Interesting Links for 24-07-2012

[andrewducker]

• Liberal reform in employment law
  (tags: employment politics government libdem uk )
• Three strikes rule has halved piracy in New Zealand. Kinda. Anyone got more stats?
  (tags: piracy copyright newzealand )
• Lego The Lord of The Rings - the whole story in 4 videos (with a few teensy liberties taken)
  (tags: funny video lego lotr )
• Frank Miller

Comments

[artkouros]

What good is half a pirate?

[bart_calendar]

I love the concept that Nickleback is god's punishment for gay sex.

[alitheapipkin]

That made me roar with laughter too

[hano]

Me too. I must remember that line.
(still doesn't explain the Smashing Pumpkins though)

[errolwi]

Some analysis of the RIANZ's made-up numbers (hey, we detected less file copying, there must be less, people can't have held off to see what happened, then carried on while hiding their activities more effectively!) here
http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2012/07/section_92a_after_six_months.html

[andrewducker]

Thanks for that!

[cairmen]

Crunch time does work, but most people fail to understand it's not a simple productivity boost, it's productivity arbitrage.

For 2-3 weeks (if I'm remembering "Slack" right) crunch time will give you a serious performance boost. However, it'll then be matched by a performance drop in the following weeks, which gets worse the more you keep doing it.

If you're 2 weeks away from a critical release and you KNOW you won't need the team for 3 weeks after that, crunch time is an excellent way to arbitrage performance.

If you're an idiot and decide to force your team to do it for 6 months... you're an idiot.

[andrewducker]

As the article says:
"Productivity drops when working 60-hour weeks compared with 40-hour weeks. Initially, the extra 20 hours a week makes up for the lost productivity and total output increases. But the Business Roundtable study states that construction productivity starts to drop very quickly upon the transition to 60-hour weeks. The fall-off can be seen within days, is obvious within a week...and just keeps sliding from there. In about two months, the cumulative productivity loss has declined to the point where the project would actually be farther ahead if you'd just stuck to 40-hour weeks all along."

[cairmen]

I'd say that's an over-generalisation - the exact drop-off depends on type of work, morale, and state of the team beforehand - but basically, yes.

[channelpenguin]

As far as I recall, the military worked all this out a couple of hundred years ago - that's why we even HAVE a nominal 40 hour week, this is where the number comes from. It's the proven absolute max you can get out of people day-in day-out without notable performance loss.

[andrewducker]

It seems a bit muddled. On the one hand saying that we should have experts who are members of the second house, but on the other saying that we should recruit people when needed.

Personally, I'd be happy with having experts recruited as needed to revise bills, and then having the government have to clarify why it was ignoring the advice of the experts.

If it wasn't the for the fact that they would just do what they do with their drugs advisors since time immemorial and just ignore them.

[andrewducker]

I like the idea of people who do not depend on elections and are not partisan taking a long-term view of our laws to ensure that they are not idiotic.

But I'm not sure why this needs a "second chamber", rather than a series of reporting committees that work with the House of Commons?