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I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

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Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#111

Post by mcculley »

diordiderot wrote: post #97
mcculley wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am aware of Pollan's recently well-publicized assertion that caffeine made the modern world. I am unconvinced. I quit caffeine a few years ago. I'm not an unusual mutant. I have the genes on markers rs4410790 and rs2470893 that indicate a typical reaction to caffeine. ( https://enki.org/2017/08/13/quitting-caffeine/ ) Most people experience a temporary increase in productivity until they build up a tolerance for ca…

What was your experience quitting like. I want to but am afraid

It was not bad. I wrote about it in the linked blog piece.

I also recommend /r/decaf where you can get support from others who have been and are going through decaffeinating.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#112

Post by spiritplumber »

vasco wrote: post #32
knuthsat wrote: post #2

Anyone knows why people decide to do this kind of time consuming work? Is the world getting hard enough that there is no alternative? Whenever I see people working really hard in other parts of the world, especially when the country is filled with other opportunities, I always wonder is it just everyone else that is raising the bar and now the standard is very time consuming work. For example, there's year long touri…

There's no "siesta" (a spanish word and custom) anywhere in Portugal, including Madeira. Businesses may close for an hour or so for lunch, but "siesta" is not a thing. Not sure why you picked that as an example out of any other work expectation in any country.

Why not? Siesta makes sense in the climate of Spain and Southern Italy. Isn't Portugal just as hot?

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#113

Post by user-the-name »

baron816 wrote: post #98
user-the-name wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You read this and your first instinct is to attack unions?

Why is your first instinct to assume unions are wholesome, benevolent actors? Unions have a long history of corruption, racism, and being associated with organized crime.

Remind me where I said that, please.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#114

Post by grecy »

diordiderot wrote: post #97
mcculley wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am aware of Pollan's recently well-publicized assertion that caffeine made the modern world. I am unconvinced. I quit caffeine a few years ago. I'm not an unusual mutant. I have the genes on markers rs4410790 and rs2470893 that indicate a typical reaction to caffeine. ( https://enki.org/2017/08/13/quitting-caffeine/ ) Most people experience a temporary increase in productivity until they build up a tolerance for ca…

What was your experience quitting like. I want to but am afraid

I'm not the person you replied to, but I can share my experience.

I used to drink at least 2 cups of coffee a day, and at least 3-4 of black tea.

over a year I slowly backed down to just a single coffee coffee in the morning.. then eventually switched to decafe coffee for that one. I had headaches for about a week, and I think I was irritable.

Recently I stopped even the decafe coffee, and now drink 1 or 2 decafe tea a day when it's cold.

I feel great, save money and don't miss the ups and downs of real coffee - I used to get the sweats, shakes, funny shallow breathing, etc. etc.

I also had no idea I was living life through a "fog", that I didn't even know about until a few months after I stopped. Life is much better now.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#115

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jbay808 wrote: post #56
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but this is BS. The course of a river is a direct result of several close-to-deterministic forces and influences. Caesar's Palace, along with "neurobiology, economics, and regulatory regimes" are manifestations of many different forces, a large number of which are subject to individual and social choice-making. The pretense that "neurobiology is destiny", "economics is as immutable as physics" and "regulatory…

Are you arguing against me, the essay, or the excerpt? I don't think your rebuttal really hits at the main body of the essay, which is about how competitive pressure can trap groups into miserable situations that no individual wants, but which are stable enough to be hard to break out of. It's not that you can really predict the form of societal institutions, but just that they perhaps aren't shaped by free choice as…

The excerpt, mostly.

The essay does continue its fair share of glib side-stepping of areas of social organization that are less deterministic than Alexander likes to suggest, but it also contains some good points and some interesting examples (even if I don't agree with his explanations/projections of all of them).

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#116

Post by ffggvv »

vfclists wrote: post #108
baron816 wrote: post #84

> I stay here because in two years, I'll be 62 and I have a union pension acquired over 37 years. I've spent so much time here that I might as well take that pension and social security and call it quits. Had they not been locked in by the pension, I'd imagine most of them would've quit, and Frito-Lay would've been force to improve conditions. I wonder if unions prefer pensions pretty much for the same reason--it all…

Nope. He is just like a prisoner coming up for parole who doesn't want to get into any trouble that will affect his release. The risk isn't worth it.

would being featured in this article jeapordize it? why even do it when you get a pension in two years

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#117

Post by Tepix »

treis wrote: post #105
pryelluw wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone knows why people decide to do this kind of time consuming work? Is the world getting hard enough that there is no alternative? As someone who had to do similar work for years the answer is that there were no alternatives. No one takes a shitty job on purpose.

That then raises the question of why they're paying time and a half to work their employees to death.

Because they can get away with it and because of greed.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#118

Post by boring_twenties »

distributedsean wrote: post #62
clairity wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as nice as that utopia would be, the fundamental flaw with trying to limit working days/hours is that some people will still pour their whole lives into work, which creates an iterated game that pushes the equilibrium for everyone toward working more. there's no practical way to mitigate this powerful, arguably inate, incentive. the other option is actively coercing a daily/weekly work limit, and that not only severe…

I can't believe people are even having this conversation. As a civilization we solved this problem about a century ago. We know the solution. In the US labour law has been subverted and undermined. Thats the problem. It's not that nothing can be done about it. Lots can be done and has been done around the globe (but predominately in advanced economies, of which the US is one).

Which civilization solved this, exactly?

Of the advanced economies, Western Europe seems to have the exact issue identified by GP: the hardest working/most ambitious workers move to the US. On the other hand, in Japan "death by overwork" seems to be close to or at the level of a genuine public health crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#119

Post by crispyambulance »

jrockway wrote: post #99
vitaflo wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All this will do is drive up the cost of housing as remote workers compete for it, driving out the locals. Remote workers also don’t fully contribute to the economy of the rural area because their place of employment is not in that area. If the company the remote worker works for does well and grows, that won’t grow the rural community.

> All this will do is drive up the cost of housing as remote workers compete for it, driving out the locals. Rural America is huge. If every single person in New York city got themselves a suburban house, they'd take up 0.1% of the United States (about the area of two counties). Housing is expensive in cities because 10 million people want to live in the same square mile. The US, however, has 4 million of those squar…

> If every single person in New York city got themselves a suburban house, they'd take up 0.1% of the United States (about the area of two counties).

Not sure what you're trying to say with this, but putting 10 million people anywhere and packing them into any density would require enormous infrastructure that needs to be built and paid for.

Of course, this does happen at much smaller scales and in many places. The pattern is repeated all over the USA: developers buy up land from farmers who want to retire, then quickly erect sprawling tracts of cookie-cutter mcmansions, selling a pipe dream of rural living in plywood and tyvek box with a 2 car garage. This always has the effect of straining the local infrastructure, making traffic into a nightmare, boosting the cost of housing to the point where it's out of reach for locals, and sucking the taxbase out of the nearby urban area.

Re: I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week

#120

Post by treis »

Tepix wrote: post #117
treis wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That then raises the question of why they're paying time and a half to work their employees to death.

Because they can get away with it and because of greed.

How would greed lead them to paying 40+ hours of time and a half OT instead of hiring another worker?
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