The car turned off the shining avenue, taking him back to the quiet splendor of his home. His futile hands clenched and relaxed again, folded on his knees. There was nothing left to do.
Wake up, sheeple! It was the iPhones all along!
The last 40 years has seen an increase of 250-375% in made up numbers presented as accurate statistics.
Improved average quality in procrastination options goes hand in hand with increased procrastination.
UK smartphone users check their phone 221 times a day on average, a recent survey found.
Who says that's procrastination?
It seems like a lot of hand-wringing without evidence that stuff isn't getting done.
To work is human; to procrastinate, divine.
I'm using my smartphone to multitask. I can't otherwise comment during this conference call because everyone can see my desktop.
Productivity per worker has been rising steadily for decades. If instead of being paid for that increase workers are simply able to procrastinate more - It's not the best trade off but it's better than just being a busy little miserable drone.
"I wouldn't say we do it more than we ever have but we talk about it a lot more," says Gray
That seems right.
8 sounds plausible. And reminds me of previous working-hours discussions here, esp. the one about Keynes' 15 hours a week prediction, whether it's been fulfilled and why not.
Our motley band of academics, journalists, and professionals has a degree of autonomy over our workday actions that is becoming ever rarer.
Fortunately we're also the subject and audience for this sort of media navel-gazing.
Back when I was in a building with security, you could see how they tracked the guards by having them touch a checkpoint on their route. I suppose now it's all RFID tags.
13: I had a night security job like that for a week of one summer at the University of Michigan. It was a like a treasure hunt without any treasure (unless you count the puny paycheck as treasure).
They made you hunt for your check?
But the crossword puzzle-unfogged substitution is also true for me. I haven't really done a crossword since I started reading here.
This is kind of hilarious, just an update about my friend who has been procrastinating on her tenure packet due Wednesday - she just had a FB status about how she got an email from the NSF, stating that she's the co-PI on a proposal that she had no idea about. (I'm like, SEE EVERYBODY LOVES YOU. She'll be fine.)
15: Yeah, it was buried around the 50 yard line in Michigan Stadium. There was only one paycheck and usually 10-12 guards working the shift, and so it was a chase to check in at all the secret places on your route and then you ran to the Stadium and looked for your shovel where you hid it and you started digging -- the first time the check had been dug up before I even got to the Stadium. But the last time I dug up the paycheck (almost $50!) and so I decided to retire as champion and took a job as a dishwasher at a bakery.
UK smartphone users check their phone 221 times a day on average
Who are these people? I check my phone like half a dozen times on a good day.
19: Wasn't there a study showing that the average American teenager sent a text every 10 seconds of their waking life?
So, to answer your question - teenagers.
The bit of the article I found hardest to understand was the thing about Victor Hugo working in the nude to avoid procrastinating. Time was, when working from home, I quite frequently used to work in the nude (well, usually a pair of boxers), and it didn't affect my ability to procrastinate in the least.
Fortunately we're also the subject and audience for this sort of media navel-gazing.
Yeah, there certainly is an internet class bias toward "people who are in a position to goof off at work."
Who are these people? I check my phone like half a dozen times on a good day.
...because you're mostly on your computer?
I would think working in the nude would lead to an excessive number of masturbation breaks.
No, because you don't need to break. Just masturbate to your progress on your excel spreadsheet.
because you're mostly on your computer?
And British smartphone users aren't? At least not to the extent that it puts a substantial dent in the average?
I want to see the methodology. I bet the real number is, like, 50. With a median significantly lower.
25: And that's how the grading spreadsheet came to have 5112 rows and 460 columns.
Procrastinate, procrastinate, masturbate, procrastinate.
28: I have to procrastinate for a while after masturbating because I can't for a while.
I find anxiety so unpleasant that I usually am motivated to get stuff done before the anxiety kicks in. (No anxiety looming, though, and the task can drag out for years...)
I think I tend to take on new tasks and responsibilities at just the right rate that, even as I become more and more efficient at doing things, my anxiety remains at around the same level (which is unpleasant but not completely overwhelming).
Raunig, a Thousand Machines
Thus to the modes of existence in abstraction, in diffusity, there also inheres the potential in itself to generate concatenations of singularities instead of identitary and communitary forms of societization. Whereas the French small-holding peasants were not only dispersed, but also in servitude under the old forms of family and village, today new forms of concatenation are to be invented that make use of the diffusity of singularities to desert from machinic enslavement and social subjection: concatenations of chain-less machines connected by the lack of any ties.The dependency on machines is multiplied through the continual attachment to the machines, the constant mode of being attached to machines. The high art of machinic enslavement interlocks a permanent online life with the imperative of life-long learning and the irresolvable merging of business deals and affects. The screams of desire of the ubiquitous attachments generate new forms of dependency, which make the material penetration of the technical machine into the human body appear as a secondary horror scenario. And yet, the desiring machines are not simply tools of machinic enslavement; the minor advantages of the resistive use of new abstract and diffuse machines in dispersion are by no means always already over-coded.
But even better, or less theoretical, Tertiary Time: The Precariat's Dilemma
Guy Standing, 2013, a pdf paper that I think became part of his book.
"We need to appreciate that time is a basic asset.
Throughout history, class struggle has been about the redistribution of the assets that are vital to the good life of the era, largely defined in terms set by the dominant social formation.
The inequality of control over time is the premise of this essay. To appreciate how the inequality is evolving, and how the emerging precariat is particularly hard hit, we need first to remind ourselves of how public and private perceptions of work have been manipulated through the ages, to the point where an ideological hegemony mocks our imagination"
...
When I say post-capitalism wants and maybe already has everything, I mean fucking everything inside and outside, 24/7/365.
You people are so weak. I have the ability to let anxiety build for years, often indefinitely, without acting on it.
I've had a procrastination problem for as long as I've had work to do. It's changed over the years, though, as each form of procrastination gets wiped out by something even more addictive. So far the progression has been: reading novels -> surfing the web -> unfogged -> con/tra dance. I'm sort of hoping there isn't another stage after this one.
And British smartphone users aren't? At least not to the extent that it puts a substantial dent in the average?
No, I'm just saying the people that are checking their phones enough to bring up the average are the ones who are using it like a PC. I check my phone way more on the days when I'm ferrying kids around and watching them at their swim lesson or whatever, but it's just fungibility.
Hey, what do you know. That 221 number comes from a survey commissioned by a Smartphone app developer. And looking at there data, I still can't figure out where 221 comes from. It appears to be a load of bollocks.
On another call. I'm to enter my code and press the "pound or hash key". Last time I did this, it was just the "pound key". I blame Twitter.
Why don't we call it the number sign?
35: I love, in that link, how the author is shocked that we start in on our phones very early and stay on them very late at night, because obviously those are the exact same users.
con/tra dance
"Swing your partner 'round real smart. Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right B, A, Start."
17 she just had a FB status about how she got an email from the NSF, stating that she's the co-PI on a proposal that she had no idea about
That's... a bit of an ethics problem, isn't it? Shouldn't she be tearing her newfound co-PI a new one?
35: Oh, pshaw. That's not 221 times checking you're phone, that's 221 tasks. That's nothing. I bet I do 18-20 just in the ten minutes it takes me to go downstairs and get lunch sometimes.
Walking to elevator: refresh Twitter
In elevator: read link on Twitter
Downstairs: Retweet link
Walking to sandwich shop: Refresh work e-mail
Respond to text from my intern
Refresh personal e-mail
Go back to Twitter
Refresh weather page
Waiting for sandwich: take photo of absurd sign
Text photo to my sister
Respond to next text from intern
etc.
Really, not hard at all. I bet I get to 221 times just in my to/from commute to work on the train (25 minutes each way), assuming I am on my phone and not marking up a report or working on my laptop.
your! your! your! My kingdom for an edit button.
Is this a thing where she submitted a letter of support saying that she would help out if needed because of her greater expertise in something or other, and it turned into co-PI status?
41: I'm guessing it's a project that she'd verbally agreed to, or was already overlapping with to such an extent that it was assumed that she was in, and the other person just went and wrote the proposal on their own?
Ok, I think I figured out their 221 number. What they do is get people to estimate how many times they do an action in a day. So they get people to estimate how many times they use their smart phone to "Check trains".... the average nubmer of time people use their smartphone to check trains is apparently 1.4. However, if you exclude the 72.55% of people who report never using their phone to check trains, the average number is 5.08 times per day.
So, they collect these bullshit inflated numbers for ever category ("Check Flights" - 6.08 times per day, "Maps" - 4.14 times per day, "Food shop app", 5.68 times per day.) And they add all those numbers together and get 219.23. Which, naturally, rounds up to 221.
The long-overdue reaction against being completely overwhelmed blog called "Permanent Crisis", one I have looked at before, but this was found by searching "Neoliberalism and time" Three parts, 2 looks best
"But he scrambles back from the precipice and into the reassuring arms of neoliberal doctrine: it's your own fault."
Rule number one of Vampire Castle: Personalize everything, turn every structural or systemic problem into a individual vice or virtue or idiosyncratic moral narrative
"When a particular kind of behavior or experience becomes socially general, we can be sure it's not because of personal idiosyncrasy on a mass scale--which is an oxymoron. Rather, something about society itself is causing that behavior to proliferate.
Today time stress is not simply widespread--it's hegemonic." ...Permanent Crisis
OT:
What do the lawyers in the crowd make of the current Supreme Court case suing Amazon's warehouse management company for payment of overtime for the security check lines they must go through?
The Amazon warehouse subcontractor is Integrity Staffing, and the US government is arguing on their behalf, against any such compensation. This ... bothers me.
My favorite line in those Supreme Court arguments was John Roberts saying "well, why don't these workers just use their collective bargaining power to ensure they get paid for the extra time?" That was some impressive disingenuous bastardism.
OT:us-nurse-infected-with-ebola-may-have-broke-protoco
Yeah, lets fucking hope so. Or bad hazmat suit. Or I don't give a fuck, this ain't West Africa, and this is very bad news. State-of-art teaching hospital who knew what they were dealing with and got all infected up anyway? Fuck me in Dallas.
"Hospital officials said the employee had worn full protective clothing during all contact with Duncan. Dr Tom Frieden, the CDC director, warned in a media briefing on Sunday that other hospital staff could also have been exposed to the virus and may show symptoms in the coming days."
Yeah, we probably need to quarantine Texas. Maybe build a fence or something.
I can't imagine anyone here being hesitant to head to a hospital if they've got flu-like symptoms.
I'd bet that nearly everybody is as good at ignoring symptoms as they were a month ago.
There does seem to be a worrisome contradiction between all the assurances that Ebola is hard to transmit and the repeated infection of various medical personnel.
48, 49: I just don't get why the obvious answer here isn't that checking out through a security line is part of the job. Many, many years ago, I worked as a check-out clerk in a department store, which involved checking in and out with the cash from the cash drawer -- count it going in, count it going out -- and that part of the procedure was assuredly on the clock, not off it. Essentially, you spent 15 minutes at the beginning the day with the check-in procedure, and 15 minutes at the end checking out, and this was part of your 8-hour shift, not extraneous to it.
This from the link in 48 is interesting:
Eisenbrey also called it "shameful" that the White House was siding with Integrity Staffing--he suspects, because the administration "doesn't want to be sued" for wage violations in its own agencies.
Really, would that be why? I assume that government staffpeople are on salary. Workers in an Amazon warehouse are not. That makes a big difference.
I just don't get why the obvious answer here isn't that checking out through a security line is part of the job.
Yeah, if you can get fired for not doing it, you need to be paid for doing it.
54: Not really: if you're not in close physical contact with someone with Ebola, it's hard to transmit. if you are, it's easier. Not hard to understand.
Yeah, I can't comprehend how there can be debate over whether something is "integral and indispensable" when presumably an employee would get fired for refusing to do it.
55: I think there are a lot of federal employees who either make wages or have overtime pay in their contracts. And then there are all the contractors - a quote in the article specifically mentions contractors who work with classified material.
If there is a significant outbreak of ebola in the US in the next three weeks, how does that effect the election? Does it help Team "People Should Have Access to Health Care" or Team "Brown People Are Scary"?
56: Well put. I suppose the countering argument is that you have to commute to work, after all, and you'd be fired for not doing that, yet you needn't be paid for that.
This is why I asked whether the lawyers in the band have any thoughts: it strikes me as a matter of contract law. When you accept a position, a job, you are agreeing that you'll actually show up -- which entails commuting to the site. So the question turns on whether any check-in and check-out procedures fall under "shows up clean" (without contraband) before beginning and ending work, as opposed to simply "shows up".
Team BPAS, easy. Team PSHAtHC have a harder, less primal argument, and, as far as I know, they are congenitally incapable of demonizing the opposition, even for legitimate reasons like underfunding public health.
I don't know quite what the point of 50 is, but fuck off anyway. Note that none of the dozens of people in social and family contact with the infected person has gotten infected. Only a nurse who probably was involved in intubating the patient, a dangerous procedure which probably shouldn't be done in this situation. Think about it... you create MORE opportunity for infected bodily fluids to be released, by doing invasive procedures.
Also, since nobody uses this highly cumbersome and hot personal protective equipment normally, people are likely to make mistakes with it.
Read this and then go to the Eli Perincevich blog.
61 is right. The outbreak is Ebama's fault!
54: Their gear is non-trivial to wear. Taking it off properly requires practice. They really should have sent the patient to one of the medical centers best equipped to deal with it. Staff at other places drills hard on these protocols.
62: People DO wear kit like that routinely, just not there. It's irresponsible to put staff at risk like that.
62: Note that none of the dozens of people in social and family contact with the infected person has gotten infected.
Yeah, I've been really surprised, in a good way, about this. I was worried, sad, about the original patient's family, esp. his girlfriend who was sharing a bed with him. I still keep expecting to hear that the family is sick. I hope they're okay.
You have to put up the signs saying "Do Not Remove Gloves With Your Teeth Unless You Rinse With Mouthwash Afterward."
Ebola isn't worth worrying about unless you are poor and live in West Africa or are a healthcare worker working with Ebola patients.
I have a conference (in Nawlins! yay Cajun food!) in a couple of weeks that a friend of mine is going to drive to from DC rather than risk getting Ebola on the plane. I did not point and laugh when he told me this merely because he's likely to be PI on a project I hope to work on.
One last thought on the Amazon thing: the defense's chief argument is that
The company's essential argument is that responsibility to compensate these workers should depend on whether the post-work tasks are "integral and indispensable" to their primary duties.
Where is "integral and indispensable" coming from? Is it statutory? Note that this appears to be an inclusive "and" -- that is, the task must be both of these things, not just one or the other. In the case of the Amazon workers, it's arguable that the task is indispensable though not integral.
From a link in the FDL thread, a Dkos diary on protection level. As always, do read the comments, which go into more details.
CDC-recommendations-are-going-to-kill-health-care-workers
Two-thirds down:
"Ebola is absolutely a BSL 4 pathogen. I have no idea where you are getting your info but it is completely wrong.
BSL 4 is for aerosol transmitted disease AND diseases that have a high risk of fatality with no known cures.
I worked in a BSL 3 lab for about 3 years doing my graduate work. Im quite familiar with the levels."
This would be the way in to trashing the defense's argument: fuck your indispensable, if it's not integral, that's enough.
I mean, what's next, mandating drug testing, off the clock, before work ensues? (I believe some workers are required to undergo drug testing off the clock as it stands.) This stuff makes me angry, somehow.
60: It's not an issue of contract. If there's a written contract or employee handbook, it makes it clear that employees don't get paid for this time. If there's no written contract, they tell the employees on the first day that they don't get paid for this time, so there's a clear oral contract.
The legal issue is whether the minimum wage laws override the contract. That gets you to the boring aspects of federal regulations about what does and does not count as work time for getting overtime.
Lots of blue collar and pink collar federal employees are entitled to overtime, and it's very common for employees to have to go through security checks if they're anywhere near classified documents. the feds also often indemnify contractors. So it would have a significant cost to teh federal government.
Disclaimer: my firm represents employees in class actions like this one frequently, but we're not involved in this particular one.
I just don't get why the obvious answer here isn't that checking out through a security line is part of the job.
Because US labor law is extremely employer-friendly? More sepcifically in this case, the statute is a mess, and draws a distinction between things like "the principal activity or activities" an employee is employeed to provide, and "activities which are preliminary to or postliminary to said principal activity". The Portal-to-Portal Act (which enacted that distinction) was passed in response to an old line of Supreme Court cases that interpreted then-existing federal law to require, e.g., payment for all the "preliminary" activities of pottery workers (putting on overalls, etc.)--Congress didn't like that, and changed the law to make sure that kind of stuff didn't have to be paid.
The "integral and indispensible" stuff is from the caselaw interpreting the Portal-to-Portal Act. I don't know the caselaw very well, but my understanding is that in this context it means something different than "you'll be fired if you don't do it"--it refers to things that are directly necessary to the principal productive activity, not just made "necessary" by arbitrary employer requiremet. (Which is not, of course, to say that that makes any sense.)
71: The legal issue is whether the minimum wage laws override the contract.
I see. Thanks. I'm gathering that the minimum wage laws include provisions regarding maximum daily or weekly hours before overtime kicks in, mandated number of breaks during the day (15 minutes for every 4 hours worked, I think), and so on. I didn't realize those laws were part of minimum wage laws.
The basic law is time-and-a-half for all hours beyond 40. There's a category of "exempt" workers who aren't entitled to overtime, more or less what we think of of as management or professionals (doctors and lawyers are professionals, but not necessarily managers, and aren't legally entitled to overtime).
In this case, the employees who worked less than 40 hours a week argue that they should be entitled to straight time for time waiting on line for security.
The basic law is time-and-a-half for all hours beyond 40. There's a category of "exempt" workers who aren't entitled to overtime, more or less what we think of of as management or professionals (doctors and lawyers are professionals, but not necessarily managers, and aren't legally entitled to overtime).
In this case, the employees who worked less than 40 hours a week argue that they should be entitled to straight time for time waiting on line for security.
It's been pointed out, in any case, that Amazon has a problem on its hands if its subcontractor can't absorb the cost of assuming a 7.5 hour work day (with half an hour for security check-out, paid). I don't see any way past the conclusion that we're looking at an immoral business model.
I bet Ebola workers get paid for the time getting in and out of their Ebola-protection suits.
Depends on if they're full-time hospital employees or contractors brought in by a staffing agency.
Right winger in my feed posted another stupid link about Ebola, one point of which is that the US patented Ebola so obviously they're behind it, look, read the patent right here! I didn't have the energy to explain the difference between an application and a patent (it's the former, never issued), the reasons you'd want to patent genes or proteins from an organism (vaccines, diagnostics), or the details of the Myriad decision that says that such patents are now invalid. I just come here to complain instead.
76.last: Ya. Amazon is infamous for fucking over it's warehouse workers.
75: And 'exempt' workers include things like the manager of a fast food restaurant who may well spend 8 hours working the register at ten bucks an hour before taking up the rest of her duties for free as I understand it.
a friend of mine is going to drive to from DC rather than risk getting Ebola on the plane. I did not point and laugh when he told me this merely because he's likely to be PI on a project I hope to work on.
Wow.
The Ebola stuff is weird. On the one hand, I'm spending a fair bit of time calming people down -- mostly outside my organization, to be clear. On the other, several reporters have asked me worriedly what kind of backlash local immigrants are getting and so far the answer is really "not much, if any."
Not far from here is Duffy's Cut, which was long thought to be a grave/memorial for Irish railroad workers killed by cholera. Recent research suggests that it is indeed a grave, but some of the workers may have been murdered by their terrified, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant neighbors. So maybe we've progressed.
45: Based on my own experience with NSF, there's a fair bit of paperwork you have to submit in order to be on official co-PI (as opposed to just some person who wrote a letter of support). I'm not sure how I could end up as co-PI on a grant without knowing about it.
Not far from here is Duffy's Cut, which was long thought to be a grave/memorial for Irish railroad workers killed by cholera.
I learned about that story somewhat recently from a powerful song from Christy Moore .
72. Thanks for introducing me to a new word. "Postliminary": really?