The FT has been covering this for a while, and some of that coverage is quite good. FTAlphaville also has a fair bit available, often from Izabella Kaminska. Pretty good coverage with some solid pieces from various research houses etc.

There are a great many "jobs" we'd be better off without. A lot of them are in investment banking and stock trading.

Hey, I want to upmod you but I'm waiting on a report I'll never read before I make a decision.

You need to call a meeting to name a committee to form a study group to get to the bottom of these unread reports.

Seriously, though. Imagine how easy it would be to write a macro to generate "work" for these idiots to do for the rest of their lives, only it wouldn't fuck up the economy like when they do it "for realsies."

Make it an MMO: as their meddling destabilizes the virtual economy it leads to conflicts among the various NPC factions. Those conflicts generate quests for more traditional adventure-type players to tackle.

No no no no!

A macro doesn't have the refined senses of a CEO that pulls in 15 million in bonuses a year for gutting the company and letting go of the employees that were his best friends and comrades for over 11 days.

At my work, you are not allowed to build your own macros. You need to have a developer build it. I had a developer contact me the other day regarding a change request that I submitted 3 years ago and I have not worked in that division for the past 2 years.

There are some folks that work near me and they use a stats program. Any time there is a change, there is ton of paperwork to justify the change. It also needs to go to a model validation team before it can be implemented, so changes that used to occur in minutes are now delayed 2 weeks. Worse, the model validation team doesn't seem to test anything, they seem to only act as another layer of documentation.

Writing this makes me wonder, why am I still there?

Because nowhere better would employ you? I have a similar problem.

While probably not entirely similar, where I used to work, in the days before mp3 players were on every cell phone, I brought in a CD with the WinAmp executable and about 600 megs of music to listen to. It installed nothing, and the network admins didn't detect anything amiss.

Perhaps something similar for macros could be done? Everyone just has their discs of magical work-help they carry about with them.

You shouldn't rely on us to pay you to stop, you should earn it through hardwork. Ideally with three part time jobs and a healthy diet of depression and hopelessness.

I'd been wondering about the potential inflationary potential, nice to see it addressed here.