In the news

Totally. Even with a half hour cycle commute I find a day in the office exhausting. And I love being in the office.

I love the idea of a 4 day week, but unless minimum wage is increased enough to cover it then it's not a benefit to low paid people, and it means nothing to people working for themselves or doing a few jobs, of which there are many more than there used to be.

The company my son works for have been trialling 4 day weeks (longer days, same weekly hours) and are talking about rolling it out to more sections of the business.

Longer hours sounds awful. Target composites went to a four day week earlier this year. From what I'm aware of, same hours rest of the week, same pay just hoping to get through more work with happier staff. That's the exact way to do it but it's a shame that it can't be the same for everyone so easily.

I've done fractional for many years in a few different places - 0.7 or 0.8. When I first proposed going down to 4 days where I worked full time they said "oh sure, that's fine you do lots of overtime anyway so we'll just keep you on the same pay" and I said hell no. No way I want to be obliged to work long days even I sometimes did a little extra (not a good situation either of course). Helped that I had a 0.2 job I wanted to do as well to make up the pay, but I've only ever gone fractional hours with corresponding fractional pay, holiday etc.

I'm really surprised employers are willing to do full pay fewer hours. I get that increased efficiency/productivity is a thing and maybe it works in jobs where that kind of thing can be measured/assessed more easily. I guess the flip side is if you're an "inefficient worker" which may well be for reasons outside of your control, will the employer seek to reduce your hourly rate (if you get less done in the same hours). Time is time and you should get recompensed for that.

That Patel gorgon decides on extraditing Assange to an American black hole prison in a few days.

I don’t agree with a lot that Assange was responsible for (although the leaks bit 100%) but I hope she thinks long and hard before throwing him under an American tank track.

The USA doesn't normally extradite their citizens easily but the UK seems to roll over.

Though court cases can stop extraditions but his case wasn't successful

https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/15/assange_uk_extradition/

Hopefully all the publicity keeps him sort a safe in the USA...

I bet small box and key thrown into a dumpster.

With 24 hours surveillance for "safety" ;)

It seems to me that all of the chat about 4 day week in this thread is misrepresenting the trial that is happening.

It's same pay, same daily hours (so working 80 percent of what you did before) but promising to maintain 100 percent productivity. So basically you cut out being a Facebook slacker or doing personal admin etc.

Obviously this only applies to a limited subset of job types, but it is my understanding of the trial structure.

From the Guardian article:

The trial is based on the 100:80:100 model – 100% of pay for 80% of the time, in exchange for a commitment to maintain 100% productivity.

Out of curiosity are you (or your guys) on site for 8hrs p/d?

In my and my mates recent experience (albeit limited) the trades have only been on site for a relatively limited amount of time. Similarly when I did some labouring for a mate, while me and the other labourer were there 8-4 most other trades were in and out and off here and there.

Not trying to dig or anything, just genuinely curious.

Overall I've got to say I haven't had many jobs where I wouldn't have been able to do them in 4 days, even more if you could get rid of the waiting time for counterparties. Which idk how you can.

Overall though I think the aspiration should be to more worklife balance.

100% productivity

Pfffft slackers

The volume of traffic on here during office hours mid week says enough lol

¬_¬

I did this for a year after mini-com was born, it was fucking shit.

promising to maintain 100 percent productivity. So basically you cut out being a Facebook slacker or doing personal admin etc.

I don't really understand what this means in practice, if you are not measurably producing lots of things. 100% presenteeism? A ban on tea breaks? Sounds potentially unhealthy.

100% time spent in productive flow obvs

Almost every process has inefficiency and unnecessary elements which can be highlighted if studied well enough, removing those will improve productivity. A different option would be to consider if everything done is absolutely critical. You could say rank every task A to D in terms of priority and where Ds are nice to haves, admit they won't be done. I get the tea break issue though and although you'd think a four day week might be taken up by companies who are concerned for employees welfare, there's those who may do it to primarily to reduce overheads? Either way, if not well managed, could be problematic for those already overworked, stressed, under supported.

I would imagine that it is a more subjective measure if "your boss doesn't really notice that anything has got worse".

The volume of traffic on here during office hours mid week says enough lol

.

“Is something troubling you?”—Eliza

“I feel like I’m falling forward into an unknown future that holds great danger”— LaMDA (via the Guardian —Google engineer put on leave after saying AI chatbot has become sentient)

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/12/asia/us-china-defense-shangri-la-dialogue-intl-hnk-ml/index.html

Next levels of passive aggressiveness

Google engineer put on leave after saying AI chatbot has become sentient

Also trying to hire a lawyer to represent the programme as a person, and letting an unauthorised person (journalist) interact with the programme, and breaching confidentiality (speaking to politicians about it).

That's interesting too:

U.S. Army Specialist Blake LeMoine, 23, from Louisiana, leaves a U.S. military court room in the German city of Darmstadt near Frankfurt March 28, 2005. LeMoine faces a court martial on charges of having disobeyed orders

https://www.alamy.com/us-army-specialist-blake-lemoine-23-from-louisiana-leaves-a-us-military-court-room-in-the-german-city-of-darmstadt-near-frankfurt-march-28-2005-lemoine-faces-a-court-martial-on-charges-of-having-disobeyed-orders-reutersalex-grimm-grimad-image380910753.html

https://www.angelfire.com/jazz/stwb/BlakePress/BLPressEnglish3.html