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posted by on Monday January 16 2017, @07:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the indispensible-employee dept.

When Stuart Nomimizu relocated from Birmingham, England, to Tokyo his friends and family in the UK started to worry. Not only did they rarely hear from him, but he seemed to always be at the office from early morning until very late at night. His working hours seemed so extreme, that they didn't always believe he was working as hard as he said.

To convince them, he documented one week of his life as a so-called "salaryman" in Tokyo's financial-services industry and posted it online so they could understand his new lifestyle.

The resulting video went viral on YouTube, racking up more than one million views. It depicts a hectic week in 2015 during the financial sector's busy season — from January to March — when Nomimizu clocked in 78 working hours and 35 sleeping hours between Monday and Saturday (before working another six hours that Sunday, which you don't see in the video).

[...] It got to the point where Nomimizu was putting in so many 80-hour work weeks that he fainted in his apartment one night and came-to right next to a TV stand, which he'd narrowly missed. When the rush period was finally over, he says the entire office got "horrendously sick."

While Nomimizu's excessive workload was somewhat temporary, he says "there are people working for companies in Tokyo that do that sort of workload and have that life day-in, day-out all year long." Indeed, marathon workdays are so entrenched in the culture that there's even a Japanese word, karoshi, that quite literally means "overwork death."

Source: If you want to earn more, work less


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 17 2017, @09:22AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 17 2017, @09:22AM (#454819) Journal
    You know, it's not too late to fix [soylentnews.org] Technocracy before reality puts a stake through its heart. In the link, I describe a really bad, ideological pathology with respect to money. It's really hard to take such a theory seriously, when one of the key steps is to throw away some of the most powerful economic tools of the past ten thousand years (and then reinsert them as a nerfed "energy accounting").

    A bunch of the rest is just stuff you would like to have. "Productive capacity many orders of magnitude higher than currently possible, without requiring any new equipment." sounds nice, but unicorns-raised-on-hand-fed-pixie-dust unrealistic (there's no way that managing our economy a little better with no change in technology or even equipment will result in that kind of improvement). Or the irrational separation of political and economical decision-making (in reality, you will never be able to do that).

    My view is that this idea of Technocracy needs to come up with basic principles and then go from there. One goal is insuring citizens of the society have a share of the bounty of the society. Another seems to be the idea of applying scientific principles to economics and societies in order to make better decisions. Fine idea, but you need to consider why that has so much trouble right now and how to fix it. Experts, including scientists, are quite easy to buy right now. Economists are particularly notorious for being available to rationalize any whim. How do you filter out powerful interests when it is so easy for those interests to interfere?

    I also think Technocracy needs to vastly reduce its expectations. Sorry, there aren't orders of magnitude of gain to be had from the sort of management improvements Technocracy advocates (After all, if these potential gains exist, then why don't we already see it on some scale? We're not that dumb.). You need radical technology development for that.

    Stop with the jobs that don't actually contribute anything useful to society. Let machines do all the work that they do better and we don't want to do. When you eliminate waste, all the productive capacity can be turned into standard of living, and with the amount of waste we have to get rid of, we should all be enjoying a standard of living far above what most of us are currently.

    I think this is another ideological pathology of the system. Waste is not where the big improvements are. Technological innovation is. For example, a back hoe operator who is moderately inefficient, still digs faster (which almost always is the most important consideration) than the most efficient and capable hundred people can dig with spoons - by orders of magnitude.

    And who decides what is useful or waste? Businesses aren't interested in employing people just to employ them. People do something the business considers useful. Obviously, that could entail a destructive job, like it's the employee's job to kick barrels of highly toxic waste into the local river. Yes, that would be waste, but a sort of waste that is well managed today in developed world societies via regulation (which incidentally would be a great example of a thing that more or less fulfills the conditions of Technocracy and usually benefits society). But if the employee does something for the business that doesn't harm society, then what business is it of yours to care whether the activity is "useful" or not to society? It certainly is useful to the parts of society that actually are involved in the labor transaction.

  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:51PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:51PM (#455651) Journal

    And who decides what is useful or waste? Businesses aren't interested in employing people just to employ them. People do something the business considers useful. Obviously, that could entail a destructive job, like it's the employee's job to kick barrels of highly toxic waste into the local river. Yes, that would be waste, but a sort of waste that is well managed today in developed world societies via regulation (which incidentally would be a great example of a thing that more or less fulfills the conditions of Technocracy and usually benefits society). But if the employee does something for the business that doesn't harm society, then what business is it of yours to care whether the activity is "useful" or not to society? It certainly is useful to the parts of society that actually are involved in the labor transaction.

    Not the person you were replying to, but there's a pretty easy example here that I'm always using -- duplication of effort. A big retail chain like Wal*Mart probably has a whole team of developers just to work on software to manage their supply chain and logistics. Target probably has their own devs working on the same issue. And so does Kmart, and so does Macy's, and on and on. And they're probably probably pretty similar to what's used by Amazon.com and Newegg. Probably even shares a lot of the same features used by UPS and FedEx.

    If these companies cooperate instead of competing, you end up with one team three or four times the size building one massive application with tons of features being pushed out faster than ever...and a ton of spare software guys who can go work on something else. And all that requires is a shift in the culture towards valuing moving society forward over enriching oneself. So yeah, as long as most companies keep their secret, then it's in their individual best interest to waste time duplicating the effort of others. But it would be in everyone's best interest -- including the companies and their customers -- if everyone just open sourced the damn thing and slashed their individual development costs. Feels a bit like the Prisoner's Dilemma.

    So just because that effort is useful to the company doesn't mean it's useful to society as a whole. In fact, in this case their use to the company is precisely *because* their effort is wasted. If the effort was not wasted externally, it would not be necessary internally.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 18 2017, @11:27PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 18 2017, @11:27PM (#455768) Journal

      If these companies cooperate instead of competing, you end up with one team three or four times the size building one massive application with tons of features being pushed out faster than ever...and a ton of spare software guys who can go work on something else.

      You lose the primary incentive to make the application better since now your infrastructure is the same as your competitor's. You also create a variety of conflicts of interest, since now this common infrastructure is an avenue for both espionage about a market competitor and sabotaging the activities of that competitor.

      And as I noted in my earlier post, what efficiencies are there to gain? Anyone with a truly inefficient infrastructure won't be in business. So then you're taking a bunch of moderately efficient systems and making them somewhat more efficient. There isn't huge gain to be had from that.

      • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday January 19 2017, @02:17PM

        by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday January 19 2017, @02:17PM (#456046) Journal

        You lose the primary incentive to make the application better since now your infrastructure is the same as your competitor's. You also create a variety of conflicts of interest, since now this common infrastructure is an avenue for both espionage about a market competitor and sabotaging the activities of that competitor.

        I work for such a store. We already share a ton of common infrastructure -- Linux. And it works great, and it's hardly stagnating, and it certainly hasn't allowed competitors to sabotage our company. So yeah, we're already doing what you predict will be a disaster, and it works very well.

        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday January 20 2017, @01:00PM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday January 20 2017, @01:00PM (#456501) Journal

          We already share a ton of common infrastructure -- Linux. And it works great, and it's hardly stagnating, and it certainly hasn't allowed competitors to sabotage our company. So yeah, we're already doing what you predict will be a disaster, and it works very well.

          Two things to observe. We already have attempts to compromise Linux and other common infrastructure. And they are naturally covert. So maybe you're right, or maybe you just don't know how your competitors are sabotaging your company.

          Second, this infrastructure development didn't need a Technocracy. It just happened because there were people with common interests who put forward the very considerable effort to make something of this complexity work.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 19 2017, @05:15AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday January 19 2017, @05:15AM (#455896) Journal
      Since it came up elsewhere [soylentnews.org], I'll note that we have some real world examples of where competition was the better form of competition. aristarchus lists several companies that he considers monopolies:

      Bell Telephone, Standard Oil, Micro$erft, Google

      The first two, AT&T and Standard Oil were broken up by law. Guess what? They became more profitable by doing so. The owners and managers no doubt thought they were running the companies in question on the best principles of the time. But it turns out they weren't.

      I don't believe I have discussed this before, but there are big flaws in using the scientific process for real world decision making, especially when it is applied to a rapidly evolving system of great complexity. First, the larger the system, the more ignorance that decision makers operate from. Second, the scientific method is too conservative to adequately guide a system where risk-taking and responding to change and innovation are two of the most important functions. Third, you can't run at large scale the most useful sorts of scientific experiments (eg, double blind studies of desired phenomena). And fourth, there are a variety of conflicts of interest that introduce huge levels of bias into the scientific process, when it is applied to an economics system.

      There are alternate forms of truth-seeking that work much better for economics system. And we use two such systems, markets and mediation systems. The former are used as a more effective means of determining collective valuations for goods and services. And the latter for dispute and conflict resolution where parties are expected to routinely have conflicts of interest deep enough that they can't provide an unbiased analysis of the issues that bring them to a court or mediator.

      • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday January 19 2017, @02:43PM

        by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday January 19 2017, @02:43PM (#456053) Journal

        There's a couple problems with that argument.

        First of all, a monopoly isn't cooperation. A single entity cannot "cooperate" because there's nothing else to cooperate with!

        Secondly, I already said we need to have some cultural shifts first to stop chasing pure monetary profit. That's why monopolies don't work, because they aren't interested in serving their customers, they're only interested in emptying those customers' wallets. We need to start working towards a society where companies want to be known for providing good service rather than just wanting to top the Fortune 500 list.

        This works. Everyone here at Soylent already knows this works. Look at Linux. Look at Slashcode. Is SoylentNews a profit-driven website? Nope. Is it highly competitive? Not really. Hell, we practically took the code directly from our top competitor! Cooperation in action.

        As for the flaws in such a system...well, I'm sure there would be some. But you act like our current system is flawless! Millions are starving under capitalism while the wealthiest eight individual people have more wealth than half the entire planet. It's pretty far from what I would consider an ideal or even acceptable system.