>8 billion people, 6 billion jobs.

[littleman]

>Uber driver!

Kind of close.  I thought the last clues would make it easier.

More hints (these ones are more direct):

• class B CDL
• yellow (not a taxi) <- BIG HINT
• crowd control
• chronic shortage of workers doing this job

[buckworks]

School bus driver.

[littleman]

Bingo!

[Rupert]

Oh brilliant, I bet that could be fun!

[Brad]

Nice.  That could be fun and with a shortage of drivers, perfect.

[littleman]

It has been fun so far.  There is also something incredibly honest and pure about this type of work.  I have spent most of my adult life injecting myself into toe consumption process of people buying items they largely don't need.  This is so far removed from that and real.  There is also a lightness to the job too, which is hard to explain.  I bring the kids from point A to point B, enable them to get their day's education, and then I am done.  It has been a long time since I've been able to leave work at work.

[DrCool]

>>It has been a long time since I've been able to leave work at work.

There are days I long for my job I had at UPS back in the mid-90s. Go to work at 10 PM, throw boxes around for 4 hours, and then come home. Paid decent, got some OT opportunities, got a nice workout every day, and the people I worked with were fun to be around. Even got to go on strike for a few weeks which was a different experience.

Something about that type of work is a great reset for the mind. Shows there is more to society than the negativity we see online all day every day.

[ergophobe]

It has been fun so far.  There is also something incredibly honest and pure about this type of work.  I have spent most of my adult life injecting myself into toe consumption process of people buying items they largely don't need.

I got up this morning at 5am to drive a snowplow. It's not really financially significant. It's more like "paid volunteer" in the sense that it doesn't pay enough to pay my property tax or anything important. It's more doing a service that the community needs.

For a while, I hated it because I had a full-time job and I got lots of complaints from neighbors, including at 3am. I "trained" people to shut the fuck up and since then, I really enjoy it.

Like you, I felt like my last job was all about how to get the top 5% to part with another 10% of their money. Even as a historian, I felt most of my work involved moving bits around in a computer.

The satisfaction of moving actual molecules and being part of the infrastructure that keeps society on its feet has grown over time. And there is a camaraderie among the plow drivers, even ones who plow for a different agency who I sometimes meet at turnaround points where duties meet or overlap.

And just in general, it feels like "real" work, not bullshit. I was struggling at the end of my marketing work to not feel like a part of my soul was being taken each day. I stay quiet about that here (for obvious reasons) and at home (because my wife still does marketing consulting), but it's true. And it's not so true that I wouldn't take another marketing job if it paid well and I have a freelance contract I just got. So I don't mean to criticize anyone. But I do notice that there is an odd satisfaction to leaving a ribbon of black road behind me that allows neighbors, UPS and others to get through. Once I start, it's hard to stop until it's done, which is something I've only experienced as a young historian and as a young programmer (and yes, it helps that it doesn't snow every day).

It has been a long time since I've been able to leave work at work.

This too. I will say that I expend a lot of energy studying weather forecasts when something is moving in, but if it's not snowing or about to snow, there is nothing to think about even if I wanted to. As someone who spent most of my career setting my own hours and choosing where I did my work, which meant that there was no clear boundary for me, it's quite nice.

[Rupert]

I have a bus driver joke that is too visual to do over the internet.  I think... i will try, and you can see if you can recreate it.

hold both hands, palm towards your face, little fingers squeezing protruding lips. Then say "bus driver!" in and odd voice then "What?" normally several times, getting louder each time.

finally
"OPEN THE DOOR!!"

I guess it depends on the doors you have on your bus.  Makes me laugh after 40 or more years of telling it to small kids.

very juvenile

That leaving work at work is huge. When we got rid of the websites, it took ages (Not sure we are even there yet) for Sue to leave her computer, trying to help the new owners. Working from home for us eventually took over our lives. (25 years in total)

So good to hear you enjoying it, I wonder when the bad kids will start to get under your skin, hopefully never.

Some friends dont understand why I love selling chairs and beds to old folk. I have come to realise there are 3 main reasons:

1 I enjoy chatting to most of them. some great stories, we usually have a laugh, even when the situation is dire. I know they love the company too. Old folks get lonely, so it works both ways.

2 I leave, if I have sold, having solved a problem for them, I am sad if they need but cannot afford it, as it means I cannot help. But generally I do sell. I have good products.

3 I earn a bit of cash, in a job that I leave behind, and have friday nights back. (Like tonight!) I will never be rich on it, but I hope it keeps me going for a few more years.

So good for you! Enjoy.

 

[littleman]

Funny joke Rupert!

I was actually slightly worried that you all would be taken aback by my thoughts on the topic.  I am glad to see that you understood what I was getting at.

I actually have guilt for some of the ways I've earned a living over the past 25 years.  I look at the Earth's problems and know that some of my actions have not helped.  I've also thought about humanities flaws and know that I've exploited them too.  My Linux project has helps counter that, and is part of the way alleviate that feeling.  I earn a little bit from it, but not enough to sustain my family.  With this job I am getting up early in the morning and helping disadvantaged kids get an education -- such a basic thing, but also feels good.

[rcjordan]

Debbie: '8 billion people, 6 billion jobs' => '8 billion people, 5 billion jobs'

Adafruit Successfully Automates Arduino Development Using 'Claude Code' LLM - Slashdot

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/03/10/0054257/adafruit-successfully-automates-arduino-development-using-claude-code-llm

Debbie keeps saying that at the current rate companies using AI will hit the "Henry Ford Dilemma"

His famous statement was that he could not afford to produce a product that his employees could not afford to buy. He raised wages and cut the work week.

The AI version will be; The company could not sell products when the massive number of displaced employees worldwide no longer had the money to spend.

[ergophobe]

>>  massive number of displaced employees

Now more than ever, it is worth reading or rereading Vonnegut's "Player Piano." First written in 1952, it imagines a world in which almost everything is automated, skilled workers train machines and then are out of work for life, and a handful of techno-elites have all the nice things. And college football players are de facto pros who stay in college until they are 30, but don't actually take any classes.

>> no longer had the money to spend

How this goes is dependent on many factors.

If you had told people in 12,000 BCE that in the future the vast vast majority of the population would have no clue how to hunt and, in fact, wouldn't even know what an atlatl is, they would have imagined a future in which everyone was starving.

If you had told people in 1500 when over 90% of the population worked in agriculture that there would hardly be any ag jobs (2%) in the future, they would only be able to imagine a future in which everyone would be starving and brutally poor.

And in the early factory world, if you had told people that in the future, politicians would be lauding manufacturing jobs as the "good" jobs, they would have thought that if those are the good jobs, everyone must be starving and brutally poor.

We navigated those shifts, but in the initial generations they resulted in shorter people and shorter lives. In other words, the predictions were true before they were false.

[rcjordan]

AI should replace some work of civil servants, Starmer to announce

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/12/ai-should-replace-some-work-of-civil-servants-under-new-rules-keir-starmer-to-announce

[littleman]

>The AI version will be; The company could not sell products when the massive number of displaced employees worldwide no longer had the money to spend.

>In other words, the predictions were true before they were false.

What happens next has to be a combination of both technology, but also politics and economic systems.

I've mentioned it before, but when the bubonic plague gripped Europe, the fate of the peasant class really depended on where they were. In the western part of Europe, peasants gradually gained more freedoms; in Eastern Europe, the opposite happened. AI's disruption may have a similar effect, where some societies will be better off and others worse off. The combination of AI with consolidated political and economic power may be very dark.

[ergophobe]

Exactly. Sci-fi writer Ted Chiang says that anxiety about technology is really anxiety about capitalism.