I once did an English language vocabulary test that yielded that I'm amongst the top 0.01% in terms of amount of English-language vocabulary.
English is not my mother tongue and I still and often make mistakes in the use of "in"-vs-"on" or even in certain forms of past tense.
However I read a lot in English, in various areas of knowledge, plus it turns out lots of really obscure words in English are pretty much the same as a the word in some other language I know or even pretty much the Latin word, so when I didn't know that was the English word for that, I can often guess the meaning.
All this to say that I absolutelly agree with you that it's a reading thing, plus at more specialized language level, the "knowledge of foreign languages" also has some impact.
Well, it does match my own experience and observations (in Software Development in a couple of countries in Europe) going back to the 90s.
The shift to "no loyalty to employees and hence for employees being loyal is a net negative" was around the point when companies started refering to employees as "human resources" and IMHO, resulted from the increased use of MBAs in Management, which in Tech happenned aound the early to mid-90s (though it dependend on country and the actual Industry making heavy use of IT).
Mind you, at least in IT and even all the way back then, it was already a good idea to move places at least once in one's career because people who worked all their life in one place don't really know any other way of working than the one of their place, which is limiting for one's professional growth (though plenty of people did manage to just keep ticking up on salary purelly on age-seniority even well after they stopped improving as professionals) because no one company has "the right processes" for everything.
Personally I actually think it's healthy to move companies at least a few times in one's career, but my point here is more about one's career and income growth stalling (and pretty early on, too) if you don't move companies.
That said, I'm talking about expert and in high demand career tracks: I don't really know if in the kind of jobs were the bean counters basically see employees as commodities there is any significant benefit from job-hopping, unless it's job-hopping into a different kind of job.
It all makes "business" sense for those who see employees as "commodities", i.e. all kinda equivalent and hence easilly replaceable with nothing lost when they're switched.
It's basically the MBA thinking of employees as just another "raw material" or "supplier".
The reality, more so in complex domains, is that employees have an adaptation and learning period when they arrive (unlike engineered devices, companies aren't standardized machines using standardized parts, so you a new "part" won't just seamlessly fit and start delivering full performance) and often never written institutional knowledge that goes with them when they leave.
However as those things are not easilly quantified and measurable, MBA types - being unable to add it to their spreadsheets - will simply ignore them rather than trying to balance such costs against salary costs: giving a decent salary increase (a guaranteed cost) will always look like a worse option in an accounting spreadsheet if its only counter is a sub-100% possibility that they might lose that employee (and, remember, since they don't count adaption and loss of institutional knowledge costs, that's listed there as costing nothing) and replace it with somebody else who might even be possible to get with a less "decent" salary (so, more than the current employees but less that a fair salary for the current employee).
Such approach works well if all companies are doing it and the probability that people will leave if they don't get a decent salary is low enough (which it probably is, since the majority of human beings favour stability over change).
If you buy a monitor from Amazon, do you expect that they will thrown in another one for free?
What about if you hire a plumber to come fixe a leaky pipe, do you expect them to install a new set of water taps for free while they're at it?
Do you go to McDonalds and expect a posh table waiter, and a complimentary bottle of Beaujoulais wine along with lightly seasoned oregano and olive oil garlick bread, for the price of a Big Mac?
So why expect that workers will do more work than what they are being paid for?!
If it's only a business relationship, as those very same managers treat it when it's time for layoffs or when giving below inflation raises because the job market isn't tight and they can easilly find replacements, then it's only fair that workers too treaty it as only a business relationship and only provide the level of service they're being paid for.
If they want the haute cuisine Michellin Starred service they're gonna have to pay more than McDonald prices.
The whole calling it "quiet quiting" is just a reflection of the moneyed class wanting to, as the Brits would call it, eat the cake and still have it afterwards.
Ultimatelly it depends on the distribution of the Human population all over the World.
It’s fine to not to offset your rotations at the end of the day if there are people on the other side of the World in average rotating about the same as you do and who thus offset you rotations with their own.
Also if some people around you tend to accumulate clockwise rotations and others counter-clockwise ones, it’s all fine as you’re offsetting each other and ditto if your personal accumulation of rotation for each day has an equal chance to being clockwise as it has of being counter-clockwise since you’re offsetting yourself over time (granted, if not in the equator you’ve made days a little longer or a little shorter in between, but all in all it’s fine).
The mass of the Earth is 5.972 × 10^24^, so you would need 5.972 × 10^20^ humans of 100 Kg each all turning in the same direction to make the Earth rotate 1% the other way (so about 597,200,000 trillion humans).
PS: I might be slightly wrong here as rotations have to do with angular momentum which is a bit more complicated than the linear kind because rotational inertia doesn’t depende on mass alone, but the law of conservation of angular momentum does apply.
Well in a very strict sense one can’t really say “never” (unless you can see into the Future), but it’s probably safe to go along with “It’s highly unlikelly and if it does happen I’ll fix it or will be long dead so won’t care”.
The average wage of women starts falling behind that of men at around the age of 30-something, which does match the point when people have kids nowadays, especially women with higher education. Funnilly enough, in average women earn more than men up to that point because more women get degrees than men.
So yeah, it’s related to childbearing.
However…
It apparently depends on how long a woman stays away from work during the parental leave period: the longer that happens the bigger the negative impact on a woman’s career and hence her on lifetime earnings.
Part of the reason why mothers stay much longer at home on parental leave than fathers are indeed personal choice, but part is cultural (i.e. societal expectation that the mother takes care of the children), part is legal (different legal lengths of parental leave for men and women) and part economic (insufficient provision of affordable kindergarten places, at times making returning to work more costly than staying at home, which associated with the other parts means women are the ones that more often end up staying at home for years after childbirth due to this).
Whilst the first 2 aren’t really something governments can do much about, the other 2 are.
A handful of countries have gone ahead and done things to change this, for example with free kindergarten places guaranteed for every child and parental leave which is just one big gender-independent block of months that can be divided between parents in any way they see fit.
So are these female politicians in Iceland pushing for the real world solutions that can start fixing the roots of the problem or are they just endlessly posturing about the symptoms for image management and political gain amongst the majority gender?!
It doesn’t really solve the problem of having a road junction - that’s still in the center and cars even come at worse angles than before- it just adds fluff around it.
On the other hand, it would probably turn into a tourist attraction and unique experience.
Taylor Swift is currently one of the biggest stars in the country. She is still on her record-breaking “Eras” tour, ranks as the second-most-played artist on Spotify this year, and, in July, scored the biggest week of sales for an album this year with “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version).” She’s using that cultural clout to...
What a fucked-up world we live were people will do or not do stuff because celebrities tell them to, double fucked-up when the celebrities have to tell people to do what they should already have done :(
IMHO if children were taught Skepticism (the proper one, not the Denialism that some morons try to pass as Skepticism) we would end up in a much better world.
Property developers have been activelly helped by governments and central banks for at least 2 decades who have done all sorts of things to rig the housing markets to always go up, even though to owner-occupiers higher prices are almost never a good thing (sure, the house is worth more, but if you try and cash it in by moving, any other house you buy or rent is also more expensive, so you gain nothing from your home having a higher valuation).
A guy his age has spent his entire life getting the message from top politicians and bankers that his economic activities are more important than just about all others and get rewarded no matter what (it really is a “no skill needed, just lots of starting money” domain), so it’s only natural if he behaves accordingly.
PS: Also, given that people keep reelecting the politicians who keep sacrificing the whole Economy (and keep selecting central bankers who do the same) to serve his interests and those of others in the same domain as her is, he probably thinks most people are morons. Worse, he’s probably right.
The system is rigged, hence the only choice is between evils.
No wonder american politicians are constantly harping about how the US is such a “Great Democracy” - it’s to compensate just how much the mathematically rigged for political duopoly american system fails to represent the will of the average citizen, unlike an actual Democracy.
The Netherlands has proportional vote, that’s why.
With electoral circles instead of PV, mathematically the two largest parties get way more representatives than the percentage of the public votes they get, and the bigger the electoral circles and fewer the representatives the worse it gets.
(Further, voters own behaviour changes to one of “useful vote” rather than “choosing those who better represents them”, plus tribalism becomes way more extreme when there is only a black & white choice - so lots of votes are driven by team loyalty - all of which makes it even worse)
(Also smaller parties dissapear, both because they can’t secure funding and because their members lose hope of ever making a difference. The closest you get to “small parties” in the US are independents, running for a very specific electoral circle only and whose voice is a drop in the ocean in a place like the US Congress)
The US has single representative very large electoral circles for Congress and double representative State-sized electoral circles for the Senate, so their system is rigged to pretty much the max it can and the result is a power duopoly.
I lived in The Netherlands and now I live in a country where the system is somewhat less so (smaller electoral circles, multiple representatives per circle) and even here you see the two largest parties getting and extra 10-20% each representatives in parliament compared to the popular vote (the governing party has 56% of parliamentary seats on 42% of votes cast) whilst the smaller parties have half as many representatives as their popular vote (in other words, every vote for a smaller party counts less than half as much as a vote for a large party, which is hardly democratic).
Most so-called “democratic” nations have this kind of rigged system, but places like the US and Britain take it to the extreme, so it’s unsurprising that when the economic supercycle is at the point where the many start hurting, in the absence of true choice you get instead the internal takeover of the rightmost of the party dupoly by the Trumps and Boris Johnsons of this world offering an ultra-nationalist far-right populist mix of othering, scapegoating and simple “solutions”.
(Funilly enough if you compare The Netherlands with Britain, whilst even now the far-right is stuck at maybe 20% in the former, in the latter it took over the Tory Party from the inside - which is far easier than convince half the population to vote for them - and hence has been in power for almost a decade with an absolute majority).
Every single one of all the government measures I’ve seen to “help people” in the current “tight housing market” is designed to prop-up housing prices and rents, never ever anything which would lower rents or house prices.
In my country they even given money to renters rather than, say, impose rent controls or start large projects building public housing.
From my own experience working in Finance every single government measure I see sure looks a lot like using the power of the State for manipulating the housing market to push prices up.
“Talk rather than pay” came with MBA-style management in the 1980s along with thing like calling employees “human resources”.
There was a period not that long ago when this kind of stuff was very visible as ridiculously over-inflated job titles (but not pay) in Tech Companies and I did know quite a lot of people when I was in Startups who had job titles which were way above their actual responsabilities or simply ridiculous (whilst I, as a freelancer, just got paid very well and didn’t really had a job title).
He’s so unruly ( lemmy.world )
xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech ( imgs.xkcd.com )
xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech...
Employees Who Stay In Companies Longer Than Two Years Get Paid 50% Less ( www.forbes.com )
It's just not fair! ( lemmy.world )
What kind of institutional gaslighting is this? ( i.redd.it )
Riot cops line up next to a sign at University of Texas at Austin. ( slrpnk.net )
Edit: Name of University fixed.
Cat after my own heart ( lemmy.world )
xkcd #2891: Log Cabin ( xkcd.com )
Alt text:...
xkcd #2882: Net Rotations ( imgs.xkcd.com )
xkcd.com/2882/...
xkcd #2867: DateTime ( imgs.xkcd.com )
xkcd.com/2867...
Sometimes a little murder is ok. ( startrek.website )
Women in Iceland including the prime minister go on strike for equal pay and an end to violence ( apnews.com )
Iceland’s prime minister and women across the island nation are on strike to push for an end to unequal pay and gender-based violence.
xkcd #2842: Inspiraling Roundabout ( imgs.xkcd.com )
xkcd.com/2842...
Taylor Swift asked fans to register to vote and did they ever ( www.dailykos.com )
Taylor Swift is currently one of the biggest stars in the country. She is still on her record-breaking “Eras” tour, ranks as the second-most-played artist on Spotify this year, and, in July, scored the biggest week of sales for an album this year with “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version).” She’s using that cultural clout to...
How about no ( reddthat.com )
Watch: Billionaire CEO says unemployment 'has to jump' to put 'arrogant' workers in their place ( www.rawstory.com )
Bernie Sanders urges left to back Biden to stop ‘very dangerous’ Trump ( www.theguardian.com )
Leftwing senator advises ‘unification of progressive people in general’ because threat from Republican ex-president is too great...
Landlords should have to pay income tax on their rental properties regardless of whether they're rented out or not. ( gothamist.com )
cross-posted from: lemmy.crimedad.work/post/12162...
Why companies say you're 'family' while underpaying you ( therealnews.com )
Felix Allen, a recently fired New Orleans-based organizer at Lowe's, recounts the measures taken by his employer to prevent his store from unionizing.