Recent quotes:

Zero sum work

Too many service jobs are meant to cancel out the efforts of other service jobs, for example in litigation, where a plaintiff’s lawyer creates a job for the defendant’s lawyer. And often the zero-sumness is asymmetric: a dozen hackers make a theft, and companies everywhere subsequently need to spend collective billions on staff or contractors to protect themselves; a few criminal plague a state, and the government subsequently needs to hire hundreds of officers to make people feel safe; a few people commit accounting fraud, and the ensuing uproar forces companies and banks to ramp up the size of their compliance departments by tens of thousands in the aggregate.