They're there so the owner of the club/restaurant can relax, not you.
Right now, I feel like this guy is useless and I don't want to give him money and I feel bad about that, like by not paying him I'm calling him useless.
If it were for the owner, and that was clear, I'd feel great because I was making his job easier by not causing any trouble or mess, and on top of that, hey thanks for the towel!
But it is one of those weird things that survives long past the point of sense, they should just be paid a wage and be employed rather than work on this weird charity-basis. It's a bit akin to waiters in the US working on tips, whereas the rest of the world just pays them a normal wage. The clubs bank on guys with 10 beers in em to both be drunk enough and close to bursting enough to pay for the service.
The highlight of that experience was the drunk lady who stole a toilet lid in the men’s room.
Japan can be even worse. I’ve seen it at hotel seven when you’re eating at the hotel restaurant.
The toilets at St Pancras are free and always have been. He was just some random guy you gave money to!
You might be confusing this with curb side check in, which is a service airlines use as a convenience to customers checking bags (so they don't need to go to the ticket counter with heavy/numerous bags ).
They also sometimes do this when looking for a bag for transfer (which failed to get interlined correctly or something, or when an elite has a connection but there's no interline agreement.)
I think you may not realize how many shoppers/how much person-density there can be in the US.
Norwegians was confused every time AFAIK.
Having to bag my own groceries is infuriating. In Canada, The Real Canadian Superstore was the first to do this and it has a shitty feel.
The lines are long, I bring my own bags and have to get out of peoples way as I pay and try to bag my own groceries.
I actually started going to self checkouts because if they don’t bag my groceries, cashiers are useless to me!
If you think bagging is just stuffing bags in orde that groceries come, you’re nuts. I hate it when a useless cashier takes my apples and just tosses them into bags too. They’re fragile and need to be handled as such.
I definitely think bagging is a service worth paying for and appreciate when I get a bagger that gets it.
Oh, my first real job was bagging and helping customers with the groceeos to their cars. Not useles.
There is a big difference between a job that creates convenience for other people and one that’s redundant or pointless.
Please tell me that you say this only to win the argument, because, come on. Putting things into something else is as trivial as it gets, and I can assure you that, even though I have never seen one, a person whose job is to fill the bits someone else bought into bags for them will give absolutely zero fucks about how he puts them things into them bags. Except maybe it's somewhere like Harrods, I guess, if they are paid high enough (now I recalled this: there was a comment or an article recently about an employee of Harrods whose job was to get fired when customers came to complain about other personnel).
You figure out how to build a base, how to seperate items by contimination risk, learn how to fill a bag up.
People who do it poorly give you 15 bags when 7 will do.
The biggest incentive is to do it faster. The job is boring as sin, so you just want to get it over with.
It's also a good job for mentally challenged people. It's low stress, something they can learn, and something they can do well at.
This is a job that could literally be automated with a pole :)
You also have to watch for the pedestrians walking around and so on. It's actually a lot more involved than you think.
I did it a few times. Not hard, but it does matter a lot, and definitely not pointless.
But, yeah you have a point.
Missing the /s. Drivers today are far worse than they were in the 80s.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/21/auto-crashes-are-on-the-rise...
[1] http://gazette.com/study-finds-fatal-crashes-in-colorado-hav...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/26/what-...
But here's the thing: There wasn't any roadwork in between. There had been, but everything was neatly packed away.
Then again, I've worked in public administration. Nothing will shock me.
What if you were older/disabled and had trouble lifting a medium-large suitcase?
Seems like not the most useless job in the world, especially since it helps keep things moving in the airport and reduces congestion by getting people their bags slightly faster.
So maybe this man is not needed all the time but definitely lack of somebody to unload the belt would cause problems.
In the US, many people get their living from holding a “anything helps, homeless vet” sign at the train station.
Coming back home from Tokyo is always a major shock.
When I was in the US there was a guy handing me a towel in the bathroom. That is an incredibly meaningless and superfluous job!
On the other hand, most Americans live their entire lives in the US without ever seeing such a guy. Are you mind-bogglingly rich?
I would just simply refuse to go to such places, but I've only ever gone at the strong insistence of friends and perhaps the insistence some strong drink.
Perhaps a real-life hack could be to bring sanitizer gel.
In an economy where having a job (or somehow having attained large sums of money because of luck/previous endeavors) is necessary to not be an outcast, this is one way of mitigating this or at least pushing the larger problem forward. We would very likely have a huge crisis if all bullshit jobs were to disappear overnight.
https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet
You can control what years are shown on that page. I sugggest you look at 1950 to 2018. Although the data is noisy, you can see it has declined. Also note that the era of occasional double digits advances ended decades ago. The 14% in 1956 and the 12% in 1971 have never repeated this side of 1973.
The economy is stagnant because the trend toward automation has died out. Although people in tech keep predicting a robot revolution, there is no evidence of it in the productivity numbers.
> Not having a job puts you in a lower social caste
This is a stupid societal expectation that should be fought rather than supported in the way you say.
There is always valuable work that can be done. It can be improving the maintenance or cleanliness of places, etc.
And they can quit. I mean, a job guarantee isn't directly a requirement in the same sense.
Thinking is a useful skill if and only if the job they aspire to is philosopher. For everything else (and for philosophers as well, really) you need training, and for that you need time.
> And they can quit.
Sure. Anyone can choose to starve.
For example, https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basi...
Which I totally get - a tourist is way more likely to make a mistake than a local.
Under French heraldry, it indicates a third son (when they bothered to use cadency on their coats of arms). Since his chances of inheriting the family lands & fortune were low, many of them set out for Charleston to seek their fortune, following the southern branch of the Huguenots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_South_Carolina
That is part of the reason he did not like them, their loyalty was bought and the "prince" who used them did not have any other leverage. It is difficult to win and then govern with mercenaries as the protectors of the kingdom. A long standing mercenary army does not convey legitimacy, and when disbanded there are issues of proper resettlement and worry about a rival acquiring their service.
Another example is the Janissaries in turkey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facino_Cane
BTW while "taken from their families" is correct, many kept ties with the families. The Sokollu dynasty of grand viziers who practically ruled the empire for decades were taken the same way, but the first of Sokollus, Mehmen Sokollu, was not only able to pass on his position to his relatives, he re-established the Serbian Orthodox Church and got his brother to become its patriarch. We can discuss the humanitarian aspects of this, but practically, these people are not slaves at all; in fact, thinking that these people were slaves is downplaying what a disaster actual slavery is.
PS. There is a book by the Nobel laureate Ivo Andric about exactly the times of Sokollu, that HN readers might find interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_on_the_Drina
My comment was mentioned to highlight that in many practical ways, the Christian population was practically enslaved to the Muslim overlords (regardless whether them being "real" Turks, or, more commonly, local converts, or even Janissaries). Much more than a Christian serfdom was a lightweight variation on slavery.
Christian population as a whole had very little to choose whether their children will be taken away and become Janssaries, at least until late times, and once taken away, those people had very little influence about their career choices. They were slaves in all practical ways the slavery means. For some exceptions, that slavery turned out to lead to high positions (like Sokollu) but, on the other hand, if the subject population retained their independence, talented people like Sokollu might have had opportunity to build up their local communities/states, instead of conquering the world for Ottoman sultans? :)
PS. I am personally an atheist, so I do not tend to look at the things here from the Christianity: right; Islam: wrong perspective.
I mean, finding cases of African American slaves that lived and worked as cooks or home attendants, or nannies, or whatever easier jobs were available in the South, in addition to much harder cotton picking would not be an argument that those people were not enslaved. The fact that one does not literally carry chains the whole day does not mean that he is not a slave, if the owner can literally decide on the life and death, without much consequence.
If we talk about imperial dominance in Ottoman Balkans, I would accept that local Muslim population (largely converts) lived under imperial dominance. Christian peasants - much, much heavier.
The Norse themselves still tended to follow partitioning laws, at least until the Scandinavian kingdoms started to coalesce. The repeated invasions of England between Ethelred the Unready and the final conquest of William the Bastard were not driven by second sons needing kingdoms for themselves, it was driven by England having the best tax base in the North Sea but high political stability, as well as the dying out of family lines.
Key point about the latter: when Edward the Confessor died without issue, the claims to the English throne were:
* Edward's brother-in-law and most powerful vassal, Harold Godwinson (son of the person who put Edward on the throne in the first place)
* William, the bastard son of Edward's maternal cousin. Bolstered by "when he was staying over when he was young, he totally promised me the throne when he died."
* Harald Hardrada, whose claim is "Cnut was King of England. He died, so his claim passed to Harthacnut. Harthacnut and Magnus made an agreement that, should one die without issue, the other would inherit his lands. Harthacnut died without issue, so Magnus should have been King of England. Magnus died without issue, so his claim winds its way back to me, his father's half-brother by way of mother."
Third sons wouldn't starve to death in any case, but they would rattle around the family lands making a nuisance of themselves and borrowing money from Dad. Noble families got some income from their tenants' taxes, generally, but it wasn't always enough to maintain yourself in high style. In some times/places, noblemen could get involved in trade, but that would mean funding other people's endeavors, not becoming merchants themselves. And sometimes even that was restricted or frowned upon.
In essence him being a crafts-person or merchant would have been looked down on by everyone.
Basically the Japanese government funds a large number of "pointless" projects, such as freeways to nowhere, large sea-facing cement walls, or things like subsidizing construction companies and the like (this is why you'll see 6 people standing around a hole in the ground, 3 "bosses" doing absolutely nothing, 2 of them old men flagging traffic, 1 person doing the actual digging). This is how Japan manages to keep their unemployment rate low, and thus keep money moving through the economy - by making sure people are able to obtain a job, even if it's useless or redundant.
At the top of it all you have the massive Zaibatsu (big conglomerates) which fund the lower level companies under their umbrella which in turn pay these meager salaries and keep people employed, typically as some kind of tax write off and the side benefits of having all of these various companies at their disposal (concrete, construction, real estate, etc).
The bottom of the system is incredibly inefficient, but it helps make sure that a bare minimum quality of life is available for people willing to try to get any old job.
Interesting article which sums up big infrastructure projects and their long term drawbacks/benefits better than I can (2009) - https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/world/asia/06japan.html
If the goal is to prevent the society from tearing itself apart then perhaps this is fairly efficient. If the goal is to ma
Japanese developed clever formal court system (Sankin-kotai "alternate attendance") where half of the daimyos were kept hostage in the capital city at all times. Spend year in your own lands surrounded by your own men, one year as hostage in the capital that was under the control of the shogun. If daimio left the capital, his wife and heir were kept as hostages. All these daimios and their close families needed something to do to make their life meaningful. Same applied to their underlings.
King Louis XIV had similar system for the same reasons. Nobles had to keep hostage in his palace at Versailles and they needed things to do. The court system developed bullshit jobs for nobles, like helping him into the bed or taking part of the party. Everyone was given a role to play.
What ended the era you describe? Contact with the outside world? I've also thought for a long time that space migration is the only real hope for the human race to avoid permanent stagnation and eventual decline.
Also the "floating world" period up to that point, so it seems like life was at least decent for people before the outside influence.
Perry (US) sailed a fleet into Tokyo Bay and threatened to destroy the city if the samurai government didn’t open trade with the US (1850s).
Fearing domination by western powers (cf. China) the Japanese reformed their society and economy based on western empires (1868) and within 40 years was able to soundly defeat Russia in a war (1905).
The scale of the war was massive. Japan alone brought a force of 158,800 in 1st invasion of 1592. In the 2nd invasion of 1597–98, Japan again brought similar number of troops.
For comparison in the Long Turkish War or Thirteen Years' War which was between 1593 to 1606, Ottoman Empire had 160,000–180,000 men.
Ming Dynasty sent 50,000 men to aid Korea, and some say this started the decline of Ming Dynasty.
One really great book I recommend for anyone wanting to learn about this war is
"The Imjin War: Japan's Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China
August 12, 2014" by Samuel Hawley.
1. This war was the first time a large group of Christians (not Western but Japanese Christians) set foot in Korea. Of the 12 (?) forces commanded by different warlords, 2 or 3 had large number of Christians. And these were first Christians to set foot in Korea.
2. Chosun Dynasty court maintained the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty (also known as The True Record of the Joseon Dynasty), annual records of the Joseon Dynasty of Korea. They were kept from 1413 to 1865. The annals, or sillok, comprise 1,893 volumes and are thought to cover the longest continual period of a single dynasty in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veritable_Records_of_the_Joseo...
Four copies of the records were kept in geographically separate area within Chosun. However during the Imjin War, 3 of the 4 were burned down by Japanese forces. The Imjin War book talks about how the last set of copy was being transported in numerous, lumbering carts pulled by ox to keep it out of marauding Japanese forces. The convoy was in a village when Japanese forces caught up. The convoy had not enough troops to resist. They then faked it to look like the village held more Korean troops than actual, by using extra flags and other camouflage. Japanese forces stayed away and this allowed the last backup of 4 backups to survive.
This tidgit was extra interesting to me for following: 1) Faking it till making it. 2) how 4 sets of backup was just barely enough.
It's the autobiography of Katsu Kokichi (Musui is another name he was known by), a samurai born in the early 19th century to a very low-ranking family. It's a firsthand account of life at the very lowest fringe of Shogunate society at the very end of that system, and is quite entertaining because Katsu is a lazy good-for-nothing who can't even get one of those pointless bureaucracy jobs and survives by doing "lowly" merchant work. I think it would make a pretty funny TV show because the protagonist is such a hapless loser.
As a result, the samurai class, especially Tokugawa's bannermen and "inner" families, sort of lost their purpose. There were no more wars to fight - not when peace lasted "as long as the waves roll" - and the strongest rebels they could expect were peasants who could not own swords.
Because they couldn't just revoke the lands Iyeyasu had distributed (without very good reason), and to give the samurai something to do, the Edo government expanded constantly, creating dozens of superfluous or sinecure bureaucratic roles, so that the second and third sons of samurai families wouldn't just sit around at home. I believe this pattern was repeated across the various daimyo han at each castle town. Further, the samurai household themselves created redundant job openings just to get more peasants out of unemployment. This was how every samurai ended up with six porters. Even as certain samurai families sunk into abject poverty in the 1800s, as the shogunate neared its end, this policy continued: your grandfather had increased the number of household retainers from five to six, to give someone's fourth son a job; and it had become hereditary, and now that fourth son's grandson was your sixth retainer, and you couldn't destroy the position even if you could barely afford to pay him.
When I hear politicians talking about "creating jobs", I think of the shogunate.