The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a society so prosperous that people would hardly have to work. But that isn’t exactly how things have played out. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/inequality-work-hours/422775/
Tag Archives: work
Living paycheck to paycheck is disturbingly common: ‘I see no way out.’
People living paycheck-to-paycheck include professors, real estate agents, farmers, business executives, computer programmers and store clerks. Four Americans in 10 say they couldn’t produce $400 in an emergency without incurring debt or selling something. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/12/28/living-paycheck-paycheck-is-disturbingly-common-i-see-no-way-out/
Snapchat: bitchycodes
Posted by Bitch Code on Friday, January 4, 2019
Tough cookie
Watching @sesamestreet with my daughter and I can confirm this is actually how negotiations for journalist salaries/benefits work. #partylikeajournalist pic.twitter.com/Rl5eFwywtn
— Matt L. Stephens (@MattStephens) December 5, 2018
The IBM “Executive” Electric
Making OmniFocus work more like the Things app because reasons
I’ve been on OmniFocus for three months now and so of course I am feeling the compulsion to switch task managers. It’s a curse with me. I keep thinking the next one will solve my productivity problems. For a couple of years I’ve switched back and forth between OmniFocus and Things.
All this switching back and forth is a complete waste of time.
This time around, rather than switch, I’m trying to identify what it is about Things that attracts me. There are two elements I can think of:
One problem is addressed here: Things makes it easy for me to quickly search to see whether I’ve already added a task, before I’ve added a new one. That’s also do-able in OmniFocus, but it requires a modicum of keyboard shortcut fanciness.
The second thing I find appealing about Things is that it’s organized around the idea of a a “big long undifferentiated list of things that you need to get done.” Things makes it very easy to look at your inbox, decide whether you need to do something right away, decide “no I do not,” and move that task to your “Anytime” list. If you decide you need to get to an item soon, but not immediately, you can easily add a star to it. I’m working on figuring out a way to replicate that functionality in OmniFocus. Even with Version 3, OmniFocus still wants you to think in terms of projects, and that’s just not how my mind works. For 90% of what I need to do, I just think in terms of “here are the things I need to do.”
It may have been a mistake for me to switch from Things to OmniFocus in August, but that’s done and I am trying to resist the impulse to switch back. The compulsion is strong though – surely if I just switch this ONE LAST TIME I will have found the perfect task manager and my life will be completely organized!
Workers are ghosting their employers like bad dates The Washington Post
Ghost story: People are no-shows for job interviews and for their first day on the job. People are leaving their jobs without quitting — they just stop showing up.
Gather round, Gentle Readers. It is time I tell the story of the worst decision I ever made in an office. Some of you have heard this. Some have not. Whatever you do in your office today, this week, the rest of this year, you can console yourself by recalling this tale.
— Quinn Cummings (@quinncy) November 7, 2018
Quinn Cummings is a writer, former Hollywood agent, and former child star – she was in the movie “The Goodbye Girl” and the 70s TV show “Family.”
40-hour work-week as a tool of immiserating economic growth
Excellent tips for a good life, from Reddit.
My career would have been much less bumpy if I’d not taken so long to figure out how far a friendly attitude can get you. I’m still working on it.
I’m taking a day off from work today to call people to get out the vote for Democrats
If you’re eligible to vote in the US you need to get out and do it. Otherwise, you’re not allowed to enjoy any of the vintage ads and retro photos I post here. I’ve got some great ones queued for Thanksgiving – don’t miss out!
Mitch
October 10, 2016
LinkedIn will now let you discreetly signal recruiters when you’re looking for a job without telling your boss. (Ingrid Lunden, TechCrunch)
Dave Winer: Less Facebook is OK
Dave is my blogging spirit animal. I like blogging, and I like sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, and Medium. Of those platforms, I get the most return from Facebook. But blogging AND sharing to Facebook and Google+ are just too much work. So I’m going to start focusing mainly on the blog, and just automatically share links to Google+ and Facebook, until those platforms become easier to deal with in conjunction with a blog.
I’m working on figuring out a way I can share short updates directly to those services and to the blog simultaneously. This will involve automated email and plenty of duck tape.
You’re welcome to leave comments here, or on Facebook or Google+. Or just stop reading, even if you’re a close friend or member of my immediate family. I do not require other people to participate in my peculiar hobby.
I will revisit this decision when it doesn’t seem to be working for me, or when the tools for sharing blog content to social media get easier to work with.
I’ll keep mirroring my posts to Tumblr and Medium because that’s easy.
And I’m still trying to figure out what to do about Twitter.
Ellen Burstyn’s Lessons on Survival
On the Death, Sex, & Money podcast:
When Burstyn was 18, she got on a Greyhound bus going from Detroit to Dallas. She had 50 cents in her pocket and a hunch that she could find work as a model. The actress and director, known for her roles in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, The Exorcist, and Requiem For a Dream, says she’d never do that now. But back then, she didn’t doubt herself.
It wasn’t the only risk she took as a young woman. At 18, she’d already gotten pregnant and had an illegal abortion. By her mid-20s, determined not to just get by on her looks, she left Hollywood to study acting with Lee Strasberg. In her mid-40s, after leaving an abusive marriage, she starred as a newly single mom in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. The role was based in part on her own life, and it won her an Oscar.
Now, at 81, she told me she is most proud of her relationship with her son, whom she adopted at birth. “I really think of myself as a work in progress,” Burstyn told me as we sat in wicker furniture in her Manhattan bedroom. “I know I’m a successful actress, but I don’t feel I’m necessarily a successful person.”
Kirsten Bell looks at the women’s workplace gap in a satirical video
Why outsource your work when you can just hire women, pay them less, and treat them worse than men?
Via Eryn Leavens, Light Reading. Thanks!
In Jim Cooley’s open-carry America, even a trip to Walmart can require an AR-15
Disabled and unable to work, Cooley carries a gun everywhere. – Terrence McCoy, The Washington Post
YouTube wants you to work for them for free
YouTube wants to enlist you to help moderate its website – Justin Duino, 9to5Google
Your reward for your unpaid labor on behalf of one of the wealthiest companies in the world: The opportunity to do MORE unpaid labor for Google!
Maybe when I’m done volunteering for Google I’ll go to Walmart and stock some shelves.
We are not amused: The tyranny of forced fun at work
Companies are setting aside work time for leisure, with required employee participation, in the name of team-building.
[Veronique James, chief executive of The James Agency, a Scottsdale, Ariz., ad firm] budgets $20,000 per year for events, which are considered part of employee benefits for tax purposes. The 30-person team has gone indoor skydiving, taken a ballroom dancing class and gone through an afternoon of trapeze training together.
Sounds awful.
David Hewson: Mistakes to avoid when writing a series
The British mystery writer weighs in:
Like most series writers, you see, I never set out to go down this path. I wrote the first Costa book as a standalone and was then asked to turn it into a series by my publisher. After which I made it up as I went along, mistakenly sometimes though I’m pleased to report the errors I committed were by no means rare.
Here, when I set out to write the Amsterdam series, are some of the pitfalls I told myself to avoid.
One of the mistakes he cites: Failing to plan for how the series will deal with the passage of time, as the years go by between books in the real world.
Different series writers handle the passage of time in different ways. Spenser and the other characters in the Robert B. Parker series aged at a rate of 1:2 for the real world for a decade or so, then it appeared they just stopped aging. In the early books, written in the 70s, Spenser referenced being a Korean war vet and an ex-boxer who once fought Jersey Joe Walcott. In the last books by Parker, written in the 2000s, those references are left out.
In the Nero Wolfe books, the characters stay exactly the same age throughout 30 years, while the outside world progresses. In the first book, Nero is in his early 40s and Archie is about 30 and they’re toasting the end of Prohibition. As the series hit its prime, Archie is enlisted in the Army during World War II — fortunately assigned to stay home in Manhattan. In the last book, Nero is in his early 40s and obsessed with Watergate, and Archie is about 30.
By the way, both the Spenser and Nero Wolfe series were continued by other writers after the original author’s death. I read one of the Spenser novels by Ace Atkins; it was pretty good. Surprisingly, it was better and more true to the characters than the later Parker novels were.
I also read one of the Robert Goldsborough Nero Wolfe novels, and found it disappointing. He had the details right, but the voice was off. For example: The book was written and set in the 80s, and the mystery revolved around some detail of personal computing technology. Archie had become a PC expert by then, and provided a clue to solve the crime. Nero Wolfe was portrayed as an antiquarian who disdained PCs.
But I thought that was precisely the opposite of the spirit of the books. Archie, as a man of action, would have disdained PCs in the early years. He’d have learned to use one, because he did Wolfe’s office work, but he would have no particular affinity for them. However, the sedentary genius Wolfe might have taken to PCs, because they are logical like he is, and he can use one while moving nothing other than his fingers and eyes.
Rape jokes and a toxic, frat-boy atmosphere at Apple
Leaked Apple emails reveal employees’ complaints about sexist, toxic work environment (Melanie Ehrenkranz, Tech.Mic)
Getting out of the office
Monitoring software lets employers keep an eye on their remote workers, with keyloggers to see what’s on their screens and cameras to watch them in their home offices. That’s both wrong and bad for business, says David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner at 37 Signals, a company filled with remote workers And Ignacio Uriarte is an artist who works with Excel and other office software.
Out of the Office – Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything podcast
I’ve been working remotely for most of the last 25 years. Hansson is right — employers should keep an eye on the work product and ignore work habits. If the work product is all right, it doesn’t matter if the employee has what appears outwardly to be lousy work habits.
Bill Maher: Clinton needs to embrace the cartoon evil image Republicans have created
Bill Maher: “Hillary has to embrace all the nasty things the haters say and run as the Notorious HRC.”
In character as Notorious HRC: “When Donald Trump gets angry at someone he sends out a mean-girl tweet in the middle of the night. That’s cute. Here’s me killing bin Laden. And Gaddafi’s ass is a little sore these days too.”
Hilarious. I love it. And there’s truth here. Americans don’t want “sweet grandma Hillary.”
Also: “Try as I might, I cannot make my brain work like a Trump voter. Maybe it’s my mother not drinking when she was pregnant.”