[foamflower]

When my family lived in Japan years ago, we noticed that when taking the train, approximately three attendants checked our tickets before we boarded a train. At least two of those jobs are "bullshit" in terms of producing wealth, but they are socially beneficial in a culture where the social contract requires near-zero unemployment. (I, apparently like you, can't help but remember this kind of arrangement when listening to "jobs guarantee" rhetoric from various politicians.)

[WJW]

Is visited the USA just once (in 2003), but there was an old man that took my bag off the end of the luggage belt at the airport and handed it to me. I could easily have picked it up myself, but he was there for those 30 centimeters of bag travel. I remember being amazed about it and remarking the pointlessness of that job to my coworkers.

[Thlom]

I'm always a bit taken back when visiting the toilet at clubs and some restaurants when I'm in the UK as there's a gentleman sitting by the sink handing out towels and stuff. Very strange and utterly useless. Not sure if he's paid by the club or lives of tip, but it makes me really uncomfortable. I just want to take a piss and wash my hands, not have an awkward conversation with a towel handler.

[richev]

I've always understood that this person's actual job was making sure that no-one was taking drugs in / vandalizing / doing anything illegal in the bathrooms.

They're there so the owner of the club/restaurant can relax, not you.

[rkuykendall-com]

If this were true, there wouldn't be so much emphases on tipping.

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!

[IkmoIkmo]

Public bathrooms don't clean themselves like private bathrooms. Particularly in high-volume places (large restaurants, pubs) it can get nasty very quickly. Think sex, drugs, throwing up, people passing out or going to sleep or just acting stupid with feces. Definitely not a useless job.

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.

[Spooky23]

I did that gig at a county fair one season. You’re there to deter people from pissing on the floor and plundering the place. People behave bizarrely in certain situations.

The highlight of that experience was the drunk lady who stole a toilet lid in the men’s room.

[listentojohan]

He or she is just living off of the tips, and of the selling of perfume and mints.

[ytwySXpMbS]

I've never seen this in my life in the UK. There is a guy watching over the people in the toilets in the clubs near me, but you don't talk to him and he doesn't hand you anything. Even if he did hand you something, you don't have to have a conversation with him.

[Balero]

Really? Just about every club I've ever been in has this. Selling chewing gum, after shave ("no spray, no lay" etc). But they are there mainly to make sure people aren't doing drugs, or fall asleep on the toilet.

[tim333]

There are quite a few in London. Here's an article about them http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7335315.stm. I think they are mostly to stop people doing coke in the cubicles.

[ghaff]

OTOH last time I was in St.Pancras there was a guy collecting the fees to use the washroom and keeping things tidied up. People in the US would be outraged to pay for using a bathroom under those circumstances.

Japan can be even worse. I’ve seen it at hotel seven when you’re eating at the hotel restaurant.

[gaius]

OTOH last time I was in St.Pancras there was a guy collecting the fees to use the washroom

The toilets at St Pancras are free and always have been. He was just some random guy you gave money to!

[ghaff]

Maybe was another a London station. Recall there being a turnstile.

[ctime]

I've never once seen this in my life (I typically have over 100k miles of airline travel per year) and have been traveling for work in the US since 2000. I don't understand how this scenario would play out, does he just grab a bag at random and hold it over his head? Read off the tag? Most people I know would be incensed if someone else were to grab their bag off the luggage belt.

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 ).

[rdl]

Baggage handlers at airports pull bags off the belts and put them in a line nearby (and sometimes give them to passengers) when there's a need to clear the belt, or when they don't have other work to do (at some airports). This is mainly to keep the belt from filling up.

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.)

[therein]

I am sure these people attend other tasks once that's done. They likely also have other belt-related tasks to deal with behind the doors.

[ilkan]

I don't travel much. But they are called porters (or, redcaps in Barbados because they wear red caps for easy identification). Let's say you are elderly, tired or have a lot of baggage. You wave a porter over, he or she takes the indicated bags off the airport conveyor belt, loads them onto a trolley, wheels them through Customs, and loads them onto the taxi for you. I've seen elderly, handicapped or heavily burdened (eg couples with 3 kids and 10 bags) use them. How else would one get by?

[baxtr]

Similar to people who pack your groceries into bags at cashier. Have only seen this in the states, nowhere else

[dyarosla]

Pretty sure the idea here is to quicken the checkout and lines-> having someone fill bags as someone else handles payments and you handle paying, makes queues move faster than having them grind to a halt due to someone packing their bags too slowly.

[tigroferoce]

IN Italy there’s a little desk behind the cashiers and it’s split in half so while you fill your bags using one half the next client uses the other half. The amount of useless jobs in the states always amazes me, but then you look at the unemployment rate and everything becomes less useless ...

[foobarchu]

The US has this depending on the establishment. The chain "Adli" (German in origin I think, but they're common in the US) doesn't have baggers, they just have a counter past the checker and you are expected to bag your own groceries. I'm also pretty sure they require you to bring your own bags too, though, so baggers wouldn't make much sense.

[dyarosla]

This too can get clogged. Been there and seen it take forever to go through lines in Italy.

I think you may not realize how many shoppers/how much person-density there can be in the US.

[reitanqild]

When LIDL came to Norway this was one of their mistakes. They insisted on not having the split desk behind the cashiers.

Norwegians was confused every time AFAIK.

[cabaalis]

I was a bagger for a while. For me, it was an entry level thing at the grocer. You would be responsible for organizing (not stocking) the shelves and sometimes cleaning. The highest paid people except managers and the owner were the cashiers. This was 20 years ago.

[hgezim]

Oh boy. I normally lurk but this one gets me.

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.

[mamon]

In my country I've seen it mostly as a charity before Christmas: some teenage volunteers would ask you if you want them to pack your groceries, expecting a small donation in return.

[rayiner]

Packing your own groceries is work and boring though.

[gtvwill]

If packing your own groceries fills your definition of work and doesn't just come under "shit you just do to get something from one place to another because you need it in your life". You REALLY need to get out and perform a variety of jobs. Like damn you gotta be about as useless as tits on a bull if you think pulling the food your going to eat that is NECESSARY FOR YOUR SURVIVAL off a bench and into a bag is work.

[rayiner]

Growing food is necessary for my survival but I don’t do that myself. Grocery bagging is also not trivial. You can’t just throw things into a bag in random order, you need to think about it. A well packed set of shopping bags is a big convenience, and I don’t want to spend the bandwidth to do it.

There is a big difference between a job that creates convenience for other people and one that’s redundant or pointless.

[briandear]

Except while I am putting things on the conveyer belt I can’t exactly be bagging at the same time. In France, checkout lines are slower because you have to run from one side of the checkout belt, to load, then to the other side, to bag and then you have to pay; meanwhile people are waiting. That “useless” job increased efficiency since bags can be filled while I am attending to the transaction. Unless you buy just a few things at a time, it’s a huge timesaver.

[nicoburns]

Also common in latin america.

[michaelbuckbee]

It's something that has disappeared over time (like elevator attendants). If I had to guess it was a holdover from before there were actually conveyor belts and porters manually pushed out cards of luggage to stops and helped people with them.

[jopsen]

In the US you often see people holding a sign saying "slow" next to construction or road work.

This is a job that could literally be automated with a pole :)

[dizzystar]

You'd be surprised. Cars will burn a sign, but they'll stop dead when they see a person holding a sign.

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.

[jopsen]

I can't help but ask, how about a wax sculpture? hehe :)

But, yeah you have a point.

[ouid]

Those signs say stop on the other side and are used in conjuction with someone on the other end of the construction holding up the opposite sign so that a single lane can be used to handle traffic in two directions. That job would need to be automated with a traffic light.

[kleiba]

In Germany, no-one is holding stop/slow signs at any construction site. This job is universally done by portable traffic lights.

[jpetso]

In Germany, people respect traffic lights even when there's no one there to enforce your good behavior.

[marcosdumay]

A smart traffic light that can count how any cars enter and exit the zone. It's perfectly possible to automate, but it may not be the best ROI around.

[Ma8ee]

They are common in Sweden for slower roads and streets. I’m quite certain they don’t count the cars, instead just leaving enough time even for slow cars to pass through.

[briandear]

That also breaks down when they need to fully stop traffic from both sides so a equipment can be moved. How do you tell the automated lights to stop everything automatically when those instances are irregular.

[girvo]

You press a button. I’m not joking either, they have a way to program them quickly for exactly this reason. Set them on a cycle, or turn them to manual.

[Clubber]

The system would also need to detect which direction the traffic was going. In morning rush hour, outbound would be much heaver than inbound (of your neighborhood) so it would typically be unidirectional.

[nitrogen]

I've seen such lights in remote construction sites on road trips. They do exist.

[epc]

I was that guy as a kid, at least for road work. The role rotated through my crew while everyone else worked in the manhole or on the street. Part of the reason for it to be a human is to serve as a witness for the police when a distracted driver plows into the road crew. This was in the 1980s, I’m sure drivers pay much more attention today.

[sverige]

> This was in the 1980s, I’m sure drivers pay much more attention today.

Missing the /s. Drivers today are far worse than they were in the 80s.

[rangibaby]

I would say they are almost certainly less drunk now

[sverige]

But a lot more have been smoking weed.

[viridian]

It depends on what you measure. Crashes are going up ever so slightly vs population growth, but fatalities per crash has astoundingly been reduced by about 70%, which is to say that you were more than 3x as likely to die in crash in 1980 vs 2011.

[ciupicri]

That's because we have better cars now which offer better protection for passengers and pedestrians: seat belts, air bags, "softer" bumpers, collision detection, etc.

[13of40]

I don't know about now, but when minimum wage was $4.75 those guys were making $20.00 an hour. It was a highly coveted job in some circles. They are starting to automate it with portable traffic lights though.

[interfixus]

I once saw a memorable setup on a fairly desolate piece of Queensland highway: There were three flagmen (as they are or were called Down Under) spaced over with a few hundred meters between them, each with a flag warning me to slow down, roadwork ahead. At the other end three others, of course, to take care of traffic in the opposite direction.

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.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

The first lollypop bearer in each direction was indicating the presence of five other people at work on the road.

[glangdale]

They are almost exclusively female Irish backpackers here in Australia from what I hear. Usually the only females on a crew.

[ReverseCold]

> the pointlessness of that job to my coworkers

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.

[rusty__]

I find the concept of having to have someone pump gas for you (by law) another strange example of a pointless job, I'm quite capable of pumping my own gas.

[llukas]

When several big planes clog US customs then there are no passengers to pick up bags from the luggage belt and it can fill in entirely.

So maybe this man is not needed all the time but definitely lack of somebody to unload the belt would cause problems.

[richev]

I've seen this at airports that had seemingly small or poor quality luggage belts, and figured that their actual role was to help ensure the smooth running of things and stop the belt jamming up with too many bags.

[cema]

Strange experience indeed. I do not think I have ever seen that in any of USA airports, large or small.

[DrScump]

If this was in the unsecured area, that may not have been an employee, but a stranger trolling for tips.

[nikanj]

In Japan, there are people whose job is to stand on the station holding a “shinkansen this way” sign.

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.

[ausvisaissues]

Most gates are automatic now in Japan (with a conductor sometimes checking tickets on Shinkansen after gates).

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!

[op00to]

Towel guy is there to prevent fucking and drug use in bathrooms (without a bribe).

[XorNot]

Also I have to imagine it cuts down on whatever the hell people are doing in unattended bathrooms where every bodily fluid ends up on every possible surface at some point.

[thaumasiotes]

> 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?

[throw_away]

You too may experience this "luxury" by going to pretty much any club (dance or strip) on pretty much any weekend in pretty much any major US city. The opulence wears off quickly, as it is made clear that you're expected to tip and all you want to do is wash your hands like a decent person.

[selimthegrim]

Theu don’t just hand you towels, they usually have OTC type things if you’re feeling ill - you’ll never be more thankful for them until it happens to you when clubbing

[nsxwolf]

If the attendant is to my left, I rotate clockwise towards the door after I finish washing. Then it looks like I didn’t see him.

[throw_away]

With wet hands, though, or damp pants, which is not a great look in either club environ.

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.

[dominotw]

Oh. Gp made it sound like it was a common thing in America.

[ConceptJunkie]

I'm 53 and the only time I've ever seen a washroom attendant was in Mexico.

[nojvek]

It is a common thing in US if you go clubbing.

[Legogris]

I was also thinking exactly this during my couple of years in Japan - that having a huge amount of "bullshit jobs" is one way of keeping unemployment low in an increasingly automated economy where growth is stagnating.

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.

[lkrubner]

An economy can not be increasingly automated and increasingly stagnant. It’s one or the other. In the USA the economy has been fairly stagnant since 1973 because the post war boom ended in 1973. The move to automation also collapsed in 1973. Please see productivity trends here:

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.

[bomb199]

A Job's Guarantee is a real movement, and a reasonable idea for this reason. Not having a job puts you in a lower social caste - might as well have them doing SOMETHING. Even if it's not especially productive, the small positive affect is better than nothing.

[tom_mellior]

No. Eight hours of soul-crushing boredom every day keeps people in such jobs from doing... anything they want. Like learning stuff that might help them contribute to society in other ways (in a more useful job, maybe).

> 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.

[dantheman]

Work should create value and in fact most of these make work jobs destroy it by slowing things down or requiring more meetings etc.

There is always valuable work that can be done. It can be improving the maintenance or cleanliness of places, etc.

[OtterCoder]

Shout-out to the Civilian Conservation Corps. We should bring that program back.

[briandear]

We could bring back Workd War II and create even more jobs — assuming that’s what we are trying to do in an America with 3.9% unemployment.

[lallysingh]

It leaves people lots of time to think of better jobs to get. They are also less likely to go to crime.

And they can quit. I mean, a job guarantee isn't directly a requirement in the same sense.

[tom_mellior]

> It leaves people lots of time to think of better jobs to get.

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.

[esarbe]

Why not just give people a UBI and be done with it?

[laretluval]

Basic job might have a better cost/benefit tradeoff.

For example, https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basi...

[freekh]

This is the same feeling I have when visiting the us. Remember coming into a Starbucks staffed by 5 people but only one doing something. At an airport there was a bunch of people whose job was to make sure I had my passport open prior to going through security. And so on and so on. It might just be my cultural shock though when going there. When you go to a different country you sometimes pick up 'strangeness' and generalise it to the whole country...

[bamboozled]

Never noticed this, visited Japan a few times myself. Often I had mine checked at the gate and on the train. Are you sure you’re not just exaggerating?

[haywirez]

I recently visited and totally noticed a lot of minders, caretakers and other seemingly unnecessary jobs, mostly carried out by retirement-age employees or retired volunteers[0]. It was weird but seemed to make sense from a societal perspective, quite heartwarming.

[0] https://haywirez.com/tokyo-hong-kong-2018/

[jstanley]

I visited Japan recently and although I think the tickets were only actually checked by one person, there did seem to be an awful lot of superfluous staff associated with any sort of transport.

[chiph]

Could it be because you're a foreigner? I almost certainly got picked out on every ride on the Munich S-Bahn by a fare agent for a ticket-check because I was obviously not German.

Which I totally get - a tourist is way more likely to make a mistake than a local.

[Zak]

It has been my impression, having spent a significant amount of time in Germany, that German ticket checkers aren't primarily trying to detect people who have made a mistake, but those who intentionally ride without paying.

[cobbzilla]

This information may be a bit dated, but I visited Berlin circa 2008 and my friend (American expat) who had been living there for 10+ years insisted that we not pay at the subway, because no one checked. Following his guidance, I never paid for the subway, and was never fined. This was just within the city of Berlin, though.

[tormeh]

This varies in place and time. I think close to 50% of my travels on a recent trip were checked.

[2RTZZSro]

Keep an eye out for people guiding traffic in Tokyo. It's much more than in Europe

[astrange]

They’ve fixed it, but Japan used to have a very high pedestrian death rate from being hit by cars.