[Non-US] News That Makes You laugh/cry/neither...

[maglag]

Wow. It's been proved time and again that overwork reduces overall productivity and increases costly mistakes, accidents, and illness. But at least it's possible that he's not a malignant robber baron, maybe he's just insane from sleep deprivation.

I remember a study that some human beings have their brains naturally wired that they can get away with 4 hours of sleep no problem and that way basically have an extra 4 hours per day without damaging their effectiveness.

The problem is that the rest of us still need those 8 hours of sleep per day to properly operate, but the "sleepless elite" ends up rising to high positions because they can output more and makes the bosses expect everybody else to somehow keep up with them.

Or sometimes workers set those standards for themselves because the market is highly competitive and gotta keep up with the top ones at any costs.

Sadly it's becoming so standard that media like mangas treats it like a joke. "Haha the main character sleeps 4 hours per day so he can work the other 20 drowning himself in coffee to stay awake then when he runs out of caffeine just collapses so funny". No, it isn't.

Also the telling sign if you're one of those persons that can get actually away with 4 hours of sleep per day is whetever you sleep extra when you have the time/luxury to do so. If you sleep late in your days off, then you really shouldn't be pulling 4 hours of sleep per night.

[Iduno]

Wow. It's been proved time and again that overwork reduces overall productivity and increases costly mistakes, accidents, and illness. But at least it's possible that he's not a malignant robber baron, maybe he's just insane from sleep deprivation.

Working 80+ hours/week will 'change the world,' though; in the same way that the Scarecrow's compound will 'take you places.'

Right, like we're just going to let "science" get in the way of how we treat out wage slaves. If they complain or get worn out, we can just replace them.

It's also possible the rich people aren't sleeping because of the blow or whatever drugs. Actually, that makes sense. They do have cokehead ideas. They just must be combining it with downers to keep themselves "even" (stupid and crazy, not just one).

[Longes]

Sadly it's becoming so standard that media like mangas treats it like a joke. "Haha the main character sleeps 4 hours per day so he can work the other 20 drowning himself in coffee to stay awake then when he runs out of caffeine just collapses so funny". No, it isn't.

Well, it is funny. But no one should be treating Three Stooges as the standard of interpersonal interactions or human resilience.

[MisterDee]

The only people I've ever met who actually worked 80+ hours per week were young lawyers gunning for partnerships at big law firms and young entrepreneurs in the early stages of launching their businesses.

Everybody else (including a host of big firm partners) were dramatically overstating their work hours (that accounted for most cases) or counting stuff like "playing golf with clients" as work. Which... okay, sure, it's technically something that generates revenue for your employer/business, but sucking at golf, drinking overpriced tax-deductible lunches and harassing waitresses is hardly the exhausting proposition they seemed to think it was.

[erik]

Shittiest job I ever had I worked 80+ hours weekly. Just so I could get my stuff done. On $25k salary. For a research lab I was coordinator for undergrad, grads, docs, also IT with computers literally dying on my first day network admin for a 50/50 Mac/win 98 office, webmaster for a Unix server that I later learned had been rooted into an attack not, collecting data during cath lab cases, analyzing data, helping with published research papers, organizing a clusterfuck mess for an office move, and I forget what else (edit oh yeah and purchasing within the Byzantine rules of a major hospital and dealing with a new Turkish PhD who would just buy things and expect me to expedite his reimbursement... and also enter my closed office and destroyed a computer I was working on that admittedly had case off and power on but I had to step away and thought people wouldn’t enter my office and remove components from computers; my bad). 3 months and I was happy to be fired since it wasn’t working out (surgeon had me reposition his monster CRT monitor on his mahogany desk and it scratched the surface, and I just didn’t fucking care anymore. I marvel at my restraint when he told me he wanted me to fix it).

[Username17]

There was a period where the spinal surgery team I worked for started every day at 7 in the morning and then on top of that I was called upon to do weekends and lates and nights and shit. So there were a number of days where I started at 7:00 and finished at 21:30. So there were weeks where I worked between 85 and 87 hours. It turns out that the entire week only has 168 hours in it, so if you work more than 84 hours you're in the hospital more than you are not in the hospital. Not that I saw my co-workers more than I saw my wife, although obviously I did, or even that I was working more than I slept, just that I was working more than I was doing all other things combined. Not every week obviously, but a block of on-calls was definitely a thing that could push me into stupidly long hours in some weeks. But even a baseline "normal" week involved me working from 7:00 to 17:30 five days - with all the on-calls being on top of the baseline 50 hours.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

I am willing to say that 100% of ceos and managers that claim they work 80 hours a week don't.

[Maj]

Treating people like people and giving them more time off without a pay cut would change the world drastically. My opinion of Musk plummets every time he opens his mouth.

[Josh_Kablack]

Dude, if it takes 80 hours a week just to work at one of your companies, then how exactly are you running 4 of your companies?

[Kaelik]

Dude, if it takes 80 hours a week just to work at one of your companies, then how exactly are you running 4 of your companies?

Because "running a company" is a non job where if you died, your job could literally be done by your assistants for a year before anyone even noticed you were gone.

[Longes]

Dude, if it takes 80 hours a week just to work at one of your companies, then how exactly are you running 4 of your companies?

Because "running a company" is a non job where if you died, your job could literally be done by your assistants for a year before anyone even noticed you were gone.

In defense of Musk - he does work. He works hard. But the work Musk does is convincing investors to not pull out their current money, and in fact, give him more money. And he is hideously good at it. Musk is so good at pulling money out of everyone he interacts with that I wouldn't be surprised to hear that he's a literal vampire with magic powers.

He's also a notorious micromanager which does no good to anyone and makes Musk the bottleneck and the weakest link of his own company.

[Chamomile]

So if Musk was abducted by aliens one day, his companies would fold after the investment money ran out and he wasn't around to use his beguiler powers to get any more, but until then they would actually work better.

[Longes]

Probably. Or it would fall apart immediately because everything goes through Musk and there's no one to pick things up without him.

[hyzmarca]

Isn't that literally just a subway?

Nah. Subways are communist trains that quickly carry large numbers of people to and from defined locations. Elon Musk wants to build underpasses for people to drive in. Because as you are doubtless aware, what people really want is the self empowerment to get stuck in traffic while enclosed in an idling motor vehicle in a smoggy carbon monoxide infused tunnel.

-Username17

Looking at the concept video of the proposal, he wants to use flatbed car carriers powered by electrified rails in the tunnels. So literally a subway, for cars. It's still stupid, and would be dangerous if people didn't turn off their motors. But Musk is also assuming fire higher EV penetration than is reasonable to assume.

[Korwin]

I'd feel slightly better knowing that people who SHOULDN'T be able to sleep at night actually can't. I figured they snuggled down not caring that they're literally murdering children without any discomfort at all.

I red an story, about Musk needing some strong pills to be able to sleep...

[EightWave]

I seem to remember Trump saying much the same thing, he only sleeps like 4 hours a night or something. Maybe when you're a rich person pretending you're going to fix everything and obviously lying you aren't allowed to sleep.

Word from the whitehouse is that Trump doesn't let anyone disturb him before 10 AM.

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, I was gonna say, the medical field can definitely crack 80 hours and it's not great. My mother fairly routinely worked some ludicrous hours as an RN at St. Mary's (a Mayo campus) and commuted 40 minutes to get there on top of that. Medicine in general favors long hours, but due to the timing of her training she was one of their first young nurses fully trained in some of their new record keeping system and she didn't crack when her first 6 months were spent in the intensive care and cardiac units. And since life is not fair, this resulted her in getting tabbed as high hours float nurse pretty much immediately.

In related news, now that she's older she's also dealing with sleep disorders and pseudo dementia. Because obviously.

[Koumei]

It also doesn't surprise me that medical staff in the UK are working crazy long hours, because the NHS is super under-funded to the point that the tabloids are suggesting they let enthusiastic unqualified volunteers step in to help.

Or they could vote the Tories out and properly fund it, maybe go for an immigration model that encourages doctors to enter the country and so on.

Nah, obviously you want Dan the Butcher working in ICU.

[Dean]

The idea that wealthy capitalists only sleep 4 hours a night is a memetic lie that is repeated by the wealthy because it reinforces a myth they prefer: That they are rich because they work hard, and the poor are poor because they're lazy. However every work study ever done shows us the people who work the most hours are the poorest and the people who work the least hours are the wealthiest (ignoring the disabled who cannot work at all). Every sleep study ever done shows us the people who sleep the least are the poor, because they're often working multiple jobs. Finally, as Maglag references above, there is the oft cited fact that some people don't need more than 4 hours of sleep to function. That scientific anomaly is talked about by capitalists to create a fiction that the wealthy are some kind of genetic lottery winners. That they must be those people and that extra 4 hours a day is why you work in a bowling alley and they run their fathers hedge fund. What isn't mentioned is that the portion of the population for whom that is true when rounded to a whole number is 0%. The fiction that less sleep is related to success is entirely a capitalist fiction. A memetic lie repeated by the wealthy to create a fiction that their wealth is anything other than generational which of course it is not.

"I grew up poor" is probably the most common capitalist lie in this vein. Compare the number of millionaires you've heard say "I grew up poor" on TV compared to how many poor people you knew growing up and how many of them are millionaires now. "I grew up poor" is probably the most constant capitalist lie. I have heard every single shark on shark tank claim they grew up poor and every single one of them I looked up has parents who are millionaires.

Trump is rich cause mummy daddy were rich, Musk is rich cause mummy daddy were rich, every billionaire with no statistically relevant exception in the world is rich cause mummy daddy were rich. Don't try to sleep less because the bourgeoisie tell you it makes you seem lazy. The upper class would love you to accept a value system where doing anything other than working until you die makes you morally bad. Don't repeat their lies.

[Iduno]

I seem to remember Trump saying much the same thing, he only sleeps like 4 hours a night or something. Maybe when you're a rich person pretending you're going to fix everything and obviously lying you aren't allowed to sleep.

Word from the whitehouse is that Trump doesn't let anyone disturb him before 10 AM.

Fuck you, quit making me agree with Trump.

Nah, I'm kidding. I usually have my shit together by 9. Then again, I'm barely trusted to deal with wastewater, not being the president.

[Mord]

The idea that wealthy capitalists only sleep 4 hours a night is a memetic lie that is repeated by the wealthy because it reinforces a myth they prefer: That they are rich because they work hard, and the poor are poor because they're lazy. However every work study ever done shows us the people who work the most hours are the poorest and the people who work the least hours are the wealthiest (ignoring the disabled who cannot work at all). Every sleep study ever done shows us the people who sleep the least are the poor, because they're often working multiple jobs. Finally, as Maglag references above, there is the oft cited fact that some people don't need more than 4 hours of sleep to function. That scientific anomaly is talked about by capitalists to create a fiction that the wealthy are some kind of genetic lottery winners. That they must be those people and that extra 4 hours a day is why you work in a bowling alley and they run their fathers hedge fund. What isn't mentioned is that the portion of the population for whom that is true when rounded to a whole number is 0%. The fiction that less sleep is related to success is entirely a capitalist fiction. A memetic lie repeated by the wealthy to create a fiction that their wealth is anything other than generational which of course it is not.

"I grew up poor" is probably the most common capitalist lie in this vein. Compare the number of millionaires you've heard say "I grew up poor" on TV compared to how many poor people you knew growing up and how many of them are millionaires now. "I grew up poor" is probably the most constant capitalist lie. I have heard every single shark on shark tank claim they grew up poor and every single one of them I looked up has parents who are millionaires.

Trump is rich cause mummy daddy were rich, Musk is rich cause mummy daddy were rich, every billionaire with no statistically relevant exception in the world is rich cause mummy daddy were rich. Don't try to sleep less because the bourgeoisie tell you it makes you seem lazy. The upper class would love you to accept a value system where doing anything other than working until you die makes you morally bad. Don't repeat their lies.

Wish we had an "applause" button.

I have actually known one such 4-hours-of-sleep-only guy in my life. He was a director in my employer's software development group and my boss for a couple of years. He was unexpectedly fired at the whim of the CEO's childhood friend, who had recently been hired on as an SVP. He is now a full-time artist and does work for various comic publishers and indies. I think he's got cover art upcoming on one of Marvel's non-flagship titles, which is good for him.

[Whipstitch]

I have heard every single shark on shark tank claim they grew up poor and every single one of them I looked up has parents who are millionaires.

Yeah, as far as I know the closest thing to an exception is Daymond John, the FUBU guy, and even he talks openly about his mother mortgaging her house to front him $100k, something millions of families couldn't and frankly probably shouldn't be willing to risk. It's unclear to what degree he's high on his own fumes versus the motivational speak just being a tool he uses to run the usual book tour and speaking hustle that success apparently entitles you to, but he's obviously still invested in the memes even if in interviews he deflects a bit by saying that hard workers are successful but not all success is financial.

[Kaelik]

Someone I follow on Twitter has been posting three sources in increasing complexity explaining why CEOs are all worthless, and the first one is that xkcd comic of a guy holding bags of money giving a motivational speech about how the way to get rich is to keep buying lottery tickets. Because selection bias makes rich people who are successful incapable of recognizing luck or privilege and instead they attribute it to [basically any quality at random].

On the subject of musk being shit, it turns out Tesla has been run from the top down with an aggressively racist atmosphere that discourages and punishes black employees.

What a complete surprise from the company of a guy who grew up in Aparthied South Africa.

[Longes]

Someone I follow on Twitter has been posting three sources in increasing complexity explaining why CEOs are all worthless, and the first one is that xkcd comic of a guy holding bags of money giving a motivational speech about how the way to get rich is to keep buying lottery tickets. Because selection bias makes rich people who are successful incapable of recognizing luck or privilege and instead they attribute it to [basically any quality at random].

On the subject of musk being shit, it turns out Tesla has been run from the top down with an aggressively racist atmosphere that discourages and punishes black employees.

What a complete surprise from the company of a guy who grew up in Aparthied South Africa.

We are talking about the company that doesn't have yellow warning signs, forklift beeping, and safety railings because Elon Musk doesn't like yellow, beeping and safety railings don't fit his sense of aesthetics. And also they cook the books on on-site injuries.

Source

[maglag]

Now for some positive news, Britain is currently running with 33% renewable energy that's also almost half as cheap as nuclear power!