Vacations in the Soviet Union
daily.jstor.org
daily.jstor.org
This can actually work out well. I experienced something similar in the US while on vacation. I was traveling with someone from Glenwood Springs, CO to Denver, CO via Amtrak. We went to the dining car for lunch an since there were two of us and space is at a premium, the Amtrak policy was to seat us with one or two random strangers. We sat and had lunch with an oil executive and someone's grandmother and it was quite an interesting experience and we got to meet two strangers. It was actually a highlight of that train trip.
I feel like the experience of having unplanned social interactions with strangers is often missing in modern American life. I don't know if the Soviet style of assigning vacation groups via a worker's committee would be pleasant, but I can't help but think things would be better if we had more situations where we are "forced" to engage with strangers.
For working class though, its probably best not to force people to socialize. The thing that doesn't get talked enough about in socialization is that its not all positive, and people have different tolerance to each others bullshit.
It got us an invitation surprisingly often, skipping a long wait or a walk to another restaurant, and made for some interesting table talk at the same time.
I'd say talking to the people at your table is purely optional, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
I am also skeptical of the fact that "the working class is growing more isolated by the day". Looking around my environment, it seems that the advent of social networks (FB, Whatsapp, Instagram, etc) has made it far easier to keep in contact and to organize meetings with people. I know that I would be socializing far less if the only means of communication we had were the phone and letters.
i would like to say, that this is at least somewhat observable today at places like work; but also, society has changed a lot.
Personally, I dislike the “bring your whole self to work” thing that companies like google encourage (used to?), where people talk about extremely polarizing topics on the company chat groups.
It's the last place in the Netherlands where your social and financial status has no value and everyone is truly equal. You see all walks of life and everyone is in it together at the mercy of science they don't understand.
This would be the antithesis of a vacation.
My wife and I went on a cruise once when we were still dating, and it was one of the ones where they assign you a table to eat. Since we were a young couple, they assumed we were newlyweds and seated us with a bunch of other newlyweds. It was fun to hear all their stories (one was a Mormon couple who had just had a very traditional Mormon wedding for example). Then 1/2 way through the cruise they switched it up and we ended up at a table with a large family from rural Oregon, who were sad at the lack of meat on the menu. Normally at home they would sit on the back porch with rifles and shoot animals that would walk by and then eat them. Which was just a really interesting thing to learn about, given that we had always been city folk.
And on another trip we stayed at a small place in Costa Rica that offered local tours each day as a planned activity. We ended up touring with a bunch of other Americans that were staying at the same place. Connected with them on Facebook and we're all still connected to this day, occasionally commenting on each other's posts.
In fact two of them were a young couple like us who were just dating and also traveling with their parents. We both ended up having kids around the same time and have even met up with them when we were in their home town.
"It encouraged workers to vacation with groups of relative strangers as opposed to their friends and families. They were all part of a collective and that umbrella united them. In the Soviet Union, after all, the collective—not the family—was the most important social unit."
Yes, the purpose of the policy was to dismantle the commitment to the family and establish commitment to "the collective." This is also why the children were sent elsewhere.
I remember the slogan "Family is the unit of society" and childless people had to pay a special tax. Also infidelity in marriage was frowned upon and could negatively affect the career.
Early Soviet Union was much more radical and utopian, with ideas almost like in Plato's republic with the goal to getting to the point where the state rather than the parents would be raising children.
This was later abolished in the 30's and 40's and more traditional family values were encouraged.
It might be sovietophobic in the sense we would rather not have it repeat, to put mildly. But for the occupied regions, it was far from fiction.
Did you mean "to dilute regional/ethnic identity"? National identity cuts across regions and ethnicities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Mingrelia
But the actual maps show a mosaic of principalities in place or Georgia.
I am just pointing out that Soviet Union has encouraged large ethnicities to coalesce, collect their shared history and culture (often inventing large portions in process) and build a nation state on top of that. This is not something you should take for granted, but that's what you've got under Soviet rule.
Not everybody got that privilege, of course. Ethnic Russians, but also Jews and Germans, did not get to have their own nation state in USSR. Technically, Jews had one but it was a joke[1]; Germans briefly had one[2]; Russians hoped to have one after WW2, with capital in Leningrad, but were derailed (Leningrad affair[3]). RSFSR was like a one huge Washington DC in that regard, with glistering Moscow and Leningrad but it was more like Puerto Rico as you descended into Nechernozem'ye[4]. No statehood.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga_German_Autonomous_Soviet... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leningrad_affair 4. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Нечерноземье
Yeah, I've heard you prefer not to mix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Estonia#Eston...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Latvia#Arajs_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust_in_Lithuania#Par...
From what I've read, the dismantling of families was really implemented in the 1920s and perhaps 1930s. That's when a kid [1] who ratted on his own father (likely sent him to Gulags) was glorified as a huge Hero of Socialism. After that period though, Communism was gradually less about implementing its distopian ideology and more about naked power of people on top, so the destruction of families was abandoned.
Or it's just believing Marx when he wrote this in the Communist Manifesto:
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.
On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.
But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.
Same deal for work-conference trips where I met coworkers for the first time then proceeded to get irresponsibly drunk with them.
Since then and until recently most people go to Turkey, though. White Sea was hypothermia inducing within a minute even in the height of July.
With that said, I'd love to hear Lex Fridman's opinion on all of this.
You won't experience much about the government while there. Police aren't really that present in public. Border control is like any other country. The only issue you're likely to run into is the Great Firewall, for which you can just install a VPN before arriving in country.
Many Westerners experience a sort of shock when they first visit China, because the dystopia they're expecting to see never materializes.
Even bog standard tourist bus trips in literally every country have obvious levels of orchestration designed to show you a face of that region which lacked any warts.
As a techie I am personally also very annoyed at the lack of Internet freedom. But as a Chinese I also recognize that there are many more aspects in life and society that are more important than Internet freedom, and that China scores pretty high at (especially in historic context).
BTW. How is Wikipedia looking from China, blank spots?
Even this photo is still censored: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man
None of those things were a given when I grew up. Those things ard still not a given in many countries in which the west tried to forcefully introduce western liberal democracy, where they all focus on things like "freedom of association" at the expense of freedom from poverty.
When you are poor, you are not free, no matter how much you can voice your opinion.
I am sorry but seeing my parents and grandparents working their asses off in a society where your next meal is not guaranteed, lifting 800M people out of poverty, seeing my hometown stop being a trashy mudpool and seeing the elimination of child abductions, count for much more to me than any amount of VPN annoyance. In the grand scheme of things, these are still literally the best 30 years out of 3000 years.
You can, in fact, lift a country out of poverty without also inflicting an authoritarian state on the populace.
Half the world managed it — you’re just making excuses for authoritarianism. We’re discussing basic human rights, not “VPN annoyance”.
It’s also counterproductive to take the debate offline, as further discussion would be for the benefit of anyone else that might read this thread. I’ll never agree that lifting people out of poverty requires authoritarian control over the populace.
Internet censorship generally ranks very low on your list of concerns if you're struggling to put food on the table. People in China have seen a complete transformation of their lives for the better, in just a few decades. They've gone from bicycles to electric cars, from not having reliable electricity to paying for everything with 5G-connected smartphones. From the point of view of how people live their everyday lives, things are better than ever.
Issues like censorship will become more important over time, but right now, they're still secondary. There are other issues at play as well, such as the legitimacy the Party still enjoys from the revolution and from its management of the economic boom of the last few decades, and people's fear of the sort of chaos that consumed China for much of its modern history.
> Half the world managed it — you’re just making excuses for authoritarianism.
You mean the half of the world that enriched itself by inflicting "authoritarianism" on other populations - or indeed, their own populations too - unless you don't consider the treatment of Black and Native people in the US to be authoritarianism, or the Irish in the UK, etc etc?
And when they eventually do, you will have nothing to say about it
Just like the russians today.
They too have a rich culture of writers, poets and composers that they should have the right to be proud of.
Good that you are.
I will add one more aspect is the almost complete absence of traffic cops. A lot of the most dangerous situations with cops in the US have been at traffic stops. But in China there are cameras that send out tickets automatically. I’m sure there are due process concerns with that implementation, but there is also a zero percent chance you will be killed by police at a traffic stop.
https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-ch...
A lot of the forced labor involves people involuntarily working alongside voluntary workers at ordinary factories. As a foreigner you won't see anything notable there.
The west severely exaggerates every bad thing that happens over there then pretends like every misstep is solved with execution. Sure there's censorship but its exaggerated to a level of fiction in the west, like a movie that's "based on real events".
More than likely if you ask a Chinese person in China about Tiananmen, they'll see you like one of those Nazi streamers who call girls whores in public. Just a weird edgelord looking to stir up trouble.
I feel like "westerners" today treat China like they used to treat Japan in the 70s/80s, not like they used to treat the Soviet Union. There's plenty of positive reporting about how things "just work" in China compared to the west (especially constructing infrastructure) and strong economy development.
The first country you list is the DPRK, who are famed for carefully stage-managing any visit by western tourists.
If you want an honest view of those places, you have to speak with people who aren’t risking their lives or livelihoods if they tell you the truth.
Having lived in one of those illiberal countries for a while (China) I could clearly see how the US media distorted everything, reduced Chinese people to a monolith, downplayed or simply ignored all of the genuinely good things happening, and took every opportunity to highlight the negatives. It is to the point where every positive, interesting, or beautiful thing is reflexively shot down and dismissed.
Very quickly when people travel (even if within their own country), they realize that their worldview has been shaped by what others want them to see. Maybe it is a benign travel ad that crops out the favela in the background, maybe it is genuinely lovely people colored as backwards or belligerent. There’s a reason someone has chosen to post that video or show you that picture.
One could also mention that the one-child policy was kept in place for years after China's looming demographic issues became apparent, and the silliness of replacing it first with a two-child, and then a three-child policy before its abolition. Perhaps it would be one-sided to not mention the massive bureaucracy of the family planning commission consisting of millions of workers at both the central and local government levels who would have to find other work without it (of which I even have family who used to coerce women into getting abortions), but I don't think that makes it any better.
Or ghost cities, which appear in Western media, but rarely mentioning that most of the apartments in these cities end up getting bought because of a real estate bubble in which Chinese citizens pour their savings into buying empty apartments in empty cities. It is 'one-sided' perhaps to not mention that the apartments have owners, but it is factually true that they are empty and the ghost cities exist.
Is Western media sometimes unfair? Sure. The BRI gets painted as a debt trap, but the reality is the projects really are intended to be profitable. Will travelling to China help with that? I don't see why, since the BRI is investment in countries outside of China.
The biggest misconception most Westerners have, though, is that they are under the illusion that the Chinese are yearning to be free from their oppressive government. And perhaps that is the 'distortion' you are thinking of. Is this a result of the media? Perhaps. But in my opinion, it is a factor of Westerners implicitly believing that all people are just like them, when in reality tyranny is only possible because the people who live under it accept it. Every nation gets the government it deserves.
There were lockdowns in China, but they were limited in time, and before mid-2022, they were relatively rare (as in, nobody I knew was subject to one after CoVID was eliminated in China in March-April 2020). For most of 2020-21, life in China was more normal than in the US and Europe.
Didn't say that. It's a fact that some parts of China were locked down for months, and that people were going hungry because they couldn't get food. That was all over Chinese social media.
That's the bailey, the wide-ranging generalization about China as dystopian hellhole that you want to make. When you get pushback, you retreat to the defensible motte of: Well, there were some lockdowns for limited time periods in some places in China. The second the coast is clear, you go back to occupying the bailey.
Motte-and-bailey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
> People were not kept in cages
What a hilarious nitpick at an obvious turn of phrase. Do you think I actually meant to say people were literally kept in little cells with bars?
The media I follow generally acknowledge that Chinese adopting capitalism led to the greatest increase of standard of living in entire human history (in terms of how quick it was and how many people were affected). That's not downplaying.
The Chinese have “capitalism” with significant public investment in infrastructure and education. Bullet trains can take you everywhere on the cheap. Few foreign companies have been successful due in some part to protectionism (but also failed business models). Their markets are highly regulated, preventing mergers and IPOs of large companies. Ant Group for example. Jack Ma was severely punished for even suggesting that bank regulators ease up. They also have strict data regulations.
On the other hand, workers’ rights are a lot more curtailed. A lot of tech works 996, and unionization is pretty rare. Getting 2 days off per week isn’t the norm like in the US. And forget about OSHA. So in that sense they are almost hyper-capitalist.
The point is, I don’t think it fits cleanly into the ideologies that many would like to apply to them.
I am not a Westerner, and I highly doubt you could get an understanding of what it is like to live in such countries by merely visiting them as a tourist.
When visiting Turkmenistan, I was completely unsupervised - and it was eye-opening and completely bizarre. I actually interacted with the locals and got to hear their stories - same in China and Uzbekistan.
I would rather not ever go back while Xi is still in power if I can help it (unfortunately I may have to one or two more times for familial obligations) and would recommend against going to anyone on the fence. Don't get Brittney Griner'd.
His rule has corresponded to a more authoritarian turn in China, especially in the last few years with his abolition of term limits. It was hardly a liberal country before, but the fact is it has gotten significantly worse, and I have no confidence of that situation improving as long as Xi is in power. I have no desire to end up like, say, Saad Ibrahim Almadi.
> do you have reason to believe his successor would be any better?
No. But it is the bare minimum.
Also unless you make a very concerted effort to get to know what is going on, you often will be blissfully ignorant because tourist areas are abnormally nice, and the workers in the tourist areas can be very motivated to present a happy face, and usually a language barrier.
You do get a slight feel, but what you don’t get to see is usually the part that matters e.g. why uncle Bob is dead or in jail; the difficulty in getting healthcare in Cuba; police abuse; the hidden constraints on “normal” freedoms.
why?
Karl Marx's definition of communism was literally "a classless society"
But Soviet union from my late grandparents tales was different reality, they used chewing gums and other stuff we considered common as currency much more sought-after by locals than rubles. It makes sense regime didn't want for people tt discover massive discrepancies between various parts of eastern bloc. As whole world saw few years after, mighty soviet union was actually pretty fragile mosaic with pieces desperately wanting freedom from often horrible and incompetent central Russian management.
One of the reason why eastern part of EU is not so happy with uber-centralization in Brussel - we saw what level of inefficiency such approach brings.
Russia does just fine without most of those pieces, whereas the pieces struggle to be viable.
The management was not 'Russian', by the way. It came proportionally from all of the Soviet republics, more or less. When the Union collapsed, they mostly stayed in Moscow.
You don't need any special approval to leave China nowadays, and haven't for a few decades. Hundreds of millions of Chinese people vacation abroad.
That's not true. Not to idealize anything, there were people, of course, who were poorer than average for one reason or another, but once in a while an average person could actually afford a vacation in Sochi and other areas around Black Sea. (The quality of accommodation is another question, of course.) Also, union members (i.e. pretty much everyone) were occasionally given an opportunity to spend time in spas ("sanatoriums") there. And if you remember, people took vacations that were usually one month-long!
Your experience may very different if you worked in military important factory etc. Second half of eighties was already a very different story though.
To wit: My current mother in the law was a simple accountant in a mid-sized Baltic city. She was able to go to a sanatorium in Crimea (without husband of course) for the yearly vacation due to a slipped disk in her back. Where she apparently had a platonic affair with another vacationer who kept writing her letters afterwards..
Similarly I was able to attend Artek (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artek_(camp) ) in Crimea solely due to my grades. Our village grade school in Latvia had one ticket allocated.
Now this was in February which is not in season. Our komsomol - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komsomol guide mentioned that only extremely privileged kids with parents high in the party got to go in the summer to meet with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samantha_Smith and other VIPs.
Note: It might not have been solely due to my grades. I was visiting Kiev on an academic trip in late 2021. The head of institute mentioned that Artek tickets were quite expensive and not everybody with an opportunity actually went. She mentioned price being 200-300 rubles - which was about twice my father's official salary.
You can find a scanned version of the pamphlet here [2]. There were many of these pamphlets published. One day I will scan them and post them. There was one on Waterways & Transport in the USSR, one about Soviet theater, one about the food industry in the USSR, one about light industries of the USSR, and one about the countryside of past and present of the USSR. I think these were a series published in 1939.
Article 119 of the Soviet Constitution:
> ARTICLE 119. Citizens of the U.S.S.R. have the right to rest and leisure.
>
> The right to rest and leisure is ensured by the reduction of the working day to seven hours for the overwhelming majority of the workers, the institution of annual vacations with full pay for workers and employees and the provision of a wide network of sanatoria, rest homes and clubs for the accommodation of the working people.
'Sanatoria' being health/medical centers or hospitals.
[0]: https://twitter.com/REVMAXXING/status/1594499770990608385
[1]: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1594499770990608385.html
[2]: https://digital.library.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/show/4595#?c=...
Why, more wealth and automation and productivity growth to no end of course.
If you moralise and add more things for a business to do, the big ones will do some performative stuff and spend their vast marketing budgets on it, and the small ones will go under, and we all lose because we get less choice and higher prices.
It always feels that way in a small business, but then all of a sudden a key employee needs to take a three month medical leave and somehow the business survives.
You just have to plan well, and I'm sure there will be devoted employees who answer the odd emergency email during their sabbatical.
One way this could realistically work today (with a lot of kicking and screaming about how it’ll ruin the economy) is each year of work earns a month of sabbatical, and once you’ve earned at least 2 months you can exercise your sabbatical rights, given some notice.
Companies could cap it at 6 months at a time so you don’t completely lose track of changes at work.
We could even make up to 2 months transferable between companies, and if you’re ever fired you can choose how or if you’d like to be paid out. That would help discourage retaliation against using the time, in addition to making it illegal.
I don’t see a reason that we couldn’t pass a law tomorrow that does this. Sure the economy would slow a bit, but what a giant quality-of-life gain it would be. And maybe it would actually make the economy grow faster in the long term if it encourages more private innovation.
But we already accept this idea for parental leave, this would be the same thing without the need for having a baby.
Why do we need for a law to be passed? There are so many people seemingly in favor of this, why don't they just band together and start a company and then pay people to take 6 month vacations?
And that's just at a basic game-theory level—quirks or dysfunctions of political systems can make passing a law extremely difficult, too, even given super-majority voter support.
Is there a law that says you can't start a company and provide your employees with 6 months paid time off?
Then, the same year, we were visiting family in Grenada and met a young family (teachers) with a 4yo on a 40' sailboat they were cruising around the Caribbean on.
This could reduce the career growth penalty for mothers. Companies may be hesitant to hire or promote women to leadership positions, fearing that they will take significant time off for childbirth. However, if taking sabbaticals every few years becomes normalized, women wouldn't be viewed as a special liability for taking leave around childbirth.
Furthermore, during these sabbatical periods, there could be programs created for potential career switchers to try out new jobs. These internships could provide workers with opportunities to explore different fields and find work that aligns with their skills and interests. This could ultimately benefit the economy as a whole by increasing job satisfaction and promoting a better match between workers and their jobs.
Also people should not pursue a strategy that concentrates ALL their enjoyment until retirement. It's a high variance strategy with IMO low EROI . My bias is because my father died in his 40s and my step father in his late 50s.. Both never saw a day of retirement despite saving for it.
I highly recommend a patterned approach to life enjoyment, yes this is highly privileged and I hope it will be universal one day.
Here's my strategy now that I'm financially stable:
I do something special, scaled to the time available, where they overlap I intersect them (ie, use the one weekend to build the one week)
* One weekend a month have a special plans
* One week a half disconnect, could be travel or camping, or staycation where you just chill and do stuff you love only
* Two weeks once a year - take an adventure, or a deep disconnect according to needs
* One month every 5yrs - Do something big that stretches you. Backpack foreign countries, or disconnect and focus on intensively learning a skill you intended to also practice going forward
* One quarter every 10 - Sabbatical (Sabbath) . Let your body and mind reset. Only do healthy and restorative things, celebrate every win you can remember, the only work you do should be investing in others, and do it at < 50% your capacity.
YMMV
As a leader, I will fight against it every time it gets proposed.
If they push back you can literally say to the manager "You told me that 6 weeks was normal"
Can you tell me more concretely what you're thinking? How do you define "long"? And, what is it about my list (despite it's prescriptive structure) that makes the time usage not "unstructured" ?
If you want that lifestyle then just become an independent consultant rather than an employee. I know a married couple who does that. They work for a while to save up enough money, then take off and sail their boat around until they run low on money and have to find new consulting gigs.
> Those who refused to work, study or serve in another way risked being criminally charged with social parasitism (Russian: тунеядство)
The Soviet Union did allow some internal dissent and freedom of speech from 1985 to 1991. That might have accelerated its downfall.
Both places guaranteed the freedom to express oneself, but only the West guaranteed your freedom also after you'd expressed yourself.
“Big deal, it’s the same here. I can also stand in the middle of the Red Square and shout ‘President Truman is a moron’”.
Even within the US, we talk a big game but - have you ever felt it wise to "exercise free speech" with law enforcement?
So yeah, it's complicated.
Uhhhh... we literally just had an entire summer of people shutting down cities to voice their frustration over police.
My personal unwillingness to start cursing out every cop I see is not actually a good litmus test for my freedom of speech.
i am very smart!
In preparation for the 1980 Olympics, Soviets published a pamphlet titled "USSR: 100 questions and answers", meant primarily for Soviet citizens as an agitprop manual - basically a list of precanned answers to the most common questions that Western tourists were expected to ask. It is a hilarious read, but also very informative if you want to know how it was all sold in official propaganda.
(So far as I know, it's only available in Russian, but automated translation is good enough these days.)
* Family outing to the fields to harvest carrots to pickle for the winter. This would be bartered with other families who went to harvest other veggies, so that your turshia would not be too monotonous.
* Going to my friend's apartment to roasting and canning peppers, because no one has to money to buy the factory made stuff. And if you did, you still wouldn't want such poor quality.
* Helping my dad unload window frames for firewood. He worked at a window factory and was able to redirect a small truck full of finished wooden frames, which we could break down and burn for heat over the winter. Sure, it would have made more sense to buy actual firewood or coal rather than steal finished industrial output, but you can't afford that on a regular salary. And it would have made even more sense to offer district heating, and the government had such plans, but you'd freeze long before this became a reality. Eventually we did get district heating - about 6 years after communism fell.
On the other hand, there are psychological advantages to collaborating with one's community to address shared issues. In western capitalist culture, many individuals are predisposed to feeling that their problems are their own responsibility, leading them to believe that any misfortune they experience is solely due to a lack of effort or poor decision-making on their part.
I wonder if it would be possible to build a society that gets the positive parts of both approaches, or if there is a better balance to be sought between individualism and collectivism.
Thing is, you fundamentally can't enforce good socialization. You can enforce socialization in general, but the more it is forced, the less likely it is to actually be good. A good society is the one that gives opportunities for people to socialize if and when they want it, and accepts that some people really just don't and that's fine too.
My grandma would continue working in her garden until she was extremely old because she was used to this, even though we could have bought any veggies or fruits to her. This likely affected her health in a negative way.
Living in a pre-industrial society isn't "good". It doesn't bring any advantages.
There were trips to leningrad or moscow but even those had years between them.
So yea, most vacations were helping out at grandparents farm. And reading books during rainy days.
Wouldn't have anything to do with this.
That this farce of a “constitution” is being quoted without irony on hacker news astounds me.
In the 90s, state sanatoria maintained their popularity in post-Soviet countries. To this day, travel agencies in some of these nations primarily focus on two types of journeys: relaxation and "learning" holidays. This deeply ingrained cultural practice persists throughout the region.
I don't know how many and which groups of people went on annual holidays in the USSR, but I know it wasn't an insignificant number from what I've observed living there as a kid.
I still remember some parts though, so if you are interested in how it worked, I can answer your questions. Most definitely it wasn't all that rosy.
One anecdote for not all rosy:
My father is permanently traumatized because he had to get his tonsils removed when he was young and they didn't give him any anesthetics.
This is a description of the most of the Soviet health services.
For example, dentists were using short metal pipe on a thumb when treating kids, so they don't bite or close their mouth.
>"and then the police shoot the dog...and the dog raped the boy...and then the rat shot the police..."
>"and then you have to eated the police...but the dog was eating the rat..."
>"and my grandmother ate the police...and the police turned the dog into lampshade....but the rat raped the police...and now my grandmother is dead inside lampshade dog...."
Sounds like you got local anesthetics. You probably just didn't see the needle due to the angle.
They could get some of the things westerners had, but with extremely low bandwidth.
Going to the dentist now is ... challenging.
There was a system of distribution of pre-paid by the government (and maybe, not sure, there were a subsidized ones) and by big factories, ministries, which often had their own resorts/sanatoriums, vouchers[0] to rest/vacate/heal there.
Add: Sometimes they were a part of incentive and motivation for fulfilling a quota or finishing a project, sometimes as means to penalize someone ("You've been seen in the state unacceptable for a Soviet man, so you are out from the list for putyovka this year!") and of course as means to gamble or obtain something, trading it for things or services.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BF%D1%83%D1%82%D1%91%D0%B...
Did you manage to form a relationship with someone outside of your initial social circle that persisted beyond the duration of the vacation ?
I recommend amending your offer with some specifics, so that we may better focus our questions on the particulars of time and place. Not to identify you (though that is a risk), but to draw context about the time (relationship with NATO, do computers exist) and perhaps about the specific locale (Okhotsk beaches are probably not like Astrakhan beaches).
(And that makes sense, we tend to focus on our own country and environment.)
The first thing I hear from any ex-Soviet who grew up in the USSR is how their lives were impacted by the constant shortages and censorship of issues with the supply chain. There's a classic joke from the USSR that goes:
"Comrade, aren't you excited for when the USA finally falls?"
"No, who will we buy our grain from?"
Another one:
"Isn't it true that the USA is rotting from within?"
"Yes, but what a smell!"
Millions of people in the USSR starved to death, and their consumer tech was among the most unreliable and poorly-made available internationally. This despite Soviet mathematicians and engineers being among the finest and hardest-working on the planet. They could only just overcome the constraints that the centrally-governed economy placed on them. The only notable exception is military hardware, which was actually funded.
What do you mean "it's obviously not true [that the Soviet economy didn't work]"?
A guy walks into the store, looks mournfully at the bare shelves, and asks the worker at the counter, "So, comrade, you don't have any meat today, do you?"
"Comrade, did you not read the sign at the entrance? This is a seafood market; we don't have any fish. The meat shop is across the road - they don't have any meat."
To me, while we might see many many problems within the Soviet economy and see many ways it could have been better, it is clearly not an economy that "didn't work". And by some measures, we can even say it "worked" better than the post Soviet economy.
After the '91 collapse Western scholars briefly got their hands on some Soviet archives and worked to piece this together. The Soviet economy was run by fixers; Party people that answered to Party leadership and mediated the difference between the State's official socialist schemes and reality. The system was opaque and kleptocratic in the extreme and, except for a brief period after the collapse, it appears not much has changed.
A concise survey of the archives can found found in: "Behind the Facade of Stalin's Command Economy: Evidence from the Soviet State and Party Archives" (Paul Gregory, 2001).
Is this actually true? In Germany at least, vacation from work is not truly our own time. We are legally required to use it to relax and restore our capacity for future work. Few people probably see it that way, admittedly.
Of course, there is still a huge difference, but it's awkward to view everything through that us-versus-them lens.
I'm from the US, and this sounds very strange to my ears.
https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/vacation-days
My guides about sick leave and sabbaticals just add a bit of context. Sick days are really well protected.
Well that's an interesting bit of trivia. Can you share anything more about it? Just for my own amusement and the amusement of people I will relate it to in the future, I would love to read whatever dry legal code sets that in writing.
Other countries have non-competes, employer ownership of things created during off-hours, and so on.
What does that mean in practice? Will the police come knocking on your door if they see you digging up the garden? Will someone arrest you if you go sailing and get bonged in the head by accident instead of resting? If you use your vacation days to help your grandma move a grand piano will you get in trouble? If you do your taxes on your vacation day will they refuse your forms?
On the other hand, we do get separate sick days (technically even if we get sick during vacation, but I don't know if anyone actually tries to get vacation days back they lost due to sickness). It's very different from countries when you just get time-off days and have to use them for both holidaying and covering sick leaves.
This does happen, because why not, if it’s your right. I have seen it a few times.
Utter bullshit. I was able to travel to every part of USSR (except of course restricted areas and abroad) during my vacation time without any problems. USSR had gobbles of big problems and general lack of freedom but vacations were not part. As a matter of fact I spent more vacation time in more places than the average North American.
Yes if one wanted they could join some semi-/organized form but there was nothing mandatory about it.
As for "focuses" - then it is not an article but a piece of propaganda. Hence it has a deserved place in a trash.
Disclosure: this is no endorsement of the Soviet-style systems. But my wife had a much better childhood then the anti-Soviet would have you believe.
You do not have to apologize for confirming that not everything about USSR (late USSR in particular) was mothers eating their kids for breakfast. People with more than 2 brain cells should understand that the world is not binary. And those who do not should go back to school as the education in their country (whatever that be) had definitely failed them.
If you mention anything here that could portray any aspect at all of the Russians (any era) as positive (or even just neutral but factual), you'll be eaten alive with down-voters.
Including this very (my) comment.
As for downvotes themselves - I personally do not give rat's ass about those. In large part those are "I do not like you" type of reaction. So fucking be it. I am not being paid for karma. Personally I did not downvote single post however I feel about content / poster.
A spa. We call that a spa break here in the decadent West. It’s a whole luxury industry thing.
When I landed at Malpensa in Milan for the first time, I noticed there was an Aeroflot airliner parked on the tarmac. This seemed odd to me. Why would someone want to fly from Milan to the USSR?
Olivetti was a massive (at the time) paternal Italian company. It had a department called Gestione Varie, miscellaneous management, which handled various things including vacations and sports programs for Olivetti employees. Among the many vacation packages offered were very reasonably priced summer vacations to Leningrad.
I don't buy the conspiracy part but liked the rest.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/544552/the-mysterio...
Really interesting, you're the first I meet that has. Olivetti still has a stellar reputation in Italy, disliked by other enterpreneurs and (so they say) loved by his employees. What's sure is that the work conditions were really progressive and I think still unparalleled today, at least in Italy.
Do you have any anecdote or interesting fact to share about your time there?
The main hotel in town, the Hotel La Serra, is shaped like a ... typewriter.
The Brigate Rosse was a threat when I was there and Adriano Olivetti was very afraid of them. You'd never see him. If you drove at night you were likely to be pulled over by the Carabinieri and have a machine gun stuck in your stomach while they figured out who you were. Everyone was on edge.
But it was a cool time. Ivrea was a company town and I think if I wanted to dial the Olivetti operator from my apartment I dialed 6. But taking a shower meant getting up at 4am so that there would be enough water pressure.
Edit: I am curious as to why I get downvoted. Is it a political trope in a particular country to say that one lives in a totalitarian society/state? A rhetorical ploy? I use it in a literal sense: no freedom of expression, no freedom of the press, jailed political opponents and journalists, criminalization of political movements, jailed citizens for saying thinks on Facebook, jailed citizens for having been in a protest, the constant threat of prison for almost any trifle...
The mines, short of skilled workers and machinery, were failing to produce their quotas of coal. The party tapped Stakhanov, a little-educated, hard-working peasant-turned-miner, to set a record that would become an inspiration and example.
Konstantin G. Petrov, the chief of the mine's party organization, recalled that Stakhanov's wife strenuously resisted his attempt to make her husband a hero until she was silenced with the gift of a cow.
To increase Stakhanov's chances, the pattern of work was changed to free him from his usual task of shoring up the tunnel as he dug into the seam. Instead, two timberers followed after him, and Mr. Petrov himself held a light to the coal-face. What Stakhanov did, to be sure, was still impressive, especially with the unreliable jackhammers of those days. Contemporaries described the big miner wrestling his hammer for hours, coal dust choking his throat and nose and grinding between his teeth.
''I suppose Stakhanov need not have been the first,'' said Mr. Petrov in an interview several years ago. ''It could have been anybody else. In the final analysis it was not the individual face-worker who determined whether the attempt to break the record would succeed, but the new system of coal extraction.
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/08/31/world/in-soviet-eager-bea...
maybe it's just because I don't have much of a social circle, but this seems appealing to me.
The author tries to make it impressive, and for that brings unneeded speculations.
> Failing to applaud a speech by Joseph Stalin could get a person arrested. So could listening to bootlegged copy of the Beatles.
The Beatles were published in USSR officially, as well as many other western artists. At least in late USSR. I still have many those vinyl discs. In earlier years, when my father was young, he and his friends had all rock records: Beatles, Creedence, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, everything. Without any problems.
Stalin and the Beatles are two different ages. Also, life in USSR was not always the same during its existence.
> That fact drove Soviet policy toward time off..
No evidence is given, what driven the policy. That's just a speculation.
> As the country industrialized, it became evident workers needed time away from the job if they were to remain productive when they were on it.
What? That had always been evident. Rest and free time was a theme of socialist movements all over the world long before the October Revolution.
> Following this train of thought, hardliners feared...
I always love when journalists have telepathic abilities. Not only they know what people do, but also what they think and feel.
> They also believed that, once the science of work systems had been perfected, workers would no longer need rest, rendering time off obsolete.
Really? A reference is needed. Vacation time was only growing with years. As far as I understand, the ideology was that with time the growing work efficiency will give more and more free time to workers.
In short, in this text true facts are mixed to produce some bullshit picture of the author's fantasy.
Journalism.
Moreover, Stalin died in 1953. The Beatles were not even formed until 1960. It's fair too sweeping a way to paint a picture of a very complicated country.
Its amazing how the author feels the need to parrot these hysterics in order to write an article about how Soviet workers generally had far more leisure time and opportunity compared to western contemporaries.
Imagine starting an article about sockhops in the 50's with:
>"In the United States, the government regulated racial boundaries with strict enforcement. Slavery was over but vagrancy charges were regularly used to traffic southern blacks to northern coal mines to work for no pay in dangerous conditions. Entertainers were getting called in front of the Anti-American Activities Committees for donating to civil rights bail funds. Failing to support the war in Korea could have you black listed from any real career.
> But you had dance halls"
Absolutely insane.
They are generally unable to engage with good-faith criticisms of the parts of it that don't work.
Don't let it get to you.
And with how the war against Ukraine is going, Russia is on a fast track to relive those memories.
There are two primary responses to this:
1. Realize that the real world is competitive and difficult and much self-improvement and hard work will be needed to thrive. These people put their heads down and get to work.
2. Refusal to address the truth of #1. Frame the real world as some unwinnable game to avoid putting in the required effort to succeed. Distract yourself with structural problems (real or imaginary) far too big for you to have any effect on but keep you from the painful self-improvement that is really needed.
Communism preys on the people who are susceptible to the second path.
Communism rebalances the relative worth of people in society. I.e. my grandfather, an engineer, earned less than a factory worker. An average or passing artist could earn a decent living in the Soviet Union, compared to having scraps today (in relative terms).
I notice this calculus as I have an artistic career and a software career. I would like to pursue the artistic career (and am actually pretty good at it), but I would make many multiples less than I currently do in software. This is partly because of how we've financialized/structured the economy (i.e. software monopolies should have been broken up, taxes imposed, etc), not because the work is actually worth less in some sense.
Shouldn't people be incentivized to pursue work that they are good at, enjoy AND which society actually demands?
If good art is rare and in higher demand, good artists will be able to demand higher pay. If good art is in high supply because many people prefer the artist lifestyle, artists will not be able to demand as high of pay. Both of these situations seem perfectly reasonable to me.
The reason investment bankers are paid well is that they make money _for rich people_. If you look at any professions, the closer you are to the money source and to the rich, the more you make.
Rich people want to stay rich in relative terms, not in absolute terms - something people always forget (because that makes them able to command other people's time and make other people "dance" for them, not buy gadgets or luxury goods which don't matter anyway).
I.e. I would argue that a lot of things that command a high income in the U.S. are actually net-negative for society overall (if we look at the value not in $ value, but in human value). Extracting monopolistic rents, for example. Slumlording. Speculating in Bitcoin. The list is long if you want to really make it.
It depends on how you define value. If you mean value in terms of how much money you receive, you actually need other people to agree that what you're doing is worthwhile.
If you only care about the feelings that YOU get from doing the work (which is totally OK) your work is still valuable, but don't expect others to provide you value in the form of money when you provided them nothing.
In other words, I'm cool with you being an artist. But you can't force me to pay you for your art if I don't want it.
In fact, if you had a choice, if we sold software services the way we sell art today, software salaries would go way down (in fact, someone could increase revenues for a company by making it impossible for you to unsubscribe. If that's not anti-value, I don't know what is. In fact, it's so bad that we even have to pass laws to outlaw it). Same for medicine and many other things - the financialization and obscurity of the actual source of the money is part of what allows this whole thing to continue.
Someone would happily buy a house that's half the size of most on the market (or less) - unfortunately, such houses are prohibited by regulation. So they are forced to choose between buying twice the house at twice the cost or renting.
It sort of works when you're comparing product A to product B at the store. When you're comparing parts of the economy, there are much greater forces and distortions at work.
A total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag not including labor colonies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet...).
The Communists didn't prey in some vaguely psychological sense, they physically exterminated anyone who disagreed.
2. USSR had no extermination camps (unlike the NAZIs), GULAG was a prison system no different from the US Prison system today.
Joe the Plumber was the poster child for this, a decade ago.
1. Keep your head down, work hard and humbly, be a good little serf.
2. Say "screw this", realise there's a ton of wealth in the world and the leeches are taking it all, push for some changes that might actually make a difference in the world.
Capitalism preys on the people who are susceptible to the first path.
If you can’t beat ‘em join em
I think for a lot of people, it's intellectual junk food. A Marxist revolution has a low risk of actually happening in the modern world. And rather than educating yourself on policy and working on advocacy, you get to play in a fantasy world where you don't have to do anything except fight the conspiracy suppressing a natural egalitarian world order.
China only began thriving after they abandoned Marxist-flavored communism and integrated markets into their government.
Well, it's not just unclear to you. Even if you buy into some of Marx's more coherent ideas, it's such a bonkers idea to form a government with the expressed intent of achieving some sort of vague Hegelian state as outlined by some untestable arguments described in an unfinished work of political critiques. Das Kapital is not exactly a useful guide for creating actual policy.
They make some good points against capitalism, but like Democracy is the worst form of government other than all the others, capitalism is the worst economic system other than all the others.
But I simply cannot agree with a world that make everybody equal, no matter how much or how little work they do. People who work jobs that require extensive studying (ie, medical doctors) or jobs that almost literally nobody would ever volunteer for (ie, cleaning public restooms) should be rewarded.
It's one of those weird catch-22s. If we actually incentivized those jobs nobody wants, they'd get done better, and then people would be more proud of the work, and be willing to pay for it. But because people don't pay for it, the work is done poorly, and so people aren't proud of it, and thus don't want to pay for it.
A simple European-style welfare state with universal healthcare is all you need to satisfy 90% of people but the elites in the US and the UK refuse to provide that.
Conservative parent/teacher/etc: "So you want free education and healthcare for everyone, are you some kind of communist or what?"
Young person, after reading the philosophy textbook chapter about Marx and ignoring a lot of history: "I guess I am one then"
Canadians of all people also ought to remember how they got their system, which was by voting[1] for parties that supported it in elections. It had basically nothing to do with threat of communism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_Saskatchewan_general_elec...
The DSA, the biggest, by far, left-org in the US appears, at least to me, to be pushing a platform indistinguishable from a Euro model.
Outside of some existential threat like war, it doesn't seem at all possible for everyone in the US to start rowing in the same direction.
It would take a political miracle because of our thoroughly corrupted political system, but once it existed as an option, I have no doubt that trying to kill it would be political suicide. The problem is that our far right party is A-Ok with working class people going broke from healthcare costs, and poor people just dying, and our center-right party has pretty much adopted a platform of "We won't make things any worse".
it's a shame people like you never consider this
Its only popular as an aesthetic. On both left and right, most politically inclined people don't have the reasoning skills to talk about politics effectively, nor would the actually enjoy living under their hypothetical best system of government.
Most political discourse is used as a signal to show what kind of person you are in conversation. And generally, there is a trend of people who basically have nothing of value to demonstrate about themselves attaching their identity to politics as a way of giving their life purpose.
>simple European-style welfare state with universal healthcare
You make it sound very simple. Its not. It sure would be nice to have if you could just will it into existence, but with realistic means, the amount of issues that you would have solve for, given the people doing the solving, its not guaranteed to turn out well. Id rather see EU adopt a more competitive business strategy and immigration policies to attract money and workers so that anyone wanting to benefit from the EU policies can immigrate easier.
This is a good way to put it. I have friends who got very mixed up with the El Chapo Trap House content. It has certainly scrambled their brains and made them insufferable - but for all of the worship of dictators and crude jokes about guillotining dentists they now make, none of them really care enough about local politics to actually start attending caucuses, let alone create militias.
It's clearly not that hard, if most of Europe can pull it off with dramatically less money than the US. Where's our American exceptionalism when it comes to catching up with any random European country?
The issue in the US isn't a lack of means, it's a lack of will. Our political system is bought out by unimaginably rich interests, who's interest in the common welfare will only begin when it has fully eroded the foundation that they built their wealth on.
... with a whole different set of legislature, political history, and even cultural history, all of which GREATLY matter for implementing something like healthcare.
Simplifying this all down to "capitalism bad" is virtue signaling just like I talked about in my original post. Either talk about real solutions or don't talk about it all.
I cannot speak to any but Canada, but the MOST people here do not want pure communism, they want Scandinavian/Nordic socialism. Our policies tend to venture into a weird combination of that and American policy copies, so we end up with a very weird mix.
My theory is Boomers and Gen X have had a huge amounts of lead poisoning from leaded gasoline. This shifted their politics to be more conservative. The 'culture war' we are fighting now is really a generational war. One with people who have lead poisoning and another without.
The base HR justification for unlimited PTO is to not have to pay out unused PTO when they leave. Naturally, it sounds good on face, but leads to less PTO taken due to inherent worries of "how much is too much", lack of manager approval, and the like.
I reject companies that force 'unlimited' PTO. I demand a minimum hard number in place on the offer letter. I've turned down places for that reason.
I work in a place that offers 20 days plus all federal holidays. It's a good compromise, but I'd prefer more.
You're asking for more than six weeks per year where you can just get paid for not working. Sure, there's plenty of holistic value-add to being a well rested, happy employee, but if the difference for your happiness and well-being is somewhere above having six weeks of paid vacation (plus assumed sick days as needed for actual sicknesses) and getting paid for doing nothing. . . what's that quantitative number, and how did you arrive there?
If your job is so stressful that the aforementioned six weeks plus sick days is not enough vacation for you to recuperate, you're likely underpaid, in the wrong field, or something else is driving your discontent. I'd suggest using your PTO to do some introspection and accounting for where those capacities may be needing some care.
I also don't understand why is it such a mystery that people might want to pursue other interests than just work and that requires time off work.
Here in Europe, 20+10 is the bare minimum, with most people getting more and still striving for more.
My stance is more of one rooted in individualism and self-advocation, i.e. if you're dedicated to a job that's considered a full time commitment, that's the social construct. We're not in a society post-labor, idealistic techtopia yet, and that transition if it occurs will be painful and bloated.
The reality is if you want the future of work when, how, where you want, then you have to recognize, admit and accept that your mental model of "employee/employer" relationship has to shift. You must not be the one exchanging what you are claiming to be your most precious asset - unburdened time - to the employer. There is no sense in continuing to enslave yourself to the constructs of yore. It is, ostensibly, within your control and power to become the master of your domain. Of course, this is going to look very catered to your particular requirements and value-adding skillsets.... do you have a set of diverse skills that can be leveraged into one-to-many income streams?
Why should the organization, that which agrees to give you quite a generous offer by any standard on a global measure, be responsible for ensuring the rest of your life is as you desire? You are the captain of the ship on this journey, only you are in control of the choices you make.
Truth is if your employer wanted to you be happy they would give you a full pension and send you on your way.
They want your labor, intelligence, work product, but it's all the same. They want your TIME.
Build businesses. Choose lifestyles that reduce dependency on extrinsic systemic operational uptime. Expose your raw value to the world as you decide and don't undermine your only static asset in life - time. It's incredible how variable the dollar-amount people set on their hours. . .
Imagine I walk into a spice stall and say: "I'd like to buy a pound of cinnamon, please." The seller might reply "Sure, that'll be $20 dollars". But I don't have $20. I have $10. So maybe I counter "Hmmm, best I can do is $10 dollars". The seller could then counter offer "I'll sell you half a pound for $10", and then we could both shake hands and walk off happy.
Replace cinnamon with labor, and that's a job negotiation. An employer, to satisfy me into selling my labor, has basically two levers: They can pay me more, or have me work less for the same pay. "Have me work less" is PTO.
If I get sick, it comes out of the 20 day pool. If I want a vacation, comes out of the 20 day pool.
At least, thankfully, I'm a remote worker, so I won't be infecting the whole office. But I still have 'come to work' sick this year. There are more than a few obnoxious cold bugs going around. And still, COVID.
And from what I understand, most European Union countries get unlimited sick leave, and 4-6 weeks of vacation both.
I also want to live and enjoy being with my SO, and doing fun stuff together. I do not live to work. I work because I have to because the threat of homelessness and destitution is the ever-present threat.
Yes, this is correct.
Just a side note, but in most countries sick leave requires a doctor-signed papers. Even for a day. Although sometimes companies give call-in-is-fine days as a perk. There're a lot of caveats around pay during that period. In most cases employer pays full salary for first week or so. Later it's on state and pay may be reduced. E.g. 80% of one's salary.
Many people would prefer to be paid less and have more vacation time. Vacation time isn't just for recuperating from work. It's free time for people to live their lives as they wish.
Personally, I get 6 weeks + national holidays + 2 family days here in Denmark.
GP doesn't say they need more time to recuperate, they just said they'd prefer more time off.
Desiring more leisure time doesn't mean your work is stressful, you are underpaid, in the wrong field, or discontent.
If your job can't provide you with a decent amount of time off, perhaps you need a better job.
I found your reply coming across fairly harsh. I think this is because we might have different interpretations of what PTO is. For me PTO is part of the compensation for doing my work. In essence, I am not getting paid to do nothing. I get paid less raw money for working, in exchange for more flexibility and less time at work. PTO is reducing my average work hours per week, just taken in bigger chunks at once rather than working a little bit less each day. I think you can also express more PTO as an increase in hourly compensation, but of course with additional implications.
Whether the mandated minimums or any amount of PTO are fitting or not is a different discussion. I think having time you can plan yourself is important. Overall, I think we should strive to work to live and not live to work. At what amount of PTO, compensation, work hours and working conditions you draw your personal line is, in my opinion, very subjective and not necessarily related to job dissatisfaction.
P.S. One extreme example for time/money trade-off I have seen, is someone who works 100%, but gets paid 2/3. In exchange he takes an entire year off every 2 years while maintaining his salary during that time. It works out, roughly, to the same hourly wage, but with more flexibility.
No. PTO (and other benefits) is compensation for work. It's not free money.
So, if you're in CA, you're protected somewhat, talk to HR and take your PTO.
Unlimited PTO is never good for you, its always good for the company, it allows them to not pay you your earned time when you leave. People with "unlimited PTO" tend to take _FEWER_ days off than those with actual PTO.
There is a bunch more details here: https://founderslegal.com/how-does-unlimited-pto-work-in-cal...
That said, I personally made good use of it. Had a coworker or two ask about how I thought it was "fair" to the company. I knew the rate at which my (salaried) time was being billed to customers and didn't see it their way at all :P
Personally, I'm in a position where I'm perfectly happy with my current company's offer: I get a relatively small (2 weeks) amount of non-sicktime PTO, but I'm more or less free to take as much unpaid time as I want. Which in a field as well-paying as software development, is absolutely fine with me. Even better would be a formal pool of UPTO, which doesn't need any negotiation at all, but luckily my boss is accommodating.
Utter bullshit. I was able to travel to every part of USSR (except of course restricted areas and abroad) during my vacation time without any problems. USSR had gobbles of big problems and general lack of freedom but vacations were not part. As a matter of fact I spent more vacation time in more places than the average North American.
Yes if one wanted they could join some semi-/organized form but there was nothing mandatory about it.
I don’t know about the parent commenter, but I am of the opinion that regardless of how common an abbreviation is, it should always be expanded, unless the circumstances prevent you from doing that. Here, in Hacker News, submissions must have a title with maximum 80 characters, but look at this:
30 characters -> Workers of the World, Take PTO
46 characters -> Workers of the World, Take Paid Time Off (PTO)
Wouldn’t you prefer to err on the side of caution and expand abbreviations whenever possible? Particularly in contexts where the audience may not be familiar with the abbreviation or where clarity is particularly important. I believe that expanding abbreviations is a simple but effective way to demonstrate inclusiveness and promote greater understanding and participation in communication, especially in multicultural contexts, like Hacker News, where different people have different levels of familiarity with certain terms.
For example, I, as a Director of OPs was constantly educating our CFO on cloud spend, and would have to kind of train him on technical matters while at the same time explaining where all our costs are etc...
Or when designing a huge project (I have worked on many projects with budgets over $1 billion) and going through vendor selection processes, where we review the RFPs with the vendors and the finance holders for the project, there are many times when one has to justify telling Mr. Money Bags why simply accepting the cheapest offer is not sufficient.
This was actually a type of work, which at the time felt tedious, but now I realize how much I actually liked this aspect of my career.
And yes, all the documentation just said RFD as well. :)
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ab...
For us it was always called “vacation”. It is taken for granted that sick days, funerals (and plenty more that I can’t list from my head) are always paid.
"You'll get more time off!†"
† assuming you never get sick.
Thanks!
Seems to be the key phrase here :-)