Alan Kay was right classifying most software engineering as pop culture. It's 2024 and we are still fiddling with spaces around radio buttons, a problem that should have been solved decades ago.
I don’t get this take. “Still fiddling with spaces around radio buttons.” It’s design. Design is unique to the creation. We still fiddle around with spacing around radio buttons because one spacing doesn’t work for every design.
Unless you’re talking about the clicking dead zone, which I would argue is more a problem with not using the right cursor than the dead zone the gap introduces.
I personally first tried 4-day workweek about 10 years ago and still love it. That was one of the best decisions I made in my life.
Especially in software industry, it's not that hard to arrange I believe. Even easier if we do it collectively. And when more and more people do it and it becomes a norm, the income will just readjust and return to the current levels.
But even today, when it's still not a norm, and I have a reduced income compared to my fulltime working peers, I still consider it a bargain. Extra free day is totally worth it. I am basically paying for some extra happiness.
For me 6 months on and 6 months off would be incredible. But of course by the time 6 months goes by, someone has learned how to do my job and maintain all the shit I built, and I'm no longer valuable. Also I lose my health insurance and probably seniority. But man would it be sweet if I could make it work.
This would be my dream setup as well. Heck I would do 7 days a week 12 hour days (with a few mental health days built in) for 6 months if it meant not having to think about work for the other 6. I'll even live on a cot at the office during the work 6!
This is something that will never happen in India because no matter how bad you want 4 day work week theres always someone who will do full 5 days a week and do additional work over the weekend.
> Why employers can't see this on the balance sheet is a different discussion.
Because it isn't on the balance sheet. The job gets done, the overtime is unpaid.
They assume that if the hours reduce, the job won't get done, they don't see each hour of less hours being productive because they've but been convinced to try the fewer hours option.
The comment you’re replying to also has many characteristics of trolling. It’s ignorant of what actually happens inEU countries, as well as the motivation behind the regulations that seem to have become a between noir for a certain libertarian flavour of HN commenters.
Yeah some of the best times of my life have been on 4-day work weeks. Added bonus, they were 10 hours days so we not only got our 40 hours a week but a chunk of that was OT!
Oh yeah I totally get it, but we were hourly rather than salary so it was the best of both worlds. We were working out of town so what's a couple extra hours a day on the site getting paid when your alternative is primarily the hotel room. For us the killer benefit was driving home Thursday night (avoiding all that extra Friday traffic) for a full extra day home with our families
I've switched to 90%, working a total of 36 hours, and spreading that to 9 hours per day. Not even much of a difference on work days, as I used to work more Monday through Thursday to have a shorter Friday. So it's basically 30 minutes more, and a day off. And only 10% less pay instead of 20%.
I would bet most of these protests were funded by the fossil fuel industry. The chances of this many people organically being anti-nuclear are near 0%.
It’s also funny how it was the environmental activists who were the ones who were powerful/influential enough to be “entirely responsible” for killing nuclear energy as opposed to be the poor old fossil fuel industry.
They were able to kill the nuclear energy industry because the economic cost of killing it was low. The alternative to cheap, reliable nuclear was cheap, reliable coal.
They're struggling to kill off the fossil fuel industry because the alternative to cheap, reliable coal/natural gas is expensive (when accounting for energy storage + backup energy production capacity), less reliable renewables.
Ironically, they'd have a much easier if the alternative to cheap, reliable coal/natural gas was cheap, reliable nuclear energy!
> Funny how environmental activists were powerful enough to kill the nuclear energy but not the fossil one.
It's a lot harder to affect something that's so firmly embedded in how we do things as a society. Blocking new nuclear developments was a lot easier than undoing generations worth of infrastructure around fossil power.
A comparison can be drawn to the USA's short-lived attempt at prohibition of alcohol versus the long-lasting prohibition of marijuana which is only now finally calling apart.
The one our society has been at least partially built around for generations has its problems normalized and mostly disregarded until something unignorable happens, which still often gets swept under the rug, where the alternative gets constant scrutiny and has to meet standards the established norm has never been held to.
Interesting to note is that the rated life time (1,000 hours) stayed the same after the cartel dissolved. Even the ones available today have the rated life time in the same order of magnitude: https://www.mcmaster.com/products/light-bulbs/light-technolo...
Sure, the cartel existed. At the same time, the engineering trade-offs are still there.
Yeah that sounds ridiculous to me. Yes I can understand that high interest rates come from periods of iresponsible borrowing by capitalists who have become complacent due to low interest rates continuing for a long time. However, to act like this complacency, which is caused by a deep understanding of the economy and business-minded spirit, would also affect the lower classes in some way even though they are largely unaware of the details of the economy or lack the ability to exploit it, is a strange stretch. Even more of a stretch is saying that the lower class equivalent of risky borrowing because of a feeling of security is... doing crime because you feel so secure in your employment?? Why would anyone in their right mind be compelled to do crime because your life is just going too well and you have too many opportunities to better yourself legally? The claims of the article make much more sense.
> > your life is just going too well and you have too many opportunities to better yourself legally?
Internalized concerns about time opportunity cost and sense of urgency and the aforementioned poor impulse control and irrational exuberance, a mix of all of them too.
Test it on yourself, when you are in a good mood or in a 'let's go after it' mood you are more likely to be speeding, the higher the mood, the lower the impulse control, it can drive you up to 120-130 mph maybe while your favorite song is playing and there is a stretch of open road ahead. Even 140 if your car is powerful, and you don't notice it. You are breaking a bunch of laws in that moment without realizing.
It comes from within, it has nothing to do with finances, job market, savings or any reasoned thought. Thank God! Being irrational and getting away with it, and then looking back in a moment of rationality is an emotion that makes us human.
I think you would need to prove to me that most of these crimes are poor impulse control in everyday activities rather than large life decisions that most people don't do when they have other oppurtunities - like joining gangs.
Have you ever lived in bad neighborhoods? There is no interview process to join a gang, a person starts with something mundane like moving drugs for some very low ranking affiliate from some area of the city to another. Literally just driving, nothing life changing.
You could rebut, why not become an Uber driver, to which I reply: same amount of money that Uber driver makes in a whole day in about 1-2 hours tops.
When you hear news reports saying "X or Y joined Z gang in 2016 and climbed within the criminal organization" , you can be sure that the first mundane task he made for some low ranking affiliate back in 2010 perhaps even earlier.
And do you not think that the problem with the gang giving you way more money is caused by minimum wages being well below the living wage (so legal work keeps you in poverty), social mobility being low (so working hard never gets you an improvement in your lot), unemployment being high, and people's only choices being jobs where they have zero hours contracts and reduced workers rights like Uber (making again, it seem less worth it and still sorta risky as a choice). Deciding to run drugs for a gang is again, not something you do on impulse like pushing harder on the accelerator pedal. You do it based on cost-benefit analysis. This cost benefit analysis comes from you being exploited my capitlists making record profits. They are having a great time and are borrowing recklessly. The people at the bottom of society do not see any sort of benefits proportional to the labour they would have to put in to participate. They are clearly not just happy campers suffering from poor impulse control from having it too good.
> After Russia invaded Ukraine last year, gas prices shot up and the EU introduced emergency measures to cut demand. With winter also unexpectedly mild, demand for electricity fell 5% in the first half of 2023 compared with 2022.
Talking about borrowing from academia, another idea I like is sabbatical. For example a year-long time off every seven years [0]. I did it once and it was great. Planning to keep doing that.
That's a bit harsh. Also you seem to assume American (or western?) spending habit that has no saving. If one would really plan for a sabbatical, I'm sure they would have planned financially from the six years leading to that too.
You must be kidding me, I was a graduate student in one of those "public Ivy" with such a low salary at 50% contract, with a spouse that holds a VISA not allowed to work, and for the duration of our VISA she never worked illegally to make money (which I heard is the norm that we didn't conform to). So I have a 25% of household income with a base that's low to begin with. Yet we can save up.
Hint: we are Hong Kong people. Don't assume people don't save up because they don't earn enough. I'm not saying the system isn't problematic, but I hope I prove your statement wrong.
