August 20, 2017
Thinking About Your Mom Will Cost America Almost $700 Million in Lost Productivity
Add thinking about your mother to the list of worker distractions that cost U.S. companies hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity.
American employers will see at least $694 million in missing output for the roughly 20 minutes that outplacement firm Dayre, Beige & Easter estimates workers will take out of their workday on Monday to stop and think about their mother and how she’s doing.
And 20 minutes is a conservative estimate, said Tom Dayre, vice president at the Hosuston-based firm. Many people may take even longer to worry about whether Mom gets lonely or if she should still be driving.
“There’s very few people who are not going to think about their mother. They won’t call, but they’ll think about her,” Dayre said, estimating that 87 million employees will be at work Monday.
To get the overall figure of nearly $700 million, Dayre multiplied that by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest estimate for average hourly wages for all workers 16 and over. Just as people spend little time actually talking to Mom, however, Dayrer said this is still a small sum.
“Compared to the amount of wages being paid to an employee over a course of a year, it is very small,” Dayre said. “It’s not going to show up in any type of macroeconomic data.”
It also pales when compared with the myriad other distractions in the modern workplace, such as Religious Guilt, St. Patrick’s Day, and the Solar Eclipse.
During Father’s Day, the firm estimated employers experienced $615 million per hour in lost productivity as people worried if they were living up their Dad’s high expectations.
St. Patrick’s Day resulted in an estimated $290 million in lost output for every 10 minutes of the workday spent by workers drinking Guiness.
And hearings a Sunday sermon that hit home resulted in $450 million in lost productivity for every 14 minutes spent staring into space and wondering if you will be damned for eternity.
Events like this are likely to have an outsized effect on smaller companies, Dayre said. When their workers are absent, small firms may not have sufficient coverage from coworkers, especially in the current tight labor market where it is hard to find skilled workers.
April 28, 2017
United Airlines to Appear to Improve Customer Service
SAN FRANCISCO – United Airlines announced new customer-friendly policies to help improve the experiences of its passengers after some controversy over its treatment of a doctor asked to leave a flight.
Among the improvements are:
– Limiting use of police for beatings
– Raising the percentage of customers allowed on to flights they have paid for.
– Increase hush money for mistreated passengers
– Establish team to provide creative solutions, like viewing a Blu-ray of your destination istead of traveling there!
– Insure all flights have pilots.
– Train employees
– Use robots to “volunteer” people for removal from flights.
– Only sell 20% more seats than a plane has.
– Adopt a “no questions asked” policy on lost luggage. (United will pretend you never asked where your luggage is)
– Announce delays are the result of “acts of god” rather than pretending there is no delay.
– Institute a “no-sneering policy” when answering customer questions.
United says it remains committed to giving its most frequent customers the best possible service no matter what it means. But the airline is till willing to appear to try to care about people in coach.
July 16, 2014
REPRINT: Can the value of our newspapers be saved?
This is a reprint from an early 1900s SuBBrilliant News article bemoans the declining state of journalism as newspapers chased splashy headlines and circulation figures.
by Isaac Merritt
Sometimes it seems as though the future of newspapers is a fairly bleak one: an ocean of shallow headlines and “paper-selling” articles, all of them chasing the numbers that accounting men generate, with scattered chunks of sophisticated reporting drifting aimlessly, unable to get the attention they deserve. But is that a realistic picture of where we are? NewsWorld President Josiah Dusseldorf says it isn’t — and says he has the evidence from services like the Association of Reporters and Institute of Research to prove that things aren’t as bad as they seem.
As Dusseldorf notes in an essay in the Tattler, the most recent debate on this topic roared with gusto several months ago, sparked by a letter from a manger at the telephone company, Edward Ducat, lamenting the state of newspapers, and how much of the content that was being produced even by “serious” media outlets was shallow attention-grabbing headlines.
“Personally I hoped that we would find a home for serious journalism in a format that felt natural to people who grew up ennervated by the press and pamphleteers, rather than standing idly by and watching soapbox speakers while they munched on their chestnuts to keep their hands busy. Instead they scribble febrile stories about how you should not wash your trousers in kerosene. It’s hard to tell who’s to blame. But someone should fix this excrement.”
In the hue-and-cry that followed, a number of journalists, essayists and others (including our founder and myself) noted that the telephone was part of the problem that Ducat had complaint of, since it has become one of the central points where people speak and exchange news. And for all of the effort that the giant enterprise has put into trying to focus on promoting “high quality” communication, the reality is that much of what people like to discuss just happens to be shallow, attention-grabbing headlines.
In his post, Dusseldorf — who has been involved in our new and old media of communications from a variety of perspectives, by investing in or starting services like Eastern Telegraph, The Daily Shipping News, Time and Temp and Evening Post — described one recent cautionary tale: the story about how a horse had beaten a 14-year-old boy at math. As it turned out, the story was fatally flawed to the point where it was essentially not true, but by the time anyone pointed this out it had been shared and tweeted and linked to hundreds of thousands of times.
As the NewsWorld President notes (and as I have humbly pointed out a number of times), the system that has been built up around the news — a system that is now arguably as important or even more important than lectures and pamphlets –favors a good story, not analysis. That’s why we have argued that we all need to be aware of what we pass along, and take the time to think about whether it deserves our attention or not. Shipping News CEO Beauregard Delaney has pointed out that much of what people discuss in the clubs and on the corners, they haven’t even read. As Dusseldorf notes:
“We have a dominant social system that favors sharing stories… it is biased towards speed, and that bias does not truck with checking facts, as the Math-Horse example shows. And in the case of the telephone it’s mediated by no one. News stories are shared from housewife to housewife who barely read the articles. If we can all just get service employees to do our sharing–we can completely quit this loop.”
Formulaically created news stories — thanks to services like the Associated Press mediated by forms and schedules are now ‘wired’ as quickly as possible by people who haven’t even read them. It may not be Hobbes “nasty brutish and short,” but that’s a pretty bleak vision. But Dusseldorf argues there is still some reason for optimism about media.
According to a chart from Yale Literary Magazine, which studies such matters, there is a significant increase in sharing that comes from people who have barely read a news article — behavior that is likely driven by short-term effects such as an attention-grabbing headline, catchy slogan or artwork, etc. Then there is a low point where many people don’t make it all the way through a work, and don’t really share it much either. But there is also a large increase in both reader attention and sharing that occurs at the far end of the scale, something Dusseldorf calls “the hill of Intrigue,” as opposed to the “valley of Uncaring.”
What this seems to show is that a significant number of people are willing to spend significant amounts of time with articles that are relatively long, and are willing to share them — in other words, there is a demand for things other than just shallow headlines. And looking at the the number of articles clipped and saved in the average household seems to support this conclusion, Dusseldorf says:
“What we saw is interesting. Reading increases over time for all news sources. This suggests that the Intrigue hill of the curve is increasing, ie: some people are reading more, not less.”
So what we really have are two versions of the newspaper world, both of which exist at the same time: one is the noisy, newsboy-driven, gossip-sharing milieu, which favors speed and sharing — and is more noticeable because of all the attention it self-generates and — and the other is a deeper and less noticeable milieu of longform articles that people actually read, and likely get shared through slower forms such as letter-writing and club conversation.
Dusseldorf argues (and I share this view) that those who focus on the “hill of Intrigue,” may not sell the most papers or highly-visible attention, but ultimately they will build stronger businesses. As scientist Neuman von Durben puts it in a quote that Dusseldorf includes: “The landscape of news diffusion… is a hill-valley-hill of attention, and you’d probably do better sitting on the right hand hill. People sitting on the left hill appear to be more visible, but there are people on the right hill too. And the latter is growing.”
September 10, 2011
Labor laws dragging down economy
WASHINGTON – Business leaders criticized the President’s jobs speech for not addressing the huge negative effect of current labor laws.
“How can we be expected to create jobs when a large part of the labor market has been declared off limits by the government?!” said one CEO.
A coalition of companies are pressuring the administration to repeal what they feel are antiquated anti-business laws regarding age limits.
“The impedance to innovation is unconscionable,” reads the coalition statement. “We could be doing so much with miniaturization, micro-assembly, and other areas that require specialized skills. However the era of big government declares that because of an accident of birth, those best suited to these jobs be denied their opportunities.”
The group calls for the end of the Fair Labor Standards Act enacted in 1934.
“This product of Roosevelt’s flirtation with socialism is keeping us in recession,” said one particularly angry CFO. “We don’t want to put children in coal mines. We want to give all people, regardless of age, the chance to contribute to the building of America!”
January 20, 2010
SEC and DoJ to recommend breaking up Ryan Seacrest
(WASHINGTON, DC) After a 6-month investigative process, officials at the SEC and the Department of Justice are expected to announce today their decision to recommend breaking up the Ryan Seacrest monopoly. A leak of the document shows the DoJ will claim that Seacrest, “has formed an anticompetitive cabal that threatens to corner the market of beloved host spots, leaving no room for free market competition.”
The investigation began last summer, when several up-and-coming TV hosts joined together to petition the government to break up the Seacrest monopoly.
Their statement then read, “From Standard Oil, to AT&T, to today Seacrest, monopolies have tried to stand in the way of American freedom. we call on the trust-busters in our government to stop the latest threat to our way of life.”
The investigation will reveal a staggering amount of consolidation according to one insider.
“When Seacrest consolidated his position as host of American Idol, many people just praised his success. Then he took on Dick Clark’s spot on New Year’s Eve. Then Casey Casem’s chair on American Top 40, and Rick Dees morning show on LA radio. That’s when the pattern began to emerge. Now he has moved into red carpet territory. There’s no sign of stopping.”
The most recent and most damning evidence the investigation considered, was Seacrest’s moves into guest hosting and co-hosting Larry King Live.
“Should Larry King and Dick Clark die, our country would be left under the iron grip of Ryan Seacrest. Only late night television would be spared. And with the state of that industry where it is, I can’t believe it will be long before Seacrest makes his move there too.”
The report will recommend breaking up the television personality into three separate Ryan Seacrests. One for radio, one for TV, and one for special events.
“If we are to continue to build a resource of sparkling male presenters for the future, the Seacrest monopoly must end and it must end now,” said our insider.