Fighting with Windows 11 introduced me to Linux Mint, which works perfectly! I’m not an OS geek, so I really don’t care about the OS – it’s just the thing I deal with on the way to Firefox.

My 76 y/o spouse loves Linux Mint. The 2017-bought desktop was deemed insufficient for Windows 11 and now runs Mint.

This appeared this week on our home Windows 10 machine as well for the one account that does not use a Microsoft account. It’s a new behavior.

This video has 7.6M views and was posted 2 years ago

In 2023? 😞

cook and sous chef

Mad respect from me. I can’t think of a more difficult job, you have to keep up, you have to juggle orders were some things are easy and some things are hard, you have to deal with the temperature and the standing and the moving. This is a tough, tough job!

A new study by human resources and payroll services platform Gusto Inc. shows smaller companies that have embraced remote work cite higher performance, better employee retention and strong corporate culture built on a foundation of flexibility. As small companies compete with deep-pocketed giants for talent, those gains could provide an edge.

“SMBs are increasingly looking to extend the flexibility that their workforce enjoys,” said Gusto Economist Liz Wilke. “Not only to attract them, but to keep them less stressed, more able to manage their lives, and to build a culture and a team that works for them.”

Companies that started in the past three years are 31% remote and 46% hybrid for their workforces, far higher percentages than more-established companies. Only 22% of younger companies are fully in the office, according to Gusto. Overall, companies that were 100% on-site before the pandemic are split between hybrid work and being fully in the office, with 8% fully remote.

from: https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/news/2023/06/13/remote-work-small-business-success-tips.html (paywalled, unfortunately)

Nobody is forcing anybody – freedom is in the freedom to abstain, and all of us can abstain from working for an employer that demands RTO. There are plenty of remote jobs remote roles are possible, and the smaller the company, the better the job because you (as the individual among fewer) are valued. Big companies don’t care and don’t have to care.

It’s probably another fact missing from this article, but while larger companies are doing RTO, smaller companies are not. Larger companies are making a mistake here, most likely. They’ve got problems and are blaming remote work rather than innovating. Smaller companies are nimble.

This is terrible reporting, emotional, practically yellow. Two academics are quoted. The article and headline tell you how you should feel about this. This should have never gotten past the editor’s desk.

I would disagree about your average because it’s brought down by people working multiple jobs

No, as these are the numbers reported by worker’s themselves (Robert Whaples’s research) and not by their disparate employers. But looking at it as you suggested, it comes out to 34.3 hours.

Here are two more views on it:

https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever (world trends)

https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/january-2007/working-hard-or-hardly-working-the-evolution-of-leisure-in-the-united-states [dated]

The unemployment rates in the USA and Canada are both far below norms. These robots aren’t taking anyone’s irreplaceable job. Of all the things they are (ugly, intrusive, annoying), one of the things they’re not doing is driving up unemployment. At worst, someone has to change jobs.

yet work more than any other time in history.

My impression is that we’re the most leisurely, per capita, than we’ve ever been. The average workweek now is 34 hours, down from 60-70 in the 1850s.

If you have the Google app on your phone, Discover is a choice on the bottom bar.

I don’t have a watch or a Fitbit, but these screens sure look a lot like Google Fit.

You have to enable it…

Do not Disturb > Apps > Wireless Emergency Alerts

Everything that has a beginning has an ending (perhaps with a long tail). Perhaps the only wrong thing is that we forgot about that. All of these Internet services tend to have a long tail, most of everything we remember once using is still around in some form barely being used but for a tiny and loyal user base that is still hanging in there for some reason.

None of these things were great in and of themselves, it was always the community.

As an audio enthusiast, it sucks that I can’t upgrade my stereo/audio system.

Exactly! I can have the system I want but having it somehow means no heated seats in the winter.

The annual subscription, which was introduced in January of 2022, goes to $139.99 in a $20 increase.

I literally renewed just two days ago, right under the wire!

For me, Music Speed Changer allows me to just focus on the segment of the recording that I need to practice. I can pick an A point and a B point and it will only play between those two points. My learning tracks also come with my part in the left ear and the other parts in the right ear and I can use the balance control to focus on one and defocus on the other. I can also make playlists for the various performances coming up so that I can practice and memorize my music while I’m driving

I use this a lot to learn new music. Some of the music we have these days is very fast, and music speed changer helps me to slow it down without changing the pitch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_zViMGxKdQ this is a song that I learned to sing using music speed changer by slowing down the track. There’s a lot of yabba dabba dat dabba in this song, and it’s rhythmic. At full speed I found it impossible.