Part of this is a cultural issue. I completely understand why people struggle with addiction, smoking, obesity, stress, depression, and so on. I don't blame the people, but the current culture of cheap and fast food, stress, overworking, lack of time and/or energy for cooking, family, hobbies, and taking care of health.
Many of these preventable diseases could be addressed by cultural changes and government care, which could decrease the cost of medical/nursing care.
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.
A year ago, I bought a brand-new EVGA hybrid-cooled 3090 Ti for 700 euros. I'm still astonished at how good of a decision it was, especially considering the scarcity of 24GB cards available for a similar price. For pure gaming, many cards perform better, but they mostly come with 12 to 16GB of VRAM.
Could you please explain more about the Ref[2], what does it mean beyond what is in article and how serious is it?
"These findings suggest that breath-hold diving training over several years may cause mild, but persistent, short-term memory impairments"
Can you tell more about recreational nitrous oxide and when does the "damage occur"?
Is there the same thing with wim hof?
(like for example with oximeter 80 Sp02 or below?)
I got in wimhof/oxide around 80 Sp02 the interesting thing is I got this feeling with fighting to hold my breath but below 90 I kinda needed to convince myself that I should breath in both cases,
Being a non-expert I can't attempt to speculate on your questions in good faith! All I was suggesting to the parent is that perhaps these articles offer as evidence of damage being done without pushing to the point of unconsciousness? Feedback is definitely welcome by an expert.
> He was a member of the Nerva–Antonine dynasty, the last of the rulers later known as the Five Good Emperors and the last emperor of the Pax Romana, an age of relative peace, calm, and stability for the Roman Empire lasting from 27 BC to 180 AD. He served as Roman consul in 140, 145, and 161.
> ...
> The historian Herodian wrote:
> Alone of the emperors, he gave proof of his learning not by mere words or knowledge of philosophical doctrines but by his blameless character and temperate way of life.
> ...
> The number and severity of persecutions of Christians in various locations of the empire seemingly increased during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The extent to which the emperor himself directed, encouraged, or was aware of these persecutions is unclear and much debated by historians. The early Christian apologist Justin Martyr includes within his First Apology (written between 140 and 150) a letter from Marcus Aurelius to the Roman Senate (prior to his reign) describing a battlefield incident in which Marcus believed Christian prayer had saved his army from thirst when "water poured from heaven" after which, "immediately we recognized the presence of God." Marcus goes on to request the Senate desist from earlier courses of Christian persecution by Rome.
Marcus Aurelius was the last of the Five Good Emperors because he did not adopt a competent, non-biological son to take his place like the previous four. Instead, he set up Commodus as Caesar and his heir, despite his mental instability. That decision alone calls into question his Stoic resolve.
True, the other Good Emperors - Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius didn't set up their children as their successors. They each adopted someone who would be good at the job. But there was one difference between them and Marcus Aurelius - none of them had biological sons. Their adopted son would be their only heir.
Marcus Aurelius' decision can be criticised in hindsight because Commodus was terrible at his job. But I'm not sure I could have done differently in Marcus' shoes. Parents find it difficult to view their children objectively and feel the need to protect them. Even if he was aware of Commodus' faults he also knew this - if he adopted someone else and crowned him Emperor, then it would have led to civil war after his own death. Either Commodus and his other sons would kill the adopted son or vice versa. Having all of them alive and at large would be an unstable equilibrium that could only be solved with war.
Come on man, this guy ran an Empire pretty well for a couple of decades despite challenges like war and plague. Maybe he knew what he was doing. Give him the benefit of the doubt.
Pretty much all Roman emperors would be considered tyrants and mass murderers by the standards of modern western liberal democracies. Marcus Aurelius was a product of his time and hardly a hero to emulate. But despite their flaws we can learn some universal lessons from their surviving writings that still apply to modern life — including at least some elements of stoicism.
Modern western liberal democracies aren't without faults either. They've been involved in a few conflicts themselves, like Iraq and Israel/Palestine (whatever your view the situation is an ongoing mess not really helped by foreign influence). Or propping up illiberal rulers. There's the values liberal democracies espouse, and then there are the geopolitical realities of how they act.
my fav part of HN is how slavery and the CIA just don't exist
but stoicism is cool though if you rich and have a choice. if you're poor it's kind of forced on you because your choice is either be ok with the abuse or die
But be aware that most writings about him are roman, and hence state propaganda which glorify his actions. In order to see more clearly what his actions were, just imagine being their victim. He perpetrated a genocide against Germanic tribes in retribution.
It's very hard to be a morally good roman emperor -- you can be seen as good by either the plebs or the elite of roman society, but not by nearly anyone else, and almost never by both even in rome.
I don't think its any accident the elite of concequering empires adopted this mentality. Though, no doubt, there were originally honest/moral/good stoic-philosophers they did create a kind of "retreat from the world dissociation" which isn't in my view, itself good. It's therapeutic in some situations, typically in cases of grief/loss/extreme-attachement --- but outside of these cases, you want to associate and attach.
Perhaps there's some case for a little stocisim in the face of social media today, or in the kinds of "adversarial environments" which exploit your attachment -- such as leading an empire (cf. Machiavelli: leaders have to be rutheless). There's possibly an argument that twitter turns everyone into a viperous courterier looking to attack each other's reputation and attachemnt-bait.
On the scale of leaders: not being needlessly cruel, trying to consider the impacts of policies beyond the immediate, and dedicating your days to ruling rather than enjoying whatever pleasure you pick makes him one of the "good" ones. Maybe that's a low bar, but even today not all leaders clear it and certainly we can compare to Commodus who came immediately after and the sources for which are similarly patchy, to compare.
I dream of a good recommendation system because Goodreads is completely terrible. I just want to know two things: which books are similar and which books I would like, beyond typical recommendations. Something akin to what platforms like VOD, YouTube, and Netflix offer. For me, this is the most important killer feature.
We’ll definitely have this at some point. A good recommendation system needs a solid base of user data, so it’s only possible once we have a larger user base. I really wanted to have this for the launch since it seemed so important for a book tracking platform but we didn't have the data to train models to make recommendations.
I mean, not really you don't need user data; I was doing something related with LLM (simply asking it) and planning to use vector databases for various tasks, like semantic search, similarity matching, clustering, and topic modeling.
Later pivoted to doing something for podcasts (analysing transcripts).
Krieger, J. W. (2010). Single versus multiple sets of resistance exercise: A meta-regression. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, 24(4), 1150-1159.
This meta-analysis found that multiple sets lead to ~40% more muscle growth compared to a single set.
Schoenfeld, B. J., Ogborn, D., & Krieger, J. W. (2017). Dose-response relationship between weekly resistance training volume and muscle growth: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Sports Sciences, 35(11), 1073-1082.
Concluded that higher training volumes (≥10 weekly sets per muscle group) produce greater hypertrophy.
Ralston, G. W., Kilgore, L., Wyatt, F. B., & Baker, J. S. (2017). The effect of weekly set volume on strength gain: A meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 47(12), 2585-2601.
Found that strength and hypertrophy improve as volume increases up to a certain point.
Schoenfeld, B. J. (2016). Science and development of muscle hypertrophy. Human Kinetics.
Discusses the mechanisms of hypertrophy and the role of training volume.
American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) Position Stand (2009). Progression models in resistance training for healthy adults. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, 41(3), 687-708.
Provides guidelines for resistance training and muscle growth.
Haun, C. T., Vann, C. G., Osburn, S. C., et al. (2018). A 6-week resistance training study on the minimum effective training dose for muscle hypertrophy in trained men. European Journal of Applied Physiology, 118(3), 593-605.
Found that low-volume training still leads to substantial hypertrophy but not maximal growth.
Heaselgrave, S. R., Blacker, S. D., et al. (2019). Effects of resistance training frequency on hypertrophy and strength: A systematic review. Sports Medicine, 49(12), 1935-1947.
Concludes that training a muscle 2–3 times per week is more effective than once per week for hypertrophy.
