World News

Methinks perhaps the International Business Times may value capitalism over quality of life.

I think capitalism tends to be valued over life in general.

I think they especially value the poor people paid to spam their sites around until their user gets banned and they make a new one and continue.

Seriously, ibtimes spams Lemmy like crazy.

Having lived and worked in Britain which also has the very same "work hard" fetish, I've always felt that was just celebrating the very opposite of efficiency:

• A person in a quarry breaking stone with a small hammer 12h a day is working hard.
• A person in a quarry breaking stone with a pneumatic drill 2h a day is working far less hard.

Guess which of the two produces more gravel at the end of each day....

In many industries "hours worked" might be vastly easier to measure for each worker than their productivity (plus under bad management highly productive workers get trottled down by the rest and things like bad project planning), but "hours worked" is in no way form or shape the desired product of employing somebody unless what we're talking about is a Human Resources company billing those hours to a client.

The only reason I willingly do extra hours is when I'm coding and in a flow state, but at that point time ceases to exist. I get sucked back periodically cuz tech job, but my work is really good about letting us flex our time as long as we hit 40.

"Look how hard I'm punching myself! It took me a lot of practice to punch myself this hard! Jealous?"

I've legit told my present supervisor that literally works 14 hour days by choice and brags about it that I pity her for it.

I had a boss once who liked brag about never taking PTO, as if it were a positive thing. To me that just means your priorities are ass backwards.

I suspect the opinion about America and American ways of doing things has also gone down a lot in other developed nations in the last few decades.

The prosperous America of the 50s where a single blue collar salary was enough for a family of 5, a good house, a good car and even various appliances was well worthy of envy, but nowadays that's all gone and even the improvements on that (which were mainly social, such as more independence for women and less racism - as that 50s "prosperity" was mainly for whites) have been going back of late or at least not going forward quite as fast as in most other developed nations (especially Europe) plus it turns out that the Equality only along racial and gender lines and never along Economic lines, which is the type promoted by Neolibs, just yielded equal poverty for the 99%.

There is no need at all to go back on Economic Equality to go forward on Social Equality, but that's what was done by 4 decades of Neoliberalism (and, worse, it was then followed by starting to go back on Social Equality as the other Far-Right rose), so now the American Way is not something worthy of envy for anybody in a Developed Nation, quite independently of one's gender, race or sexual orientation.

In some countries they do, in others they don't.

From my own experience in Software Development, in England they definitelly do, whilst in Portugal they kinda do mainly because management culture is so horribly, horribly bad and people do not naturally tend to be organised and properly prepare, so overruns and not taking in account risks of problems and delays in time estimates are all the norm (so overwork is not driven by a "work hard" culture like in England but by constant fuckups leading to overwork leading to even worse fuckups because tired people make even more mistakes)

(Mind you, the management culture in England is hardly good, but it's still better than in Portugal).

On the other had, I've also worked in The Netherlands were I've only ever once seen a work culture similar to the US, in a small web-development company (and I killed that crap in the projects I was involved in, to great satisfaction of the junior devs) and as half of my career there was as a freelancer, I've worked there in maybe 5 or 6 different places in 8 years so I saw more work environments than normal.

One experience that stuck with me in The Netherlands was working for a bank and being still there at 6:05 PM on a Friday by my own initiative to finish something and the project manager coming over and literally telling me "Go home, you're not supposed to be here" even against my own insistence that I just wanted to finish something. I've worked in or for Finance at one time or another in all those countries and what's typical in that industry elsewhere is the exact opposite of what happened to me in The Netherlands.