Weirdly progressive for someone bougie
This is why working from home needs to be more normalized. The corporations have made the market impossible to bear unless you have more than one income. Without the ability to work from home (ideally flex hours), then basically your house goes to shit. You don’t have any free time if it doesn’t.
Your “choice” after putting in a full day of work for enough money to buy a portion of your groceries, is to come home and do everything that your stay at home partner (now, working a full time job), would have otherwise done (basically speed running burnout, any%), or actually relax and accept that your house will always be somewhat messy.
We have to be in the office 5 days a week. My boss who is a boomer/late gen X gets annoyed when people aren’t “butts in their seats 9-5”. I’m a Xellenial and really don’t care when my guys are in as long as they get things done. I keep telling him the more rigid he is with time, the more likely we are to lose good people. We’re already on thin ice with 5 days in office and have been losing people. It’s a constant fight that I have to shield them as much as possible from.
Xellenial - I like that. I’m also an in-betweener - Boomer and X. It’s also called Generation Jones.
Do you feel part of either, part of both, or completely not fitting in with either?
Part of both. My work ethic is closer to that of X, but I very much understand the millennial approach to things. They way I’ve heard that sub-generation defined is “analog childhood, digital adulthood”
In a team meeting I had a while back my lead was talking about making sure we don’t get burnout. I asked if our department could trial run a 4 day work week. Their answer was “company won’t allow that but if you get all your work done by Friday I won’t ask questions if you’re not online”. Productivity and morale immediately went up. Good leads shield their team from the bullshit thank you
My current mid-manager has the same attitude that gets them our respect back, but as long as it’s not codified, it’s one single useful piece of corruption that’d be taken away if that gets noticed or they’d get replaced. Better to have legit short hours than cuts entirely dependent on someone’s will, but we are frustratingly happy eating what occasionly falls from the table. It causes a lot of mixed feelings to say the least.
As a software deceloper I struggle to understand that phrase “if you get all work done”. That will never be the case for me, because (1) there is always more work and (2) we usually plan in more into a sprint than one can muster. That means we are always moving work from one into the next sprint. You are never done early enough to quit even a quarter of a day early.
we usually plan in more into a sprint than one can muster.
That means you have a project manager who doesn’t understand how sprints are supposed to work, and he’s hurting the entire team because of it. You guys will get burnt out, productivity will be shit, and the good people will leave. I’d encourage you to talk to them, or their boss if they don’t listen.
I mean, that’s true, but the point still stands - every first Friday of a sprint there is ALWAYS going to be work to be done.
And what if they’re doing Kanban?
The point is, Fridays off shouldn’t ever be dependent on “all work being done”.
You should be able to tell by the first Friday if you’re on-track to finish your sprint without working Fridays. You can’t tell now because you’re overloaded.
Are you me? This fits almost 100% my curent “setup”… Insane.
I always wondered what would happen if we had a family wage, instead of a minimum wage. The social and economic implications are an interesting thought experiment.
I’ve had thoughts along those lines. Like how everything I buy is just something my employer technically spent money on with the indirect expectation I am making purchases to keep myself relatively fit for work. But atomization is capitalism’s greatest strength, this economy runs on scapegoats and finger wagging.
Meanwhile, in Argentina, legislators granted special powers to the president, and now he’s proposing extending the work day to 12 hours.
As true ancap would do
You’re right, of course, but 🤮
And even that was a compromise from just working until you drop. People organized and died for the 40-hour workweek.
Literally got on trains, headed into West Virginia, shot at each other, stormed machine gun pillboxes, and got bombed. If it weren’t for those people we’d still be in labor camps
Pinkertons murdering workers at Carnegie Steel
The same Pinkertons that were sent after some guy who grabbed a few Magic the Gathering cards?
He didn’t even grab them, he was sent the wrong box by the warehouse by mistake.
Pretty sure Nintendo has made use of the Pinkertons as well.
They also expected a lot less. One of the hardest parts of being a nurse in the modern day is having to be mentally “on” for 2x6h for 2-3 days straight (or just 12h straight if I don’t make it to lunch). I’m constantly having to evaluate and reevaluate every action I take and decide whether multiple different types of clinical alarms are actionable or not moment-to-moment. I actually LOVE getting a nursing assistant assignment for the night because it means I get to just clean things and people all night and not have to think (as much) about every possible medication and health condition and how all of them will interact. I would 100% just make beds and wipe butts all shift and give meds 1-2x if they’d let me. That honestly sounds so mentally zen to me.
To say nothing of the massively increased productivity of modern workers (who now pay to get “trained” in college, instead of having business train employees on the company’s dime).
It’s also the death of the Third Places
https://medium.com/illumination/the-death-of-third-places-and-the-evolution-of-communities-5bbffc01c5eI view college as training for dealing with deadlines and some logic practice (e.g. this essay isn’t coherent; math exam next Wednesday). I never see people come through the door ready to go… it takes a few weeks before even the most basic tasks can be delegated. Their writing still sucks 90% of the time, and their math is usually shaky (lucky we have automated many steps with computers.)
I agree that the pace at which all this goes is exhausting and more breaks are needed, but the third world is still full of people working overtime to overtake these “professional” jobs that colleges purport to prep workers for. Don’t go to an overpriced Ivy League school and take on debt and expect a 20h week… go to a govt sponsored school and be prepared to compete with the remote workers working for the company that is undercutting your employer. Welcome to globalization.
Yeah then women entered the workforce and employers were like, “yayyy! Now we have doubled the labor pool. We can pay people half as much by not increasing real wages for 40 years.”
This is exactly why I liked Elizabeth Warren, she seemed to be the only politician talking about the major issue with tracking “family income” as opposed to individual incomes…
I’ve been single for the last decade, at this point I know it is permanent. I will never have a second income. I do not enjoy living in someone else’s garage as I near 40 years old… Whatever OPs image has to say, I still feel like a complete failure as societal expectations of an “adult” are pretty much everything I don’t have.
You could get a roommate.
Is this not a good-faith suggestion? If you’re going to disagree at least explain your downvote. I had roommates post-thirty and it improved my living situation drastically.
I expect they probably have the same ideology I have, that this statement is very simple minded and throws very big well “you could just marry someone rich” vibes
Like yes the comment is genuine but it isn’t reflecting on the fact that what the person is commenting on is the fact that societal expectations is that households required 2 income sources, which is polar opposite of what the society was built on where you used to be able to build a house and have a comfortable living with one income Source in the house, and now you can have two income sources in the house and still struggle to make ends meet. (hence the ideology of a minimum household wage instead of a min wage per individual)
Take my grandfather for example his house is currently equated at 300,000, he paid 14,000 when he bought it, this was with a stay-at-home wife and a household of four kids. My grandfather was a teacher, so on a teacher’s salary he was able to afford that house and support his kids and his wife all with him being the only one who worked in the house. I believe that’s the point that the commenter was trying to get at and it’s likely why other people down voted that response. “Just get a roommate” doesn’t address the actual issue at hand, it’s a temporary solution to a hard set problem.
But that is just how I see it,
300k on a 14k house? That’s chicken shit lol God I feel bad saying that but I feel worse saying my Nana got 1.5 mil on her 15k house. Somebody can do that math but I just ate dinner, I don’t have any room to eat shit too.
I appreciate your response, thanks!
the working class should have better living conditions, especially in modern times where worker productivity is multiple times higher than post-WW2 technology allowed even after accounting for the higher tech level required for modern society
why not simply lower your living conditions?
Ironic how the one arguing in bad faith is the one complaining about it.
I mean, there’s room to talk about addressing systemic change and immediate quality-of-life suggestions in mutual exclusion, right? It’s not like taking steps to improve your life now is capitulation, and as I said having roommates was a step up in living conditions and made me better prepared mentally and financially to exist. I don’t see the irony at all – apologies if I’m misunderstanding – but we have to accept some nuance here.
It is why I supported Warren, too. The concept is pro family, pro worker and pro business. It is terrible it is out of reach for so many families.
Women fought for their freedom, and the corporations just said fuck it, imprison them all :/
50 years now. The production/wage split was roughly 1973.
I’ll add to this: it was also from an age where necessities were fairly readily available at basic income levels (in most cities) and through a lifetime you could get ahead and upgrade your house along the way while supporting a family on a single person’s income.
Now you can have two people making a decent income and still have issues affording rent/mortgage. Necessities have gone up significantly while stuff like TVs have become cheaper but also shorter-lived.
Are TVs and things really shorter lived? I remember my parents having theirs forever, but I was like 8 years old. Everything felt like forever. That 21" TV that lasted most of my childhood was probably only about six or seven years old when they swapped it out for a bigger one.
Meanwhile as an adult my TV still feels new because I remember paying for it, but it is already 7 years old. And I’m not thinking of replacing it yet.
For computers I had a Spectrum +3 which felt like I had it for a lifetime, but looking at release dates for that and what I replaced it with, I must have used it for 5 years tops, and the same for the Amiga 1200 I replaced it with. Modern consoles have about a 7 year lifespan. They’re cheaper too, when you take inflation into account.
Housing is fucked. Although I do think too many people have this weird idea that they need to live in big cities or popular areas. You can live in a smaller place. They have electricity, internet and food. You’ll survive.
Having seen a lot of failed tv/monitors I’d say they fail easier since we went lcd. The polarizing films get vinegar syndrome, and the LED lens start popping off from aging adhesive at around 10 years.
Beyond that LEDs start failing because of excessive heat depending on the backlight settings in the same timeframe and when one or two have problems it usually cascades into full failure - or trips a check in the TVs software to turn off the backlight making the TV unusable anyway.
Newer TVs usually have even more complexity and will likely fail quicker IMO.
I’ll agree that a modern TV is unlikely to be economically repairable if it breaks. For the price of calling somebody out to look at it, you could have got a used (or even new) one that’s still better than what you had.
Where the good old days you had a local TV repair man, who could fix the few things that went wrong with them. And chances are most TVs then had the exact same faults. It wasn’t just a couple of circuit boards they no longer make that cost nearly the same as the whole TV.
My TVs and monitors have always been fairly reliable. Only really had one fail before I wanted to upgrade it anyway, and that was a cheap Samsung monitor that was pushing 15 years old. A £40 used one from CEX was just as good. I don’t know if I’ve just been lucky, but I tend to stay away from the cheapo supermarket brands. If you’re buying the Deal of The Week from Aldi, where they get you a 65" TV for under £400 then you might have less luck.
15 years isn’t really that long. Older tvs could last decades. My grandparents are still using a TV they bought at least 30 years ago. My other set of grandparents have some tvs still functioning that are even older than that.
My dad bought a small electric fan in the 70s. It still works (he gave it to me.)
I bought a taller fan in the 00s. The motor burned twice in 5 years and then I couldn’t find where to repair it anymore.
I’m in Canada. Even smaller cities are absolutely fucked for house prices or rent right now
I had to laugh when somebody in my office found a house for £25,000 in the middle of my nearby city.
“It’s a nice one too!” he said, pointing at the picture.
I looked over his shoulder. “Mate, that’s the price for the parking space in front of it.”
The property sites are a minefield though. The parking paces are obvious enough to people with eyes, but the amount of cheaper properties and then you see it’s for part ownership…
It comes from a very particular age.
It was after WWII when the US was one of the few countries that hadn’t had its infrastructure destroyed by the war. It was also the late 1940s. In the 1930s the New Deal had shifted a lot of power from the rich capital owners to workers, but because of the waning years of the depression and then WWII, nobody had really seen the fruits of that work. Suddenly in the late 40s, the war ended, the US economy was in a huge boom because it was the only place in the world that could still make things, and workers had all kinds of hard-won protections.
This was never going to be sustainable. Eventually the rest of the world was going to rebuild, which was going to result in more competition, and a relative weakening of the US economy. But, the post-war years also saw union power getting weaker and weaker. A significant part of that was that organized labour smelled a lot like communism, which was the scary enemy from the end of WWII to the 90s. So… no communism, no organized labour, nobody to push back on the rich as they consolidated power.
Also, inflation isn’t really the issue, it’s that workers don’t have the power to demand that their wages go up as well. And, of course, with so many workers supporting an anti-union, pro-business party like the GOP, worker power is going to stay near zero.
Capitalism in action, wages will rise to meet bare necessities plus replacement, and fall to that level as well, regardless of productivity levels.
Preach it!
I think she could be right…
But at least I can watch YouTube at work.
At this point you should be watching YouTube at work. Reclaim the time lost at work by any means necessary!
I’m working on downsizing a lot. I have so much bullshit. And people just keep getting me more. Like pls stop. I can’t handle it lol
Even worse, the entire concept of clocking in and out for ~8-hour shifts comes from factory jobs during the Industrial Revolution. Missing time meant that your station on the line wasn’t being manned and was holding up production. While obviously some fields still operate like that, many modern professions are task-oriented and being forced to be physically present for an entire shift is entirely unnecessary.
