For 11 Years, the Soviet Union Had No Weekends (2018)
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Damn. Recently, talking with folks down at a resort in Mexico, the workers all reported 1 day off per week, and it was staggered. Seems similar to what was described in the article. Painful.
For me, it would be ideal if everyone worked 3-4 days. A day for rest, a day for errands, and a day for fun means three day weekends are ideal from a worker perspective. And it is important that those days can overlap with others - what good is a day of fun if you can't do it with friends and family?
But from your own example, it is completely unfeasible for the resort, and myriad other businesses where there is no "productivity booster" - you just need bodies in slots :/
The problem is that, as states, we are not translating these increased profits into increased quality of life for citizens. UBI is the most obvious way to start doing it.
What we want is to in effect charge companies in relation to how much profit they're making off replacing workers (increasing productivity). When a company is able to replace 10 workers with technology, they should pay at least enough taxes for 5 workers to live off UBI. Repeat until everyone that wants to can live comfortably off UBI. While other people voluntarily work to make a lot more money than UBI.
Or to put it another way, most people don't have to work 16+ hours/day just to stay alive.
What people choose to spend that time doing is up to them. Most will use it to watch TV/Netflix/etc while a much smaller number will work on skills and things to make their lives better.
They almost never had to, so that's a pretty lousy bar to use.
If you're working a ton of hours in a low wage job, there's a good chance you can't get a stable home if you cut back to a reasonable amount of hours. In a situation like that it's not "optional", even if you wouldn't actually die.
Even if you have a solid 40 hours a week job, and you get paid well enough that you'd be happy cutting back to 32 hours a week, it's very hard to arrange something like that. It's only optional if you have an especially good negotiation position or you're lucky, not if you're a normal worker.
> a much smaller number will work on skills and things to make their lives better
It's pretty awful to expect someone that's already working far more than full time to spend even more time practicing work skills on top of that. Anyone that can do so is amazing, but anyone that doesn't do so should not be blamed.
Edit: To the dead reply to this: No one with an ounce of self respect is going to incentivize leisure? Even if you have no humanity in you, and don't think people deserve a single free hour in the week, it's less efficient to work people until they're worn out. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face because the poors don't "deserve" it. People don't get depressed because they lack 100+ hours of labor to slog through in a week. The ennui of feeling no purpose kicks in a hell of a lot lower than that.
If you limit your perspective to the last ~120 years, you are correct. I did not.
There were a couple periods where the norm for many was horribly long factory hours. But in the long view it was definitely not normal to work 16 hour days, year round, with modern minimal break lengths.
That's a pretty naive thing to say IMO. Humans almost always had to work that much, especially after agriculture was invented.
As automation becomes more pervasive, billionaires and VCs are not the only ones who should be benefitting from it. Wage laborers should also get rewards from that, meaning higher wages, and no need to work 40+ hour weeks. We should be working on improving QOL for all people, not just wealthy asset holders.
But sure, just call them lazy so you can feel good about yourself when you keep treading all over them.
Are you sure about that? For example, air travel used to be a luxury only for the wealthy, and you wore your best clothes for a flight. Now airplanes are filled with people dressed in sweats and paying very cheap fares. Tourist destinations are buried in tourists the world over.
Buying a home computer used to cost $3,000. Now you can get one for a couple hundred, and that's in inflated dollars.
What you get when you buy a car is enormously better than what was available in the 1960s. I love old cars, but I'm well aware of the overall poor quality of them, lousy crash resistance, high maintenance, crummy handling, etc.
Clothes are historically cheap as dirt. My mom would sew layer after layer of patches on my jeans. Nobody does that anymore. My aunts would knit socks for me. Nobody does that anymore. (Still have the socks, they're treasures now.)
In general, things are so cheap it makes no sense to fix or maintain them. Just get another one.
Kids get a small mountain of toys for Christmas. Back in the 60's you got a handful of items, and did not feel deprived at all.
You can get a color TV for a couple hundred bucks, one that is far better than the $$$$ ones from the 1960s.
Think about all the entertainment you can get for free from the push of a button. You can get an MIT education for free in your home. You can get any question answered by typing into your computer.
Steak is much, much cheaper than when I was a boy. Then it was a luxury.
Fresh food from all over the world, 12 months a year, at your local grocery.
Our homes are much bigger than they used to be.
Car stereos used to be so expensive people stole them all the time. Today car stereos are so cheap they are worthless.
I built a home theater in my basement from equipment I got at the thrift store for $50. The HD projector was $600 new, and is probably even cheaper today. The screen was $50. The same setup would have cost $20,000 25 years ago, and wouldn't have been HD.
I remember when home stereos were expensive, like $thousands. Now you can buy excellent equipment at the thrift store for $20.
I remember buying stuff mail order from Sears with 3 to 6 weeks delivery time. Now I am spoiled rotten by getting it in 2 days.
Teenagers were expected to work starting at age 16, at least up through the 70s. Now a person's first job is often after college.
Nobody had a microwave or dishwasher when I grew up. Every meal meant time at the sink washing everything by hand. People rarely ate out. My how that has changed.
Seriously, we live in a golden age.
You used to be able to cover tuition and living expenses on a single part time job as a college student.
A single family household from a single high school educated worker could support a house, a car, children, a non working spouse, food and utilities.
Healthcare did not used to be this ruinously expensive.
Our TVs being cheaper, bigger and more colorful is cold comfort in comparison. It's great the tech, car, logisitics and textile industries has delivered more for less, but the rest have gone the opposite direction. Many would be very happy if they could buy a 1970s lifestyle at 1970s prices.
I'm not sure things are much different today vs back then. Two working parents were always the norm, even in the mythical 50/60s.
https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2...
Prior to that most households were single income.
For example, these days said couples tend to be older, more educated and with less kids on average. Which may explain why they're more likely to be dual income. You don't have time for a second job when you have 5 kids to raise. But that's less likely to happen today, statistically speaking.
So your comparison most likely compares people in different stages of life, not the same people across generations.
But in any case, the worker participation rate has stayed between 58% to 68% over the last 70 years, with around 63% today. Doesn't sounds that big of a difference to me.
Housing is more general of a problem, probably because it's also considered investment (with zoning as a way to add value), renting is a business...
In Canada for example, housing is significantly more expensive on a cost/hours_worked basis than large chunks of the USA, and many households have debt load levels higher than the US. Cost of normal goods such as gas, utility bills, food, consumer goods, etc are also more expensive than the USA. You can see similar dynamics in Europe too.
IIRC you were talking about regular people's problems. Europe is not uniform, but in the richest countries you can live comfortably off a blue collar salary, no matter the taxes or cost of living. Actually it's infuriating how our government compares our taxes (Spain) to northern countries in percentage, omitting the fact that what you make after taxes and expenses is still higher because raw salaries are much higher there.
Since the price of housing is more land than the building itself typically, a house that is literally double or triple the size in interior sqft (1500 to 3000 sqft for ex) can cost 'only' %25-%50 more.
There is also an availability factor, most of the US & Canada is suburban, you don't really have much of a choice to buy a small house. And with the price dynamic described above, it doesn't matter as much. You need a house to live in either way.
I've also heard that housing is crazy expensive in places like stockholm, and people do crazy ass stuff in amsterdam like no principal payment mortgages, but I'm not as familiar with the real dynamics there.
Building codes require houses to be middle class houses. That means they cost more. If there are any left, take a look at homes in your area that were built before 1960. Quite a different. It would be illegal today to build the house I first bought, in almost every aspect. But it was a typical mass produced house built around 1970.
Secondly, at least in Seattle, the city government regularly heaps more and more expensive burdens on landlords. For example, recently they passed a law that the landlord is financially responsible for damage to an apartment caused by domestic violence. Regardless of your feelings about that, that causes rents to go up. Ever increasing restrictions on evictions causes rents to go up, again, regardless of whether those restrictions are justified or not.
It's not until the land is completely used that cities turn to revitalizing their core. But even then, new construction favors the upper class. If you're going to tear down a bunch of old bungalows, they need to be replaced with something pretty expensive to make the project economically viable.
> they need to be replaced with something pretty expensive to make the project economically viable.
Which implicitly requires there being lots and lots and lots of people who can buy them.
One thing to note, what we often think of as luxury housing or new building regulations adding cost tends to be %10 of the cost of new housing. Expensive housing typically comes from expensive land and zoning bureaucracy delaying things.
I call it the lexus effect. A luxury lexus vs the camry it was based on is often a %10-%20 BOM difference vs. bigger margin it has when sold.
I live in a neighborhood full of 50's era ranch houses that are ~800sq feet and between 80-120k. It's an industrial area surrounded by factories and shipping yards, for that authentic, disco-era experience. Without the internet, cable, and cell phone bills, you could probably keep monthly living expenses under $1500. There's a grocery store within walking distance and bus service (not sure how great it is though).
Depending on what you call "high school educated," this is doable and more on a single income. Not for a McDonalds fry cook, but someone making $40k/yr could raise a family here. It would just be a sacrifice. I'm surrounded by single parents doing this everyday.
Health insurance is still fucked though.
People have more money available, the resource is scarce, and the bare minimum to live costs less. This means that people are willing to pay more of their income and these people end up taking up the supply.
I also notice your time scales jump back 50+ years to the 1960s ... But, do all of your same observations hold up within the last 30 years? Some, maybe. How about 20? Much fewer. How about 10 years? Almost none.
Funny, that must be why attempting to make objective arguments with anecdotes does not actually qualify as "objective". Huh, imagine that.
novok, by contrast, makes all the same points, correctly, and without all the histrionics.
It can simultaneously be true that the technical 'dividend' is enjoyed by practically everyone in the developed world, and that the necessities of ordinary life have become more expensive, saving rates have plummeted, and precarity has been normalized.
Indeed, this appears to be the case. Expecting every comment on the Internet to cover everything salient about a given topic is unrealistic. Good thing we have the nested forum format, so that other people can fill things in!
Please do not make personal attacks against people on HN. There is literally no reason to tell someone that their on-topic and very-relevant comment/response "is low quality doesn't add to the discussion". It is petty.
> Expecting every comment on the Internet to cover everything salient about a given topic is unrealistic. Good thing we have the nested forum format ...
Again, my response was utilizing the HN format to fill in some missing information and make a very relevant point about improved formatting of arguments in general.
> It can simultaneously be true that the technical 'dividend' is enjoyed by practically everyone in the developed world, and that the necessities of ordinary life have become more expensive, saving rates have plummeted, and precarity has been normalized.
It CAN be true, yes. It can also be true that the technical dividend is far out-weighed by rising costs. It can ALSO be true that globalization has changed the pricing dynamic mentioned in GP more so than a "technical dividend".
> Sigh ... I hope this style of commentary comes to a swift end on the internet (and especially places like HN)
?
housing - a couple factors at work here. Increasing population means housing is going to cost more. There's no getting around that.
education - you can get an MIT education for free on youtube. I've been filling in gaps in my education that way. For FREE!!! How awesome is that? The cost of attending college has indeed gone way up - due to government policy.
healthcare - this cost increase is driven by government policy.
Which is a very relevant form of regulation with regards to housing costs, because this regulation tends to exist more in places with high housing demand. So, you can still buy a cheap house in the middle of nowhere where there also is likely (gasp) no regulations on housing. Not sure what the causal relationships are exactly but the correlation seems to be there for sure.
I just sum it up as the baby boomers fucking over their kids for a quick buck, but shrug what do I know?
I missed the note about the grinding cost-increases of college that people don't apparently need to work to pay for (and everyone apparently goes to!).
And the entry for the increasing deaths-of-despair rate that is turned the US life expectancy rate negative.
And the one for young folks' increasing need to delay what used to be normal young adult things, like home purchase and marriage. And...
I think what you mean is that, if you have money and are over 40, the world will cater to you. (And to be clear, I'm in that category, as are many here.)
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/life...
About 10 years more than 1960.
Try this: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db355.htm
The birth rate going down will help a lot in making things more sustainable long term.
> In general, things are so cheap it makes no sense to fix or maintain them. Just get another one.
> Steak is much, much cheaper than when I was a boy.
> Fresh food from all over the world, 12 months a year,
This is terrible for the planet. I'm on board with the other stuff but our disposable economy and distant supply chains are a disaster.
So, it is a stretch to say that these are the productivity-boosters that have brought us into a post-scarcity+UBI phase of humanity. The real problem in our modern economy is very clearly our lack of productivity booster innovations. Most recent advancements in standard of livings have been in mobile apps and games. Wowzers.
True job productivity innovations are near nil in recent times, specifically for very physical businesses like a Resorts. Globalization does make certain things much cheaper, however. But, that doesn't really help the Resort and that is entirely different conversation all together.
My sister is a fitness instructor and it leads to some interesting effects on her time. She's busiest between 6am and 9am and 5pm to 10pm. Middle of the day? Nothing to do, everyone's at work.
Hiring people is costly, and if everybody works fewer hours you need to hire more people to get the same output. More people also means more communication and management overhead. So suddenly changing your scheduling approach is probably net negative in the short term, if other businesses continue with the previous workload.
If most of the population agrees that 5x8 is reasonable work hours, then that's what employers pursue with scheduling. If you pursue to change the status quo (say, 3x8 or 5x6), then you should be ready for people who still think that 5x8 is perfectly reasonable and fine for them so they are going to continue doing it their way. And to the market which may not adjust to lower individual output during a significant part of your lifetime.
Of course it the entire humanity just woken up tomorrow and everybody decided that it is enough to work only 3 days per week and anything more is slavery, then the scheduling will just adjust and more people will be hired to fill the time slots.
Only for the smallest of businesses. Your commercial rent is costly, your insurance is costly, your materials are costly. People are the least costly resource for any non union (most of world) work. Training is costly, in many cases, granted. Maybe that should be the focus, in the cases where it applies. Saying workers are costly across the board is incorrect.
Their hourly rate isn't the issue. It's about the commitment to fulltime, which SEs often avoid via contracting.
Seriously, where is this "hiring is costly" sentiment coming from? Especially when it's for a job that other people are already doing.
I think it works with healthcare because it's very shift work friendly. Each customer is a discrete appointment and independent and thus more flexible.
Yes, ideally each worker would work half the hours for double the pay, but that is not free to the resort owner.
For technical roles, I can think of some downsides. It would presumably mean more employees, each with shallower institutional knowledge, and more general management+communication challenges (think Mythical Man Month).
I'm reminded of the question of whether it's a good idea to overwork junior doctors to the point they're undeniably sleep-deprived (which I understand is standard practice). I believe studies found that although sleep-deprived doctors do get patients killed, it's worse to increase the number of times patients are passed between different doctors.
If you're doing 'stateless' work, like retail, the game changes.
One compares 28 hour shifts to shifts that were 'reduced' to 24 hours, for example. You're going to be zonked long before that, so the change has a fairly small benefit. Handoff is also something could be presumably be fixed with better training and/or technology, whereas sleep deprivation is bumping into fundamental limits of human physiology.
It baffles me that the medical field is so attached to these hours when there's tons of laboratory experiments and real-world data (pilots, long-haul truckers, armed forces, etc) showing people don't do well.
I guess we're just throwing mental and physical health out the window? Do those things not matter because they don't directly influence profits?
Wouldnt you prefer no days off and criminal penalty for tardiness?
Fun days are somewhere in between. You need your group to have its time off all at the same time, but sometimes a service employee needs to be working at that time.
I'd think that in Mexico, those resort workers would probably prefer that everybody get Sundays off. But resort guests and management would prefer that services be available every day of the week, including Sundays.
The described arrangement appears to be that full staffing is equal to 6/7 of the employee roster. Or, conversely, that the employee roster is 7/6 (117%) of the daily staffing requirement. How difficult would it be to expand the roster to 7/5 (140%) of the requirement, or 7/4 (175%), for two or three days off per week, respectively? That still wouldn't address the non-synchronized schedule, but it would provide more downtime.
This is somewhat better than the stores, where most full time workers must have open availability 7 days a week. I think the longest I went without a day off was 11 days, during the holiday season. My managers went probably 2-3 weeks.
We were supposed to have been better than most US retail in these respects. Half of America is a de-facto vassal state to the other half.
There is no "prison sentence for being 20 minutes late" in the decree.
Google translated version of the decree: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=https%3...
Depends upon if those in charge of setting this up viewed family as a bad thing.
From the article:
>The ostensible reasons for the shift were economic. Its accidental social consequences, like families being unable to come together, or religious practice made more challenging, seem to have been seen as a bonus. In one diary entry dated shortly before the changeover, the historian Ivan Ivanovich Shitz wrote disparagingly about how the nepreryvkawould kill off Sundays and all Christian holidays, he wrote, and make it impossible for people to meet in groups, whether union-based or political, or as a family. Finally, he wrote, its primary function seemed simply to generate the illusion of a culture of intense work.
Now, a lot are pushing for universal healthcare and similar social safety-net programs. Confusing these two things is a hallmark of either a propogandist or one of their rubes.
For example, does their view of communism allow for some private property or not (and often with some special subset that I've commonly see named personal property instead of private property).
It is also a bit like those who advocate for the free market. Many advocate for a free market. Very few advocate for a market so free that humans can be traded. And there are many products that you will find some think should be regulated within their free market while others do not.
Unfortunately, propaganda (from both sides) has made it synonymous with full blown authoritative Soviet unions style regimens.
Unfortunately, few people on either "side" take the time to look deeply into the movement(s) they support or rally against.
The employees in a company form a community. The community of employees owns the company, aka worker owned company. The profits of the company are distributed to the community.
This is a core idea in communism, everyone has a common stake.
Property is supported by the state. Property rights are meaningless if they aren't recognized and enforced legally.
Like I said, "communism" is very broad.
A central theme in communist ideology is that workers own the means of productions. That can have many forms, but does not necessarily lead to a centralized state, like the Soviet one.
EDIT: I find that the bs jobs are a symptom of centralized/privatized means of productions. Which is why I made the "pretend to work" comment. Corp style jobs resemble soviet style labor. Bureaucracies come in many forms. Some look like the USSR, some look like middle management.
They can be enforced illegally as well. Now that can be viewed as a shadow state and a shadow legal system operating within the primary one, but under such a view we would find that the state exists as soon as any two humans work together and as a consequence the common meanings of words become suspect.
I think a better way of looking at it is that property is supported by violence. Civilized society we give rights to that violence to society to deal with those who don't behave because in general it is more efficient for all of us, but if that society betrays our expectations we will resort to violence against even that society itself.
It also isn't just property rights. All basic concepts, including up to the right to life, follow the same pattern. Thus a society that can destroy property rights is free and capable to destroy rights to life or bodily integrity.
They're pushing for communism, because it is increasingly apparent that they have been screwed by the existing system from a moment dating to some time before their parents were born, and they'd prefer not to be. Since no other system has been publicized such that it has given them some hope of not being screwed, they are increasingly choosing the option of being slightly less screwed personally at the cost of the whole economy being more screwed.
It's just the Nash equilibrium. Once the voting leverage for screwed people passes a tipping point, their choices will become reality, and everyone who might prefer some other option will have no better chance of a President of the United States trying to get a Supreme Court justice appointed within the last two years of their term, when a unified voting bloc controls Congress.
> But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself;
Early Marx's entire vision is foundationally based on the scarcity labor tipping point you're describing. He wrote a lot more after that as well.
They can see with their own eyes what he could only imagine and speculate upon, and then some. And what they see is that not only are factory-owners richer than non-owners, who aren't really even "workers" any more, but that some owners have insignificant need for labor, and that even they are inferior to the owners of the machine specifications and procedures, the holders of patents and trademarks.
They can also see the output of factories that produce modern war materiel. Pilotless aircraft can carry missiles aloft, linger a while, and then rain fiery hell down upon people who never even knew they were up there. A single bomb can end tens of thousands of lives in a flash of light. Even a single person can unremarkably buy enough firepower from the consumer supply chain to terrorize an entire city for a few hours, from a rented hotel room. A private company can reach orbit. A religious cult can synthesize and deploy chemical weapons. Seaworthy cities, powered by uranium, with miniaturized airfields as their roofs, are becoming obsolete, thanks to machine-controlled weaponry.
Nobody is that visionary, as to predict the politics of a world that has reached the bounds of human imagination, and then continued to progress another 50 years.
When people stay home, and don't go to work--either voluntarily or laid off--for fear of a global pandemic, the stock market still rallies. The event that is as near to a general strike as I have seen in my lifetime is being dismissed as a temporary inconvenience to business owners. We all saw how the former Soviet Republics delivered up all their capital into the arms of a few oligarchs within a matter of years as the former government order crumpled. Who now has the power to wrest control of Gazprom from Vladimir Putin?
The youth in the US need never have even heard the name Marx. They can come by their new brand of communism completely from scratch, just by reflecting upon the history of the last 50 years, and extrapolating the simplest of models into future decades, and onto additional simple models of water use, housing starts, and climate change. It is easy to see that a mere handful of people are looting the entire planet, and if that is allowed to proceed unabated for a few more years, an inflection point will be passed, such that even a concerted, aligned, and organized effort by 99.9% of the human population cannot stop it peacefully via the existing institutions.
* Communism is viewed favorably by 37% of millennials.
* 22% of millennials believe society would be better if private property were abolished.
* 15% of millennials believe the world would be better if the Soviet Union still existed.
It really should not surprise you that a generation that grew up with the rising wealth of their baby boomer parents (so were used to some comfort), and were suddenly cast into a world as independent adults and yet simultaneously completely fucked over by the Great Recession ... would find things that are drastically different from the current status-quo (e.g., Communism) as appealing.
That being said, most Millennials would not want anything close to actual communism ... I think.
I would say that prospects are always better for those that command expertise in the technology of the day.
Ex: A developer has much better prospects today than in the past. A library probably has the same prospects now as then.
Even working as a burger flipper they can get a degree, move up the management chain, etc.
A couple generations ago people were starving and out of work due to the great depression. We had a recession in 2008, and had no where near the same impact. Just more people on welfare, and people lost money on houses.
Plus, everyone always can be an entrepreneur, which is the source of all our current wealth anyways.
no it isn't
> Even working as a burger flipper they can get a degree
did you get a degree while working a full time job?
> everyone always can be an entrepreneur
no they can't
> Borrowed from Medieval Latin sabbatum (or from Vulgar Latin *sambatum), from Ancient Greek σάββᾱτον (sábbāton), from Hebrew שַׁבָּת (šabbāṯ, “sabbath”).
It's funny cause in Romanian we're using "sâmbătă" for Saturday, which is pretty damn clause to that Vulgar Latin term "sambatum" (which makes sense, Romanian being a romance language), but our official etymological dictionary [2] gives the old slavic "sonbota" as a source.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/s...
In English we derive it from Saturn, which is also a god, but I guess too far removed for us to think about it. AFAIK a fair number of European names for days are derived from pagan gods. Even more if you count the Sun and Moon (Sunday, Monday) as gods, as many historical European cultures would have.
Even Thursday is for Thor, Friday for Freya. Which is to say Germanic gods too, not just Greco-Roman or Hebrew.
My favorite weekday names are Japanese:
日曜日 nichiyoubi, "sun-weekday"
月曜日 getsuyoubi, "moon-weekday"
火曜日 kayoubi, "fire-weekday"
水曜日 suiyoubi, "water-weekday"
木曜日 mokuyoubi, "wood-weekday"
金曜日 kinyoubi, "gold-weekday"
土曜日 doyoubi, "soil-weekday"
Aside from Sunday and Monday, these names derive from the elements associated with the planets Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn respectively, as indicated in their Japanese names (kasei, suisei, etc.) -- planets named after the gods who gave the weekdays their names (or their rough Norse equivalents in English).
The pairings of elements to planets seems to have been done by the Chinese many centuries ago.
Monday = dies Lūnae = moon = 月
Tuesday = dies Martis = fire = 火
Wednesday = dies Mercuriī = water = 水
Thursday = dies Iovis = wood = 木
Friday = dies Veneris = gold = 金
Saturday = dies Saturnī = earth = 土
Sunday = dies Sōlis = sun = 日
Edit: Looks like China did have the same paring of elements to planets as the Romans did in the form of the 七曜 but they weren't used for days of the week until contact with western civilizations along the silk road until after at least 400 AD. Ancient China simply numbered the 30 or 29 days in their lunar calendar and used groupings of 10 days (旬) but didn't really have a concept of a fixed cycle of days with a day for rest and prayer. The crazy thing is that the east and west somehow came up with the same parings between elements and planets.
Edit2: After a bit more research, looks like I was mistaken about the element parings. Rome was the one that paired planets and their associated gods to days of the week, but China was the one that paired elements to planets, and the two sets of parings mixed together afterwards. The fact that gold/metal was an element should have been a big hint since Ancient Greece only considered 4 classical elements while Ancient China used 5.
Tuesday through Friday are all named based on the Germanic correspondence for a Roman god, as established by the Romans (Tyr/Odin/Thor/Frigg (not Freya) - for Mars/Mercury/Jupiter/Venus). There was no corresponding Germanic god for for Saturn, so it kept the same name.
The weekends had already received Judaic/Christian names, therefore weren't changed and are quite similar to the other Romance languages: Saturday is "Sábado" (derived from Sabbath) and Sunday is "Domingo" (Dominicus, Lord's day in Latin).
Also, early in the Catholic tradition, Sunday the first workday and only Saturday was reserved for religious activities. For this reason, in Portuguese, the week starts in the "second" day.
Even more curiously, Russian also used that word for Sunday, but then it gradually shifted to mean the whole week, requiring a new name for the day. Technically, this means that the entire week is "do-nothing" in Russian. ~
Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar#Work_weeks
Its technically illegal, but theres nothing to stop an employer from firing you for consistently refusing overtime shifts. Time clocks rarely allow you to punch in anything later than the time specified in the system, or 5 minutes before.
Employers can also retaliate for your lack of participation by altering your work shifts between day/night, or cutting your work hours to make you poor. This was pretty common at most of the factories in the south i worked in while saving up for trade school. I once worked at a glue manufacturing plant that routinely scheduled 14 hour overtime on the weekends a few times a month. I refused once, and was fired the next week.
I actually think the American corporate system is the best of both worlds; you have central control and authority of a corporation which makes it efficient but if that central authority is poor the corporation dies so they're incentivized/evolved to be competent. And you as a worker can leave that corporation anytime you want, so as long as workers are scarce they're strongly incentivized to be good to you. Not a perfect system, but pretty good compared to any alternatives I've seen (e.g. soviet-style top down government control with violence as the enforcement mechanism).
The big difference is the ability to consent and not consent. Yes, some places demand mandatory overtime or you will be terminated, but that is it. They won't pay you anymore, but you are free to do whatever else you want. In this case, the alternative is often prison. That changes the equation so that a person is not consenting to a trade (work more hours to have this job instead of finding an alternative) but instead being forced under threat.
This difference is important.
As for the illegal side of things, that is a problem and something we do need to change. Laws should be equally enforced.
There'd be a thousand "It was probably ancient aliens that made the Soviets do it, eh?"-jokes as a response if I shared the link.
The change of starting point of years counting is also religiously motivated, because currently we have a 2020 years from the birth of Jesus Christ.
When I see that BC and AD change the meaning, I suspect that it is a part of the same process, probably third try to change calender.
Various revolutionaries naturally want to put themselves on the top or are otherwise hate Christian culture and therefore have tried to change the calendars or change what the BC/AD/BCE/CE acronyms stand for or whatnot due to their desire to exclude Christianity from their cultures.
There are plenty of other calendars in existence, though. Japan still has eras based on their emperor at the time, for example, though the western calendar is a lot simpler because you don't have to memorize a huge list of emperors and do a lot of math to figure out how many years ago something happened. Quick, how long ago was Showa 55 if Showa went up to 64, Heisei up to 30, and 2020 is Reiwa 2?
And that's an easy one.
https://www.ewc.co.jp/Pages/Information/CalendarEN.aspx
Yeah, it was 1980, so that was 40 years ago. How many got the overlapping wrong and were off by 1, though?
In west tradition it is often INRI inscribed above Jesus head. That stands for "Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdæorvm". Not king of Romans, but king of Jews. That was declared as His fault, because that time Judea was a province of the Roman Empire, not independent kingdom, so when one declare himself as a king, he really declare rebellion. This was used by the Jews to force Pilate to execute Him.
Implicit side of this: He was really the King of Jews and He put the end of Old Testament history.
Birthday of Jesus Christ was accepted as a starting point for calender several hundred years after His death and Resurrection. Roman Empire does already transformed to Byzantine Empire at that time.
Nevertheless in Byzantine Empire commonly was used calendar since creation of the universe. And in Russia also, till 1700 AD.
So it is not such a straightforward acception of the calender, but status of calender nowadays as a status of English language, most of us understand it, even if not use in everyday life.
And it is really important, because makes the birthday of Jesus Christ just one day in history, which in turn makes Him real person, non fictional, non mythological.
But, yes, Russian revolutionaries consciously re-enacted a quite a few superficial but symbolic things from the French revolutionary period, much like US was cosplaying the Roman Republic in its founding era.
The only difference is lower costs for machines; since machines are never idle you need 6/7 as many.
By example, if your widget factory has 7 workers and 7 machines, by shifting their schedules so each worker takes a different day off, you can do the same amount of work with only 6 machines.
That's not what it describes.
> Eighty percent of the workforce were told to go to work; 20 percent to stay home. The continuous week began as a five-day cycle.
Every day 1/5th of the workers were off. So that's 4 days on, 1 day off.
So if we're really repeating that stretch of history, look out for the modern equivalent of the Spanish Civil War somewhere.
I am past trying to debate with people that fall for this, it seems a better idea to sell kiddies pipe dreams and make some cash off of them. (For some reason these people get a lot of attention in the UK media).
In school, I wondered why the East German government beat down the workers movement so violently, and why they locked their citizens behind a wall. Surely they should have been very pro-union? The state should have done everything to keep their citizens happy, and if they wanted to leave, then why not just let them leave? After all, isn't the point of communism that the people are in charge? My teacher was baffled and couldn't understand my naive question :-D
Now, my mental model of these "real socialist" states is that they are just degenerate capitalist dictatorships - namely, you only have one single capitalist, and that is the state itself. I find this explains a lot of their dysfunctionality.
So it succeeded! Or does this mean set a match as to a rocket rather than to Joan of Arc?
I didn't really mind that I didn't have Saturday and Sunday off per se, it was that I never had the same day off, so my friends couldn't include me in a consistent game night or something. The constantly changing schedule made retail deeply corrosive to all of my interpersonal relationships, and made holding down a second job nearly impossible (which I really needed when I was part-time).