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Comment by bikelang | Hacker News Reader

Seems like everyone, everywhere is overworked, underpaid, and under supported. How much longer can we frogs survive the boiling?

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> Seems like everyone, everywhere is overworked, underpaid, and under supported. How much longer can we frogs survive the boiling?

I'm Australian. In Australia, if you are forced to work overtime the rate of pay goes up, by 50% or if it's extreme, double. As a consequence "underpaid" isn't a common complaint of people working lots of overtime.

This has some negative consequences of course. If labour is plentiful you can have lots of people on hand and pay them on an hours-worked basis. The same deal applies - if you go beyond 40 hours a week their rate of pay goes up, but that shouldn't happen if labour is plentiful and management is on the ball.

But if, as in this case labour isn't plentiful, then they are going to have to fix it some other way - like paying to train more staff. What the employers can't do is offload the problem entirely onto their employees, so there are forces compelling them to get their act together.

The OP makes it sound like the dynamic is very different in the US.

Things are quite DOGEy in the US.

Workers in these jobs in the US have less protections than the private sector as they are deemed imperative to operating the country. As such it is illegal for them to strike for better wages, but they do receive 1.5x wages during their mandatory overtime work, and have a base wage over twice that of the annual median income, before their significant overtime income. I think the burn out is a bigger cause.

I've met truck drivers in the US that were driving 16 hours per day. I'm not sure if it is legal or not but it certainly wasn't considered exceptional. It's insane the kind of pressure some jobs put you under. Now ATC has obviously more potential for misery than a truck driver, still a passenger bus / truck collision isn't a small thing either.

Truck drivers and the hours they're on the road need to be logged per law. Most of this is done (or perhaps MUST be done) electronically.

16 hours is generally not allowed unless there are severe adverse conditions, but it's only recently with ELD (Electronic Logging Device) mandates that these rules are being forced to a degree. Before that, many drivers would simply go as many hours as they humanly could to keep moving.

See: https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours-service/summary-...

This was a while ago and I was absolutely shocked. In Europe they'd impound your truck.

They would keep multiple overlapping logbooks so they could always present a "legitimate" log to DOT.

I forgot about this, you're right. I remember some of my family members talking about this. (much of my extended family was in trucking)

It's mostly around engineering whether you have enough downtime to "move" your "driven" hours into.

For long-haul it's probably a bit different, but other routes have a lot of annoying delays.

E.g. waiting at a port, waiting for a trailer replacement, waiting for receiving, etc.

Afaik, these are all classified as driving hours for logbook purposes.

It creates a situation where you legally have to park a truck on the side of the road when you hit your cap, even though 1/2 of your day might have been waiting around for something.

Imho, that's a bit ridiculous, and I'm sympathetic to shadow logbooks there.

For the 16 hours straight cross-country pounders, less-so. But long-haul is what autonomous trucking will likely eat first.

The toll it takes on your sleep schedule is also brutal, because the rule is 10hr on / 8hr off. If those 8 "off" hours happen to coincide with sleeping hours you might get some rest but that won't be frequent, or enough. It would be better, smarter, and safer to just drive 16hr and then sleep for 8hr. But the rules are the rules, they don't have to make sense.

much of my extended family was in teh trucking industry one way or the other. Before the electronic books you had manual log books. Lying in your log book was a very big deal, i want to say you could get in trouble with the law in addition to getting fired. Before that though it was even more the wild west than it is now. My step-father knew my grandfather's "outfit" and he would joke that if they had a chain long enough to go around it they would haul it no questions asked.

This is from a popular 90s country song:

sleep would be best

but i just can't afford to rest

have to be in Denver at morning light

- much too young to feel this damn old

The USA has time and a half overtime above 40 hours as well under the FLSA. This applies to ATC.

Unfortunately, this is now priced into certain government jobs in the USA and people rely on it. Americans see the obscene amounts of money and hours as a challenge until they actually burn out.

ATC isn't even the worst offender. Law enforcement and prison guards can pull 100+ hours a week on a regular basis. This is how prison guards can pull $400k/year.

> ATC isn't even the worst offender. Law enforcement and prison guards can pull 100+ hours a week on a regular basis. This is how prison guards can pull $400k/year.

There's definitely elements of that - but part of that is that many pensions are based on the two highest earning years of your career, so it's "common" among cops when they are planning to retire to spend two years working every possible piece of OT available, to maximize their pension income.

Sounds like a weird incentivization for sure. Why not base the pension on the average over all the years worked as in many other countries? When you offer such incentives, people will naturally work in such a way.

Because you'll loose half a career's worth of inflationary salary rises that way. Also, women might work part time after having children which would skew the average annual salary down. Over a 40 year career, just from inflation alone, you'd be getting about half your final salary that way, even ignoring any increases later on from being better qualified or taking on more responsibility.

Mind you, in the UK, defined benefits pension schemes are very rare nowadays, but where they exist they are defined as a percentage of the final year salary with that company, so the highest 2 year thing seems a bit weird to me but for a different reason.

Highest 2 year is an attempt to address the edge cases around 1 year (especially final year).

You can adjust for inflation and only exclude year where you don't work full time.

Much more obvious solution is to not include overtime pay in the pension calculation.

In the US, social security is based on the 35 highest paying years. If that system is good enough for social security, I don't see why we don't do the same for government pensions.

But wouldn't it be cheaper for them to just hire more people to do the same amount of hours so that no overtime was used? And they would get better work output as well, since people would be rested.

It would, yes. There's large worker/union pressure in many of these fields to not take away overtime by reducing hours, though, since it is such a huge part of total compensation.

It would be cheaper.

But then you don't get to go on stage with a chainsaw and bragging about how you're downsizing government.

Yes, but it's a local maximum since hiring more people is going to be expensive/difficult until overtime is fixed.

Some state prisons have escaped the overtime pit by offering huge sign-on bonuses and doing a hiring surge. But it takes longer to train ATC than a CO.

> The OP makes it sound like the dynamic is very different in the US.

The obvious reason that US air traffic control has been understaffed for "a while now" is that, roughly a decade ago, the FAA caved in to political pressure to stop having so many white controllers by decommissioning any hiring practices that posed a risk of hiring white controllers.

This meant the size of the workforce froze, stressing the system.

Tracing Woodgrains went into a good amount of depth on the scandal: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...

That scandal exacerbated the problem, but there would still be a severe shortage had it never happened. The core issues, pay and grueling hours, predate that scandal by decades.

I don’t think this statement is helpful because it effectively downplays the government mismanagement and industry-specific plight of ATC workers by expanding and generalizing the problem.

It’s analogous to this hypothetical conversation:

“XYZ Politician is a corrupt official who needs to be investigated”

“Well actually, corruption is everywhere.”

See how that downplays and changes the subject at hand?

Not everyone is overworked and underpaid like ATC workers. The US government needs to implement real reforms to rectify that situation.

That's true, but there are not that many jobs that have so many lives on the line as ATC.

They tried.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...

Well, some critical mass of frogs must recognize and accept the fact we've been boiled, and then go after the cooks.

Instead, you find that this critcal mass is happy being boiled with their eyes wide shut.

True, few people managing lots of airplanes at the same time...

Not at all, the ATC situation is different. It doesn't help to try to jam a general (and wrong!) societal comment here, just diffuses responsibility.

Uhm, not everyone. There is a lot of people who live on passive capital income. They contribute absolutely nothing yet they control the economy.

Lots of people are overpaid and underworked too. Or in bullshit jobs, or both.

The point of the frogs boiling metaphor is the frogs in fact do not survive.

In reality when these experiments were conducted the frog simply jumped out as soon as the temperature started to raise, frogs will not sit there in slowly boiling water and just die without trying to escape way before the water becomes dangerous.

We need to combine the crabs in the bucket with the frogs in the water and I think we'll have the right metaphor.

Sadly most of us are hopeless lobster boiled by greater powers. Unlike the crabs through you still can save the other lobsters by refraining to eat them.

Well, it works with humans just fine.

Except for when it doesn't. It's not clear to me as to what you are trying to say.

None of us are jumping out of the pot. We will boil happily. An argument to the contrary needs to look outside.

Yep, in the experiment where they did not, their brains had been removed. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2009/07/guest...

So not to dissimilar from modern society then.

The point of using the metaphor is that something will have to give if we don't course correct.

No it isn’t. The metaphor is that if you throw a frog into already boiling water it would attempt to jump out. If you start with tepid water and increase the temperature slowly enough they don’t. Sadly this was proven through experiment in the 1800s.

It’s an argument that if you make changes slowly enough people won’t notice.

Not really the point, but that experiment was debunked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

In the experiment you mention, before they put the frog in the cool water, they removed its brain. Then they boiled the water. The frog did not jump out of the water because it had no brain. The experiment proved the opposite of what you are asserting.

If every wealthy country had a frog to represent their culture of taking care of workers (strong unions, workers rights, vacation days, not having healthcare tied to their employment, maternity and paternity leave, equitable pay etc), there is one particular frog which most would describe as having had its brain removed.

From the wikipedia article linked to just below this reply, it says that the first such experiment is as you described. But then goes on to say:

Other 19th-century experiments were purported to show that frogs did not attempt to escape gradually heated water. An 1872 experiment by Heinzmann was said to show that a normal frog would not attempt to escape if the water was heated slowly enough, which was corroborated in 1875 by German scientist Carl Fratscher.

I don't see the point of the experiment with the brain removed, but given that they did the experiment with intact frogs as well confirms their original hypothesis.

However, later on in the article, it's been disputed in recent years: as the water is heated by about 2 °F (about 1 °C), per minute, the frog becomes increasingly active as it tries to escape, and eventually jumps out if it can. Earlier it also says that frogs put into already water just die (not mentioned, but presumably from shock) and so don't have a chance to start attempting to jump out. I imagine humans dumped into boiling water would have a similar response.

Frog boiling seems like an active research field. I wonder what the social dinners are like at their conferences.

Now apply it to the context of the conversation.

We as a society are both ATCs and plane passengers, and most often, the latter. And when an overworked ATC makes an error, we indeed may fail to survive.

yes, and, fortunately -- even the frogs have enough awareness they actually jump out before they are boiled.

I have disproved this at home. Frog gets in idle hot tub. I turned up the heater. Soon, frog climbs out.

If it can also reverse a string on the whiteboard, extend an offer.

The frog failed the whiteboard test, but it could sing a hella Michigan Rag.

You know the story about how the frogs, thrown into a hot pot will jump out. But, if you turn up the heat slowly, they just eventually die? Well, the other day, at work, we were called into a room to watch a mandatory video of frogs in this environment. I actually noticed that management had turned the thermostat up really high. I hopped out of that meeting very quickly.

As long as we're desperate for a job and we need to finance our lifestyle to impress the Johnsons.

It's not even to impress anyone, we need to keep roofs over our heads and food in our family's bellies

Oh, look whose family has a roof over their head and food in their bellies!

We get it, @ExtraRoulette. You're big pimpin'.

I think we now have the answer to your query:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046401

But I don't think we should extrapolate from it.

Y'all can do with a bit less of that.

Overweight/obesity combined: ~73-75% (nearly 3 in 4 adults) in the US.

It's quite a tired take that the obesity epidemic is because Americans have too much affordable access to good food. America has affordable access to terrible food and while people can keep their bellies full on that actually eating healthily is a luxury.

99% of people can do 48h water fast with no issues. Easy weight loss, no need for a gym or healthy food.

Try it!

Or don't. Feels good to mog people by just being normal weight.

People who can afford crappy fast food can afford chicken breast and rice with veggies store bought and made at home. Just easier to kick back with a Big Mac and fries after work. Personal responsibility is key

“Made at home” means time. I cook 3 meals a day in my house and it’s a significant dent in other things I could be doing. The more stress I take on from work, the less effortful food I make. I have taken years in my adult life to get good enough to “throw something together” that is healthy and is something I enjoy eating and would choose over a burger. I still eat a lot of burgers.

Personal responsibility sure but that often comes with utter ignorance of the systems that people find themselves in, especially poverty and mental health. The bottom 50% own nothing, have no security, and everything that makes their lives a little easier are things they’ll consider.

Great. So stop saying it's cheaper. It's more convenient, sure. Takes effort, yep.

I was obese most of my adult life. It absolutely cost me more to eat cheap (as in nutrition) shitty fast foods than prepare things from base ingredients. It was more convenient and it was the easy path for sure, but absolutely in no way a means to save money. It costs vastly more. I could only afford to get fat once I started making money. Growing up we were too poor to eat that horribly.

Your story is your story and nobody can say it isn't, but it reads strange to me to comment about cost when the crux of my statement was about the relative time and effort to cook rather than cost.

But since you'd like to speak about price it seems, I'd posit that for a good long while there, dollar menu items were genuinely about as cheap as you could get for food - $4 on the way home from work and get an hour of time back to unwind? It was worth it to me - heck, a lot of the time I used that time to be in the gym.

I'll grant you that pretty much any restaurant you'd sit down in where you don't pay at the counter is utterly more expensive - 3x the ingredient cost at least.

But we're not comparing steaks and chicken entrees here, we're comparing rice & beans and chicken breast vs a McDouble or $5 footlong. Weeknight roasts that you have to plan ahead for, Sunday meal prep days. Its all time - I recognize this because I choose to take that time on, and its time that I don't get to spend on other stuff.

You don't need to cook 3 meals a day, eating 2 or 1 meal a day is perfectly doable. And cooking once and eating it over 2-3 days is perfectly doable.

Or you can just eat bread with 1-2 topics of choice. Perfectly viable and fine for a long work day. Its only a problem if you eat to much.

> and everything that makes their lives a little easier are things they’ll consider.

Consider it, but don't cry about cost when you door dash 5 times a week. This is actually pretty common. People Door Dash, pay with Klarna and then pay Klarna with Credit cards.

Personal responsibility is code word for "I do not want to look at causes of issues, just find someone powerless enough to be blamed." So you pile ever exceeding expectation on that most powerless people in the system and blame them for predictable society wide failure.

You're misinformed. Cheap healthy options are readily available at the grocery store. If you don't want to spend time on food preparation you can substitute canned vegetables for fresh which is slightly less cheap but still cheap.

In the extreme case you don't even need a proper kitchen - a microwave, a rice cooker, and some large bowls will suffice. You can reliably find all of those things at thrift stores in the US. You also have the option to purchase dry staples in bulk (rice, oatmeal, pasta, etc) in 10, 25, or even 50 lb sacks if you can find a local place that stocks them (costco for example).

> actually eating healthily is a luxury.

This is provably untrue. It is such a tired trope to constantly refute. I guess I need to start a google doc with citations.

It is FAR cheaper to buy staples and cook your own food at home. And healthier. You do not need to eat farm to table veggies and local meat for this to happen.

Anyone who tells you it is cheaper to eat fast food and prepared junk foods is misinformed or outright lying with an agenda.

Just look at every single immigrant community that migrates here. They know how to prepare food for cheap.

Yes, it takes a time investment and skill. No, the trope of "single mother with 3 jobs" is not a thing. Those people are already feeding their family healthy foods for the most part since they have self-selected for caring and putting effort in. I lived in communities with many such folks, and the ones holding down three jobs in no way fed their kids fast food or microwaved meals on a regular basis.

If anything is a luxury it's being able to eat prepared fast foods for the majority of your diet. Growing up McDonalds was a twice a year treat for special occasions. Peeling potatoes and baking bread from actual flour and yeast was the daily chores.

> immigrant community that migrates here. They know how to prepare food for cheap.

absolutely. you need to be smart about your food. your health, your choice. time saved is time earned. healthy eating, healthy body

I thought it was the avocado toast that was keeping us from owning a house.

It's simple... AI and automation will be gradually replacing everyone's job. The reason people are overworked is because they can't afford to lose their job.

I wrote this 12 years ago and it's even more true today: https://magarshak.com/blog/stop-wasting-our-time/

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