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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23324 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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If there's a societal shift working Fridays is going to end up looking as quaint to Westerners as working Saturdays does to the right now (plenty of parts of the world where working Saturdays is normalized).

My friend, once upon a time working on Sunday was not done. Then it was done but in exceptional circumstances and you got paid double time for working on Sunday. Now, in a lot of jobs, working weekends is part of the job, you don't get paid extra for working those days, and maybe you only have work every other weekend. But you still have to work it. (And it used to be that working half-days on Saturdays was normal before unions got strong, which is what I think you are referring to with "as working Saturdays does to the right now)".

Think of the jobs where it's "my weekend is free, now I want to go shopping/eat out/visit this attraction". People have to work in those places to provide the services for the people not working on the weekend.

Plenty of people in the West work Saturdays and Sundays.

(There also used to be a custom called half-day closing during the week, generally on Wednesday or Thursday. That's gone too, now those days are full work days).

Plenty of people work weekends, but far, far less than a century or two ago.

You are in a humongous bubble if you think working on Saturday or Sunday is anywhere near normal. It's a very small amount of jobs that do this sort of thing. (Unless you mean working weekends but still 5 days a week.)

It's absolutely possible for us to shift the societally acceptable norm to 4 days a week instead of 5.

Oh sure, we can shift, but you will have an uphill battle over "why do you expect me to pay five days' wages for four days' work? I'm a business, not a charity".

You don't think UBI will be an uphill battle? These sorts of things are always battles my friend.

I am very damn sceptical of "AI will mean AGI will mean ASI and that means post-scarcity utopia". Jeff Bezos could afford to rent out Venice for his second wedding. That's not putting any money in my pocket. Some people will get very, very rich, the rest of us will carry on as usual only now in the Brave New World of "yeah, that job is now done by a robot/AI".

The service industry has lots of six day work weeks. It's pretty standard in restaurants for managers and chefs to get one day off per week(mon-wed) and be on call for the rest of their non-scheduled time.

For managers and chefs, sure. That's nowhere near the majority of workers. That's also a norm that could be changed with enough pressure from organized labor.

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