141–150 of 165 posts
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Why should I not simply work 24 hours a day, every day of the year? This way no one can out compete me.
You're forgetting to account for sleep time, time to eat, and at least one bathroom break a day.
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The beauty is that I want this experiment to run and see how it performs. The pessimism I have (based on last 10-15 years of decline and anti-capitalist motifs today) is that we're going to shy away from looking at the performance of this project anyways and prevent anyone from talking about it. 4-day workweeks will become the de-facto standard. By force. My prediction is that we will see shaming of companies that ev…
> I'd like to see 6-day work weeks as an experiment. IMO this needs without a lot of additional context. Being from the GDR (East Germany), before studying and then working in IT I got to experience a variety of production jobs. From brewery, sausage factory, chocolate factory, to various metal working and consumer equipment making jobs, both as part of regular education (yes, school kids went into production as part…
I also wanted to add that those two things are separate for the purpose of this discussion:
- How people feel (after shorter or longer work periods)
- How productive people are.
From my experience, while doing a more mundane "conveyor belt" type of job I sure would like to have shorter work days too, I'm still able to churn out pretty much consistent quality to the end. That is different from (very design oriented, vs. standard not-much-brain-needed) code writing, where quality of what I produce suffers dramatically and I have to redo everything the next day(s) or get a lot of hard to maintain and/or debug code.
Of course, people may burn out more quickly or have negative health outcomes later, but that still is a different discussion than the one about productivity.
I love a three-day weekend as much as the next guy, but I don't understand how people are pushing for shorter workweeks, and even for universal basic income, meanwhile all the Starbucks near me close at 7pm because they're short-staffed. And restaurants and grocery stores and everywhere you look, there's still a labor shortage.
Maybe they opened a shop or 2 too many?
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I actually think it's quite astounding that they haven't been forced to give this up, and I hope they never have to. Specifically, when I go to my GP, the staff are always busy, don't appear to get much of a break at all. I doubt a half day on a Wednesday makes up for extra hours put into their job just to get through the week.
I mean to me it makes sense that they would be less busy if they worked a full week like everyone else. When we have a shortage of GP's and it's impacting people across the country (and having a knock on effect on hospital A&E usage) disallowing 4.5 day weeks would probably help. There are obviously much bigger issues at play (e.g. recruiting GP's) but that doesn't mean we should ignore things that could impact immed…
If you’re working 20% less than your competitor, you will fall behind. There’s no amount of mental gymnastics one can do to reconcile that fact. And if true, then the market should resolve this.
The beauty is that I want this experiment to run and see how it performs. The pessimism I have (based on last 10-15 years of decline and anti-capitalist motifs today) is that we're going to shy away from looking at the performance of this project anyways and prevent anyone from talking about it. 4-day workweeks will become the de-facto standard. By force. My prediction is that we will see shaming of companies that ev…
I also don't think you should conflate society as a whole with an empathy-based irrational class of highly compensated knowledge workers.
If you take pizza delivery for example this is really just an argument about the number of hours per week for mandatory overtime as practically all non-knowledge work is best measured in hours of labor.
Lowering this to 32 hours for pizza delivery is rewarding economies of scale that can better absorb higher labor cost. Rewarding Pizza Hut at the expense of the locally owned pizza place that goes out of business.
Pretty much in line with economist Joseph Schumpeter 100 year old prediction about the end of capitalism in that that our capitalist system will be so successful that it will create a class of people with so much leisure time that this class has nothing much to do other than to try to improve the system and in turn destroys it.
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But that's not for you to decide. We live all together, and someone getting sick from an infectious disease concerns us all.
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Semi-off-topic, but did you try taking your kid to play ice hockey? It is one of the best sports for kids that have a lot of energy and need to shake it off. And they have so much padding it is really safe. Where I live we have lots of 5-6 year olds (and a few 3-4 year olds) who really enjoy it. Usually clubs have old kids equipment that you can borrow for the first couple of months while you try it out.
He takes soccer classes, will do basketball also in the fall. We are trying to pack his schedule with fun things to do as those things reopen. Going through the 3-5 stage during COVID wasn’t fun.
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Not everyone chooses that his life be dedicated to keeping up with or beating the competition.
But then they should be not surprised when they find themselves unable to find a well-paying job.
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I guess it's amusing to you because you don't have children.
I think wanting daycare is totally reasonable though. I just think it'd be nicer if it didn't have to be school. Traditionally, multigenerational households would have helped with child rearing but now it's often pretty much entirely on the shoulders of the parents which I know would be extremely draining.
It goes much further. In 90% of human societies up to 60 years ago, it was normal for children to spend a lot of time interacting with neighbors and others outside of the home and schools environments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_takes_a_village
Furthermore, the extreme forms of helicopter parenting where children are not even allowed to walk to school by themselves is very US-centric and very modern.