August 2011

Thu Aug 04 12:30:36 PDT 2011

How Much Does On-Call Duty Suck?

Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope arithmetic and attempt to quantify it. First, I value my weekends because they give me time to escape the city and be in nature, so the big issue for me is lost weekends. A weekend where I am not free to leave the city (because it means being away from cell phone and internet service) is a lost weekend, so far as I am concerned.

52 ÷ 3 ≈ 17. One week out of six of primary on-call, preceded or followed by a week of secondary on-call is typical in jobs that require on-call duty. During both, one is forbidden from exiting the technosphere. So that means one out of three weekends — or about 17 in a typical year — is lost.

17 × 2 = 34. A weekend has two days, so that’s a total of 34 days of lost time away from work.

34 ÷ 5 ≈ 7. Dividing the number of days of lost time away from work by the number of work days in a week gives the number of lost weeks away from work.

2 - 7 = -5. Now, subtract the number of weeks of lost time away from work from the typical number of weeks one gets away from work (paltry though it is in the USA), and we see that the typical on-call job is worse than a job with no vacation benefits whatsoever. Much, much worse in fact.

Fri Aug 05 21:39:25 PDT 2011

Chutzpah Defined

Crashing the economy in no small part by mis-rating the crap investments of the banksters as decent, then downrating the credit of the government that bailed your bankster friends out.

Mon Aug 22 09:14:23 PDT 2011

They’re Both Wrong

Many establishment analyses of the recent riots in London point to a breakdown of traditional values as the root cause. Many radical analyses point to (ironically enough) essentially the same thing, as they argue it is some sort of sign of revolutionary disgust with capitalism.

They’re both wrong; the riots represent no fundamental abandonment of the values of bourgeois society. They merely represent the internalization of values primarily associated with the elite: the value that one’s own desires are primarily what matters, and that one need not overly concern oneself with the effect one’s actions might have on others.

The only difference is that the elite control the mechanism of the State, and use it to legitimize and serve their interests. Therefore, they have no need to engage in illegal behavior in order to enrich themselves at others’ expense. The demographic who rioted has no such privilege, and as such chose to simply ignore the law while they enriched themselves with stolen goods and amused themselves by torching buildings and cars.

And no, the riots are not some form of revolutionary uprising. Yes, there was apparently some class resentment expressed (the pictures of torched cars I saw showed primarily expensive lusury models). But overall, the violence and destruction was far too random to represent any sort of uprising. What can be purpose of burning down a building containing small businesses on the ground level and working-class apartments above (and many such buildings were burnt)? That does nothing to attack the privileged elite.

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Last updated: Tue Sep 13 16:14:12 PDT 2011