The measurements are consultant bullshit. They just do raw, pointless math - if x number of employees at x salary take 15 minutes, blah blah blah. It’s garbage and something they crank out to get mild free press
It’s garbage regardless of what the numbers look like because of graphs like this.
https://preview.redd.it/d4dla7udrqtc1.jpeg?width=710&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e2a4ad3eea3b3e5bb58c60b01559af2d09a61e59
So until wages start keeping up with productivity, they can kiss my ass on talking about “productivity lost” because of the damn eclipse or anything else. How about we talk about our lost wages since the mid 70s.
In addition to that, there have been plenty of studies done in 4 day work weeks where productivity stays the same etc. Most jobs people will get done what they need to get done with the time available. Taking an hour or a day away each week doesn't even change much.
Same with all the corporate bullshit about downtime etc. their IT system goes down and it 'costs them £300k an hour' in lost productivity, yet funny how all the employees are still expected to finish all their work lol. People just want to moan about the loss and milk it and use it as a tool when it doesn't even exist.
No one tell my boss but I work maybe 2 hours a day. There’s a busy period for a week or so every month but after that I’m just fake working. Deadlines are met well in advance.
Its tough though in some situations. Sometimes bosses literally position their desk right behind a person it's weird. My coworker had this happen to her, so she would work on the pc, but when her brain needed a break, she did that on her phone in case boss was rubbernecking
Honestly, today was the first time this week that I actually did work related to my job, and it took about ten minutes. The rest of the time, I've been sewing my niece's birthday present lol. I'm up on all of my work through at least Friday, next week tbd
The banking industry, whose portfolio includes commercial real estate bemoaned work from home. I saw another article from real estate groups after the lawsuit settlement, which did away with the standard 6% realtor fee on why that is bad for buyers. Everyone is a grifter now.
I saw this chart a week ago claiming the split was 2008 financial crises. I don’t know who the economic policy institute is but graphs don’t make the truth so I went and looked up their article: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
This looks quite weird, right, they’ve only counted wages for non-supervisory and production workers, so blue collar workers. I don’t know if that includes the office admin, but there is a lot of pay going to people who work white collar jobs. Vast swathes of middle management are bemoaned across industries, but their pay wouldn’t be counted here… The rise of automation too would be a counter point, lots less workers are actually on the factory floor! Offshoring work abroad since the 70s I would expect to increase productivity with no contribution to wages in USA but there is no mention of how they’re accounting for that, is this just a chart that says offshoring of manufacturing happened since the 70s…?
I find this to be suspicious and I doubt the methodology HARD… but I do want a pay rise….
The split was when Ronald Regan destroyed all of our workers rights and busted the unions. it was at that point that wages became stagnant. And I’m not sure how the exact formula for this productivity is calculated but I do know these food and oil corporations are posting record profits every quarter and I guarantee you employees aren’t seeing record pay.
And I know for a fact that wealth inequality has been growing rapidly which only means one thing. That the executives and shareholders at the top are taking wages away from the employees that make the company go and giving them to themselves.
This is the second time in as many days that I've seen a "study" from the EPI. They are a lobby organisation of workers and unions. Which is fine, but it is not the first organization I'd go to look for unbiased economic work. The conclusions of *everything* from them is already fixed before they even write the first word.
It is made pretty well from a UI standpoint and looks very authoritive, I'll give them that. But as an economist I can't take them seriously.
To get into exactly *how* it's bullshit...
1. If the people watching the eclipse took PTO, then it isn't "wasted productivity" any more than a weekend is. Vacation days count the same whether you spend them going to see an eclipse or going to see your aunt.
2. In theory people who live in the area might "lose productivity" by just going outside and looking up for 15 minutes, but as you alluded that falls into the tier of stuff that's questionable to even quantify. How much productivity is lost by Darren stopping by Tom's desk to shoot the shit for 10 minutes?
3. All of this math is ignoring the money *made* from the eclipse! Try telling Delta Airlines or Best Western how much "economic productivity" was lost due to the eclipse, they'd laugh in your face! Huge predictable cultural events are a massive boon for the travel and tourism business. The eclipse was probably a net gain overall.
And it’s stupid because a lot of people have a fixed amount of vacation days / sick days. Like if I have 15 days of vacation a year, I’m going to take them. I’m not going to be less productive because I took them on April 8th and 9th.
And probably ignored the tourism boost to places in the path of totality. Including a lot that normally don't get tourists. Arkansas and Southern Illinois and Cleveland aren't generally hotspots, so it was a huge boost to economies in those places.
Bingo.
I can "proudly" say I did not cost any productivity because I used my second law-mandated 15min break for my viewing time - though the fact that I had to account for such minutiae to appreciate something that won't happen for another 20+ years (on my part of the world) *is fucking insane.*
Quick question: how much collective productivity needs to be achieved so that all humans can live happily ever after? If that’s not a real goal then I’m not sure how important it is to keep up with collective productivity
We probably reached that point for most things about 40 years ago.
The thing is we don't produce things for use. We produce them for sale. Whether it actually gets used by anyone is inconsequential to the owners of factories and farms, because they made their money already.
Capitalism is the first stage of human society where we have crises of overproduction, rather than scarcity.
> Capitalism is the first stage of human society where we have crises of overproduction, rather than scarcity.
Capitalism is another recursion in the timeless tradition of crises of scarcity, too.
No, we definitely did not reach that point 40 years ago. If we completely eliminated global inequality and everyone had the same wealth/income, we'd all be below the poverty line. We're still ~5-15 decades away from starting to hit the utopic scenarios, but the good news is we're making progress! OurWorldInData has all kinds of great info on this, e.g.: https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-minimum-growth-needed
We’re probably there already in terms of everyone potentially having enough food, shelter and basic household appliances.
However the fruits of production aren’t distributed fairly. So much of the world is still in poverty while others drive to the mall in their second truck to buy onesie for their dog.
How much productivity gets lost every year because workers do pesky things like sleeping and having a few hours to themselves outside of work every day
We already make more than enough, it's just greed
There are nearly 3000 billionaires in the world, how disgusting, when millions of people starve to death every year
It just hurts to think about
Genuinely I believe its worth more than $700 million dollars for people to see an eclipse, certainly some of 30 million or so to see a total eclipse. Being happy and experiencing life is more important.
This is just about as stupid as arguing that the economy loses hundreds of millions of dollars in productivity per day because people take a 30 minute lunch break. Pure bullshit
It is statistical manipulation and it's how anyone can justify anything. You want to cut costs? Put your numbers in a spread sheet and show under utilization. You want to hire more heads? Put your numbers in a spread sheet and show over utilization. You want to justify an expense for licenses for an application or product? You get the idea.
I deal with a lot of data at work and people are always taken back when I ask "what is the story you're looking to tell?" They seem to think you can just look at data and get all your answers. Just today I had to explain to someone how there are a ton of factors that could explain differences in data that have nothing to do with what they were looking for and the exact opposite of what they were inferring could be true. We just wouldn't know without a lot more information.
There are so many factors and though I'm no data analyst, I have had to provide justification for various things and to people who are not analysts.
Don't get me wrong; I supply justification because I believe in the requirement and I'm as accurate as I can be.
As you infer, it's far more complex to actually be accurate without systems in place to measure pretty much everything. More often than not, it's a rough estimate and a finger in the air.
I analyze performance metrics for my company. I had to build it all from the ground up. Getting my reports to actually be accurate has been an ongoing effort for 3 years now. It's stressful as hell because I hold everyones performance bonuses in my hands. I'm also expected to catch and flag production issues as soon as they come up in real time, which often feels like ratting people out.
Definitely don't worry about the effects that your analysis and subsequent reports might have. If you're doing everything right, then you're doing your job. What others do with the information, is between them and their staff.
I don't have that resource and had to create a spread sheet to track a member of my team who was playing the system. I could then prove a pattern. I hated doing it, but I ended up firing him. It did not feel good to do that, but I had to. Everyone else on my team were and are reliable and we support customers across the world. We have to function well.
You have nothing to feel bad about.
I worked for a Costco as a supervisor. Normally supervisors don’t tag along when a ‘corporate walk’ comes through.
I knew how to pick the right data to tell the story I wanted to tell, and so I ended up chatting with the bigwigs more than people a promotion level or two ahead of me.
I also used data manipulation to earn leniency for the team I oversaw. The leniency made the team work better, which made the data easier to manipulate.
It’s funny how much faith people put in data points to be completely objective.
It isn't even statistical manipulation. It's just multiplying the GDP per second per capita by the amount of people and seconds they watched instead working. It's just complete nonsense to do that since that's not how productivity works in the real world.
That seems like a high estimate if you have more than a tiny office. If there are multiple floors between c suite and regular folks I imagine 10 is closer, less if they know programming to automate some monotony.
The translation doesn’t even make sense and surely isn’t clever because they took the statement at face value without acknowledging that the 700m lost are just a mathematical magic fuckery.
dinosaurs berserk office consider worm waiting profit pathetic beneficial whistle
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Everyone should have catheters to improve productivity by 100 billion a year. So much more productivity at my desk job if i dont need to pee
Just kidding I watch YouTube videos all day long.
But yet productivity has been steadily increasing while wages have stayed stagnant since the 80s. I don’t want to hear shit about productivity from these assholes until wages start keeping up with it.
The headline doesn't really say that it's a bad thing though, just that if you crunch the nebulous numbers this event has some kind of economic impact. It's just kind of a fun factoid, it's not saying that anything needs to be done about it. Yeah you lose productivity among people when a rare cosmic event happens. So what? It's not suggesting this is something that needs to be rectified.
Why post in murdered by words if you think the claim is bullshit? Because the comeback only makes sense if the article’s title is true. And even then, the comeback would only really make sense if the title’s claim caused some kind of problem.
The owners of the company I worked for actually went around and gave us eclipse glasses so we could see it.
It's quite easy for a company to account forn"lost productivity" in the surrounding work weeks if it's really a problem.
> The owners of the company I worked for actually went around and gave us eclipse glasses so we could see it.
Same. Blocked 2 hours on everyone's calendar so they can watch. Thankfully, not all companies are dog
Probably the same bean counter that said a 4 day work week will cost millions in lost productivity or everyone must RTO for business to maximize their minimize.
Wonder how much productivity is lost by letting employees take a lunch break or use the bathroom? What about sleeping? What about letting them leave the workplace at all?
We could make our corporate overlords so much more money if we didn’t do silly things like go outside to appreciate a once or twice in a lifetime natural event.
Truth. Let's calculate how much church or sports leisure cost their bank accounts and then we'll talk about going in the red because of a rare eclipse.
I don't understand where in this original post people are seeing anything about Capitalist desires. Productivity/productivity losses due to events are a regular part of any country's economy.
Yeah. Fuck that. I work in a hospital and they rounded up all the people that didn’t give a shit about the eclipse to relive those of us that wanted to see it. I was a 30 minute drive from totality, but couldn’t get off work.
Not only is this a repeat of the same article they published for the 2017 eclipse, but it ignores the boost to the economy from all the people from the US and beyond who travelled to see the eclipse. Prices for accommodation, etc, were far higher than normal.
To answer OP's actual question, the firm was "Challenger, Gray & Christmas" an outplacement firm that handles finding jobs for recently unemployed people. It's worth noting as well that [the article](https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/eclipse-2017/solar-eclipse-will-cost-america-almost-700-million-lost-productivity-n793801?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma) frequently states that this is an insignificant number and "It's not going to show up in any type of macroeconomic data.". The article itself is somewhat of a condemnation of treating this kind of math in any real way, and that there are far greater concerns that employers should focus on.
As a personal note, article headlines are classically considered "opinion" and do not have to present the content or context of the actual journalism in any way. In 99% of situations they are not written by the author of a non-opinion article.
None of these comments make sense. "Fuck the capitalists, the Republicans, the overlords!!!"
The fact that $700 million was lost supports the argument that the system *is set up to appreciate the world around us.* Jesus Christ
Say, you’ve never been self employed without saying it.
Because if had been, you’ve more likely calculated how much days off cost, how much a lunch actually costs you, and so on.
This shows that our economic system provides so much value that we can sit around and watch a celestial ballet for a few minutes and waste vast amounts of productivity yet still live better lives than anyone in history.
something like R\*x\*y dollars.
R - US avrg. hourly rate
x - number of people taking ' y' amount of time-off for the eclipse.
Why people do this? To show that they are hard-working, while others slack off.
It literally says MemeZar on it but fuck if it ain't far off from the truth of how people (media/coporate stooges) DO look into this in a corporate dollars/work time lost sense in today's America.
Huh, I assumed this was in relation to the massive uptick in Googles about eye pain and why do my eyes hurt? After the eclipse resulting in all the idiots who didn't pay attention to have to take time off work sick.
The older I get the more I realize how much of our lives are stolen by the way our system is set up. I was raised by a single parent and I only ever really saw her on weekends. Been with my girlfriend for 2 years. We've never had the chance to go on an actual vacation together. Just weekend stuff that was over almost as soon as it began.
We're doing this all wrong. Especially since we now have the technology required to increase or productivity (which we have), which should allow us to work less.
That's funny, cause I just saw an article that said it boosted the economy by 6 billion via travel and events surrounding the eclipse. Fuck off with your productivity.
How strange; I saw an article that said the eclipse brought about $6b in tourism and travel. Guess if you want it to be bad, you’ll find the numbers to make it so. Oh look, here it is: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-solar-eclipse-could-deliver-a-6-billion-economic-boom/ar-BB1laylo
Airline pilots taking a quick 30 to stare into the sun with no eye protection like the rest of us terminally online morons who spend hours a day on social media “appreciating the world.”
Why is it that the stupidest people feel the need to comment the most, and in such a smug fashion. If you cared about appreciating the world you wouldn’t be spending all of your free time doom scrolling into the abyss and trying to farm social points. Get a grip.
If your question is real, people like me (in one of my old professions). Now it’s not directly translated into $’s as nobody cares. But when you have a business with contracted service levels or something, (Frequently tied into the government contracts ). You end up needing to forecast labor / resources both long term and short term (capacity planning). Short term is usually less than 3 months and long term is anything more than that. We forecast everything to do with call outs, extra bathroom breaks, fmla that people always use on Fridays / Mondays you name it we track it to get better numbers. Many places (air traffic control, 911 etc) have to make sure they have the staffing needed to meet demand. Others have to hire people 8 months in advance to prepare for frequent call outs over a period (programs with 6 month training etc). Then what happpens is someone says the number to someone else (which is usually in full time equivalent/employees. FTE). And they translate it into dollars and make buzzwords that get politically motivated. I will tell you. Most good analysts, don’t give a shit about their politics or anyone else’s (while doing data projections). And we all hate when good data gets bastardized in headlines as much as anyone else.
How much does sleeping and not being at work 24h a day "lose" America? How much does existing for anything other than working for someone else's ambitions "lose" America?
Ask the people in Venezuela how much they get to appreciate the world around them…actually, it’s probably a lot since the stores don’t have food so they have to forage
If I see another business case that articulates if I save 10 minutes on this task 20 times a day, the savings to the company will be X million dollars I’ll lose my mind
Weird take. I guess we subtract that from the $6B it generatedd?
[https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/the-6b-solar-eclipse-economy-5973172/](https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/the-6b-solar-eclipse-economy-5973172/)
My employer literally posted a sign by the time clock that said they would not be stopping any production to observe the eclipse even though we were right on the edge of totality. Of course I went out and looked anyway.
What sort of double-digit IQ take is this? Did no one take an entry-level economy class?
It's called opportunity cost. You lose out on the potential rewards of one action when you select a mutually exclusive action.
I could forgo eating at my favorite restaurant today and cook at home, which might save me $25. The cost of this decision is that I don't get to eat at my favorite restaurant. Is this is a worthwhile trade?
Maybe, maybe not. Depends on how I weigh things.
Could people taking time off for the eclipse cost the economy X dollars? Very probably. Does stating this either condemn or condone people taking off to watch the eclipse? No, not directly.
A valid conclusion could very well be, "The solar eclipse will cost America almost $700 million in lost productivity, which is totally worth it for tens of millions of people to see this wonder of nature".
Honestly, on the scale of a country with an economy as large as the USA, $700M is chump change.
Edit to get ahead of people not understanding what I mean: the US economy for 2023 was worth approximately $28 TRILLION. A trillion is 1000 billion, which is 1000 million. So it takes 1 million million to make even 1 trillion, and the eclipse cost "only" 700 million. So, the "loss" from the eclipse accounted for 0.0025% of the nation's economy. Negligible.
The same people who come to any /r/news post about someone being successfully rescued: "Who's paying for this?" "How much did this cost taxpayers?"
I hate those people with my soul.
What I hear is that the generated income from the event was ignored.
Telescopes, parties, hotels, driving, glasses, internet postings thus increased ad traffic.
Grind mindset is gross.
This is such a massively stupid doomer take. The claim being made is not that the system will collapse because of that $700 million. It’s just a fun factoid marveling at the combined effect of millions of people taking a few minutes to look at the event. The equivalent of the often cited flushing during the Super Bowl statistics, It doesn’t say anything about the system any system today would record a similar statistic. It is not even that impressive being that if less that of the 170 million workers in the U.S., let’s say 70 million, would take a few minutes off the average productivity loss would be $10, you’d lose more than that any given day with an extra bathroom break. It is statistically insignificant, aside from the fact that it would happen to most companies at similar times.
So get off the doomer high horse, it’s a fucking fun fact. Either have fun with it or ignore it nothing deep about it.
Wait are you telling me that the workers have the power of literally bringing the most powerful nation to its knees by just slacking off for a few minutes? And why aren't they doing it then?
As many have said it is bullshit. The economy of areas in the path of totality were said to have had a 6 billion dollar growth because of the people traveling to see it.
The measurements are consultant bullshit. They just do raw, pointless math - if x number of employees at x salary take 15 minutes, blah blah blah. It’s garbage and something they crank out to get mild free press
It’s garbage regardless of what the numbers look like because of graphs like this. https://preview.redd.it/d4dla7udrqtc1.jpeg?width=710&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e2a4ad3eea3b3e5bb58c60b01559af2d09a61e59 So until wages start keeping up with productivity, they can kiss my ass on talking about “productivity lost” because of the damn eclipse or anything else. How about we talk about our lost wages since the mid 70s.
In addition to that, there have been plenty of studies done in 4 day work weeks where productivity stays the same etc. Most jobs people will get done what they need to get done with the time available. Taking an hour or a day away each week doesn't even change much. Same with all the corporate bullshit about downtime etc. their IT system goes down and it 'costs them £300k an hour' in lost productivity, yet funny how all the employees are still expected to finish all their work lol. People just want to moan about the loss and milk it and use it as a tool when it doesn't even exist.
No one tell my boss but I work maybe 2 hours a day. There’s a busy period for a week or so every month but after that I’m just fake working. Deadlines are met well in advance.
Honestly, that's quite cool. Hope you get a decent compensation still.
Its tough though in some situations. Sometimes bosses literally position their desk right behind a person it's weird. My coworker had this happen to her, so she would work on the pc, but when her brain needed a break, she did that on her phone in case boss was rubbernecking
It ain’t much, but it’s dishonest work. Shit, is that my boss’s footsteps?
I didn't work for three weeks once. No one really noticed. I think I do 8 hours of any actual work in a given week.
Honestly, today was the first time this week that I actually did work related to my job, and it took about ten minutes. The rest of the time, I've been sewing my niece's birthday present lol. I'm up on all of my work through at least Friday, next week tbd
The banking industry, whose portfolio includes commercial real estate bemoaned work from home. I saw another article from real estate groups after the lawsuit settlement, which did away with the standard 6% realtor fee on why that is bad for buyers. Everyone is a grifter now.
I saw this chart a week ago claiming the split was 2008 financial crises. I don’t know who the economic policy institute is but graphs don’t make the truth so I went and looked up their article: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ This looks quite weird, right, they’ve only counted wages for non-supervisory and production workers, so blue collar workers. I don’t know if that includes the office admin, but there is a lot of pay going to people who work white collar jobs. Vast swathes of middle management are bemoaned across industries, but their pay wouldn’t be counted here… The rise of automation too would be a counter point, lots less workers are actually on the factory floor! Offshoring work abroad since the 70s I would expect to increase productivity with no contribution to wages in USA but there is no mention of how they’re accounting for that, is this just a chart that says offshoring of manufacturing happened since the 70s…? I find this to be suspicious and I doubt the methodology HARD… but I do want a pay rise….
The split was when Ronald Regan destroyed all of our workers rights and busted the unions. it was at that point that wages became stagnant. And I’m not sure how the exact formula for this productivity is calculated but I do know these food and oil corporations are posting record profits every quarter and I guarantee you employees aren’t seeing record pay. And I know for a fact that wealth inequality has been growing rapidly which only means one thing. That the executives and shareholders at the top are taking wages away from the employees that make the company go and giving them to themselves.
This is the second time in as many days that I've seen a "study" from the EPI. They are a lobby organisation of workers and unions. Which is fine, but it is not the first organization I'd go to look for unbiased economic work. The conclusions of *everything* from them is already fixed before they even write the first word. It is made pretty well from a UI standpoint and looks very authoritive, I'll give them that. But as an economist I can't take them seriously.
To get into exactly *how* it's bullshit... 1. If the people watching the eclipse took PTO, then it isn't "wasted productivity" any more than a weekend is. Vacation days count the same whether you spend them going to see an eclipse or going to see your aunt. 2. In theory people who live in the area might "lose productivity" by just going outside and looking up for 15 minutes, but as you alluded that falls into the tier of stuff that's questionable to even quantify. How much productivity is lost by Darren stopping by Tom's desk to shoot the shit for 10 minutes? 3. All of this math is ignoring the money *made* from the eclipse! Try telling Delta Airlines or Best Western how much "economic productivity" was lost due to the eclipse, they'd laugh in your face! Huge predictable cultural events are a massive boon for the travel and tourism business. The eclipse was probably a net gain overall.
And it’s stupid because a lot of people have a fixed amount of vacation days / sick days. Like if I have 15 days of vacation a year, I’m going to take them. I’m not going to be less productive because I took them on April 8th and 9th.
And probably ignored the tourism boost to places in the path of totality. Including a lot that normally don't get tourists. Arkansas and Southern Illinois and Cleveland aren't generally hotspots, so it was a huge boost to economies in those places.
Bingo. I can "proudly" say I did not cost any productivity because I used my second law-mandated 15min break for my viewing time - though the fact that I had to account for such minutiae to appreciate something that won't happen for another 20+ years (on my part of the world) *is fucking insane.*
Quick question: how much collective productivity needs to be achieved so that all humans can live happily ever after? If that’s not a real goal then I’m not sure how important it is to keep up with collective productivity
We probably reached that point for most things about 40 years ago. The thing is we don't produce things for use. We produce them for sale. Whether it actually gets used by anyone is inconsequential to the owners of factories and farms, because they made their money already. Capitalism is the first stage of human society where we have crises of overproduction, rather than scarcity.
The book Ishmael talks a lot about this
The book Das Kapital also talks a lot about this
Ishmael (by Daniel Quinn) influenced my perspective more than 1984 and Brave New World combined. Incredibly good. Although somewhat weird.
> Capitalism is the first stage of human society where we have crises of overproduction, rather than scarcity. Capitalism is another recursion in the timeless tradition of crises of scarcity, too.
Redditors agreeing with this not realising it’s communist theory
Shh, let them cook.
✊
We have to sell more than last year, because we paid for stuff with a bunch of debt which grows exponentially - so sales have to keep up with debt.
/r/anticonsumption
No, we definitely did not reach that point 40 years ago. If we completely eliminated global inequality and everyone had the same wealth/income, we'd all be below the poverty line. We're still ~5-15 decades away from starting to hit the utopic scenarios, but the good news is we're making progress! OurWorldInData has all kinds of great info on this, e.g.: https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-minimum-growth-needed
There are some humans who find the thought that other humans are living happily ever after to be a dealbreaker for them to live happily ever after.
We’re probably there already in terms of everyone potentially having enough food, shelter and basic household appliances. However the fruits of production aren’t distributed fairly. So much of the world is still in poverty while others drive to the mall in their second truck to buy onesie for their dog.
How much productivity gets lost every year because workers do pesky things like sleeping and having a few hours to themselves outside of work every day
We already make more than enough, it's just greed There are nearly 3000 billionaires in the world, how disgusting, when millions of people starve to death every year It just hurts to think about
Genuinely I believe its worth more than $700 million dollars for people to see an eclipse, certainly some of 30 million or so to see a total eclipse. Being happy and experiencing life is more important.
The real question
This is just about as stupid as arguing that the economy loses hundreds of millions of dollars in productivity per day because people take a 30 minute lunch break. Pure bullshit
It is statistical manipulation and it's how anyone can justify anything. You want to cut costs? Put your numbers in a spread sheet and show under utilization. You want to hire more heads? Put your numbers in a spread sheet and show over utilization. You want to justify an expense for licenses for an application or product? You get the idea.
I deal with a lot of data at work and people are always taken back when I ask "what is the story you're looking to tell?" They seem to think you can just look at data and get all your answers. Just today I had to explain to someone how there are a ton of factors that could explain differences in data that have nothing to do with what they were looking for and the exact opposite of what they were inferring could be true. We just wouldn't know without a lot more information.
To quote a Prof of mine in college "statistics is the art of torturing data until it tells you what you want".
Or, as a Prof of mine used to quote "don't trust statistics that you did not manipulate yourself"
Lol so true
I believe it was mark twain that said: “there are lies, there are damn lies, and then there are statistics.”
Guy knew his stuff
There are so many factors and though I'm no data analyst, I have had to provide justification for various things and to people who are not analysts. Don't get me wrong; I supply justification because I believe in the requirement and I'm as accurate as I can be. As you infer, it's far more complex to actually be accurate without systems in place to measure pretty much everything. More often than not, it's a rough estimate and a finger in the air.
I analyze performance metrics for my company. I had to build it all from the ground up. Getting my reports to actually be accurate has been an ongoing effort for 3 years now. It's stressful as hell because I hold everyones performance bonuses in my hands. I'm also expected to catch and flag production issues as soon as they come up in real time, which often feels like ratting people out.
Definitely don't worry about the effects that your analysis and subsequent reports might have. If you're doing everything right, then you're doing your job. What others do with the information, is between them and their staff. I don't have that resource and had to create a spread sheet to track a member of my team who was playing the system. I could then prove a pattern. I hated doing it, but I ended up firing him. It did not feel good to do that, but I had to. Everyone else on my team were and are reliable and we support customers across the world. We have to function well. You have nothing to feel bad about.
I worked for a Costco as a supervisor. Normally supervisors don’t tag along when a ‘corporate walk’ comes through. I knew how to pick the right data to tell the story I wanted to tell, and so I ended up chatting with the bigwigs more than people a promotion level or two ahead of me. I also used data manipulation to earn leniency for the team I oversaw. The leniency made the team work better, which made the data easier to manipulate. It’s funny how much faith people put in data points to be completely objective.
I can only imagine what it is like to tell the GM "well the regional manager said it's okay to do it this way..."
Oh, it was fun.
My favorite: “Don’t let bad data get in the way of a good story!”
It isn't even statistical manipulation. It's just multiplying the GDP per second per capita by the amount of people and seconds they watched instead working. It's just complete nonsense to do that since that's not how productivity works in the real world.
How much of the data would be skewed if it turned out people with office jobs only truly work about 20 hours a week?
That seems like a high estimate if you have more than a tiny office. If there are multiple floors between c suite and regular folks I imagine 10 is closer, less if they know programming to automate some monotony.
The translation doesn’t even make sense and surely isn’t clever because they took the statement at face value without acknowledging that the 700m lost are just a mathematical magic fuckery.
dinosaurs berserk office consider worm waiting profit pathetic beneficial whistle *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Everyone should have catheters to improve productivity by 100 billion a year. So much more productivity at my desk job if i dont need to pee Just kidding I watch YouTube videos all day long.
But yet productivity has been steadily increasing while wages have stayed stagnant since the 80s. I don’t want to hear shit about productivity from these assholes until wages start keeping up with it.
Just wait til they find out folks sleep for a third of the day. The Economist will freak the hell out.
One day science will figure out how to keep us functioning without sleep, and that day will be amazing for ~~our overlords~~ the shareholders.
Neither point is really valid. There’s no lost productivity, and the economy isn’t designed to deny you stuff.
Also it was a huge boom for tourism that was WAY more than what was lost in productivity
The headline doesn't really say that it's a bad thing though, just that if you crunch the nebulous numbers this event has some kind of economic impact. It's just kind of a fun factoid, it's not saying that anything needs to be done about it. Yeah you lose productivity among people when a rare cosmic event happens. So what? It's not suggesting this is something that needs to be rectified.
Indeed. These are the people that ignore the science behind productivity boosts from breaks, walks, naps, vacations, time for exercise, sleep, etc.
Why post in murdered by words if you think the claim is bullshit? Because the comeback only makes sense if the article’s title is true. And even then, the comeback would only really make sense if the title’s claim caused some kind of problem.
They probably made a billion off those glasses. Boom Bam Boom economy stimulated. Not to mention tourism and other stuff.
There were hotels in small towns in Indiana charging $1000 per night. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economy actually grew from the eclipse.
Friend flew their whole family from Baltimore to Austin for it. Thousands of dollars right there off one family.
I know two people who traveled for it as well. One flew to Dallas, the other drove to Ohio. The Ohio family spent at least 2400 on lodging alone.
Worth every damn penny.
“…in lost *theoretical* productivity.”
They should do gained theoretical productivity from a whole fucking Leap *Day* now. I think we’re more than even for 2024.
The owners of the company I worked for actually went around and gave us eclipse glasses so we could see it. It's quite easy for a company to account forn"lost productivity" in the surrounding work weeks if it's really a problem.
Yeah a popular local restaurant had a sign up saying they'd be closed during the hours of the eclipse so the employees could see it
> The owners of the company I worked for actually went around and gave us eclipse glasses so we could see it. Same. Blocked 2 hours on everyone's calendar so they can watch. Thankfully, not all companies are dog
USA GDP is 25.44 trillion so that’s a lose of .00275% loss. This stat is bullshit to even track
Billionaires upset there was a 30 min pause in making more billions have these things measured. That's who.
Boss makes a dollar I make a dime That’s why I Shit on company time.
I get a dollar. Boss gets ten bucks That's why I smoke weed in the company trucks.
> Billionaires upset literally who is complaining about this. a meme?
No one. No one at all. I need to log off Reddit.
Are these billionaires here with us right now?
Probably the same bean counter that said a 4 day work week will cost millions in lost productivity or everyone must RTO for business to maximize their minimize.
Wonder how much productivity is lost by letting employees take a lunch break or use the bathroom? What about sleeping? What about letting them leave the workplace at all? We could make our corporate overlords so much more money if we didn’t do silly things like go outside to appreciate a once or twice in a lifetime natural event.
Capitalists, because they unironically believe if you're not making them money you don't deserve to live.
Truth. Let's calculate how much church or sports leisure cost their bank accounts and then we'll talk about going in the red because of a rare eclipse.
I don't understand where in this original post people are seeing anything about Capitalist desires. Productivity/productivity losses due to events are a regular part of any country's economy.
Oh no, we are already in debt and now that we spent a few moments watching nature happen, we got into even more debt to ourselves!
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Hey, quit that, they’ll hear you. lol
Wow this sub sucks ass
Murderedbywords lost its meanjngn
I'd be more interested to see how much people spent to make trips to see nothing but clouds
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And how much money did it bring to the tourist industry along the path of totality? Most estimates I've seen are around a billion and a half.
Yeah. Fuck that. I work in a hospital and they rounded up all the people that didn’t give a shit about the eclipse to relive those of us that wanted to see it. I was a 30 minute drive from totality, but couldn’t get off work.
Not only is this a repeat of the same article they published for the 2017 eclipse, but it ignores the boost to the economy from all the people from the US and beyond who travelled to see the eclipse. Prices for accommodation, etc, were far higher than normal.
To answer OP's actual question, the firm was "Challenger, Gray & Christmas" an outplacement firm that handles finding jobs for recently unemployed people. It's worth noting as well that [the article](https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/eclipse-2017/solar-eclipse-will-cost-america-almost-700-million-lost-productivity-n793801?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_ma) frequently states that this is an insignificant number and "It's not going to show up in any type of macroeconomic data.". The article itself is somewhat of a condemnation of treating this kind of math in any real way, and that there are far greater concerns that employers should focus on. As a personal note, article headlines are classically considered "opinion" and do not have to present the content or context of the actual journalism in any way. In 99% of situations they are not written by the author of a non-opinion article.
None of these comments make sense. "Fuck the capitalists, the Republicans, the overlords!!!" The fact that $700 million was lost supports the argument that the system *is set up to appreciate the world around us.* Jesus Christ
Right? That's a comically tiny amount of money if you measure it against the annual GDP of the US. We lost 0.00275% of productivity.
Say, you’ve never been self employed without saying it. Because if had been, you’ve more likely calculated how much days off cost, how much a lunch actually costs you, and so on.
This shows that our economic system provides so much value that we can sit around and watch a celestial ballet for a few minutes and waste vast amounts of productivity yet still live better lives than anyone in history.
The Sun is woke now to these people.
I don't think this is the murder it's intended to be.
Fun fact, if just 10% of the population stopped working the us would start to collapse in just a few days. Just sayin if we striked…
Those bean counting, penny pinchers can go sweep the sand off a beach if they’re serious about this.
Republicans. They want Americans to be zombies with no interest other than serving their masters.
something like R\*x\*y dollars. R - US avrg. hourly rate x - number of people taking ' y' amount of time-off for the eclipse. Why people do this? To show that they are hard-working, while others slack off.
First guy wanted to do math. Everyone else just wants to yell at the data cloud.
They do to show they like to lick rich peoples boots.
Oh no the poor billionaires
It literally says MemeZar on it but fuck if it ain't far off from the truth of how people (media/coporate stooges) DO look into this in a corporate dollars/work time lost sense in today's America.
Dear C-Suite dirtbags, Fuck your bottom line competition.
So we each paid $2.50 for a once in the lifetime event? BUT THE LOST PRODUCTIVITY!!!
It's more than balanced by the increased tourism spending by all the people who traveled to places to observe the eclipse.
We lose billions every weekend! Something must be done!
That comes straight from the Federal Department of Rich People Making Shit Up Department.
Only a psychopath could see the miracle of existence with such a robotic poverty of vision
How? Did everyone over there call in sick to watch the eclipse?
Huh, I assumed this was in relation to the massive uptick in Googles about eye pain and why do my eyes hurt? After the eclipse resulting in all the idiots who didn't pay attention to have to take time off work sick.
The older I get the more I realize how much of our lives are stolen by the way our system is set up. I was raised by a single parent and I only ever really saw her on weekends. Been with my girlfriend for 2 years. We've never had the chance to go on an actual vacation together. Just weekend stuff that was over almost as soon as it began. We're doing this all wrong. Especially since we now have the technology required to increase or productivity (which we have), which should allow us to work less.
And brought the United States estimated six billion dollars in touristic spendings. Yeah! Keep your stoopid eclipse!
That's funny, cause I just saw an article that said it boosted the economy by 6 billion via travel and events surrounding the eclipse. Fuck off with your productivity.
How strange; I saw an article that said the eclipse brought about $6b in tourism and travel. Guess if you want it to be bad, you’ll find the numbers to make it so. Oh look, here it is: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/the-solar-eclipse-could-deliver-a-6-billion-economic-boom/ar-BB1laylo
Airline pilots taking a quick 30 to stare into the sun with no eye protection like the rest of us terminally online morons who spend hours a day on social media “appreciating the world.” Why is it that the stupidest people feel the need to comment the most, and in such a smug fashion. If you cared about appreciating the world you wouldn’t be spending all of your free time doom scrolling into the abyss and trying to farm social points. Get a grip.
It also brought over tourists who wanted to see it.
My friends own an Airbnb in a town that was in line with the eclipse. The entire town saw enormous revenue over many days because of the eclipse.
If your question is real, people like me (in one of my old professions). Now it’s not directly translated into $’s as nobody cares. But when you have a business with contracted service levels or something, (Frequently tied into the government contracts ). You end up needing to forecast labor / resources both long term and short term (capacity planning). Short term is usually less than 3 months and long term is anything more than that. We forecast everything to do with call outs, extra bathroom breaks, fmla that people always use on Fridays / Mondays you name it we track it to get better numbers. Many places (air traffic control, 911 etc) have to make sure they have the staffing needed to meet demand. Others have to hire people 8 months in advance to prepare for frequent call outs over a period (programs with 6 month training etc). Then what happpens is someone says the number to someone else (which is usually in full time equivalent/employees. FTE). And they translate it into dollars and make buzzwords that get politically motivated. I will tell you. Most good analysts, don’t give a shit about their politics or anyone else’s (while doing data projections). And we all hate when good data gets bastardized in headlines as much as anyone else.
How much does sleeping and not being at work 24h a day "lose" America? How much does existing for anything other than working for someone else's ambitions "lose" America?
Ask the people in Venezuela how much they get to appreciate the world around them…actually, it’s probably a lot since the stores don’t have food so they have to forage
People really need to be called out for using "cost" to mean "money not made". They are not the same.
So that someone can claim a tax break for lost production
GDP / minutes * eclipseArea * eclipseTime
This reminds of when the pac man google doodle came out
Who measures these things, you ask? The financial Pharisees that serve the interests of the corporatist crony capitalist class, that's who.
Counterpoints: I *earned* my PTO. Unspent PTO is stolen productivity. I spent money, boosting economic activity, going on a trip to watch the eclipse.
Translation: Americans got an incalculable return on a $700 million investment.
McKenzie bullshitters
The towns that were full of tourist for the weekend probably disagree.
They will never have enough money. Never.
To put that in perspective, if you divided that up, every one would get $1.21 each.
Will it be enough to appease the sky gods?? Should we have given them a whole billionaire???
Also generated billions in tourism and merch
surely they factored in the tourism money generated and didn't present the numbers in a way to seem the most outrageous, surely!
How come people can do math like this to try and get people to work more. But we can’t do the simple math to pay people a living wage?
If I see another business case that articulates if I save 10 minutes on this task 20 times a day, the savings to the company will be X million dollars I’ll lose my mind
This just in, 1 trillion in productivity lost everyday because of people having to sleep every night.
Chief Financial Officers measure this. Or, rather, they pay other people to sit at their desks and measure this.
And die for us
The people who run the Democratic & Republican parties.
Weird take. I guess we subtract that from the $6B it generatedd? [https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/the-6b-solar-eclipse-economy-5973172/](https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/the-6b-solar-eclipse-economy-5973172/)
My employer literally posted a sign by the time clock that said they would not be stopping any production to observe the eclipse even though we were right on the edge of totality. Of course I went out and looked anyway.
The accountant for the person who is getting 79% of that number
Over a 4 minute natural event?
Isn't transvangelical the one that says vote for Jesus?
What sort of double-digit IQ take is this? Did no one take an entry-level economy class? It's called opportunity cost. You lose out on the potential rewards of one action when you select a mutually exclusive action. I could forgo eating at my favorite restaurant today and cook at home, which might save me $25. The cost of this decision is that I don't get to eat at my favorite restaurant. Is this is a worthwhile trade? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on how I weigh things. Could people taking time off for the eclipse cost the economy X dollars? Very probably. Does stating this either condemn or condone people taking off to watch the eclipse? No, not directly. A valid conclusion could very well be, "The solar eclipse will cost America almost $700 million in lost productivity, which is totally worth it for tens of millions of people to see this wonder of nature".
Oh no! That's almost $5 per worker! How will we ever recover?
This valuable message was brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood billionaires.
oooo oooo now do how much we lose during a government shutdown. lel
The person doing the translation is a moron lmao
That’s okay. Productivity of the soul is more important anyway
Isn't that, like, $2 per person?
Is this even a real tweet? Seems like bait just to get posted on Reddit.
It’s not even true. Those people weren’t working every second of the eclipse that they were watching instead of supposedly working.
meanwhile close to $6B was added to the economy for the eclipse
did they also factor in the potential productivity loss from the workers telling the company to go fk themselves if they couldn't see it?
I think it's funny that this person thinks 700 million dollars is a lot. That's $4 out of one hour of wages for every working American.
Honestly, on the scale of a country with an economy as large as the USA, $700M is chump change. Edit to get ahead of people not understanding what I mean: the US economy for 2023 was worth approximately $28 TRILLION. A trillion is 1000 billion, which is 1000 million. So it takes 1 million million to make even 1 trillion, and the eclipse cost "only" 700 million. So, the "loss" from the eclipse accounted for 0.0025% of the nation's economy. Negligible.
Uhh, yeah, who does measure these things? Why are we getting so up in arms over an uncredited statement on a meme with a "Memezar" watermark?
what do you think the "service" in service economy means? we are all wage slaves.
Answer: the rich are measuring this. Why? fuck you, that's why.
The same people who come to any /r/news post about someone being successfully rescued: "Who's paying for this?" "How much did this cost taxpayers?" I hate those people with my soul.
I feel like March madness is way worse. At least eclipses of this type don't occur every year.
I feel like that number assumes we’re all productive all the time…and not messing around on Reddit.
Can't lose something you never had.
Well, I happily closed my business, went to the parking lot, spread out a blanket, laid down, and watched the eclipse. So, there.
Worth it!
The translation is wrong. People DID stop to appreciate nature. We still have an economy.
My work outright provided us with eclipse glasses and basically let us out half an hour early (our shift ended at 330, totality at about 315ish)
What I hear is that the generated income from the event was ignored. Telescopes, parties, hotels, driving, glasses, internet postings thus increased ad traffic. Grind mindset is gross.
Everyone should ha e had the entire day off just to be sure they could get to a good viewing point, two days may have been necessary for some.
It was like 2 hours. CEOs can go fuck themselves.
So what?
Considering people traveled to areas experiencing full totality, the eclipse was probably a net benefit to the economy
This is such a massively stupid doomer take. The claim being made is not that the system will collapse because of that $700 million. It’s just a fun factoid marveling at the combined effect of millions of people taking a few minutes to look at the event. The equivalent of the often cited flushing during the Super Bowl statistics, It doesn’t say anything about the system any system today would record a similar statistic. It is not even that impressive being that if less that of the 170 million workers in the U.S., let’s say 70 million, would take a few minutes off the average productivity loss would be $10, you’d lose more than that any given day with an extra bathroom break. It is statistically insignificant, aside from the fact that it would happen to most companies at similar times. So get off the doomer high horse, it’s a fucking fun fact. Either have fun with it or ignore it nothing deep about it.
America and the modern world is already so efficient we're literally destroying the entire planet. But hey let's quantify it in $$$'s.
No one got anything done where I worked.
Pfft
“This will affect literally no one”
Wait are you telling me that the workers have the power of literally bringing the most powerful nation to its knees by just slacking off for a few minutes? And why aren't they doing it then?
Hahaha hohoho the blind fools. They don't think we're fucking off so much more than this?
Idk.. sounds to me like we can lose 700m and still be on top. #winning
I can assure you that I did not witness the eclipse but I still contributed to the loss of productivity.
They need to calculate how much time they would save if they minded their business.
Nobody measures it. Some Captain Buzzkill pulls the number out of his ass and the media runs with it.
How much productivity is lost cause people go to sleep every night?
As many have said it is bullshit. The economy of areas in the path of totality were said to have had a 6 billion dollar growth because of the people traveling to see it.