Indeed, if you're paying attention to local news in Massachusetts, you might be shocked, or not, that cops from Canton, Boston, and the Massachusetts state police, and the county District Attorney, and judges, are all complicit in railroading a woman who was dating a cop who was likely killed by another cop. The web of deceit is so thick, it can't have been just for this one case. It must be long-standing and pervasive and there must be many victims. It's also unlikely that Massachusetts is the worst place in the US in this respect.
They are referring to how there’s a belief in some parts of Massachusetts that the police are trying to frame Karen Reid for the death of John O Keefe (0). At its climax it was all over the news, it was discussed at a lot of water coolers, and there were even billboards bought by the highway to show support and draw attention to the court case.
The amount of evidence described in the Wikipedia entry that relies on mobile data is both fascinating and jarring; step counts, battery temperature, automobile software, Ring cameras...wow.
Railroading is essentially coercing/bullying someone into a situation or doing something with a connotation of things being taken too far, very quickly, using overwhelming force… like a train.
The case they’re referring to is the Karen Read case. The whole for/against thing has become quite political and sensationalized, especially after the involvement of a popular local online right-wing commentator named Turtle Boy (because Turtle Middle-Aged-Man didn’t have the same ring to it.) Another Canton policeman seemingly murdered a young woman who’d refused to get an abortion. He’d been sleeping with her for a few years after she started some sort of internship/cadet program with the police department as a high school student. Canton is a sleepy, medium-sized suburb, btw.
The corruption in the Massachusetts State Police is cartoonishly prevalent. There are too many major recent (and past) scandals to even choose one. They see themselves as a pseudo-military organization and are famous for their arrogant, officious, and rude manners, violence, aggression, corruption, and cover-ups. I got stopped at some sort of checkpoint in rural Georgia at 2am on a 2 lane country highway 50 miles from anything and was astonished by how professionally those bored cops acted. Completely different than my experiences with state police back home. Who knows: maybe the Georgia cops would have been way worse if I wasn’t white while there MSP might be more egalitarian in their ghoulishness?
I’ve had far more interaction with urban police in MA, both as a punk-ass teenager and in professional dealings, and the experience has been fine for the most part. Staties and cops in the suburbs? Yeesh.
I don't think I am naive, just imagine the repercussions of the headline "FBI collected thousands of child rape photos for blackmail" or "Cop work computer was found filled with child porn"
Anything linked to pedophilia in the US and elsewhere is without remorse, and will continue that way due to parental fears.
Seizing control of criminal websites is literally standard procedure. Three letter agencies are known for hacking their way into criminal platforms and keeping them running for as long as possible. They justify it as an opportunity to catch high value targets. They're quite willing to literally distribute CSAM from their own servers for months, years on end if that's what it takes. They don't just react either, they are very proactive. They start their own CSAM communuties to entrap criminals. So called honeypots.
It's a recurring theme with these authorities. You see, they're special. They get to spread this sort of material with complete impunity. They get to stockpile cyberweapons and use them against the targets of their investigations, or even indiscriminately. If you do it, you're a hacker spreading malware. They're just doing their jobs.
Sometimes those two privileges collide, resulting in truly comical and absurd situations. FBI has allowed cases against child molesters to go down the drain because the judge ordered them to reveal some Firefox exploit they used. They didn't want to invalidate their "network investigative techniques".
It's even more legally funny than this. They are also allowed to enact entrapment to some degree and it passed court muster in the US.
That because it's extremely hard to use it as a defence.
Note that these actions are illegal in most continental jurisdictions as stings must be devised ahead of time against specific groups of people.
There's also Article 6 of ECHR.
In other words, FBI cannot run a sting off an EU site like this, at least definitely not a German one.
I think there’s a difference between leaving a CP site up for two weeks so you can track the users, versus actively posting CP on legal websites for the purpose of blackmailing third parties into blocking them (“The Bardfinn Method”).
"The Justice Department said in court filings that agents did not post any child pornography to the site themselves"
"The FBI kept Playpen online for 13 days"
"There was no other way we could identify as many players"
I think the normal person would think this is worth while to catch more pedophiles, hence why this would work politically. However, you can read by the tone of the article that even this drew a lot of rage.
Imagine the FBI agents collecting CSAM, uploading it to websites for the purpose of... preventing copyright infringement
How about "The President was close friends with a known child sexual predator and his entire government spends a significant amount of time covering up their connections because it seems fairly obvious the president fucked teenagers and then fomented a coup and put literal criminals and felons in his cabinet so no one would hold him accountable while destroying the nation's economy and starting wars nobody can even understand"
The jeffery epstein case is real, however the narrative created is similar to pizzagate
"world elite is practicing a child sex ring", this is why it's so compatible with the current vogue bipartisan populism which generally says "your life sucks because of the rich/elites"
jeffery epstein was in reality associated with many politicians, including trump and clinton, as far as I can tell on both sides there is a lot of extrapolation as to what really happened
On pure numbers alone, this is practically guaranteed to be the case for a portion of the world elite, since statistically speaking at least 1% ~ 2% of them will be pedophiles. Same as any community, anywhere. The average child sex ring is probably made up of individuals about as wealthy and sophisticated as your dad, uncle, neighbour, boss or your friends, and if even they can pull it off then surely the global elite can.
With Epstein the is plenty that did happen that remains unaddressed and is completely factual. Eg The-Man-Formerly-Know-As-Prince-Andrew.
He is a child rapist.
Quite why the now dead queen supported him so much (presumably including the payouts) is baffling.
And pictures and letters and cohabitation and friendship and mutual business arrangements and the list goes on. The court of public opinion is not an actual court.
>And pictures and letters and cohabitation and friendship and mutual business arrangements and the list goes on
At best that proves he's affiliated/associated with a convicted pedophile. Going from that to "we can upgrade it to the much more direct fact "President Trump is a pedophile who liked to rape little girls" is a massive leap. There's plenty of other famous people who turned out to be sexual offenders, but we don't go around accusing their entire circle of being "pedophile who liked to rape little girls".
>The court of public opinion is not an actual court.
Good. The court of public opinion has shown itself to be massively partisan. People's evidentiary standards change on a whim depending on how much they previously like/hate the person. By invoking the "court of public opinion" excuse, you're basically admitting that there's weak evidence for the allegations, so you need a lower bar to "convict" someone.
I am imagining the consequences of that headline and there are none. If you disagree maybe you should imagine some of the real headlines that have occurred lately and check your imagination against reality. Federal agents are actively encouraged to violate your civil and constitutional rights. Those consequences live only in your imagination
Who says that? Because that’s not the prevailing opinion among me (soon 40), my friends snd my family.
Benefits from «stuff» caps off ar a certain level. After that you want to work less so you have more time to, among other things, actually enjoy your stuff. The exception to this are wealth chasers with multiple yachts etc., but that isn’t «we», that’s a tiny tiny sliver of the elite.
1) Unions say it when they always demand increased salary (= focus on private spending) rather than reduced working hours
2) Voters say it when the right and far right is polling high. Lower taxes = wish for higher private spending, if people are going to work less then tax rate must up for society to function as public expenditure will increase, not decrease, with lots of elderly needing care and fewer workers available.
3) Lots of people have the ability to reduce working hours by working fewer hours (in Norway, if you have kids you can always get 20% unpaid leave by law). And most could do so economically if they reduced their consumption and spending. But people do not seem to consider reducing their salary as an option. The option is available to lots of people and they are not taking it.
PS: You talk about getting more stuff, but to meet the future labor problems we are talking about reductions being needed to peoples consumption, not staying at the 2025 level.
>The option is available to lots of people and they are not taking it.
They're not taking it because living costs are up across the board. The laws allows you to work part time, but your expenses don't so you have to work 40h week to keep up in the rat race with everyone else.
1) Unions are asking that Capitalists share a bigger slice of the fruit of workers labor back with the workforce. Forcing a link between that and private spending and eventual consumerism is skipping a few steps in the logic.
2) Voters vote on a number of reasons. Taxes are one, but they range from geopolitical, immigration, healthcare, education, safety, access to housing among others. And then there is the charisma and quality of the candidate. Saying people vote left or right for one single issue is simplistic, and not very genuine. It could also be that significant groups of people abuse the social support tools, and people get tired of paying taxes for someone else to benefit by not doing their share.
3) You are clearly well off and are being a bit selfish. Many people live paycheck to paycheck, and would like to save some money for their future, which seems smart considering that goverment funds will crumble (as stated in this article). Other people work because they have done so for 30 years and sadly their life are empty outside of it. Assuming people work 100% just because they are too materialistic or attached to wealth feels a bit unfair to what most of society goes through.
Don't mean to critise, but in face of your strong opinion, I wanted to highlight that as Flaubert said, "There is no truth, just perceptions".
On 3), sorry, I should have been more specific -- I was talking about Norway specifically and also specifically about the middle class segment.
I was a bit clumsy -- I just meant that if people wanted to prioritize time over luxuries then SOME people, who are in a position to, not all, could have sent that signal. Because luxuries (vacations, cabins, boats) are still getting prioritized in the scandinavian middle class, and those specifically could have sent the signal they wanted more free time instead.
I agree with your points outside of that context and I should have specified it.
People who believe that consumerism was something that the general population opted into willingly rather than a result of a torrent of post WW2 psyops campaigns designed to deal with the "problem" of industrial overproduction.
My friends and I would love to have 4/5 or 3/5 of working days with 4/5 or 3/5 of salary, but sadly I don't know any companies that offer that. I understand that it may be hard with meeting culture, but we can make 1 or 2 days with no meetings.
I don't want to go back to the stress and uncertainty of freelancing; I want a predictable, safe income with simply scaled-back hours/pay.
My salary (and my friends') in IT is 2-3 times more than the average pay, and 60/80% is more than enough to live comfortably
I don't think time worked linearly correlates with profitability, especially when talking about long timeframes. E.g. working 120 hours per week for a year is extremely unlikely to result in 3x the productivity as 40 hours a week. Same with working 3/5ths as much, it's unlikely to linearly scale down to 3/5ths the value (not that "it can't ever", just not as a typical expectation).
That aside, plenty of places offer a 4x10, or are fine with it when asked, and I think that's a more productive way to put in 40 hours each week while also being more convenient for yourself (before even getting into wanting to lower total hours).
4x10 is rough. I’ve been in positions that started with 5x8 then went to 4x10, then others 8,10, or 12 with built in overtime or comp time to get to 40hrs average.
You end up trying to cheat meals for speed eating unhealthy. High amounts of caffeine, little family time, and at least the first day off is usually wasted catching up on lost sleep. If you happen to do shift work, good luck trying to get much done as you need to shift to a different schedule to be somewhere during open hours.
We were more inefficient going from 5x8 to 4x10. Try training on little sleep before coffee kicks in. You need to re-do it later. Try sleeping after drinking coffee all day to stay awake, it’s great for your heart and blood pressure.
If you're already time constrained to the point working 2 extra hours means you can't get through the day without caffeine and skipping meals then of course it's a bad idea, but that's not an inherent fault of a 4x10 in itself.
A 4x10 is particularly attractive for those able to work remote and/or without lots of other time commitments. If you have an hour commute each way, kids to drop off/pick up from school/sports, responsibility for cooking meals 100% of the time, and so on then it really doesn't make sense to point the finger at the 2 extra hours as the sole root cause of the problem in that situation.
Those don't exist because of unintended (but obvious) consequences of government regulation. For all sorts of reasons the risk and cost profile is pretty similar per employee whether they are 20 hours a week or 60 hours a week (non exhaustive examples: health insurance costs me the same to provide no matter how many hours an employee works. Depending on your regulatory regime certain payments like pensions/unemployment are capped so more workers earning less can actually cost more than less workers earning more, firing regulations makes more employees riskier because the probability you hire junk you can't get rid of or an employee turns to junk and you can't fire is higher with more employees, etc.) Since there is a very real cost with what you want your skill set has to be scarce enough to make the added cost worth incurring. As long as I can hire someone that will work full time for similar hourly equivalent pay, the part timers will not be seriously considered.
Health insurance being dependent on your employment, is a whole problem on its own. Of course these things need to be arranged differently, ajd with more freedom for the people themselves.
That said, I recently opted for a 40 hour work week for the first time in decades because otherwise this job is too big a step back in income.
Health insurance is complicated and I think it's not right to say it's a problem that the employer is paying (or that the government is paying). I think it's more accurate to say the cost for service is way too high in general, and we are missing out on network effects and efficiency gains by not providing healthcare to some and/or no not providing enough healthcare soon enough to some (and by providing too much healthcare to some too soon).
Under that problem statement, it makes a lot of sense for a large subset of healthcare (i.e. the routine or semi routine stuff like emergency services, family doctor routine visits, many common diseases, especially childhood diseases, routine dental, drugs for these diseases, etc) to be single payer (i.e the government) as long as the government is very proactive and flexible in crushing those costs through its multiple available levers.
I see more of a role for private insurance for the rarer stuff where the cost/benefit to society of society paying isn't as obvious and the optional stuff (ie treatments that have a generic option and a newer drug that is more effective, cover the generic, let people buy insurance if they think they want access to the expensive latest and greatest). There is pretty clearly a role for private and public providers of healthcare in both the government single payer and the private insurance role as well.
> it's not right to say it's a problem that the employer is paying (or that the government is paying)
These are two completely different situations, and the first is absolutely a problem. It means you lose your health insurance if you get fired, and indeed that working part-time may not be feasible.
The efficiency of the system is a separate issue (but also definitely an issue).
They are not different. They are linked. Who is paying only matters because the item is arbitrarily too expensive for the person to just pay on their own.
Of course they are different. It's easy to lose your job. From what I understand, there are even countries where you can be fired while sick. And then you lose your health insurance exactly when you need it most.
Losing your nationality is extremely rare. The two cases couldn't be more different.
It's definitely possible, and my current company were very happy to agree to 4/5 of the time for 4/5 of the salary and it's working out well for everyone. However, I've also found some organisations - that are otherwise good - to be hostile to working less than full hours. Since we work on interesting problems and they were happy to go with 80% it made it an easy task deciding which job to accept!
I should add that's it's a start-up so some weeks I work more and others less. But I still have the day my kids that I wanted.
Perhaps try quietly asking your current company? They might surprise you and start a trend.
If you want to work a 25 hour week you can go to where my wife’s family is from and pick up however many shifts you want at the local convenience store. You can live a lifestyle comparable to my wife’s grandparents working far less of the day.
The problem is in knowledge work fields where manpower isn’t scalable (read the Mythical Man Month), and the industries are competitive and winner-take-all. A programmer who works 30 hours a week is far less valuable than than one that works 50 hours a week.
Depends on what they do with those 30 and 50 hours. If they're burnt out, even 100 hours chained to an in-person desk, they aren't going to accomplish much, so that's just not true. The right software engineer can come in, have a pointed discussion, have some coffee, go look at some code, have a few conversations, and have a bigger impact in an hour in terms of setting future direction and avoiding pitfalls than a different engineer could do in a week.
> But we don't want to work less, we want more stuff.
Hold on. That's what tech is for right?
certain people on this forum keep saying we don't want to work. They say it's OK that they steal our art to train AI that takes our jobs, because then we can finally chillax and not work. But now apparently we also must keep working the remaining shitty jobs to not starve until we die? who is supposed to win here??
Obviously it depends a lot but, as white-collars tech people, we can already work less.
What's preventing us from going on sabbatical ? We would earn less, sure, but do we really need that money? I mean it is buying us things that our parents didnt have so it should be possible to do without, no?
Yeah I guess it answers the question who wins (for now). for sure it's just a problem for copywriters who will need to work as roofers until the ever increasing retirement age because a thing trained on stolen text now does the copywriting. The tech people who made it happen can just chill and tell everybody how they can work less while snowboarding in the alps.
That's been happening, but not as quickly as earlier generations expected. In 1970, the average labor force participant (employed or unemployed) in Denmark worked 1845 hours. By 2022, the number had fallen to 1371 hours. The numbers are similar for most West European countries but not for East Europe or the US.
Out of curiosity, what drove that shift? Shorter workweek, fewer hours per day, drastically more vacation, or some combination of the above?
Based on a 40-hour workweek, this would be 34 workweeks. Adding on 2-3 weeks worth of paid holidays, that leaves the equivalent of 15-16 weeks of vacation a year? I know my coworkers in Europe get more vacation than we do, but somehow I don't think it's that much more.
With a 32-hour workweek, this instead looks like ~6 weeks of vacation, which is more believable.
Full-time in Denmark is 37 hours/week and most people have around 6 weeks of vacation/year (the legal minimum is 5). Some people will be working part-time, bringing the total hours worked down, so the numbers make sense to me.
In the United States, full-time hours are in a range.
Part-time workers are often capped at 29 hours per week, due to tax considerations, such as the Affordable Care Act and other benefits. 30 hours is where the "full-time" label is applied there.
A wage-earning (non-exempt) worker must be paid overtime when they exceed full-time, which is typically a 40-hour maximum. Overtime pay may be "time and a half" or "double time" in certain circumstances.
Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States. Sometimes we refer to "banker's hours" which has the negative connotation that the worker never ever works outside that schedule.
In the UK You don't get paid for lunch which is why real white collar hours worked are more like eight to six or a lot longer.
And typically you get to work through your unpaid lunch, while your contract says 37.5 hours and 'any other time necessary to complete your work'. At least that's been my experience for the last forty years or so.
> Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States.
I have seen it go one of several ways.
- Technically count the person as 35 hours per week, giving a 1-hour lunch break. (Or 37.5, with a half-hour unpaid lunch break)
- Add an extra half hour to the day, e.g. have the employee work 8:30-5 or 9-5:30.
- Salaried employees aren't explicitly punching in and out of the clock each day, so there's nothing stopping them from working 8-6 or even longer hours. They don't get overtime, but at the same time the company doesn't care what hours they work as long as they get their work done.
"Banker's Hours" used to mean roughly 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM because most retail branches were only open on weekdays during those hours. This was long before online banking or even ATMs.
Right. I thought about part-timers or people working reduced schedules bringing the average (mean) down; I just wasn't sure if I was missing something systemic or not.
It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public.
In particular, counting unemployed labor force participants feels wrong, even if you're counting how many hours a week they're spending on job seeking activities (applying to jobs, prepping resumes, interviewing, etc). I know I would burn out if I spent even 5+ hours a day doing just that, 5 days a week, even if I didn't have a full-time job.
There's also a pernicious thing that certain companies do (I'm thinking retail) where they just won't schedule you for enough hours to qualify you as full-time, since if they exceed that threshold, then (gasp) they have to pay benefits like health insurance. I also would prefer not to count that in the discussion of "how much does a typical employee work?"
On the flip side, I'm also less interested in considering the workaholic lawyers and consultants who are putting in 60-80 hours a week (or more!). There are far fewer of them, but they still skew the numbers.
From my perspective, the stereotypical US workweek is and has been 9 to 5 (whether you count that as 35 or 40 hours after accounting for lunch) for the past 50+ years. We certainly fall behind when it comes to vacation, since we still have no legally mandated minimum (I think 2-4 weeks is typical; anything higher is good but not unheard of).
> It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public.
In particular, it looks like as mentioned, most employees in Denmark fall in the 35-39h bucket (nearly 4x the size of the next biggest bucket, 40+ hours). Meanwhile, if you look at the US, the 40+ bucket is more than 10x the size of any other. But it's not exactly a US vs Scandinavia situation -- Sweden has just under 70% of its workforce also working 40+ hour weeks, higher than the UK or Germany.
Don’t forget the expansion of the labour pool by women entering the workforce, who work more often part time. And more men work part time too, especially without a woman at home doing all chores like cleaning and cooking.
Over the past half century, a lot of women went from housewife to part-time worker, resulting in more hours worked per adult citizen and household, but fewer per labor participant. The same is true if labor participation in general went up, which between 2012 and 2022 it did, by about 5pp: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1166044/employment-rate-...
That's not the kind of progress described by the mchanson.
> "By 2022, the number had fallen to 1371 hours. The numbers are similar for most West European countries"
In France it is officially 1607 hours per year, but it could be legally much higher and the mean duration is 1 679 hours. From Eurostat, in 2021 the mean duration in Germany was 1 769 hours and 1 923 hours in Italy.
That's not really how I have observed progress working. It seems to broadly do two things:
convert labor demand into the cheapest most abundant labor (i.e. assembly where you can teach almost anyone a small set of tasks and have a lot of stations drastically increasing output while keep labor scarcity and thus cost lower or straight up geographic arbitrage moving production to much cheaper labor countries)
Increase the complexity and therefore scarcity of labor demanded to keep progressing.
Neither of these things end up where you want as far as working less while having all your comfort things because the first one tends to push unit labor costs down making your labor hour demand go higher to support your lifestyle at the lower wage and the second one increases value of the limited group of humans that can deal with the complexity, so their wages can and do easily trend high enough to incentivize full time or more hours.
It's not equally distributed. In Boston, MA area kids have as much autonomy as their parents wish to give them AFAIK. It's not uncommon to see 10 year olds in my town nearby they are doing all sorts of biz around town on their own.
Literally any very low income area of any larger city in the US is the same. You see kids all the time walking around without adults. If they're very young (like 6 or whatever) they're typically an older kid, sometimes like around 10 to 12, but again this happens everywhere.
It's only middle class neighborhoods and above where people start to have strong reactions to this in a "won't somebody think of the children!!!" sort of way
This is just doomerism and painting with a planet wide brush. IMHO it's not so simple.
There has been much laudable and scientific progress in the past 50 years. Higgs Boston discovery and mRNA vaccines being two that come to mind.
And examples of progress that science helped start and then international and national institutions brought to the masses: Smallpox eradication, HIV treatment, lower childhood mortality, etc.
Their response may well have been stellar, that just doesn't matter all that much after you've rendered a whole fleet of PC's incapable of starting up.
Delta being shit at IT doesn't excuse Crowdstrike for their obscene level of negligence. Delta had an eggshell skull but Crowdstrike is the one who broke it by pushing an untested update to the world.
The fact someone releases some software doesn't make someone inherently responsible for any and all business loss related to an event caused by it. I suspect CrowdStrike's EULA has some significant disclaimer of liability, for whatever worth that ends up in court.
Depending on how hard they push this in the Courts, one possible consequence might end up being the legal weakening of all such EULAs.
I wonder if a judge is going to look for someone to blame when a software glitch grounds more than half the planes in the US and conclude that "the vendor said no take-backsies" just isn't good enough?
If they do, could have interesting consequences for the various software licenses with indemnification clauses.
I mean, I assume CrowdStrike will end up settling to get this out of the news, and I assume that's all Delta is looking for, the handout to shut up.
But let's look at how ridiculous this could go: Imagine Delta's house of cards IT stack was so fragile that this incident ended the company. Not another Delta flight ever took off, the company went bankrupt, etc. Would CrowdStrike be responsible for the full business value of Delta? Of course not, that would be ridiculous. The fact that Delta says they lost a half a billion dollars does not automatically mean CrowdStrike is responsible for a half a billion dollar loss. CrowdStrike has likely some responsibility, and Delta has the rest for not having factored this possibility into their resiliency strategy.
