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.
>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.
This is something that no one seems to want to address. The minimum wage should, at the very minimum, allow a single person to afford rent, food, hygiene products and clothes. Minimum wage covering basic necessities should at this point be a human right. Instead, for the past 40 years, the cost of living and housing and the wages have been rapidly diverging.
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.
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.
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.
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..."
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Another potential fix would be having two calendars. A lunar calendar for weeks/months, and a solar calendar for seasons/years.
In every society, some of the brightest and best minds got employed as astrologers, astronomers, and designers of calendars.
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"
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..."
So move back.. problem solved.
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.
Related: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch
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.
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.