Why weekends are under threat | Hacker News Reader

Why weekends are under threat

thehustle.co

27 pointsAnon8430 comments

This is content marketing from Hubspot. I dont need to hear opinions on how to live my life from a billion dollar company.

It's also got a lot of hallmarks of AI written prose

Very on-the-nose too. How did it get past editorial review?

Clickbait title. The article never gets around to how weekends are under threat. The closest it comes is to say that a lot of us have to check email on Saturdays.

Livable wage is under threat. Week ends are the least of it. Millions working full time jobs can't pay their bills anymore.

>Millions working full time jobs can't pay their bills anymore.

Anymore? Real (inflation adjusted) wages are up for all income groups[1]. The lowest percentiles actually saw their wages grow more in relative terms than the highest.

[1] https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20260103_FBC...

America is not the only country in the World. Here in Montreal, minimum wage went up to around $15 an hour, in the same time a clean one bedroom apartment went from $600-800 to minimum $1500. I live alone and used to spend around $250 in groceries a month now it's around $600 and so on and so forth. And I am not at minimum wage. I can't even fathom how someone making $20 an hour manages to survive.

We have a huge surge of homeless people, mostly because renting one room was about $150-200 now it's around $600 for a crappy one.

People are struggling and the way you wrote that comment, you seem to have no idea as you are personally not yet a victim of the system.

Just think about how much one is struggling to turn around and burn a whole warehouse and how normal people are reacting to it.

> The data from Google search queries became a competitive advantage that allowed Google to continually improve its search algorithm and ad targeting.

This kind of refers to the past though. Anyone who is using Google search these days, curses how unbelievably useless it has become. This is how monopolies ruin the segment they dominate.

If there were real competition, Google would improve the search engine, or it would go extinct, and be replaced by something better.

The whole article is written really strangely. Was that written by AI? There seems to be some disconnect in the writing itself.

With even their lowest subscription, Kagi is a very nice substitute to the old Google.

The "strange" writing that is somewhat AI-written is pretty much the norm now. I'm actually getting used to it, although it immediately triggers the "this is AI assisted writing" klaxon in my head.

The week is not _completely_ a human invention, it is, conveniently, a period between two moon phases

Just under a period.

29 days for a moon loop. 29 / 4.0 is 7.25. Every 4 weeks you'd be out a full day.

So yes, a week is a human invention.

Either all of my old mechanical clocks with moon dial are wrong, or it's 29.5 days.

Worse, it's 29.53, with a solar year being 365.25217 solar days, so 12.37 lunar cycles in a year, so you're off by 10.926 days a year.

In every society, some of the brightest and best minds got employed as astrologers, astronomers, and designers of calendars.

Yeah you're right, i was doing it via memory. Which makes this whole thing even more incorrect.

ITS NOT JUST A PHASE MUM!

That’s how units work, fitting the messy natural world into comprehensible numbers. A year is 365 days, except every four, except every 100, except every 400. A month is 30-ish days, and there are 12 of them in a year, because that roughly syncs up the orbits of the Moon and Earth. Except there used to be ten of them (“DECember”), with garbage time filling in the remainder of Earth’s transit around the Sun. A second is something related to Cesium-133, because it’s close to 1/(24x60x60) of a day, because Sumerians chose base 60.

Discrepancy is that we're mixing (lunar) months and weeks with solar timekeeping, in a solar calendar. These are fundamentally incompatible, so we've gone with cramming the approximate periodicity of the lunar calendar into the solar calendar, while ignoring the fact that we're no longer tracking the moon, and that the weeks don't line up with the year, and the fact that the months are randomly different lengths because they also don't line up and we don't want a weird half-month at the end.

Another potential fix would be having two calendars. A lunar calendar for weeks/months, and a solar calendar for seasons/years.

our work patterns are a construct of industrialisation.

Tech workers need to unionize. You aren't petit bourgeois any longer. Corps aren't even pretending y'all are not a fungible as everyone else now that they smell blood in the water.

Before I left my previous company the CEO waxed philosophical about adopting the 996, even as we had above target profits for then nth quarter in a row and layoffs rolling over every department.

> CEO waxed philosophical about adopting the 996

we really need to categorise this as mental illness in order to pushback. Its a symptom of hoardcurse, i.e. people trying to justify the assets they have through performance theatre, when they could instead just accept they're somewhat fortunate.

How will unions help layoffs? In the auto industry, unionized shops are still seeing record layoffs.

Tech just isn't compatible with unions. Most unions involve so much red tape that it would cripple the tech industry from innovating and just allow other countries with no unions to dominate.

You have always been replaceable, but there's a big difference between making $100,000+ with full benefits after going through years of high education and a minimum wage factory job.

Housing costs are up too though

This is such an American problem. I moved from the EU to the US so I have always been pretty strict with work hours. I finish at 17 and don't work on weekends.

I have applied the same approach in the US and I have never had anyone tell me that I have to put in more hours. However, I see a lot of movement over the weekend and at weird times (people working past midnight). But the thing is that no one is really forcing them, I think this way of thinking is embedded within the average American relationship with work.

I have observed this in my wife too. She stays past her contract hours but mostly because a lot of people in her company do the same.

I think this is a "self reinforcing peer pressure problem"

I moved from Canada to Germany to avoid that work culture. Everytime I visit home, I feel like everyone is working all the time. When I work with North American colleagues, I have to explicitly tell them that I don't expect a reaction outside of office hours.

As the tweet goes:

> Europeans' out of offices are like "I will not be working until 18 September. All emails will be automatically deleted."

> Americans: "I am in the hospital. Email responses may be delayed by up to 30 mins. Sorry for the inconvenience! If urgent, please reach me in the ER at..."

"This is such an American problem. I moved from the EU to the US "

So move back.. problem solved.

Or maybe the American problem should be solved.

As I explained in my comment, it is not a problem for me. But the author of the post makes it seem like it's a universal problem

The article does not answer its own question, or say anything, really.

In a sufficiently competitive environment, players abandon a value for a temporary advantage. When other players follow suit, that value is gone, but the playing field is still level, and everyone is worse off.

Weekends are under threat because our jobs are. Everyone's keeping their head down to make it through the next round of layoffs, to avoid getting replaced by AI, to avoid a protracted job search.

An article written for extroverts. I will be happy to spend my all weekends during the work days of everybody else.

As an experiment, consider if we get rid of both the clock and the calendar, leaving us only with Unix time (which is utterly incomprehensible without a calendar or clock reference).

Timers would still work. Actions would then be more ad-hoc. The simple change would likely lower stress tenfold, and this is what can be measured.

How then would appointments work? Day offsets (from 0 to 2) would still easily work. People wanting to come in to see a specialist would just have to call/contact, then come in at any time of the day. Some would come in earlier in the day, and some would come in later in the day, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, and things would work out.

Everything would likely be slowed down in the immediate sense, but would this be so bad? Odds are that no; it would probably add much to happiness, and perhaps become more sustainable.

How would a big passenger airplane even depart? It wouldn't, and that's okay. Cargo planes and other dedicated airplanes would remain unaffected because they can depart when there is sufficient mass.

It would be like a return to old times, maybe to an extreme version of Italy. The early chaos, if managed aptly, would soon manifest as a longer and healthier life.

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