How’d that work out?
The average cubicle farm, it seems, is where the 40-hour workweek went to die. According to a new survey, a staggering number of American professionals have workweeks that exceed 40 hours.
Virtual meetings software company PGi conducted an online survey of its customers that yielded more than 600 responses. Of those, 88 percent said they work more than 40 hours a week. Roughly a third each said they work between 41 and 45 hours, or between 46 and 50 hours.
Just over one in five said they work more than 50 hours a week. A main culprit in the lengthening of the workweek is technology that lets people work anywhere.
“I think a lot of it has to do with the “always on” atmosphere that’s permeated across our culture,” said PGi executive vice president of strategy and communications Sean O’Brien.
Now we have smartphones and laptops and Bluetooth. The boss can always reach you; the files are never more than a click away, and even those of us who cherish time away and make an effort to get out of the office at the end of the day can still get a phone call in the middle of a beach in the Keys that begins with “I hate to bother you, but where’s the spreadsheet for the budget…?”
As Erik Loomis at LGM notes, “The 40-hour week becomes a joke, both because many people cannot work at all or can only find part-time work while those who do have work have to labor well past 40 hours because the boss can track them.”
And yes, we can now shop at home and watch stuff on huge color TV’s. Of course the biggest market for that is porn. (Or so I’m told.)
]]>Well, since I am always the last to join something trendy, my account was started less than a year ago. And here is my first tweet:
]]>Two questions: 1) Who falls for that kind of scam, and 2) who uses a fax machine any more?
We still have one because we need something to hold down the top of a spare desk, but I can’t remember the last time I got real fax message.
]]>We’ve all been there, right? Well, not with a guy doing a “deep background” interview at the top of his lungs on a commuter train. Usually it’s someone gossiping — “He said WHAT?!?” — on the plane or bus as if they were all alone.
]]>Bigger than Katrina: Boulder County rescues over 1,200 people from flooding.
World’s oldest man dies in N.Y. at age 112.
Tropical Update: Hurricane Ingrid is headed for central Mexico.
The Tigers lost to K.C. 1-0.
]]>Egypt — Islamists rally in support of Morsi.
One dead in storms that hit the Midwest.
F.A.A. plans to ease restrictions on electronic devices… except cell phones.
Food Network drops Paula Deen.
The Tigers lost to the Red Sox 10-6.
]]>I don’t promise I’ll be tweeting every minute of the day, and I won’t be filling you in on everything I do, eat, see, or hear. For one thing, I can’t twitter from the office, which is where I spend most of my time. Second, I can’t imagine anyone would actually give a rat’s ass about what I do, eat, see, or hear.
But anyway, I’m on it. Yip yah.
]]>Numerous commentators, most notably at The New York Times, have expressed concern that a broad ruling on marriage equality could turn into the next Roe v. Wade, igniting decades-long culture wars and damaging public perception of the Supreme Court. Better to rule narrowly, they say, and let the states follow the emerging trajectory towards marriage equality.
That argument, though, is not only totally ahistorical, but dangerous for both civil rights and the Court’s credibility.
Contrary to the current mythology, Roe didn’t incite the culture wars, and before the case was decided in 1973, the right to abortion across the fifty states was far from a foregone conclusion. As Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel detail in their book Before Roe v. Wade: Voices That Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling, an organized, primarily Catholic Church–backed anti-abortion movement existed in force before Roe. Although abortion rights were initially championed by Republicans and favored by a majority of Americans, social conservatives saw an opening to exploit for political gain. According to Greenhouse, before the Court decided Roe, conservative architects of the “New Right” had already decided to use opposition to abortion as part of a strategy for party realignment that would come to fruition with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. “New Right” leaders sought to bring Catholics and into the party and politicize Evangelicals to form a coalition of traditionalists based on hostility to progress and change.
Abortion was hardly their only issue. The new conservative coalition opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, claiming that gender equality would destroy the family and send our daughters to war. They stoked white voters’ fears of full racial integration with racist tropes about black criminals and welfare queens. Those narratives and appeals to tradition continue today, with social conservatives hoping for a return to a gauzy vision of Good Old Days America before the social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s—and before women, people of color, religious minorities and other marginalized groups were able to secure a full range of rights.
A different ruling in Roe—or none at all—wouldn’t have prevented a Republican Party realignment that was already underway. It wouldn’t have prevented abortion, and the rights of women and other traditionally disempowered groups, from becoming controversial political issues. But a Roe-free United States would almost certainly mean a United States wherein abortion laws were wildly varied, with women in many parts of the country having no legal right to abortion at all. Similarly, even though Brown v. Board of Education inspired an immediate backlash from Southern racists, it’s tough to argue that without court intervention, racial integration of public schools and other facilities would be better without Brown than the (admittedly lacking) state of racial equality today.
Acceptance — Aaron Hartzler tells how he gets along with his parents who would rather see him dead than gay.
“Honey, we’re praying for you.”
This is how my mother ends every email she sends me. Typed in italics and peppered with smiling emoticons, Mom’s electronic missives are as precious as she is — as earnest as the Empty Tomb Cake she bakes each spring on Good Friday. An edible replica of the cave where Jesus was buried after dying on the cross for our sins, the Empty Tomb Cake is the standard passion week centerpiece in my childhood home. It is frosted in gray, surrounded by a field of green coconut grass, and finished off with a Hostess Ding-Dong as the stone that was rolled away. On Saturday night, after everyone goes to bed, Mom steals into the kitchen under cover of night and rolls the Hostess Ding-Dong away from the door of the Empty Tomb Cake, then retouches the frosting. On Easter morning Jesus has risen — right there in the middle of the kitchen table.
As sweet as Mom’s loving messages and born-again baked goods appear at face value, there’s a silent threat in “we’re praying for you” that sticks in my craw. I came out to my parents the first time at the age of 19 when I was kicked out of the Bible college where my dad taught. Since then, their ongoing prayers for my “deliverance” from “Satan’s lie of homosexuality” have continued unabated in the presence of my four younger siblings and the unsuspecting wait staffs of Olive Garden restaurants nationwide. Indeed, my parents offer a never-ending stream of supplication to a God they’re certain is testing them with a son who has been blinded to the righteous pursuit of a female partner by the penis-shaped temptation of Satan.
“We’re praying for you” isn’t a harmless afterthought. It’s not a pleasant wish for my general well-being, continued physical health or financial security. No, my mother’s “we’re praying for you” is an italicized baseball bat, a silent plea for God to change her oldest son from something abhorrent and abominable back to the fresh-faced young man who dated the captain of the Bible college cheerleading squad, before it was discovered he was also sleeping with the captain of the boy’s soccer team.
Very Natural Gas — A dairy farm in Indiana goes for recycling in a big way.
Here at one of the largest dairy farms in the country, electricity generated using an endless supply of manure runs the equipment to milk around 30,000 cows three times a day.For years, the farm has used livestock waste to create enough natural gas to power 10 barns, a cheese factory, a cafe, a gift shop and a maze of child-friendly exhibits about the world of dairy, including a 4D movie theater.
All that, and Fair Oaks Farms was still using only about half of the five million pounds of cow manure it vacuumed up from its barn floors on a daily basis. It burned off the excess methane, wasted energy sacrificed to the sky.
But not anymore.
The farm is now turning the extra manure into fuel for its delivery trucks, powering 42 tractor-trailers that make daily runs to raw milk processing plants in Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee. Officials from the federal Department of Energy called the endeavor a “pacesetter” for the dairy industry, and said it was the largest natural gas fleet using agricultural waste to drive this nation’s roads.
“As long as we keep milking cows, we never run out of gas,” said Gary Corbett, chief executive of Fair Oaks, which held a ribbon-cutting event for the project this month and opened two fueling stations to the public.
“We are one user, and we’re taking two million gallons of diesel off the highway each year,” he said. “That’s a big deal.”
Doonesbury — Live birth.
]]>The Twinkie, it turns out, was introduced way back in 1930. In our memories, however, the iconic snack will forever be identified with the 1950s, when Hostess popularized the brand by sponsoring “The Howdy Doody Show.” And the demise of Hostess has unleashed a wave of baby boomer nostalgia for a seemingly more innocent time.
Needless to say, it wasn’t really innocent. But the ’50s — the Twinkie Era — do offer lessons that remain relevant in the 21st century. Above all, the success of the postwar American economy demonstrates that, contrary to today’s conservative orthodoxy, you can have prosperity without demeaning workers and coddling the rich.
As he notes, tax rates were high — some as high as 91% — but people still made a lot of money and lived pretty well (including George Romney and his family). Labor unions were very strong, and yet companies were still able to make money and crank out the things the consumer wanted, even if it was junk food, cigarettes, and Edsels.
The Twinkie was a harmless snack, all sweetness and light, but it also became symbolic of an era that looked good on the surface but covered up a lot of things we’d rather forget: segregation and paranoia, polio and Senator McCarthy, Sputnik and duck-and-cover. We couldn’t survive on Twinkies alone; they were little sugar bombs just waiting to go off. They even formed the basis of the defense of Dan White, the man who assassinated Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone in San Francisco in 1978: the junk food made him do it.
It may be just karmic that the demise of the Hostess Brands line of bland and poisonous foods like Ding-Dongs and Wonder Bread come to the end of their current life soon after the end of a presidential campaign that represented a backwards march to the era when the kind of food they sold was what America was all about. We can be all nostalgic about those days, but as Dr. Krugman notes, “we are, morally, a much better nation than we were. Oh, and the food has improved a lot, too.”
Have some granola.
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