Interesting Links for 01-04-2015

[andrewducker]

• Playing Pillars of Eternity as a party of bears.
  (tags: bears games )
• Generous welfare benefits make people more likely to want to work, not less
  (tags: work welfare )
• The the software studio that created Tomb Raider fell apart
  (tags: games fail )
• How Putin could lose power
  (tags: Russia politics )
• On Saving the World and Other Delusions
  (tags:

Comments

[andrewducker]

Ten points to whoever works out which one is an April Fool!

[gonzo21]

Surely the Labour drugs policy attack? They can't be so stupid as to have pitched that.

[chess]

Unfortunately the welfare story there has a correlation/causation problem - might it not be that countries that have a high work ethic for some other reason can afford to lay on generous welfare systems, because their culture means that people continue to engage in paid work?

(The increased paid hours worked by people - or at least people without important unpaid work like students studying or parents parenting - in guaranteed-income experiments is a much more convincing demonstration of the point they're trying to make.)

[bart_calendar]

I don't get why the machete thing was so bad. In high pressure creative jobs both employees and bosses often have creative ways of making points

[naath]

Yeah, I Just Don't Get people who jump from "person yells at and is violent to objects" to "person might hit me" but clearly people *do* do that, and that would make the working environment hostile for them.

[bart_calendar]

I guess it would, but for me unless I had any reason to think the person was violent to other people, I'd think it was just a stunt he was pulling to get a point across.

And it sounds like the two employees who were fucking each other were really taking advantage of the fact that their direct boss (the letter writer) didn't want to get involved and stop it and the fact that the big boss had a crush on her and was willing for a while to ignore her not doing her job because of it.

If I had two employees that were making the hundreds of dollars an hour lawyers make in America using their work time to spend several hours a day fucking - and their salary was coming out of my pocket I'd be pretty pissed off.

[lilchiva]

I was reading this and all I thought was "I look away from the internet for one minute and everyone turns into some sort of candy ass."

However, I am from Texas. We have many shrines devoted to crazy narcissists here. I have had any number of jobs with shitty work environments. (All of that pretty much convinced me to stop working ASAP. And, that's what I have done with myself.) One could make a fair comment that both you and I happen to be inured to certain types of legitimately abusive behavior. I, for example, do not think calling someone a "fag" or a "total cunt" is a firing offense. The law, in most states, and most HR polices happen to totally disagree with me.

[andrewducker]

I figured - it looked like a list written by someone who'd spent a lot of time in the job :->

[phillipalden]

"Generous welfare benefits:" Like the $900.00 check most of my friends get, that won't even pay the rent around here.

I hate stories like that because it reinforces the mistaken belief that we are just lazy, when most of us would work if we could.

[andrewducker]

I don't understand how your comment relates to the post. Which says nothing about laziness, and says that people with higher benefits want to work more.

[phillipalden]

My bad, sorry.

[andrewducker]

Don't worry about it - I misread things on a regular basis!

(Including a link yesterday!)