What Will Work-Life Balance Look Like After the Pandemic?
Brother 2 sent me this article and noted: "The following article supports your theory that our economy will transition in the future to a "contractor" based model. I think the effects of how our country is dealing with this pandemic will only exacerbate this happening." From the article "As if being a working parent didn’t already include enough moving pieces to manage, even toddlers are now having standing teleconferences. For the two of us, our daughters’ virtual morning preschool meeting is one more item to be juggled as we attempt to work full-time from home without childcare. Our own conference calls are scheduled for naptime and occasionally interrupted by a request for potty. We attempt to wedge the rest of the workday into the early mornings and post-bedtime. The Covid-19 crisis has shoved work and home lives under the same roof for many families like ours, and the struggle to manage it all is now visible to peers and bosses. As people postulate how the country may be forever changed by the pandemic, we can hope that one major shift will be a move away from the harmful assumption that a 24/7 work culture is working well for anyone. For decades, scholars have described how organizations were built upon the implicit model of an “ideal worker”: one who is wholly devoted to their job and is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, every year of their career. This was always an unrealistic archetype, one that presumed a full-time caretaker in the background. Yet today, over two-thirds of American families are headed by single parents or two working parents. With schools and daycares closed, work cannot continue as normal simply because working remotely is technologically possible. Employees are disproportionally well-compensated for being ideal workers. “Time greedy” professions like finance, consulting, and law — where 80- or 100-hour weeks may be typical — compensate their workers per hour more than professions with a regular 40-hour week. Flexible-work arrangements come with severe penalties; many who leave the workforce for a period or shift to part-time never recover their professional standing or compensation. When individuals push back — asking for less travel or requesting part-time or flexible hours — their performance reviews suffer, and they are less likely to be promoted, studies find. Simply asking for workplace flexibility engenders professional stigma. The “ideal worker” expectation is particularly punitive for working mothers, who also typically put in more hours of caregiving work at home than their spouses. Furthermore, men are more likely to “fake it” and pass as ideal workers, while women make clear that they cannot meet these expectations, including by negotiating flexible-work arrangements. Many organizations are not amenable to adjustments, leading to the perception that women are opting out of the workforce — although research suggests women are actually “pushed out.” In our world of laptops, cellphones, and teleconferences, the intellectual and analytical tasks of “knowledge workers” can continue at home. But low-wage workers increasingly are subject to similar expectations of responsiveness, even as they have less job security and even less flexibility than higher paid workers. In the midst of this pandemic, store clerks, delivery drivers, and warehouse workers are now forced to be “ideal workers” too, risking exposure to the virus in public with little support for the families they leave to go to work. There have been many calls for restructuring how work is done, including making more room for our families and questioning the real value of the eight-hour (or more) workday. Now is a time for companies to step back and reexamine which traditional ways of working exist because of convention, not necessity. Executives and managers have the opportunity to choose quality work over quantity of work. They can value the creative ideas that emerge after a midday hike or meditation session, rather than putting in face time at the office. They can stop rewarding the faster response over the better response, or the longer workday over a more productive workday. They can rethink highly competitive career tracks where you make it or wash out — such as giving tenure-track scholars and partner-track lawyers the choice of a longer clock before their evaluation. During this pandemic, employers are seeing that workers can’t function well without accommodation for their family responsibilities. Will that lesson last after the crisis is over? American families want greater choices in determining how their work and their families fit together. Post-pandemic, can we create a system that fits real workers, not just idealized ones? If so, we have the opportunity to emerge from this crisis with both healthier employees and better performing organizations." My response This has been coming for decades. The Boomers were the last generation to want the old model; the GenXers accepted it be never really wanted it. The Millennials hate it. Plus, the young know that there is no reason for the workplace. They know computers can function to assess work quality, and value and negotiate with the worker for appropriate pay for an amount of work. The problem is the Boomers are in a box. They cannot understand that the work arrangement which worked for them does not work for others, and they cannot understand how the new model will work without layers of bureaucracy and managers. Like most change, this will be glacial with loads of complaints right up until the moment the change strikes a chord in the majority of people; then it will shift rapidly to a new model. The "pre-change" takes decades, but the actual change will only take a few years or perhaps a decade. Some jobs might remain in the old model, just like buggy whip braiders last even today, but those jobs will be vanishingly few. We stand a the edge of a sea change, which will change the economic model, the work model, the wage model, the political model, our social model, and pretty much everything else. This change is more complicated than those in the past because it is so all-encompassing. My current concern is that the change will not be triggered by the virus but will take an additional trigger like a war. I don't think a war would need to be kinetic, but I wouldn't rule one out. More likely, the war would be cyber, or a geopolitical cold war, or perhaps something else entirely. I don't see the virus pulling us together, and I suspect that will have to happen before we can functionally work through this issue and execute the change. Perhaps it will be a civil war. Trump hatred seems to be sufficient to carry sufficient vitriol. I speak to progressives routinely, but I have never been able to get a serious answer on what is the base motivation for the Trump hatred. I have come to accept that it is baseless, probably tribal hatred driven by the tribes's loss in 2016 and the inability to accept that loss. Inchoate hatred of the tribes Emmanuel Goldstein is a sufficient trigger for civil war
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The novel coronavirus in the U.S. During the 1957-58 virus season, more than 116,000 died of influenza. The 1960 US census placed the US population at 179,000,000 people. Today the population is about 331,000,000. The death rate today from Chi-Comm 19 is 0.000166. In 1958, the death rate from the flu was 0.000648. One of these numbers is far larger than the other, yet during 1957-58 we did not shut down the majority of the US economy because we had a problem with the more deadly Asian Flu. The governors decided to shut down their state economies out of fear; this has consequences. One of which has been every business large or small has appeared in Washington DC, hat in hand seeking a handout. So have millions of people. We already have unemployment compensation schemes and bankruptcy protection; why did we need more? And why are we bailing out businesses? The investors in these businesses took a risk that their investment might be lost if something bad happened. Chi-Comm 19 is bad, but the actions of the governors of many of the US states have been far worse. It is these people upon which the opprobrium should fall, not the taxpayers. We have lost our minds believing that the federal government can protect every investor, every wage earner, and every business from loss. We have mechanisms in place with which to sort through these issues and protect the vulnerable. We should use them. The governors of the states which took draconian actions closing their economies need to stand up in public and tell the voters why they took these actions without counsel from the state legislature or anyone else of note. It is possible that New York City, and perhaps other localities, needed to take draconian actions to protect the emergency health care system, but even that is not obvious. There is no evidence that people in most states needed to take these draconian actions to prevent a problem, which was only 26% a similar problem we survived 62 years earlier, without draconian action. The governors of the states are now marshaling for the largest bailout in human history. This bailout is an attempt to protect themselves from the consequences of their incompetence and destructive actions. We should not bail them out. We need to allow the voters of these states to assess these politicians' actions and take appropriate actions to hold these people to account. America today suffers from a massive problem of immaturity among our adult population. Most of the immaturity rests among the Baby Boomers who are now mostly in their 60s and 70s we think of them as mature but they are not. These are the same people who have decided that it is just fine to demand our governments spend massively while only agreeing to be taxed about 75% of the expenditure amounts. This is why the US has nearly $24 trillion in debt, hanging over the heads of our children and grandchildren. It is also these people who received massive infrastructures like our hydro dams, our electrification grid, and our Interstate Freeway system and who have failed to maintain these structures because they didn't want to pay those costs. The Boomers are immature, and they need a serious comeuppance. The Boomers have also failed to fund their pensions, old age medical, or retirements. We do not have the money to unwind these massive and ruinously costly mistakes. The idea that we are bailing out the Boomers businesses and can bail out all of the myriad other Boomer failures is laughable. What we need is a serious maturation of the Boomers, and we need it now. Stop the bailouts, stop larding the financial mistakes of the Boomers on the heads of the younger generations. It is time to tell the Boomers to grow up. The Trump Derangement Syndrom is a serious sickness, it has distorted the minds of the people infected with this mental virus to the point that they would sacrifice any number of people so long as Trump is removed from office. This is the same totalitarian mental illness which infected the Soviet Union and resulted in the murder of 12 million during the Holodomor, the Chinese Maoists and resulted in tens of millions of dead multiple times, the Khmer Rouge and resulted in the killing of nearly half of the Cambodians in the Killing Fields, and the Nazis and resulted in the murder of 10 million during the Holocaust. These people have been infected with a shocking mental illness which will justify any actions they wish to take, including the murder of any number of people in the goal of ridding the world of Trump. Sorry, this is not a difficult choice. Progressives have no moral center. At their core is a totalitarian vacuum, which allows them to sacrifice real lives on the alter of their political desires, just like the Maoist, the Soviets, the Nazis and so many others. If you want to know where this comes from watch Groundhog Day. Phil Connors is the at his core an amoral and selfish individual who is willing to sacrifice any and all for temporal personal gain, pleasure, or benefit. This is one of the thematically great films. The first video is the trailer. The second video is about the premise/theme of the film. The Boomers are the first generation in human history to be completely egocentric and self-centered. They have consumed everything and left nothing for their progeny. The only question is do we hold the Boomers accountable (no bailouts) or do we let them continue their destructive ways (bailout the Boomers)? I vote for the latter, what do you think? A Virginia preacher believed ‘God can heal anything.’ Then he caught coronavirus.
The God of the Bible is coming to Earth to make your life here perfect because you believe and ask for goodies? Belgium relaxes coronavirus lockdown despite world's highest death rate
Sweden made the right choice. Most of the rest of the world did not. In this pandemic, a strange paradox occurred. The people began to believe that if they used mitigation measures like "social distance," self-quarantine, or partial-quarantine, they could avoid getting or dying from Chi-Comm 19. But death from the virus was always only a remote possibility for those with serious underlying conditions. And since we did not, and, do not, have a vaccine, the disease will return for further rounds during the next virus season. So, what we did was use mitigation to lower the hospital pressure curve in New York (this was not only good but necessary), but we failed to achieve anything like herd immunity, which is essential to protect us during the next virus season. We've met the enemy, and it is us. We need the herd immunity to avoid this problem surfacing again with the same or worse ferocity next virus season. We need the quarantine to end now, so we have some chance to build herd immunity, and create a small amount of protection. If we fail to do this, we will see what we saw during the 1918 Spanish Flu. Then, the first wave was quite small during the virus season. The next virus season, however, the Spanish Flu became a serious and very deadly pandemic that killed far more people. This is because the first round did not infect enough people and did not build sufficient herd immunity to avoid a devastating second round. The governors of the progressive states are placing their political well being over the needs of the greater community when they maintain the lockdown. Yes, it is possible that some cities or local areas might need to be opened later, to allow breathing room for hospitals. But there are no entire states where the shutdown was every necessary or even merited. We need new and better leaders. We need to stop fearing the paper bête noire. I’m getting tired of people playing fast and loose with statistics
When a hurricane threatens Miami, we do not evacuate Miami, Seattle, and everything in between. This makes no sense whatsoever, so we don't do it. But when New York and New Jersey faced a hospital crushing pandemic, we decided that Wagontire, Oregon needed to shut down as well. Why? What possible reason could there have been? The reason was the governors panicked because they knew that if someone died, they could be blamed. The politicians did not make the hard choices rationally and reasonably; they made the hard choices politically according to what they thought would be best for their careers. Perhaps we need to eliminate the potential for career politicians altogether?! Why does Joe Biden want to be president? (And why did Trump want to be president?)
Trump's motivations were always clear, and they are why people turned out to vote for him. Biden's motivations, outside of naked ambition, have never been clear and are the reason why he never gained traction with voters. I believe that Biden's lack of motivation outside of naked ambition will once again derail his run in 2020. Just as money could not buy Bloomberg a candidacy in 2020, naked ambition will not be enough to get Biden what he wants. Prediction: Americans will see through Biden's campaign, and Biden will lose between 45 and 50 states to Trump. Or if Obama is correct between 55 and 60 states, but I continue to adhere to the revisionist history that the US has 50 states, not the 60 Obama seems to believe. If natural, was it a product of the wet markets, or was it a virus being investigated by a lab in Wuhan? This is a good discussion of these ideas. It is an hour but worth you time. the intro issues and discussion is interesting but the subject starts at about 15 minutes into the video, so that takes it down to 45 minutes. . |
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