[ROCKMAN]

Pstarr – “Now the US is a nation of middle managers all meeting to fine-tune their own make-work.” And so true of the oil patch. I’ve been employed/consulted for Big and Middle Size Oil and couldn’t tell you how many hours I’ve pissed away in meetings. Meetings that happened just to give the appearance of justifying the positions of middle managers. Which is why I’m very happy ending my career with my private company. I’ve VP of Operations. And how many grunt employees work for me? None…I are the grunt employee. I handle the well site operations from my wheel chair. And when I have to haul my ass into the logging truck I have a little step stool to help me reach the first rung of the ladder. Same set up for my VP Geophysics and the president/engineer. We are the managers/grunts. When we need an extra body or two we bring in very experienced and high paid consultants. We are each directly responsible to our owner when things don’t go right. OTOH we each have the potential to share in the fruits of the eventual liquidation of the company…if there are any to share. We only get a piece of what we developed less what we spent to do it. In exchange we accepted salaries well below normal scale. Right now our net is less than zero much to do with the falling NG prices a few years ago (we were focused heavily on NG in the beginning) and the recent drop in oil prices. Basically you take your chances.

Right now we’re coming out on the short end but that was our decision to make. And now we’ve had to slip into a bit of austerity and all employees get furloughed one week a month. Better for everyone then laying off 25% of the staff. And if we do a big acquisition or oil prices recover sufficiently salaries will be restored. Many folks might like the arrangement to get piece of the ultimate profit…until you tell them they have to give up salary upfront. IOW if you want more than a pay check you have to invest directly in the process by giving up a big chunk of your income. And that’s where the wheat is separated from the chaff. LOL. If one doesn’t have the confidence in their abilities and that of their co-workers they don’t take the gamble.

[Newfie]

Let's look at some stats

Jobs 2012 BLS thousands
Goods producing excluding AG. 18,360
AG 2,112
Non AG self or unpaid. 8,815
Services. 116,067

So that's 116,067 in services vs 29,000 in production and AG and unpaid.

Or roughly 4:1. Services vs production.

Now not all of those services jobs are fluff, but then not all production jobs are really production related.

No my friends, the vast majority of our economy is just financial masturbation. Not doing any real work, just bureaucratic buck passing.

Want proof? Just think about all the folks you know and how many get their hands dirty?
Go to a mall, is there anything there that you need? Like a shovel or screwdriver?
The entire medical insurance industry is a scam, no value added.
Go through any strip mall, nail salon, hair cutter, weight loss center, pizza shop, anything really related to primary production?
Prisons, we are huge on prisons and the court sopport system and the entire industry. Any primary production there?
I live in Philly, I walk to work. I pass food joints, high end restaurants, dozens of fancy clothing shops.....but nothing related doing anything physical.

Yup, most jobs in the U.S. are just BS that we could really live without if we were truly interested in efficiency.
................
Some years ago I worked on maintenance management assessments for a quasi government agency. Pretty run of the mill outfit for a big government operation. Nothing special. But the new boss wanted an assessment of how well the maintenance was working.

I found and applied a standardized industrial assessment methodology that looked at some dozens of factors and rated the organization accordingly. The low end of the score, if management was totally brain dead, was the labor force would be about 25% effective. The high end, if management did everything right, was about 70% effective.

I looked at a variety of crafts in multiple locations. The score was always the minimum. Management simply did not have any effective tools, none.
A sample question would be, graded one to five.
Do you know what your job title is?
Do you know who your boss is?
Do you know there is a chain of command?
Do you know what it is, the people?
Do y have a copy of the organization chart?

Typically the guy would know his boss, but nothing more. The scores were abysmal. The upshot was....nothing, nada, nil.

There were lots of meetings, reports, plans, studies, hooten and holleren and nothing happened. Well, lots of money was spent on us consultants. That was good.

So, pretty much, that tells me they could have fired all the managers and not taken a hit on productivity. Management is about 20% of total staff.

I see this kind of crap a lot.

[Newfie]

The city moved to fire an employee for missing about 18 months of work, even though he had the best excuse of all time — he was dead.
Bureaucrats at the Human Resources Administration filed charges against Medicaid-eligibility specialist Geoffrey Toliver accusing him of going AWOL — even though his death by cancer was reported in an online obituary.
An administrative-law judge then agreed to his firing, noting Toliver didn’t show up at his hearing.

http://nypost.com/2015/08/07/city-tried ... -was-dead/

Thanks to Plant who posted this gem elsewhere.

I think it was just last year in NYC they found a guy dead at his desk, a few days after the fact. The explanation was that he was a quiet and diligent worker. I'll say!

[Cog]

Newfie, sounds like Disaster Capitalism in its most brutal form.

And then years later I discovered that the real work of the company was performed by the workers. The hierarchy was merely intended to protect the owners from the workers. Because the owners in their white-tablecloth mansions were scared stiff of the workers. The workers could actually run the company and had no need for endless wasteful meetings.

.

You are obviously missing your true calling pstarr. You should get the workers to collect their nickels together and buy a majority stake in the company and run it as they see fit. Then you could show us evil managers and CEO's how smart Joe Punch-clock truly is.

[Newfie]

Diverting away from actual discussion on the points again Cog?

You the teflon poster!

You should run for President, just ignore the question and spout the party line.

[Cog]

Diverting away from actual discussion on the points again Cog?

You the teflon poster!

You should run for President, just ignore the question and spout the party line.

I'm simply trying to help out pstarr with his homework on how a modern capitalism works. To do otherwise would be rude in the extreme.

[Newfie]

Tomato farming again in your spare time?

(Slinging fertilizer that is.)

[Cog]

Tnx guys. He a jerk.

Buy low and sell high is my recommendation.

[Cog]

Tomato farming again in your spare time?

(Slinging fertilizer that is.)

LOL Who has time? Someone has to work for the millions who want to sit on their ass all day. But my shoulders are broad enough to bear the crushing weight.

[Newfie]

Tomato farming again in your spare time?

(Slinging fertilizer that is.)

LOL Who has time? Someone has to work for the millions who want to sit on their ass all day. But my shoulders are broad enough to bear the crushing weight.

Channeling Ayn Rand Cog?

Actually, I really liked that book. I thought she got the economics about right, all her raving about idiot bureaucrats and who the really smart folks were responsible for keeping them in power.

I read it as a call for revolt against the bureaucrats. Of course the movers and shakers were too busy being in cahoots with the bureaucrats to take responsible charge.

But Any wasn't talking about the you and me, we don't rise to her level. Gates, Jobs, that kind of guy. Don't flatter yourself by thinking you are Atlas. You, like me, are just a Cog.

[Cog]

When you have enough Cogs, you form a machine. I'm not alone in the world who is tired of funding the lazy, the shiftless, and the worthless. You are of course welcome to vote in politicians who will increase this funding. Have at it. Vote for Bernie Sanders. He has free stuff for everyone.

[hvacman]

re: management/paper-shufflers vs workers.

SO...way, way, way back, who contributed more to man's welfare and advancement...

The cave man (or woman) charcoal-shuffler who visualized the shape of the round wheel?...or the gang of cavemen workers who carved it out of the rock along the line the charcoal-shuffler sketched?

True confession - I'm an HVAC paper (or currently - mostly a pdf) shuffler. I don't bend any sheet metal, weld any pipe, strain my back pushing around any air conditioners. I just sit on my a$$, push buttons on calculators and computers, type in what equipment to buy, and draw up the plans that the actual HVAC workers use as instructions to buy the materials and install them as a system (though sometimes they consider my plans more of a "suggestion" than an instruction;). If the system works great - congratulations to the craftsmen who sweat the details. If the system blows hot when it should be cold, or visa versa...blame it on the idiot engineer who doesn't even know which end of a screwdriver to hold on to.

Rockman is like me - nothing but a paper shuffler and talker. He isn't flinging around the drill pipe on the drilling rig, hooking up the hose and pumps to circulate the mud, mucking out, etc. He just looks at paper and data and punches numbers and tells the owner "I think we should drill here". And if the owner (another paper shuffler who just lucked into all his money) say "yes", RM tells the actual workers where to drill, how deep, etc. etc. etc. Nothing but words. He may so darned useless, he may not even go out and paint the "X" on the spot. Just send out a pdf or paper map.

Yeah, a couple of useless paper shufflers. We should just cash it in and just let those oil patch hands and metal tinners figure it all out. That is where the real knowledge base is.

sheesh....

[Newfie]

When you have enough Cogs, you form a machine. I'm not alone in the world who is tired of funding the lazy, the shiftless, and the worthless. You are of course welcome to vote in politicians who will increase this funding. Have at it. Vote for Bernie Sanders. He has free stuff for everyone.

What you fail to realize is that it is YOU who is making what you hate possible.

You are so closed minded you can't see the difference between explaining what is and wishing for something different.

You may have broad shoulders, because your head is Ismushed between the blades!

L I S T E N....I don't like it, but it is the way it is!

Before you can change something you have to understand it.

Go back and read Atlas Shrugged again. She was trying to get you to understand why you are being used.

Sheesh!

[Newfie]

HVAC,

Yeah, we ar not communicating. I'm not complaining about anyone and their job. Yeah, some of us, like Rockman, are in primary production. And some of us, like you and I are in secondary production. And there are those in the tertiary segment who do very valuable and necessary work.

But look at my favorite kicking boy for a moment. Health insurance. At this moment we have a single payer system. That payer is the tax payer. All health care dollars come from folks who work and earn a living. Either from us shelling out cash, through employee supported plans, or through redistribution of our income via the tax system. But all comes from one place, the worker.

But the U.S. has a very complicated and inefficient method of doing the redistribution involving all kinds of gyrations with the IRS, our employers, social services, etc and so on.

It would be far more efficient and cheaper to simply recognize this fact and design an efficient redistribution system where by far less money is lost in passing the buck around, diluting its buying power on every pass from hand to hand.

If we did reorganize the system we would put many thousands of clerks, analysts, and sundry bean counters out of work.

Thus what the U.S. Health care system REALLY does is to provide workfare for the middle class. It is just a thinly desiguised socialist wealth redistribution program. It is kensyian economics diggin holes and filling them in again. It's real value is in providing the workfare in such a way that the beneficiaries retain their respect.

No slam on them, they are just a part of the system, as we all are.

[Cog]

Was standing in line behind a woman using an EBT card to buy some junk food at a convenience store. She swiped her card and then wanted to buy some lottery tickets with cash. The following exchange happened.

Me: Hey you might want to buy some Roth IRA tickets. A lot of people are winning good money on them.

Her: Have you won money?

Me: Yep $1500 so far

Her to Clerk: You have some of them Roth IRA tickets?

Clerk: *Winking at me* We don't sell those here

Me: They sell them at Casey's down the street

Her: Thanks for the tip

LOL'ed all the way home

[AdamB]

All the way home, I am stewing about the utter wrongness about me busting my hump earning a living while some land whale and her brood buy frigging ice with a EBT card.

This country is doomed and I see it more everyday. And yes, I did some checking and you can buy ice with an EBT card. Haven't any of these people heard of ice trays?

Gotta agree with Cog. The free stuff army (great phrase by the way) is just deadweight, as we now know it isn't peak oil or phantom resource scarcity that is the issue, but all of those who just consume without a second's thought on contributing.

Give me my free stuff!!

[Outcast_Searcher]

Channeling Ayn Rand Cog?

Actually, I really liked that book. I thought she got the economics about right, all her raving about idiot bureaucrats and who the really smart folks were responsible for keeping them in power.

I read it as a call for revolt against the bureaucrats. Of course the movers and shakers were too busy being in cahoots with the bureaucrats to take responsible charge.

Did we read the same book?

The movers and shakers (the folks who ended up founding Galt's Gulch -- the ones who actually knew how to do industrial processes) sure didn't seem that way to me.

If you're talking about the ones who WERE the bureaucrats, that's different. Or if you're talking the clowns who just got in the way (and yes, they were suck-ups) like James Taggert, etc. -- they weren't the movers and shakers -- they were part of the problem the heroes of the story rebelled against.

Hank Reardon was guilty of having "his man" in Washington (a lobbyist, apparently) since he wanted to focus on running his metals business, but that was to do the minimum required with the "chief assh*les in charge), which I wouldn't call sucking up.

Like me paying my income taxes, partly to stay out of jail, does NOT mean I fully support and endorse the current income taxation system, where people like Mitt Romney pay a much lower effective tax rate than a head of household with the median income.