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25-Dec. Shout-out to everyone else at work

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: 25-Dec. Shout-out to everyone else at work

#111

Post by fortran77 »

dlivingston wrote: post #102
hashimotonomora wrote: post #31

Thank you for being grateful. Please also note that Christmas is not a thing for a lot of people. Jews, Chinese, Muslims.

Yawn. Christmas is ostensibly a religious holiday, yet those from all faiths and cultures celebrate it. I am an atheist and it is my favorite holiday by far. I know Jews and Buddhists and Hindus who celebrate. It is a cultural holiday, not a religious holiday. This is a very important point.

What an insensitive take! It is a religious holiday. I don't celebrate it. It's fine if other people do.

Stop trying to shove it down everyone's throat.

Re: 25-Dec. Shout-out to everyone else at work

#112

Post by Kye »

eganist wrote: post #100
mobilefriendly wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's hope Starship lift capacity will make Webb obsolete in a decade!

Doubtful considering how long it took to put JWST together. What, 30 years almost? Granted a lot of that was scope creep but nonetheless, I'm betting it's not launch capacity that's the bottleneck.

The available launch vehicles probably demanded a certain amount of ambition in the plans. You can't launch small experimental telescopes with a short planned operation on the shuttle. It's too expensive just to show up with anything less than Hubble's successor. Now the new space race is aiming at making access to space cheap and common.

Whatever follows probably won't be a big telescope. It'll be all the little experiments that couldn't find funding over those 30 years because there was nothing to launch them without breaking the budget. There's a lot of progress deferred because every launch had to be big.

Re: 25-Dec. Shout-out to everyone else at work

#113

Post by diob »

pkdpic wrote: post #90

> remember that all across the world are millions of other people working the truly important jobs Im going to assume this wasn't intenional but it came off as a little negative given the rest of the positivity in this sweet message. It just got me thinking about underpaid educators and childcare workers who for the most part are off today. Really everyone, we're all in this together right? Keeping this whole crazy m…

Yeah I agree. This reads to me more as one of those folks who is always trying to one up. Oh, you're tired? Well I got less sleep than that!

Shout out to everyone who decided not to work today because of work life balance. You're the real mvp, in my opinion. We are humans, not machines.

Re: 25-Dec. Shout-out to everyone else at work

#114

Post by tomcam »

I retired from an easy job (sold the business for a dollar) and I’m now building a new business from scratch. Heading into my seventh decade and working seven days a week for months now.

Mine is definitely not a truly important job. I have the same attitude as you and sometimes I’ll forget it’s a holiday and when I go out, say to the local McDonald’s, I’ll leave a huge tip and thank them for working.

Re: 25-Dec. Shout-out to everyone else at work

#115

Post by Rebelgecko »

rootbear wrote: post #11

Quite a few of my NASA colleagues worked today to launch the James Webb Space Telescope, and I'm sure most of them didn't mind working on Christmas. And I certainly appreciate all of those who work on the holidays to keep us safe.

A friend of mine is in Kourou, I think she would've preferred to launch a few days ago so she'd be able to spend Christmas and New Year's with loved ones

Re: 25-Dec. Shout-out to everyone else at work

#116

Post by Rebelgecko »

rvba wrote: post #89
sandworm101 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a very common misconception about the military. The uniform makes life easier. I never have to worry about fashion. I never have to figure out what is or is not appropriate attire for a specific meeting. It is very liberating. >> about making an effort at dressing that correlates with wanting to make a bigger effort in general. If you want to make the effort, military uniforms allow that too. The military is…

Dont the fighter pilots try to sound cool on the radio though? Like pracficing speaking with a certain accent. At least that's what was said in that SR71 story.

They certainly try their best to look cool. All of the pilots I've worked with wore a flight suit every chance they got. They probably mow their lawns in Nomex and aviators.

Re: 25-Dec. Shout-out to everyone else at work

#117

Post by CharleFKane »

sandworm101 wrote: post #21
duxup wrote: post #18

I used to work Christmas pretty often. One job, PC support could be brutally busy. The other, tech support for some high end networking equipment was very quiet. I loved working holidays there. Mostly just played video games. Always strange how the jobs that pay less often are more work / tiresome.

Much of that depends on corporate culture. Often it is the lower-paid and more junior people who get the bad shifts. But in my organization (military) it is normal for the more senior people to work those shifts. Responsibility for mission-critical tasks falls upwards. If you are only going to have one person on shift, then that person cannot be a trainee. So all the people I interacted with this morning were relativ…

“ But in my organization (military) it is normal for the more senior people to work those shifts.”

I remember reading a story about Jim Mattis (back before he was famous). A fellow general showed up, found Gen. Mattis was the duty officer on Christmas Day, and asked him how he got stuck with that.

Gen. Mattis told him, “Well, the young man who was scheduled for duty today has a family, and I decided it was more important for him to spend the time with them. So I took his place.”

Re: 25-Dec. Shout-out to everyone else at work

#118

Post by bachmeier »

hashimotonomora wrote: post #106
dlivingston wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yawn. Christmas is ostensibly a religious holiday, yet those from all faiths and cultures celebrate it. I am an atheist and it is my favorite holiday by far. I know Jews and Buddhists and Hindus who celebrate. It is a cultural holiday, not a religious holiday. This is a very important point.

Christmas is literally Christ’s mass. If there’s a widespread religious celebration it’s that.

Maybe a different way to state the point is that you need to distinguish between the relationship of Christmas to Christianity and the Christmas holiday (in the US). If you search on the history of Christmas, you'll find that until relatively recently (late 1800s) it wasn't even a holiday in the US. You will find that in some cases Christians passed laws punishing people for celebrating Christmas in the US. Easter was the dominant holiday in the very early church, with Christmas being relatively minor. We celebrate Christmas as we do in the US because it's an official holiday.

This also says nothing of the Orthodox Christians that celebrate Christmas on a different day. The distinction is pretty clear for them - Dec 25 is purely a holiday, since that's not the day they celebrate the birth of Jesus.

Re: 25-Dec. Shout-out to everyone else at work

#119

Post by midasuni »

enduser wrote: post #77

My wife had already delivered one baby by the time I had tea this morning, fewer than 2 hours into her 24-hour shift. I miss her today and am also very proud of the work she does (Nurse Midwife).

If I were having a baby I’d hope the midwife wasn’t at the end of a 24 hour shift!
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