Big Data 2

Yesterday:  A couple of my patients were talking about how stressful and how constant their jobs were.  Later I met with a few of my colleagues for our annual gathering and we joked about how much money we weren't making.  Most of us can track at least a 20% fee reduction from insurance companies over the last eight years -- beginning long before Obamacare.

Part of the reason work is stressful is the result of how we live in a global economy and many jobs, from running a chain store to developing software to track weather satellites, is often done by teams from all over the world who work together virtually.  That means that someone is always working on it, and everyone is always part of the process, so everyone is "on" almost all the time.  Another reason, and here we begin to get into Big Data, is that costs are tracked all the time too.  Data comes from everyone's computer about who is doing how much of what.  It becomes clear from the data when someone's job is no longer needed, then they can be cut, just like turning off a machine.  It makes it easier because the person who cuts someone else out of the job has no real idea who that person is because they may be working a thousand miles away and not across the hall.

Then because people get cut so easily everyone knows that jobs are not only hard to find, they are hard to keep, so just having a job is a good thing.  That means the employer won't have to pay as much because people want to work, and people know they can be replaced easily, either by someone else looking for work, or else by a machine that won't complain.

Because so many people work in ways that are connected to some kind of electronics, whether it is a big office workstation, a hand-held box scanner or a GPS, all kinds of data about how fast people work, who follows rules, who creates better methods and who creates trouble is monitored and algorithms are developed to pick out the "good" workers and weed out the "bad" ones.

The pressure to get something done seems much more intense than it was ten years ago, and certainly much more than it was twenty-five years ago, pre-email, when you could go home from work and not have constant up-dates.

The pressure is great, but to what end?  Most jobs seem to be help business get get better organized so that they can sell me stuff I don't need and probably didn't ever think I wanted.  Most airplane travelers are business travelers who travel to help businesses run other business to make something, somewhere that someone else will sell to me.  While they are traveling they go to hotels and restaurants and use cars and use business machines to keep in touch and to track how they doing, and how much gets made and sold.

It all seems to go around and round.  It creates a lot of stress, but it gives people jobs so that they can have families and buy stuff for their families, which keeps the businesses going

Now everything everyone buys is tracked and priced and that allows someone to advertise to whoever bought what they did to buy more of it, quicker and maybe cheaper.  Which is good because I just got a $900 sweater for $9.99, and if I buy another I get another one free, but I don't need three sweaters, but I  may some day.

Should we sorry about this?  Should we get off the grid?  Keep all our data private, away from the NSA, and Google and Amazon and Macy's and Walmart and Target, or should we just buy another sweater and keep it all chrunning along?

And it's been three years and the US hasnt started a new war.