I prefer co-op games like the James Webb telescope. Thanks ESA for a perfect launch.
I'm a simple man, I see actual accomplishments of mankind being mentioned and I upvote.
Line go up is for smooth brained animals.
Rocket go up is for true gentlemen.
Cool pictures also make monkey brain happy.
It is amazing what humans can do when we all work together for something that’s good. I think it’s really when people start trying to take advantage of each other when it all goes downhill…
I love how in every topic about WFH there's some dudebro going on about the economy suffering due to supposed lessened productivity and I'm like... Why should I care?
Don't you even think about the billionaires, bro?
Less trickling down for me
I love the abstract “productivity”.
Like yo, cancer is incredibly productive.
Demolishing subsistence farms and replacing them with cash crop slave plantations is mad profitable.
I could make thousands of dollars in a day if I just sold everything I own.
Our metrics of economic growth revolve around basically doing all of the above, to varying degrees of figurative vs. literal-ness.
This reminded me of an old joke:
Two economists are walking down the street with their friend when they come across a fresh, streaming pile of dog shit. The first economist jokingly tells the other "I'll give you a million dollars if you eat that pile of dog shit". To his surprise, the second economist grabs it off the ground and eats it without hesitation. A deal is a deal so the first economist hands over a million dollars.
A few minutes later they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist, wanting to give his peer a taste of his own medicine, says he'll give the first economist a million dollars if he eats it. The first economist agrees and does so, winning him a million dollars.
Their friend, rather confused, asks what the point of all this was, the first economist gave the second economist a million dollars, and then the second economist gave it right back. All they've accomplished is to eat two piles of shit.
The two economists look rather taken aback. "Well sure," they say, "but we've grown the economy by two million dollars!"
That's not how productivity works. It's basically looking at how much a person can produce with a given amount of labor.
Take that small scale subsistence farmer. Individually, they will live a precarious life. Their country will not have the surplus food needed for other pursuits like building cities, engaging in R&D, developing science, and so on. A smaller and smaller number of people need to be able to feed more and more using less land per person.
Manually copied manuscripts are another example. They were painstakingly copied over by hand in an incredibly low productivity manner. The introduction of the printing press essentially eliminated an art form, but gave rise to practical mass media.
In the present day, computers have been the main form of productivity booster. While arguably social media is a drag on productivity, overall computers open up a broad range of possibilities.
Like yo, cancer is incredibly productive.
Cancer is incredibly costly to society. Think about it, a single person getting cancer could mean many hours of them being in the hospital. Net zero on productivity
Demolishing subsistence farms and replacing them with cash crop slave plantations is mad profitable.
As I detailed above, transitioning from unproductive farms to highly productive farms is necessary. Don't believe me, ask Mao.
I could make thousands of dollars in a day if I just sold everything I own.
That would not be a productive activity since there would be no value added. Arguably there would be less value, since that stuff is likely worth more to you than it is to another person.
People have been told their entire lives that the GDP of their nation matters without ever considering what it actually represents, or how it actually went up.
Great, number go up, but why and who actually benefitted.
The 1%. Productivity has been going through the roof, wages have stagnated for decades.
Excuse the week-old reply but
People have been told their entire lives that the GDP of their nation matters without ever considering what it actually represents, or how it actually went up.
You got a poor, poor education if you were never taught why the GDP matters, or what it represents.
You should care because that profit should be going to the workers who create the value. It doesn't go to the workers, so you should continue not caring about productivity. Damn the man.
Workers aren't the only factor the creates value. Capital and land also add value. Why would people use them otherwise?
That being said, the workers are jointly responsible for their actions in production while capital is merely an instrument of their will and cannot be responsible for anything. Workers are denied the positive and negative results of their actions, so we should not care
Oh no! We got so wrapped up thinking about general human well-being, we forgot about productivity!
But for real, if the economy isn't for people then wtf is it for?
Oh, it is for people. Just not for people like us.
Don't you understand? The line must go up as sharply as possible forever.
It's also bullshit. Worker productivity is overall slightly up with WFH. The economy suffered from the pandemic and everything that entails.
There's no Americans bragging about that. Corporations and the government, sure. The rest of us are to busy living in pain
Some years ago I were in US on vacation and a Cadillac commercial said you shouldn't buy cars made by lazy people wo have 4 weeks vacation every year, instead you should buy an American car.
you should buy a car assembly someone who is absolutely exhausted and has exactly no reason to give a fuck. Because freedom.
"Everything is possible if you believe in it" and destroy the fucking planet while doing so
Most Americans have no clue what the rest of the world is like.
Most Americans don't even understand the progressive income tax system we have, they will go so far as to decline raises because it'll put them in a higher bracket and they think that will mean less take home pay. It doesn't! You should always take a raise!
I believe I'll someday move to a country that has good policies for everything from healthcare, to work life balance, and social safety nets, and I'll never have to deal with the American nightmare again.
God please let me move to Europe I don't even care what language I have to learn I just wanna be able to live without worrying about affording a doctor appointment.
just wanna be able to live without worrying about affording a doctor appointment.
If you avoid the flatlander areas, Canada may be for you. We also speak English; just, without the accent. :-P
(unless you live on the island that's an hour's ferry from France)
Dutch American Friendship Treaty.
Nah, man. Stay where you are, we don't want any 'muricans (assuming you are). Fix what you have instead.
We'd love to fix what we've got if that were a reasonable option. For most people, it's not.
See, politics are so broken here that it's really just a dick measuring contest to see who can wax the best poetic. And then even when we do get a decent president—because let's be clear, Biden isn't a good president—they often cater to corporations long before they even think about making things better for the working people.
At this point, fixing our political system would require either:
- A voting miracle, voting not on party lines but on the actual merits of the candidates, or at least voting for the actual best candidate in the primary of the "least" evil party.
- A revolution, either through ratification of a new constitution or actual war.
Most people in America are too uninformed for number one to be realistic within less than an entire generation. Sure, newer generations are far more informed and are actually changing the voting landscape in some ways, but it's not going to be enough to change everything while we've still got boomers voting for politicians who don't have their best interests in mind. It will take years, if not decades, to get that far.
Meanwhile, most people don't want to be involved in a revolution. Even if everything is peaceful (which it likely wouldn't be), and we're able to ratify the new constitution without many issues (which there would be a ton of), that still leaves us with a tumultuous period of transition. Not many people would really want to live through that. I admit that most people probably would because there's not much of a better choice during that transition, but I guarantee there would be a huge spike in emigration from the United States.
Moving to Europe or Canada is just the best option for a lot of Americans who feel they can't deal anymore with our broken politics, substandard workers' rights, and/or dwindling human rights for LGBTQ people. My family has tossed the idea around of moving to Canada, since it's close, or even Germany despite the fact that my husband and partner make decent money. We just can't keep up sometimes, and as a polyamorous household of three AMAB people, two of whom are married, we're worried for our rights, too.
For most people, moving to a different country is a fresh start, and the majority of them will do their utmost to make sure they respect the country they come into. There will always be some that don't, especially when they're coming from a country like America, but for the most part, all we want is basic rights that other people have and not having to worry about putting food on the table some days.
Edit: commas and grammar
lower unemployment
Doesn't matter, I can only have two, maybe three jobs at once so any more than that is irrelevant to me
higher growth
I get the same $8/hr whether the GDP goes up, stays the same or goes down. You can't leave workers out of the distribution of wealth and then pretend that more wealth is good for workers
Don't worry about it man. You are missing the point. Look at how many billionaires we have now! All that money is going to trickle down any time now!
I don't understand how the hell people even work jobs that don't make minimum of $30/hour at least in California and even parts of the East Coast. Like your rent is $1600-$2200. At 0.8*3200 for $ 20/hour with taxes your take home is $2560 for a 40 hour work week. So what are you just not eating that month?
How about healthcare transportation medical 401K literally anything? Pruning of benefits didn't happen because of corporate greed it happened because people just accepted what they were offered. In the Midwest where apartments might be closer to $700-$900 a month some of this works but on the coasts rent is usually twice that. And a car to get most places is $400 a month with insurance supposing you have the credit.
I work in IT and programming, and Id love to do physical labor and talk to real humans rather than salamanders in silicon valley. But the jobs I see don't even break $30 an hour. Yet it costed me $27 for ham and cheese and altoids, not even including bread where I live in the bay area. It is fucking expensive.
I feel like America is doing so many things ass backwards greed first. But it's not like I have the experience of living overseas or in Canada or otherwise so I don't have much to compare it to, so it's safer by default to live with the devil you know than the one you don't.
What people do is pile into apartments. Yeah, to live alone may cost let's say $2000/month rent. But you can pile 4+ people into a four bedroom apartment that costs $5000, split it four (or more) ways, and they're paying $1250/month. Some of them have significant others, so then you wind up with two people in one room each paying $625/month. (Just random numbers, but that's the general idea of it.)
The people I know who do it hate it, but it's what they can afford while staying in the area they like (and/or were born in, have a community in, etc.).
Don't want to brag, but I took my compulsory 2-week vacation in July. I'm having another week of vacation in the middle of August and I'm taking a whole month off in the middle of October when my second child is born (dad-vacation, in addition to the 18 months that the mom has as paid maternity leave). Oh and all of this is fully paid.
I've had about 6 or 7 weeks of paid vacation this year already. A week long winter vacation and 4 week summer vacation and random days off in the middle of the week every now and then. The good thing about christian culture even though almost no-one is religious here is that we still get a day off for their holidays.
I had a few days off in spring, recently had my 2 weeks and another coming in october.
Not much but it's sufficient to me (but more is always better).*Fully paid by your higher taxes.
Having lived and worked in both the UK and US, yes I pay roughly 4% less "tax" in the US.
but, as I didn't have to pay for Healthcare, and my student loans payments were a percentage of my earnings — vs the amount I've had to pay for Healthcare, copay, scripts, etc here. If we actually compare like for like and assume that Healthcare payments are only not called a tax out of a semantic convention for political reasons despite being practically a tax by nearly any definition - I've pay way more in """"tax"""" in the US.
Assuming the average person earns roughly $65k, would you pay an extra $200 for 100% fully covered, fully comprehensive, $0 co-pay, you walk in (to your nearest hospital, no need to check if they're in network) get an x-ray, a blood test, your appendix removed, stay over night, go back the next day for kidney dialysis or chemotherapy and pay nothing more than that monthly extra $200/rate in perpetuity? Especially as the average cost is $456 (+ co pay) for Healthcare and that usually isn't a "good" let alone the "best" package.
How does that work exactly? Why would the government pay my vages during my summer holiday when I work for a private company? I'm afraid you have no idea what you're talking about..
I will gladly pay for those.
But as far as I am aware those higher taxes fuel other things paid leave. I believe paternity leave is subsidized by it.
I recall going to the UK after brexit, to a house party with family friends. I was hounded with how do you function with only a 2 week holiday. I then shared i had 4 weeks after 5 years. They were so confused that we could function with less than 6 weeks of vacation.
Burn out in the USA is a real thing. Our politicians will never vote for a mandatory vacation for anyone other than them selves
It's amazing how submissive American men are.
If you complain about it some Americans will just call you lazy. lol. Same thing with the cost of healthcare. They'll just tell you to get a better job or better healthcare. They never speak about the root cause of the problem.
We are voting to give ourselves an increase on per diem, but we are also cutting food stamps benefits.
Dude we dont even get presidents day off.
It took me way too long to realize chasing a high pay, high stress career wasn't worth it. I envied my friends and family for being able to enjoy weekends, evenings, and holidays when I couldn't. I missed my best friends bachelor party, I missed Christmas and New Years parties. If i didnt miss them entirely i would show up late or leave early from every occasion. I realized I was going to reach the end of life never having lived it.
Yup, I gave up my 70 hour work weeks. My 50 hour weeks grew my salary and position, then my 60 hour weeks put me in charge of massive projects, which drove me to 70 hours during a couple ERP implementations. I took a paycut overall, but now I work 40 hours.
Does everyone have healthcare?
For a meager $18000/year with copays and premiums. Murica!
Don't forget they won't help you until you spend a couple of thousands out of pocket first.
Canadian here, no, not at all. I had a family doctor but they retired, the new doctor was already full up so I am left without a family doctor. If I need medication it has to be paid for out of pocket, any dentistry that is not life altering (cleaning, fillings, braces/retainers/corrections) has to be paid for out of pocket. Therapy? Out of pocket. Glasses, hearing aids, you guessed it.
Sure you could have a job with health coverage but that is up to the discretion of your employer, they can drop your coverage and all you can do is nothing. Canadian health care is an absolute embarrassment and should never be celebrated as some achievement over the only country with a worse system than ours.
Might depend on province. I'm in BC, never had issue with Doctor. Bi Yearly vision checks, if you don't have employer plan you signup for pharmacare and based on income once you hit a threshold all meds are free. Or free from the start with a disability status application. And I do celebrate our system even though it is not perfect, I had Cancer. Biopsy, CAT, PETS, FMRI, surgery, chemo and radiation, hospital stay all free. cost me $70 parking pass at cancer center. If that was in the USA id be looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars owing
HA
i do!
also im a student and getting paid monthly to do so.
I usually just take a week over summer then the other 6 weeks at other times of the year. Hotels, fights and stuff pretty much double their prices over the summer.
As an american, who gives a shit about all that stuff when your family savings can be wiped out, home foreclosed upon, and bankrupted just because you get sick or suffer an injury!? Even if you plan and do everything right, it could still happen to you, through no fault of your own.
So, IMO until we have universal healthcare like every other modern nation, they all beat us...
or you can just move to a different country. Ez.
I can't speak for others of course, but I don't want to move away from family...
Sorry, didn't see your email cos it's actually fuckin illegal to send me it if I'm not working
I used to work for a French company. My colleagues in France would take the whole damn month of August off, and then complain that North Americans never worked.
TBF my experience with Japanese and American workers is that you spend a lot of time in the office, but aren't particularly productive. Hardly surprising, given there's loads of evidence that suggests a strict enforcement of leisure time, actually increases productivity.
No one works at 100% if they work 70 hours a week and check their emails during the weekend.
Or as I once put it to a boss, when he asked me why I was leaving the office at 1700 on the dot, I finish my work in 8 hours, my colleagues need 9.
Absolutely. I worked for one office where one founder would literally come around doing “bed checks” multiple times a day. I’m talking about a guy with a net worth well over $100 million, seriously connected to federal politics, major local influence on universities and government. This guy spent no less than 15 hours/week checking to see who was sitting in their seats. That was one of his top priorities.
Of course, this bled down to supervisors that he promoted. And as a result, the entire office was full of the most mediocre workers I’ve ever dealt with. Just sit at their desk doing nothing except ready to schmooze the boss. Many were afraid to use the bathroom, go to lunch, etc. Total nonsense.
My old boss told me that he didn't care how many hours I worked as long as I got the job done.
Months later I got called into the office and put on a PIP with the reason being that I left early. I worked from 8:00 AM to 5:30 PM.
I ended up going back to the company I was at before then. They have the same policy but actually don't care. My current boss has told me multiple times to get off the computer and go home. Last time I had to leave early, she told me to make sure I factored in traffic.
That's the thing - if you have plenty of vacations and a short work week, then you tend to actually do work during your working hours. If you're in the workplace for 70 hours every week all year, then naturally you can't do useful work for most of these hours. Which is why it looks like you never work as you have to rest at work.
I'd rather have 30 incredibly intense and productive hours than 60 completely chill no stress do a little of this a little of that hours.
My old job was 60-70 hours of incredibly intense productivity (was working for a Japanese corporation) and I learnt at a rate well above what other workers would due to the intensity, but then I had a breakdown from burn out. Keeping that tempo for fewer hours is the best of both worlds. Employers need to be focused on output rather than time logged.
I'm definitely cutting off my nipples this summer
How very Ichi the Killer.
But the real killer is average life expectancy.
Check out the southern US states for that, especially Mississippi. It's soul crushing that people think that's okay.
And the rocket scientists over in the Mississippi legislature thought it was a good idea to turn down Medicaid expansion funds from the ACA. I honestly have a hard time figuring out how self destruction they let themselves be.
According to Wikipedia, 74.7. Hawaii is the highest with 81.6. That's fascinating, on average people in Mississippi are living 7 fewer years. That's a lot.
Oooo that must sting.
Also, it’s not just about time off, you can have decent time off (not 6 weeks, but decent), but the culture can be hyper competitive.
The obvious problem is that the United States missed the Revolutions of 1848 because they were trying to figure out how to be the Red Wizards of Thay before it existed.
Do an even better comparison: school vacaancies with work vacancies. That's real life. GPT/BARD might help speed it up
Are we gonna include school shooting deaths in those vacancies? Because for some absolutely unknown reason American schools suffer from mysterious shooting deaths multiple times a year. It's so strange and mysterious and there is absolutely no way to stop it. Like, there is literally nothing to do about all the school shootings every single year for the last few decades.
To be fair, they have tried nothing and are all out of ideas.
It's called The Purge. They celebrate it every year
Lower unemployment because there are mainly no basic benefits and people have to eat or they'd die
I'm neither so i don't get it, any help?
Top panel is explaining why Americana are better than Europeans. Bottom panel retorts with saying that they're on vacation. Europeans get more paid vacation time than Americans.
EDIT: Added "paid" vacation time. Also, someone else mentions that it's obligated, so they have to take it. I'm not sure about this, so I'm not editing above to include it, but there you go.
Instead of being smug Europeans could try to help foster solidarity amongst the workers of the world and help Americans fight for their labor rights
Thanks for your comment. I'm currently out of office on annual summer vacation until 30th sep 2023.
savage 🤣
Ok, how do I, as an individual, do that?
By posting memes on Lemmy to piss off Americans, so they start to take formative action after they research the memes context and realise they don't have free health care, cheap/free post secondary education, and mandatory holidays like the EU bros.
Tldr: Post them memes buddy!
Edit: guys... this is c/memes. Y'all are taking this way too literally lmao. Lighten up a bit ffs.
Motivation to even want to have some solidarity instead of smugness is the first step honey.
I would recommend you start by joining the Industrial Workers of the World and paying monthly dues to empower the union to fight the fight necessary. https://www.iww.org/membership/
Establish more labor unions! This is the only solution.
OP being smug also increases the reach of the post by a lot compared to a dry post about solidarity.
That fight is on your own.
No.
maybe stop calling everybody on this side a "sOcIaLiSt" and we might feel like it
Imagine thinking that the American posting asking for worker's solidarity is somehow not left of the socialists
Who cares about Americans?
Man I miss that show. I really should finish it.
post ww2 socialist russia people had more disposable income and more vacation days than americans.
This reddit-ass post
I couldn't justify a 80k-100k pay cut for an extra week of PTO.
What about three weeks of extra annual leave, public holidays, real healthcare with no bullshit co-pays (and unlimited sick days, they don't count towards "pto"), a maximum 35 hour work week... Because that's more like what it would look like for a higher value job like that. Depends on the country and the job, of course. But in my case in the UK right now, and in my last job in Germany, my total "pto" in US terms has been roughly two months. (Which is a lot even here, but it's not by any means unheard of, and easy to get if it's a priority to you). Doing a job with an average salary of about 100k in the US, and I get paid a little over 50k £ for it, which is about 1.5 times the median salary here, so even after the recent inflation it affords a pretty comfortable lifestyle, it's enough money to pay the mortgage and take holidays to the continent in my ample time off.
Sorry, this turned into a bit of a rant, but tldr: it's not just "an extra week"
Still not worth it. I broke my leg 3 years ago I paid $2.4k total with my insurance. Today it'd be more like $5k as my insurance isn't as good, but it would still be worth it to stay in the US even if I broke a bone every 3 months! However, two months of PTO is certainly something. But to be honest, my mentality is in a place where I'd probably end up doing some work on the side if I honestly had 8 weeks of PTO. Even when I had unlimited PTO, I only took like 4-6 weeks a year.
I think broadly speaking, if you make under $120k/year in the US, your quality of life will be better in Western Europe just because of the social safety net and worker's protections. And this is especially true if you're planning on having children.
Which side means I get to have rights and keep them?
Europe I'd say
Sorry to say but the battle is never won there, it's a constant fight to gain and maintain rights for as many people as possible.
And to stop authoritarian rules based on faith tradition.
For this question it's important to understand that there are positive and negative rights, a positive right might give you the ability to do something like shoot a gun, a negative right might be a right that forbids killing you, both are very important and are often in conflict with one another.
Knowing this a 40h work week and paid vacation of 5 weeks is a negative right forbidding your employer from exploiting you for more than that time. On the other hand social security and similar things are positive rights allowing you access to resources where otherwise you wouldn't have any/enough.
Keeping this in mind and assuming that economic rights are generally the most important for freedom under a capitalist system, because fundamentally almost every positive right you want to use also requires you to have money. And assuming freedom is greater if more people are reasonably free than if few people are completely free.
Europe I'd say.
Yeah this is 50-50 my right to maintain my existence as a lesbian/trans woman and my right to like function as a human being with biological, social, and spiritual needs.
I’d love to get to the point where I can tell my boss I don’t answer messages or show up to work during Beltane or Mabon, but as it is I’ll keep hoarding my pto in the hopes that if I get Covid again I don’t have to share it with my coworkers.
Holy fuck I need to radically unionize my workplace…
Neither
I have 30 days PTO + 12 or 13 federal. I also make 40-50k more than EU devs.
Ok?
Okay.
That soons like a good gig. But i am curious, how much of this extra 50k is left after you factor in health insurance and other utilities? I heard health insurance is expensive is the USA, but i actually have no clue how much it is.
After a certain point money becomes much less of a motivator I find. I could probably make 20-30k more in the US.
But I live in a MCOL area, family and friends are close, I work only 4 days a week, my job provides me with an electric car off my choice (with private use), I live close to countries I enjoy spending my vacations in, I have affordable healthcare, I have a very solid safety net, decent pension system, public infrastructure is fantastic, I live knowing my fellow citizens enjoy many of those same things, etc.
I'm not really going to compromise on all that other stuff. The two things I am envious off are space and access to the wilderness.
Not trying to argue but we have all of that in the states. It's slightly more expensive, but again, I make more.
My point, is it's not a hell scape like reddit/lemmy would have you believe.
Starting at 90 or 100k you'll find that the quality of living here is superior in most aspects. Probably not worth leaving friends and family behind of course.
Russia: glances at Europe
Europe: save us, America!
Yeah, someone has to pay for saving their asses in both world wars, they're obviously not going to do it.
You're the kid that bragged your dad could easily beat up the other pre-schooler's dad.
I think we just finished paying that back, actually.
Why are you bringing the Soviet Union in to this?
Hahaha, uwot?
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