6 ms·

Maybe not let people work 12 hour shifts? This isn't the 19th century.

jajko 2y ago
But we talk about Musk, who is absolutely clear how he views workers and at this point we know how he treats them too (and himself, which is a textbook example of unhealthy obsessive behavior among other unhealthy stuff coming from high performing broken mind). He makes it trivial to have a love/hate 'relationship' with him, for better or worse. Fun to watch from the distance, just not grokking all those early adopters. I have small kids, there are risks I take also with them but they are always calculated and control is on our side. This is just blindly trusting some startup mentality scales well into giga factories level.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
Some people like 12 hour shifts? You make more money and your commuting expense per hour of work goes down. The alternative is that someone who wants to make more money takes a second job somewhere else. Then they're working 16 hours a day and have two commutes. What does 16 hours of work and 6 hours of sleep do for quality?
- pixiemaster 2y ago
  how about 7hour shifts and enough pay to sustain a family with that?
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    How about two hour shifts that pay a million dollars an hour? You can't change the market rate for that kind of labor by magic; employers are operating in a competitive market. You can get more money by working more hours.
    - jjav 2y ago
      > employers are operating in a competitive market Let's see; Musk is demanding that the board give him a 56B pay package. Tesla seems to have about 130K employees. They could afford to give every employee a 400K raise and Musk still gets a fortune from the left over money. So money doesn't seem to be very tight there, it's just that greed demands that a single person gets it all.
      - FiberBundle 2y ago
        The shareholders would pay for Musk's pay package by having their shares diluted. It's not as if Tesla has to provide any money for that, so it's not really comparable to giving employees a raise.
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        Money is money. In theory they could dilute the shareholders by issuing new shares into the market and use the money to pay employees more. But this fails to identify what magic is to be used to cause them to want to do that. Employers (and employees) generally have a pretty good idea what the market price is for a particular job. If they have to fill 100 positions and offering $25/hour causes them to get 100 qualified applicants who accept the position, they could offer $35/hour, but this is like saying that the employees could accept $15/hour when another employer is offering $25. Some explanation is required for why they would.
        jjav 2y ago
        > so it's not really comparable to giving employees a raise Employees can (and most often are) paid in those company shares as well, so no difference.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        Tesla is a public company. If the board doesn't think Elon Musk is worth that amount of money, they don't have to pay it to him, and have the incentive not to -- the shareholders would get to keep the money instead. But maybe he is worth that amount of money; he's a one-man marketing machine and owns a major social media company that can influence the public perception of the company. That could very well be worth that amount of money to the company over a period of years -- and it isn't a single year's compensation. So then we're back to it being a competitive market. If the company gets e.g. $60B in value from having Elon Musk, and he knows this and demands $56B, the company can either pay the market price or have a net loss of $4B relative to the alternative. And then have even less money to pay employees. Or maybe he isn't worth that much and if the shareholders give it to him then it's costing the company money. But then that's maladaptive and the company will lose business to some other company that pays its executives less and uses the money to lower the price of their cars and gain a competitive advantage while still paying the market rate for other types of labor. Either way it doesn't change the market price for those other types of labor, which are much easier to estimate than the value of certain unusual executives.
    - yndoendo 2y ago
      Magic does exist. Rephrase it as regulation. Just think the minimum wage with current day inflation for 1968 is just less than $15 an hour. Deregulation and push for top 1% profits and shareholders has pushed wages down over 50%. This cuts into long term economic growth and mobility. Reading most of your comments. You support treating works terribly by rejecting work life balance. For example, my brother in law will boast about working 100 hours in a week and in the same breath complain about having no time for himself or his family. A strong labor force is only true when it is mentally, physically, and emotionally healthy.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        > Just think the minimum wage with current day inflation for 1968 is just less than $15 an hour. Less than 2% of people make minimum wage and the few who do wouldn't be making significantly less if it didn't exist. The primary effect of minimum wage laws is to eliminate internship opportunities. The primary effect of raising them to the point that they applied to a non-trivial percentage of workers would be to accelerate automation and offshoring. This is why workers keep getting screwed. People ask for the wrong things. > Reading most of your comments. You support treating works terribly by rejecting work life balance. These are individual choices, and this is the problem with most feel good regulations. If someone is working 12 hours, maybe it's because they can't otherwise afford rent -- but then instead of doing something about high rents, you want to prohibit them from working enough hours to pay their bills. > Deregulation and push for top 1% profits and shareholders has pushed wages down over 50%. Younger generations are struggling because things cost more, specifically housing, medicine and education. These all have regulatory causes. Zoning rules, licensing rules and building codes inhibit housing construction, keeping supply low and prices high. The law promotes employer-provided health insurance, preventing employees from choosing not only where to get healthcare but even where to get insurance, since that's chosen by their employer. Then we pretend this is a market-based system even though we've disconnected choices from costs through the law, and wonder why Americans pay more for healthcare than anyone else. The government promotes student loans. It doesn't pay for tuition, it subsidizes loan interest and prohibits the loans from being discharged in bankruptcy, allowing colleges to raise tuition into the sky without losing students. Then people have to repay that debt for decades, instead of using the money to buy a house. "Deregulation" is a nonsense word with no specific meaning. If the state government passed a law removing local zoning restrictions, is that regulation or deregulation? It doesn't matter. What matters is that they haven't done it and now housing is unaffordable.
- gopher_space 2y ago
  Have you ever worked a 12 hour shift? Ever worked 4 10s? You know how you’re mentally checked out of a job after 4 to 6 hours? That doesn’t get better after 8. A 12 hour shift means you’re in a bit of a mental fog half the day.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    It depends what kind of work it is, and what kind of shape you're in. Some people have more endurance than others. If you're not capable of doing some work, you can do other work; that's no reason to say that someone who is capable of it should be deprived of the income.
    - askonomm 2y ago
      So because someone can take more of a beating than I can, it makes it somehow okay?
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        If someone is capable of doing work, and wants to because they'd make more money, what right do you have to prohibit them from doing it just because you can't?
    - gopher_space 2y ago
      What kind of work are you imagining where there's no brainwork involved and no danger to the project or other employees if a tired worker makes mistakes? I think you're operating on too many hypotheticals and not quite enough personal experience.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        Many types of manufacturing. If you're making e.g. textiles, and being tired means you occasionally produce something that gets tossed out by quality control, this is not obviously a danger to anyone so it's just a cost trade off in wasted material vs. benefits of operating the factory for longer hours. Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens. The cost of mistakes you make from being tired can be less than the cost of waiting 16 hours before responding to the emergency or leaving it to someone unqualified. Generically anything where the cost of occasional mistakes is low or they can be detected before they have a major impact. But also, the point is that different people have different levels of endurance. Some people will be making more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be making after 12.
- slowhadoken 2y ago
  I wouldn’t have believed this when I was a teenager but as an adult I know it to be true. I’ve worked with guys who knock out 10 hour days everyday with an hour commute to and from work. I could only keep it up for three months at a time but immigrants and guys fresh out of the military are machines.
- asa400 2y ago
  A bunch of people think they're good at working 12 hour shifts. Almost none of them are. There is an absolute mountain of fatigue research that bears this out. Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain amount of hours in a given period because if their performance suffers, people die. Personally, I'd prefer the same apply to whoever happens to be installing the accelerator pedal on my car. Sure, you can let people work as many hours as they possibly want, you're just making a decision that someone other than those workers and the companies that employ them is going to pay the externalities for all of their quality deficiencies. We have hour restrictions because people can't consent to being killed by a tired truck driver.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > There is an absolute mountain of fatigue research that bears this out. Any kind of sound research is going to conclude that a physically fit and healthy person has more endurance than a sickly and out of shape person. The former can work more hours than the latter in actual fact. > Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain amount of hours in a given period because if their performance suffers, people die. Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain number of hours because some of them are sickly and out of shape, if those ones were to work 12 hour shifts then people would die, and that provides a convenient excuse for their lobbyists to demand rules that reduce the labor supply.
    - asa400 2y ago
      It's a truism to say healthy people are healthier than unhealthy people. Of course they are. The point isn't that healthy people can work more than unhealthy people, it's that all people - even healthy people, even young people, even experts - have a much lower tolerance for stress and fatigue than they think they do, and their performance at the limit degrades quickly.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        The issue is that the limit is in a different place for different people. One person's performance is degraded by hour 6 as much as another's is by hour 10, so it makes no sense to limit them both to 8 hours -- the first presumably shouldn't even be working 6. There is also the question of where to stop. Suppose that the average person's performance is degraded by 5% after 4 hours. Should everyone stop after 4 hours then? They're not at peak performance anymore. But 95% is often good enough. And maybe 90% is good enough. Maybe 80% is good enough. Maybe 75% is good enough and one person is at 75% after 8 hours. Maybe only 90% is good enough but it's a different kind of work and then the same person is still at 90% after 14 hours. Maybe you're at 85% after 8 hours but get back to 90% with a cup of coffee. There is no one size fits all.
sonicanatidae 2y ago
That's gonna be tougher when they just fired 10% of the work force.

But we talk about Musk, who is absolutely clear how he views workers and at this point we know how he treats them too (and himself, which is a textbook example of unhealthy obsessive behavior among other unhealthy stuff coming from high performing broken mind). He makes it trivial to have a love/hate 'relationship' with him, for better or worse. Fun to watch from the distance, just not grokking all those early adopters. I have small kids, there are risks I take also with them but they are always calculated and control is on our side. This is just blindly trusting some startup mentality scales well into giga factories level.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

Some people like 12 hour shifts? You make more money and your commuting expense per hour of work goes down. The alternative is that someone who wants to make more money takes a second job somewhere else. Then they're working 16 hours a day and have two commutes. What does 16 hours of work and 6 hours of sleep do for quality?

pixiemaster 2y ago
how about 7hour shifts and enough pay to sustain a family with that?
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  How about two hour shifts that pay a million dollars an hour? You can't change the market rate for that kind of labor by magic; employers are operating in a competitive market. You can get more money by working more hours.
  - jjav 2y ago
    > employers are operating in a competitive market Let's see; Musk is demanding that the board give him a 56B pay package. Tesla seems to have about 130K employees. They could afford to give every employee a 400K raise and Musk still gets a fortune from the left over money. So money doesn't seem to be very tight there, it's just that greed demands that a single person gets it all.
    - FiberBundle 2y ago
      The shareholders would pay for Musk's pay package by having their shares diluted. It's not as if Tesla has to provide any money for that, so it's not really comparable to giving employees a raise.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        Money is money. In theory they could dilute the shareholders by issuing new shares into the market and use the money to pay employees more. But this fails to identify what magic is to be used to cause them to want to do that. Employers (and employees) generally have a pretty good idea what the market price is for a particular job. If they have to fill 100 positions and offering $25/hour causes them to get 100 qualified applicants who accept the position, they could offer $35/hour, but this is like saying that the employees could accept $15/hour when another employer is offering $25. Some explanation is required for why they would.
      - jjav 2y ago
        > so it's not really comparable to giving employees a raise Employees can (and most often are) paid in those company shares as well, so no difference.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      Tesla is a public company. If the board doesn't think Elon Musk is worth that amount of money, they don't have to pay it to him, and have the incentive not to -- the shareholders would get to keep the money instead. But maybe he is worth that amount of money; he's a one-man marketing machine and owns a major social media company that can influence the public perception of the company. That could very well be worth that amount of money to the company over a period of years -- and it isn't a single year's compensation. So then we're back to it being a competitive market. If the company gets e.g. $60B in value from having Elon Musk, and he knows this and demands $56B, the company can either pay the market price or have a net loss of $4B relative to the alternative. And then have even less money to pay employees. Or maybe he isn't worth that much and if the shareholders give it to him then it's costing the company money. But then that's maladaptive and the company will lose business to some other company that pays its executives less and uses the money to lower the price of their cars and gain a competitive advantage while still paying the market rate for other types of labor. Either way it doesn't change the market price for those other types of labor, which are much easier to estimate than the value of certain unusual executives.
  - yndoendo 2y ago
    Magic does exist. Rephrase it as regulation. Just think the minimum wage with current day inflation for 1968 is just less than $15 an hour. Deregulation and push for top 1% profits and shareholders has pushed wages down over 50%. This cuts into long term economic growth and mobility. Reading most of your comments. You support treating works terribly by rejecting work life balance. For example, my brother in law will boast about working 100 hours in a week and in the same breath complain about having no time for himself or his family. A strong labor force is only true when it is mentally, physically, and emotionally healthy.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      > Just think the minimum wage with current day inflation for 1968 is just less than $15 an hour. Less than 2% of people make minimum wage and the few who do wouldn't be making significantly less if it didn't exist. The primary effect of minimum wage laws is to eliminate internship opportunities. The primary effect of raising them to the point that they applied to a non-trivial percentage of workers would be to accelerate automation and offshoring. This is why workers keep getting screwed. People ask for the wrong things. > Reading most of your comments. You support treating works terribly by rejecting work life balance. These are individual choices, and this is the problem with most feel good regulations. If someone is working 12 hours, maybe it's because they can't otherwise afford rent -- but then instead of doing something about high rents, you want to prohibit them from working enough hours to pay their bills. > Deregulation and push for top 1% profits and shareholders has pushed wages down over 50%. Younger generations are struggling because things cost more, specifically housing, medicine and education. These all have regulatory causes. Zoning rules, licensing rules and building codes inhibit housing construction, keeping supply low and prices high. The law promotes employer-provided health insurance, preventing employees from choosing not only where to get healthcare but even where to get insurance, since that's chosen by their employer. Then we pretend this is a market-based system even though we've disconnected choices from costs through the law, and wonder why Americans pay more for healthcare than anyone else. The government promotes student loans. It doesn't pay for tuition, it subsidizes loan interest and prohibits the loans from being discharged in bankruptcy, allowing colleges to raise tuition into the sky without losing students. Then people have to repay that debt for decades, instead of using the money to buy a house. "Deregulation" is a nonsense word with no specific meaning. If the state government passed a law removing local zoning restrictions, is that regulation or deregulation? It doesn't matter. What matters is that they haven't done it and now housing is unaffordable.
gopher_space 2y ago
Have you ever worked a 12 hour shift? Ever worked 4 10s? You know how you’re mentally checked out of a job after 4 to 6 hours? That doesn’t get better after 8. A 12 hour shift means you’re in a bit of a mental fog half the day.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  It depends what kind of work it is, and what kind of shape you're in. Some people have more endurance than others. If you're not capable of doing some work, you can do other work; that's no reason to say that someone who is capable of it should be deprived of the income.
  - askonomm 2y ago
    So because someone can take more of a beating than I can, it makes it somehow okay?
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      If someone is capable of doing work, and wants to because they'd make more money, what right do you have to prohibit them from doing it just because you can't?
  - gopher_space 2y ago
    What kind of work are you imagining where there's no brainwork involved and no danger to the project or other employees if a tired worker makes mistakes? I think you're operating on too many hypotheticals and not quite enough personal experience.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      Many types of manufacturing. If you're making e.g. textiles, and being tired means you occasionally produce something that gets tossed out by quality control, this is not obviously a danger to anyone so it's just a cost trade off in wasted material vs. benefits of operating the factory for longer hours. Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens. The cost of mistakes you make from being tired can be less than the cost of waiting 16 hours before responding to the emergency or leaving it to someone unqualified. Generically anything where the cost of occasional mistakes is low or they can be detected before they have a major impact. But also, the point is that different people have different levels of endurance. Some people will be making more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be making after 12.
slowhadoken 2y ago
I wouldn’t have believed this when I was a teenager but as an adult I know it to be true. I’ve worked with guys who knock out 10 hour days everyday with an hour commute to and from work. I could only keep it up for three months at a time but immigrants and guys fresh out of the military are machines.
asa400 2y ago
A bunch of people think they're good at working 12 hour shifts. Almost none of them are. There is an absolute mountain of fatigue research that bears this out. Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain amount of hours in a given period because if their performance suffers, people die. Personally, I'd prefer the same apply to whoever happens to be installing the accelerator pedal on my car. Sure, you can let people work as many hours as they possibly want, you're just making a decision that someone other than those workers and the companies that employ them is going to pay the externalities for all of their quality deficiencies. We have hour restrictions because people can't consent to being killed by a tired truck driver.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > There is an absolute mountain of fatigue research that bears this out. Any kind of sound research is going to conclude that a physically fit and healthy person has more endurance than a sickly and out of shape person. The former can work more hours than the latter in actual fact. > Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain amount of hours in a given period because if their performance suffers, people die. Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain number of hours because some of them are sickly and out of shape, if those ones were to work 12 hour shifts then people would die, and that provides a convenient excuse for their lobbyists to demand rules that reduce the labor supply.
  - asa400 2y ago
    It's a truism to say healthy people are healthier than unhealthy people. Of course they are. The point isn't that healthy people can work more than unhealthy people, it's that all people - even healthy people, even young people, even experts - have a much lower tolerance for stress and fatigue than they think they do, and their performance at the limit degrades quickly.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      The issue is that the limit is in a different place for different people. One person's performance is degraded by hour 6 as much as another's is by hour 10, so it makes no sense to limit them both to 8 hours -- the first presumably shouldn't even be working 6. There is also the question of where to stop. Suppose that the average person's performance is degraded by 5% after 4 hours. Should everyone stop after 4 hours then? They're not at peak performance anymore. But 95% is often good enough. And maybe 90% is good enough. Maybe 80% is good enough. Maybe 75% is good enough and one person is at 75% after 8 hours. Maybe only 90% is good enough but it's a different kind of work and then the same person is still at 90% after 14 hours. Maybe you're at 85% after 8 hours but get back to 90% with a cup of coffee. There is no one size fits all.

sonicanatidae 2y ago

That's gonna be tougher when they just fired 10% of the work force.