odoriferouszephyrs:
The other thing about knowledge workers is that they’re exquisitely sensitive to even minor sleep loss. Research by the US military has shown that losing just one hour of sleep per night for a week will cause a level of cognitive degradation equivalent to a .10 blood alcohol level. Worse: most people who’ve fallen into this state typically have no idea of just how impaired they are. It’s only when you look at the dramatically lower quality of their output that it shows up. Robinson writes: “If they came to work that drunk, we’d fire them — we’d rightly see them as a manifest risk to our enterprise, our data, our capital equipment, us and themselves. But we don’t think twice about making an equivalent level of sleep deprivation a condition of continued employment.”
And the potential for catastrophic failure can be every bit as high for knowledge workers as it is for laborers. Robinson cites the follow-up investigations on the Exxon Valdez disaster and the Challenger explosion. Both sets of investigators found that severely overworked, overtired decision-makers played significant roles in bringing about these disasters. There’s also a huge body of research on life-threatening errors made by exhausted medical residents, as well as research by the US military on the catastrophic effects of fatigue on the target discrimination abilities of artillery operators. (As Robinson dryly notes: “It’s a good thing knowledge workers rarely have to worry about friendly fire.”)
Fuck that shit. 4 HOUR DAY FOR 8 HOURS PAY. Solve this problem as well as the unemployment rate both at once.
You may do more than just solve the unemployment problem, but actually create a labor shortage—from the POV of labor, a good thing. You can only say that cutting hours while holding salaries constant will increase employment if demand somehow stays the same. But people with more money for less work will feel as if they have more money—duh, because they do, or, to be exact, their income has doubled while their hours have been halved, but increased leisure is also experienced as increased wealth—and so demand will go up.How much? Mebbe a lot. But if employers can only have twenty hour a week workers, they’ll have to hire more people, people who were previous unemployed or underemployed, thus increasing total demand more.
(I call this the “no lump of demand” argument for cutting hours while holding or increasing salaries. It’s basically the “no lump of labor” argument against cutting hours carried through a bit further. Incidentally, nobody ever argued for cutting hours as if demand were fixed. Canadian historian/economist Tom Walker is the expert on this canard.)
(Source: azspot)
You can’t buy friendship. Rent, yes, for exorbitant amounts, but buy, no.
Something to keep in mind in those rare moments when one is both flush and lonely.
authenticiouslycounterfeit wrote:
What I said: I’m a communist.
What they heard: I want to bring back the Soviet Union. I approve of all of Stalin’s, Mao’s, and Pol Pot’s policies. I hate free speech. I’m jealous of rich people and I think your grandparents from Russia deserved all the political repression or poverty they may have suffered. I am a complete psychopath.
which is brilliant and funny ‘cause it’s true—that people hear it that way, not that it’s a correct interpretation (must I say that it isn’t? Of course I do—this is America, goddamn it.)
Yet when one says:
I admire the Founding Fathers
No one hears:
I am willing to tolerate, if not actually support, slavery. I believe in unequal distribution of wealth. and that only the landed and propertied elites should have the franchise. If we must give those without either a role in public life, let it be strictly limited and subject to approval by the selected members of our class.
There’s more justification for interpreting the second that way than there is the first.
(Source: soviet-champagne)
“You get what you pay for”—a real example of commodity fetishism.
Filed under bromides unbound
“Nobody resents you more than somebody who’s loved you”
William Gaddis, The Recognitions
The last post was TMI, wasn’t it? Sorry. Somehow I feel I owe it to her to tell the truth. For somebody with the problems she had, she managed to accomplish a few things with her life.
Who’s the greater achiever: someone with every material advantage and a large supportive family structure who goes on to have a successful career in one of the classic professions (physician, lawyer, engineer) or creative field (artist, actor, musician, writer) or someone with the deck stacked against them—and this isn’t me duplicating her paranoia: the facts of her early life were truly shitty—not much in the way of material means or emotional support who goes on to just keep their head above water most of the time?
Yesterday was my mother’s birthday. She would have been 83 years old. She died in 2001 at age 72.
She had some serious, untreated mental illness. I don’t know what her symptoms added up to but she had serious paranoid delusions—thought the phone was being bugged, that she was being watched, etc.—but on occasion could get it together enough to hold down a job. Funny thing was, it wasn’t because her symptoms were in remission; she still had the same delusions, but she felt she could handle “them,” whatever they were after or whoever “they” were. She was relatively happy during these times. Otherwise, she was miserable.
I guess that’s what you call someone will mental illness who’s “high functioning.”
I started this blog with the intention of it being a series of aphorisms, but it’s hard to be an aphorist when your natural inclination is long-windedness. But, as William S. Burroughs wrote in The Place of Dead Roads something is worth doing especially if you’re not good at it:
Life is an entanglement of lies to hide its basic mechanisms.
Kim remembers a teacher who quoted to the class: “If a thing is worth doing at all it is worth doing well… .”
“Well sir, I mean the contrary is certainly true. If a thing is worth doing at all, it is worht doing, even badly,” said Kim pertly, hoping to impress the teacher with his agile intelligence. “I mean, we can’t all become Annie Oakleys doesn’t mean we can’t get some fun and benefit from shooting… .”
The teacher didn’t like that at all, and for the rest of the school year singled Kim out for heavy-handed sarcasm, addressing him as “our esteemed woodsman and scout.”
Burroughs had a gift for the aphorism. From Naked Lunch: “Gentleman, I will slop you a pearl: you find out more about someone by talking than by listening,” something I’ve frequently forgotten, always to my bitter misfortune.
