32-hour workweek still is too much. For six-hour workdays would be a reasonable change. Specifically for the United States - also a mandatory 20-workday vacation (I live in the EU, heard Americans only have 2 weeks an that sounds nightmarish).
People need to have lives, not just jobs+recovery. Working for 5 consecutive days feels like living in the office and only coming home to sleep and do home chores - this doesn't even justify commuting.
Not just “2 weeks”, most offer 10 days - and that has to include sick time off.
I once had 4 days sick, and my manager had to call me into a meeting with HIS manager to impress upon me that there was 6 months left to the year and I could only take 2 more sick days before they would have to count it against me on my performance review.
They won't reduce the workweek without reducing your pay. There might be some 3-card-monte-style shuffling so that it seems like they didn't (at first), but no rational person (or company) pays more for less product.
If someone will consistently pay you to do it and you consistently agree to sell that, then it is a product to be bought and sold. Pretending otherwise just leads to mental illness, like leftism.
Please put the snark down for one second. Unions have been intentionally eviscerated by both the government and the media (eta: as evidenced by at least one sibling comment). It took a heroic effort to start one union in one Amazon factory, and that was under "the most pro-union administration in American history" (and it is sad to realize that it might be near the top of that list).
Setting that aside, employees still have no leverage as many benefits that people rely on are tied to employment requirements. People can't take off time to retrain for a better job, have to come in when they're sick, etc., because if they upset their employer, they may lose their job which means losing food assistance they need for their kids, and employers know this...
To infect more people. This should be outlawed as sabotage and bioterrorism. If an employee would come in sick to my office I would be really mad at them, fire them if they do so twice.
If there were some kind of organization like that, mobsters would take it over, and they'd collude with the business to squeeze the workers for all they're worth. Believe it or not, some of us have first and secondhand experience with unions, so we don't pay much attention to the communist propaganda bragging about them. Besides, in an economy where many are unemployed and desperately seeking jobs, they tend to want fewer barriers to getting hired, not more. Only the most mature companies can afford the extra overhead of a unionized workforce... how many of the people here reading your comment work for startups? Do you think that they read it and say to themselves "gee, I know that we can barely afford to keep the lights on and we're just six, but I wish there was a union here holding the CEO's head under water until he gives us more raises"?
I get that you don't like unions but this is a weird argument. Unions being corruptible isn't a great reason to imply companies should be able to do anything they want to their workers and the workers should placidly accept it. Neither is your next implication that some companies wouldn't be viable if they had to pay more so therefore paying more is bad.
In a labor market, companies aren't entitled to labor and laborers aren't entitled to jobs. If a company isn't viable then it isn't viable. If a job doesn't pay what you want, you dont have to do it. Things get complicated (intentionally?) when companies control large swaths of jobs at once or have outsized impacts on their employees' lives and future careers. Employees don't have nearly as much impact in the other direction (individually) and this asymmetry is the cause of lots of abuse historically. Unions are one way to help steady and maintain the labor market in order to keep it fair and efficient and powerful.
In general, things are worth improving even if there aren't perfect answers.
Never really heard of one that didn't end up corrupted. Usually from the get-go. To call my argument "weird" tells me how little personal experience you have with unions.
>Neither is your next implication that some companies wouldn't be viable if they had to pay more so therefore paying more is bad.
Not some. Practically all companies. In tech, maybe only the FAANG set would be able to shoulder that burden.
>If a company isn't viable then it isn't viable.
Some companies are viable in one environment, but not in another. If you're changing the environment to make fewer companies viable, then you're putting more people out of work. This should be obvious. It isn't, I think, because some second grade teachers pass children who should have flunked out.
>In general, things are worth improving even if there aren't perfect answers.
Dimwitted people will try to "improve" things right until the world burns down around them. Any attempt to point out to them that this is occurring will be met with even more ambitious-but-ill-conceived attempts at improving things.
> Never really heard of one that didn't end up corrupted.
We have them across the pond and they work for us - they are us. We can run for election in them. We can run them.
> To call my argument "weird" tells me how little personal experience you have with unions.
Sounds like you are the one with a limited experience of the world. The world is much bigger than America. The idea that "unions can't work" is fed to you and you gobble it up.
> Not some. Practically all companies. In tech, maybe only the FAANG set would be able to shoulder that burden.
In Europe, companies have to pay a living wage and they still function. They just don't always turn into giant funnels to siphon wealth into the hands of the ultra wealthy. If that's failure, then let them fail!
> Some companies are viable in one environment, but not in another. If you're changing the environment to make fewer companies viable, then you're putting more people out of work. This should be obvious. It isn't, I think, because some second grade teachers pass children who should have flunked out.
We have unions in the UK/EU and companies are still viable. Only people who failed geography and don't realise there are other countries out there would think that.
> Dimwitted people will try to "improve" things right until the world burns down around them. Any attempt to point out to them that this is occurring will be met with even more ambitious-but-ill-conceived attempts at improving things.
Whereas the really clever people want to keep things the same, because they are terrified of change.
> seeking jobs, they tend to want fewer barriers to getting hired, not more
Like it or not, this is worth highlighting indeed. As I heard unions are an extra barrier for job seekers: in some occupations a union also has to approve an employee, not just the employer and this can make getting in the occupation prohibitively hard. Whoever knows better pleas comment, especially if and why this is not a problem.
Of course it would be a problem. We don't have that on this side of the pond. Unions are meant to be democratic institutions - members can table motions and other members can vote. If members of a union vote to keep such a barrier for new employees, it's not the concept of unions that's broken. It's the members. Unions aren't some kind of demon you summon from the dark side.
Depending on what you consider a startup, they employee less than 10% of full time workers in the US. The great majority of folks are not working for startups.
>The great majority of folks are not working for startups.
I was speaking to a particular audience, here, which isn't a randomized sample of the American workforce. And the sort of people who do the sort of jobs that we all do here, we're the ones that it's being talked about "shortening" the workweek... because for the other crowd, shortening the workweek happens when you piss off the assistant manager, and they only schedule you for 3 hours next week.
Additionally, you might consider that instead of focusing on the less than 10% that are startups, you should talk about the more than 95% that aren't gigantic fortune 100 companies with employee head counts numbering in the tens and hundreds of thousands.
> Believe it or not, some of us have first and secondhand experience with unions, so we don't pay much attention to the communist propaganda bragging about them.
In the EU I've never heard of a single union other than itself. Every time I see the word "union" it's about the US. This doesn't mean they don't exists in the EU, in fact it some googling uncovers they pretty much do, yet somehow they appear invisible unless you look for them actively. Meanwhile it seems they are always hot in the USA as they get mentioned so often.
One might say the same about you and the communist twaddle that you peddle. Yo guys zinged me for 30 or 40 internet points yesterday, but the only votes that counted were cast last November.
So the fact that we have unions in the UK and Europe, <40h weeks, >25 paid days of annual leave and 8+ days of public holidays, employment rights and don't beg for tips, free healthcare and, shockingly, free enterprise.... makes us communists? Do you even know what communism is? Sounds like you deserved to lose these internet points.
Better avoid living in states (not only American) which claim a right to surveil, let alone decide what takes place within your body. If your state issues such a law - run, it is fascist now, no matter how nice it seems in other aspects so far.
Does anybody know a good service providing an API capable of categorizing URLs? I have a big collection of unsorted bookmarks I want to categorize by subject. I was planning to use Pocket for this. Is there any good alternative?
What is Oberon useful for? Apparently it's not very feature rich: limited Unicode support, limited graphics support, no XML, no JSON, no HTTP. Or am I wrong?
I'm sad all eInk monitor makers want to ship high refresh rates and other parameters to compete with classic displays, making them this expensive. I would rather buy a cheap 1 Hz monochrome eInk display (at least FullHD size and HDMI/DP-attached though) just to display text documents than a ridiculously expensive eInk to watch action videos on it (what a ridiculous aim, right tool for the job anybody?)
These ARE the same slow panels. The high refresh rates are basically done with compromises on quality during refresh. Large eInk panels are expensive. Just look at how much a 13" eInk device is vs. 10" or 7" or 6". This is a whole level over 13".
If you are going to use these on a computer at all you need some sort of high refresh mode. Things like scrolling and typing are just way too annoying without it.
I agree!!! I just need color syntaxing and basic stuff for reading. They are so focused on playing Youtube videos (even reviews focus on that). These devices are purchased by people that READ. We have ipads and other monitors for the other stuff. I think tech is filled with management that are detached from reality. It is like Elon alienating the base for Teslas... Red States DON'T buy EVs dude. What happened to common sense in tech... Just look at what your customer base wants THEN design the product. Don't focus on what the competition is doing.
Your comment seems too charged emotionally and politically (so I'm afraid people are going to downvote) but makes a lot of sense. That's so weird they focus on videos when eInk lovers mostly are readers and mostly own other devices to watch videos on.
It might be a fun project to create a UI for use with low refresh displays. Maybe have config options for super low refresh rates, color calibration for the new eink displays and adjust the scroll step size. No mouse pointer, just keyboard shortcuts.
I dream of such a lo-fi UI: no animations, no redundant elements, no individually different look&feel for every app - only the information you really need, displayed where and when it really makes sense, updated when necessary, formatted uniformly.
In fact there already are some projects of eInk-orientd OSes (e.g. MuditaOS). I don't know how good they really are though.
> If you are going to use these on a computer at all you need some sort of high refresh mode. Things like scrolling and typing are just way too annoying without it.
I hate scrolling and hardly ever scroll really - I just use multiple vertical displays to fit every page fully, only switching pages. Surely this whole discussion thread can't be fit in a screen but I'm perfectly comfortable "scrolling" it with PgDn.
I'm used to slow-response typing (waiting for seconds before a word I typed appears when using modern software on old PCs). In fact I don't even look at the screen when I type until I finish a sentence - despite typing fairly fast I have a habit of looking at the keyboard. I don't mean this is a right way to type yet it proves seeing characters displayed immediately is not essential.
I touch type too but the lag is very much there. Correcting a typo is difficult because unless you're perfectly counting key presses you don't know where the cursor is.
Sure, this can be an inconvenience when you type a lot and use a single-display setup. But I read way more and consider single-monitor work resemble running on crutches. This said I would probably put an eInk and a classic display alongside each other to display what I have to read on one side and what I have to edit next to it.
Messenger apps even have separate panes for displaying message threads and for editing the message you are going to submit - I could put these on separate displays (if the apps would allow moving panels around the way classic desktop apps did).
This seems a reasonable assumption to me but I don't mean to insist I'm right.
Slow monochrome eInk panels have been around for 2 decades. Mostly built into pocket book readers, phones (like Motorola F3) and niche devices like supermarket price tags rather than computer monitors attachable with common connectors.
Okay, perhaps it's not the speed which makes them expensive, yet manufacturers and researchers mostly brag about making them faster (and more colorful) rather than making them more cheap (what I would prefer them to).
A text heavy application where update rate matters is programming. And I would be the target audience for that.
Also I would suspect the high refresh rate isn't the main cost driver here. You can simply refresh eink displays with different methods that offer different trade offs
> A text heavy application where update rate matters is programming. And I would be the target audience for that.
I wish you get what you want soon. Nevertheless I would prefer there to be a cheaper option for those who only need to read static documents or watch dashboards of information which doesn't change fast.
> You can simply refresh eink displays with different methods that offer different trade offs
Needless to say eInk displays aren't meant to refresh the same way classic displays do. Only the regions which actually change are supposed to redraw. 1 Hz doesn't mean the whole panel is fully reset 60 times every minute, only that it takes a second to display a change. Is this what you mean?
I'm not sure update rate is that important. Subsecond sure, but 33Hz seems overspecified for showing ascii that occasionally scrolls a little. Maybe critical for mouse pointer IDEs?
Yes, mouse pointer is among major articles driving refresh rate demand. Code auto completion/hinting is another one. But these are not essential for every workflow, there are many people who don't really need these. The most itchy thing is waiting for a letter to appear on the screen after you press a key - everyone wants this real time but some people still can tolerate a delay.
In the end it is about latency. A common example for me would be multireplace, where I select a word, ctrl + d through all instances and replace them. The second step will present me with multiple instaces of often wildly differnt usages of one word per second. This being sluggish or unreadable would be a dealbreaker for me, personally.
I can imagine that a somewhat responsive display would also be important for vim users.
> (what a ridiculous aim, right tool for the job anybody?)
High efficiency computing where we dont update the screen until absolutely necessary. Efficiency isn't just good for mobile/battery devices, it's good for everything.
What I am glad to leave behind and forget like a nightmare is Windows local networking with shared folders etc - these never worked nice and the last time anybody I know used these was pre-2010. Today we just use NextCloud, Matrix, email and Git for all our collaboration needs.
Who's "we"? I work for a company who drank the MS cool-aid, so running Windows on laptops, using Office365 for e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, teams for chat, sharepoint / onedrive for shared ressources.
Have you tried launching a local app by typing in the start menu on a default win11 install with limited / slow internet access? Good times. How about doing some operation (say delete an e-mail) in one window of "new" outlook and having the others refresh?
I have never understood how some otherwise reasonable people are able to consider this absolute shitshow of a work environment good enough.
In my opinion Total Commander has always been the most ideal (also fast) file management tool since Windows 3.x. It was named Windows Commander back in the days but it still supports Windows 3.x as Total Commander.
I thought most meetings take place because people are to report how many meetings they organized/attended as this is considered a productivity metric.