn is SEO so the websites I make rank higher. While I don’t like the idea of “gaming the system” to rank higher, it kind of becomes a necessity when everyone does it. What for you makes it such a scummy business?
Because of AI, SEO it’s likely to disappear along with search engines. People will just ask AI instead of using Google or Bing.
I’ll take the bait a little. I will help small businesses out of SEO holes from time to time. My friends’ business was really stuck, and often you just need an outside eye to point out some obvious things: their home page was a splash screen with no text, they didn’t use the most-searched terms in their headings, they were using text-on-imagd with no alt text.
As, generally, it’s agreed we need businesses to have a society (somewhat unfortunately), and businesses need the internet to function nowadays (mixed blessing), I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to help the smaller guys succeed.
Landlord
Not a job
It’s like calling shareholder a job.
Its a crime imao
But their money is at risk! 😱
I don’t know why people are so insistent it’s not a job rather than arguing that it’s a bad job, etc. Small landlords almost certainly put a lot of time into maintaining the property, handling occupancy, reporting income, etc. How is it any less a job than renting out bouncy houses. Sure some landlords might outsource all this, in which case it’s more akin to holding interest bearing assets, but for a small landlord it almost certainly is a job under any definition of the word.
Small landlords put in a lot of time?
How much would you say? My job takes 37 hours a week.
Is a job a job only if it takes a certain amount of hours a week? dumb comment tbh
But to answer the question my friend who owns 2 properties spends probably anywhere from 10-30 hours a week. He mows the grass, takes trash to the dump, makes repairs himself, etc.
Pull the other one mate.
If a landlord is providing services like mowing the lawn and taking rubbish out etc, you can damn well guarantee that they’re charging extra for those services.
You honestly believe a landlord spends 15 hours per week maintaining a property? At that point, you’d be exceeding by far your tenants right to a reasonable expectation of privacy, so are you really that gullible or are you just on some really good shit? You’ve clearly never rented a property yourself.
He does not charge extra for those services. Idk what you are on about, I know for a fact maintaining his property takes a decent amount of work. I don’t respect some internet nobody telling me that isn’t true lol. 15 hours is not that much time.
Health insurance agent, health insurance CEO, health insurance board member, etc
99% of middle management could have been automated away a decade ago
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.
This is the first correct answer that I came across in this entire thread… Ugh…
not exactly what you’re asking, but banks and insurance companies are the majority of what I call “the beaurocracy of money”. they don’t produce anything of value, and are basically just a sinkhole for labour.
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.
No. No you wouldn’t. We don’t need banks to implement the concept of currency in a society and you’re myopic for not understanding that but instead pretending to be some sort of authority on the matter.
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.
Do you believe in unfettered free markets? Those jobs are very often to implement compliance to restrictions in the markets.
No, they are not.
They are often enough purely internal documents or remnants of old days, where certain documents were actually important, maybe.
Depends on the industry. If literally everyone just always documented everything, my job would be much easier.
The company I work for now has very much this attitude for the last 50 years.
As a result they have 3 locations, no sops, and no accountability.
Over the last 6 months is been my job to put us back in compliance with local and federal reporting requirements and develop SOPs. The feedback from the bottom up is that it’s wonderful to have consistency, different bosses giving the same answers to questions, auditors being able to complete audits in expected and appropriate times, and in compliance with reporting regulations.
Can companies go overboard and employ people like me who do busy unnecessary work? Absolutely. But it is definitely appropriate to have a couple of administrators.
Rules and procedures are always a trade-off. However, I would argue that the vast majority of organizations have way too many of them and produces way too much busy work.
Just look at your own example - I’m 90% sure, that the different locations did have procedures and did document stuff, just not in a consistent way. So their documentation was scattered and their reports practically useless.
I’m no economist, but banks are pretty useful from how I understand it. Lending out money people don’t use is like creating money out of thin air. Helps people buy houses and everything. I tried looking for the video I saw on this topic, it’s something like “how banks create money out of thin air”.
anything related to planning, creation and targeting of ads
Anything in the online sports betting space. Addicts, scumbags, degenerates, and the people who make money off them.
Most CEOs.
Money managers, financial management. Yeah, they make sense in capitalism but they really don’t produce anything tangible.
I mean most are just greedy cuz the field attracts those kind of people. You’d be surprised how many people have next to no financial literacy and a GOOD financial expert can do legitimate good for these people.
I did say it makes sense in capitalism. I too pay to use one. I’d like a world without them.
What does Atwater make?
What do you mean, like, how much money does the company make?
Oh, no, I mean what do we make?
I don’t follow. We make money.
No, I know we make money. I mean, what do we create?
We create wealth.
No, no, I mean, what do we build, what do we design, you know? Because I have some ideas that could really help the company.
Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, we don’t build anything.
The financial industry is, ostensibly, about connecting people that need money to people that have more than they need. In practice it’s about skimming from the top of EVERYTHING in society.
They provide plebs access to the complicated world of finance and pass on some of the yield. I think that’s valuable.
Diversity and Inclusion Officer
I dunno. There’s an inclusion officer at my kids school who’s sole role is to make sure kids get the help that they need to not get left behind academically. They don’t have “Diversity” in their title, so it may not be demographic driven which I’m guessing is the distinction.
They mean the C-Suite “position” that changes absolutely nothing about inclusion or diversity in the company.
They run the yearly mandatory training that tells everyone that diversity is not in fact an old, old wooden ship.
Very controversial statement but really couldn’t be more true. Of course there might be exceptions but most of the time it’s a cushy job where you are paid exorbitant amounts to do practically nothing of value.
This is an interesting one that I hadn’t thought of before. I think the same could probably be said for any sort of corporate job where you’re coming up with stupid corporate nonsense speak. Like whoever’s job it is that’s seems to come.up with a million pointless acronyms for a company that they share with new employees at orientation for some reason.
Diversity and etc. is no doubt important, but should be strived for as a group.
Politicians
We could very easily vote on most issues ourselves using the wide array of technology at our fingertips, with a similar or possible better sense of security than what politicians currently provide.
But the only way for that to happen is for politicians to make it happen, and who would vote to eliminate their own job? No one.
Well, the second problem would be figuring out who curates the system. If you’ve ever voted on a referendum you’ll probably know what I’m talking about. You can make any proposal sound awesome/horrible if you leave out the right details.
If you’ve ever organized to resist a referendum you’ve probably also experienced the “we’ll just rephrase this and try again later” effect, wherein special interests just need to stubbornly keep pushing until the opposition voters get sick of participating in the polls.
I don’t think these are unsolvable problems, but they do inherently require setting up a representative beaurocracy of unelected technocrats – an apparent oxymoron. It’s gotta be someone’s job to run the machine and ideally you want them to be looking out for the people above all else.
So, how to play kingmaker? Well, if we take literal kings & elected representatives off the table, what remains is a model akin to academia, wherein credentials & seniority are prioritized above most else. It’s not a bulletproof system (none are), but if you squint hard enough the EU sort of exemplifies what this model could look like – just replace the delegates with smartphones, essentially.
Who would draft new legislation? I know it’s not just politicians that do this but their staff helps a ton. I just don’t see a good system of John Everyman drafting a bill that makes sense. That said I would like to see politicians get fixed cause the system is clearly broken.
Hmm… I’m not sure I agree with this completely despite politicians obviously being problematic. At least at its core, the rationale is that the significant majority of people aren’t aware enough of all the contentious (or even mundane) issues in society, so we elect people we trust to make our decisions for us. I just checked Canada’s recent bills in Parliament, and the voter turnout for something like this would be almost nothing:
Bill C-16 - An Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the federal public administration for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2023
Obviously our current system is very easily corruptible and that needs to be addressed, but getting rid of politicians altogether wouldn’t necessarily fix our society, despite how terrible they’re making it right now.
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Anybody want to bet someone in the building administration is in bed with this company?
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Now, that, is a postage tax.
