
How Nonemployed Americans Spend Their Weekdays - up_and_up
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/06/upshot/how-nonemployed-americans-spend-their-weekdays-men-vs-women.html
======
bglazer
Since minimum income and negative income taxes are an often discussed topic on
HN, I wonder what supporters of these ideas think about this article? It's
pretty troubling to me that 27% of the surveyed men were watching TV at 2 in
the afternoon. I'm intrigued by the idea of a guaranteed minimum income and
especially the effect that it could have on allowing people to pursue risky or
creative projects. I'm very much not intrigued by a quarter of the population
watching daytime TV.

~~~
ep103
1) Unemployed is a mixed category of people who can work, and those who can't.
Without meaningful statistics on how those two groups make up the sample of
people in the survey, it might make complete sense for so many people to not
have a primary activity of looking for a new job.

2) We're ~5 years after the last economic collapse, but with minimal actual
economic recovery. I don't have the statistics handy, but IIRC U6 went up
significantly during that period. A _lot_ of people simply gave up trying to
find a new job after being unable to do so for so long. We would want
statistics on what portion of the unemployed fall into that category too
before making an opinion.

~~~
DanBC
> 1) Unemployed is a mixed category of people who can work, and those who
> can't.

Sorry - this line triggers a knee jerk response from me. Please feel free to
ignore the rest of this post.

There are very few people who are so disabled they are unable to work.

There are people who face discrimination; or who have learnt patterns of
livingthat are not compatible with work; or people who have learned
helplessness. Employers are understandably nervous about employig someone with
no work in the past three years (and even if they're not nervous they usually
get to chose between the person with large gaps and the person with recent
work history).

Modern approaches to getting people with disability back into work concentrate
on "place then support" \- you get someone a jon and then you provide support
to them and their employer to keep them in that job. This is prefered to
"train then place" where you put people through work-preparation courses and
then eventually try to get them a job and don't support them in work.

I'm particularly interested in barriers to employment for people with mental
illness. When someone has a leg amputated there is a period where they are
rehabilitating and having prosthetics fitted, but then they can return to
work. From time to time they may have problems with their stump and they will
need new prosthetics. We don't expect those people to never work again. So
it's weird to me why we don't see severe mental illness as havig similar times
of illness and wellness.

This organisation has good quality information about curret best practice.
[http://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/employment/index.asp...](http://www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/employment/index.aspx)

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>There are people who face discrimination; or who have learnt patterns of
livingthat are not compatible with work; or people who have learned
helplessness.

And there are also people with crippling depression, fibromyalgia, and/or pain
disorders.

>I'm particularly interested in barriers to employment for people with mental
illness. When someone has a leg amputated there is a period where they are
rehabilitating and having prosthetics fitted, but then they can return to
work. From time to time they may have problems with their stump and they will
need new prosthetics. We don't expect those people to never work again. So
it's weird to me why we don't see severe mental illness as havig similar times
of illness and wellness.

Maybe it's better in the UK, but in many countries, employers simply don't
want to hire someone with a history of chronic semi-disability. This can be
particularly bad in the United States, where disability and health insurances
are provided by the employer instead of the state.

~~~
MichaelCrawford
I myself have quite severe Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder.

Among my symptoms are visual hallucinations, paranoia, delusions (other than
paranoid delusions), depression which can be suicidal, actual suicide attempts
- no suicide completions so far :-D - a euphoric state known as mania, which
can feel good to some extent but, when extreme, is far worse than all the
other symptoms - sleep disturbances (at times insomnia, other times
hypersomnia), catatonia and flat affect, that is, an inability to outwardly
express my emotions. My flat affect makes it difficult to connect to other
people, which itself can lead to depression.

However, the specific reason that I work as a coder, is that computer
programming accomodates my illness in a way that physics does not. (My degree
is in Physics, not Computer Science.)

I hated coding with a passion at my first full-time programming job, I wasn't
any good at it, and fully intended to do just about anything else once I was
able to find a "real job".

However I happened to notice that I could still write software even when I was
floridly paranoid. I mean like that NAZIs having Panzer exercises in the
office parking lot. I didn't see any soldiers or weaponry when I looked
directly out the window but when I turned away I could feel their presence.

I decided to stick with programming in part because of that, as well as some
other reasons.

These days I am contemplating going back to complete my Physics PhD. What I
find these days is rampant age discrimination, as well as no one believing
that my resume is for real.

I wrote my first computer program in 1976, in FORTRAN, with a pencil on a
coding form, then typed it into a paper teletype terminal, where it ran on an
IBM 360 mainframe. That box was so expensive that the University of Idaho had
just that one computer for the entire campus to share. I'm pretty sure it had
magnetic core memory.

------
dkopi
Hacker News -> Reddit -> Stack Overflow -> Repeat

~~~
MichaelCrawford
Don't forget Kuro5hin!

I had the idea I'd be able to attract some consulting clients if I answered
lots of questions at StackOverflow.

I expect that would work well were I to keep it up, but after just one day of
devoted overflowing, I came to the conclusion that my brain would explode were
I to persist.

~~~
pjc50
Does this work for anyone other than the top few posters?

I have quietly accumulated 13k rep on electronics.stackexchange, but I don't
think it's much use to me.

~~~
stingraycharles
I have been contacted by several (!) recruiters of Google after answering some
very specific questions about a distributed consensus protocol (Paxos). I can
imagine they rather search for specific topics / keywords than reputation,
using the logic "if he can get the accepted answer on these topics, he might
be worth checking out".

~~~
MichaelCrawford
I myself once scored a firewire consulting contract as a direct result of
answering question's on Apple's firewire developer list.

However that contract came several years after I answered the question.

To the extent I do stuff like post to stackoverflow, I don't expect it to pay
off soon.

------
hyunwoona
What chart API is it used in the article? Highcharts?

~~~
1wheel
[http://d3js.org/](http://d3js.org/)

------
seren
I̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶a̶s̶t̶o̶n̶i̶s̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶h̶o̶w̶ ̶o̶n̶l̶y̶ ̶5̶0̶%̶ ̶o̶f̶
̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶s̶l̶e̶e̶p̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶b̶y̶ ̶3̶ ̶A̶M̶.̶ ̶B̶u̶t̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶b̶e̶
̶i̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶t̶r̶e̶n̶d̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶g̶e̶n̶e̶r̶a̶l̶
̶p̶o̶p̶u̶l̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶w̶e̶l̶l̶?̶

Edit : this was actually a rendering issue on my browser as pointed out by
desdiv.

~~~
desdiv
You're seeing a rendering error. This is what the graph is supposed to look
like: [http://i.imgur.com/xLEu0yM.png](http://i.imgur.com/xLEu0yM.png)

The error on my browser (Firefox 34) made it look like 80% of the people were
asleep by 9PM, hilariously enough. This is the erroneous rendering on my end:
[http://i.imgur.com/dOEWFkP.png](http://i.imgur.com/dOEWFkP.png)

~~~
seren
You're right, the graph looks ok for a few split seconds and then have a weird
offset to the right.

------
MichaelCrawford
Hanging out at Hacker News.

~~~
seren
Would that count as Education or Leisure ?

~~~
MichaelCrawford
Addiction.

It is readily apparent to me that Hacker News has been a serious problem for
me for several weeks now.

There are so very many fascinating articles and essays, you see. The result is
that I experience persistent headaches, no amount of sleep makes me feel
rested, and I haven't been submitting any resumes.

I love HN, I really do, but if I keep hanging out here, if I don't actually
have a brain hemorrhage I'm going to starve to death in the cold.

I'm not kidding about this.

I have lots of real life experience with people who were addicted to cocaine,
crack, alcohol even heroin.

My experience of HN screwing up my life isn't a whole lot different from
intoxicants screwing up theirs.

~~~
eat
> My experience of HN screwing up my life isn't a whole lot different from
> intoxicants screwing up theirs.

Except the fact that you can just stop doing it at any time with literally
zero physical side-effects.

~~~
nothrabannosir
Don't understand why you're being downvoted; that's exactly right. This is not
like cocaine, heroin, or crystal. If anything, it's more like weed.

The psychological craving may be similar, sure. It's habit forming, not
physically addictive.

~~~
DanBC
Most drugs are not strongly physically addictive. Most drggs have short risk-
free withdrawal times. Alcohol is rare in being a drug that has a risky
withdrawal that needs medical supervision - and even that's for people who are
on the very heavy end of the drinkijg spectrum. (A litre of spirits with an
ABV of 40% per day is what you need to get a medically supervised withdrawal
in England. That's about 33 US fluid ounces per day). People can be having
serious problems with drink and mot reach that threshold.

Saying "you can just quit" ignores the severe trouble that a few people find
themselves in with things that are not physically addicting.

Telling someone with a gambling addiction that they could just stop is an
over-simplification. It's such an over-simplification that it's dumb, and thus
it's not surprising a few people felt it needed a downvote.

------
MichaelCrawford
I apologize for hijacking the thread, that was very, very off-topic of me.

After I take a phone call I'm expecting, I'm going to head home, catch some
ZZZs, as well as call my shrink. I'm not sure if I'll call her before I sleep,
or tomorrow.

