Healthcare being so tied to your employer is so anti-labor it's unbelievable.
AT&T threw money at smart people and said, "Do stuff. Then we'll see if we can use it"
No one does that anymore.
[0] Defense contractor Raytheon most specifically.
AT&T paid people to fuck around. Claude Shannon, father of Information Theory, founder of Artificial Intelligence, and namesake to Anthropic's flagship product, was also busy building flame-throwing trumpets and rocket frisbees while creating entire new fields.
But I bet you know what the cavity magnetron - invented in Scotland - is. You probably used one today already.
Cellular phones were invented in the UK and Finland. The US didn't even have them until the first couple of generations were obsolete here.
Transistors were invented in Germany, although they were made practical in the US, I'll them that.
A few states inside the US upgrade federal holidays to state holidays to required paid time off. Most don't.
In the US paid holidays are a corporate "tradition" more than a regulated common good.
Even US federal employee holidays vary between agencies and branches of government.
Better imo would be - if I personally accomplished something meaningful and valuable and 'earned' time, then I am strongly incentivized to take time. Also it taking time will help my health and wellness meaningfully then I should also be incentivized to do so.
But that seems impossible to setup if we aren't all our own business owning entrepreneurs.
Regulations are means of pushing the bottom line back at scale. They should be unnecessary in ideal humane society, but that’s not a thing. I wonder whether there’s a way to shift the culture somehow… but there seems to be no political will for that, because it’s certainly not any popular agenda point.
Edit - the original source even had the audacity to label Yemen with a “smiley face” since it has the most paid days for the region.
I wonder how much vacation time the people who invented the transistor took each year.
Edit: up to three mentions of transistors now. Bizarre
> "workers in Europe take about 2 to 3 weeks off each year due to sickness in addition to their vacation"
It looks like in Germany it's 20 days a year - https://www.dw.com/en/germany-sick-days-absentees-mental-hea...
Are you all really that sick? Shouldn't the availability of lots of sick time and your "superior" healthcare system decrease your illness levels? Doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
ramijames•42m ago
dayyan•36m ago
Work is a privilege.
InsideOutSanta•29m ago
TheOtherHobbes•22m ago
Perhaps there's a reason it has declined since.
pudgywalsh•5m ago
In the 60s people would often die from ailments that are now solved with routine outpatient procedures.
Cars were cheaper too but it turns out all that emissions and safety equipment costs money.
croes•4m ago
BTW if work would be a privilege, you would have to pay to do it
strictnein•30m ago
Could be better for sure, but a graph showing the US as having 0 days of paid days off because the federal government doesn't mandate anything is misleading at best. Average US worker after 1 year of employment earns 7 sick days and 11 vacation days. And likely has some state and federal holidays off as well, and could very well qualify for state required PTO and sick time. But that doesn't get clicks and attention.
More data, if one is curious:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs2.t06.htm
richwater•26m ago
Faaak•26m ago
strictnein•24m ago
InsideOutSanta•19m ago
Including sick days makes the calculation worse, not better. Sick days typically don't exist in Europe. If you're sick, you obviously just don't go to work. What's the point of infecting the whole office?
On average, workers in Europe take about 2 to 3 weeks off each year due to sickness in addition to their vacation. In fact, if you're sick during vacation, that doesn't count as vacation time, at least in some European countries.