Hacker News Reader

Comment by hospitalJail | Hacker News Reader

The article basically says people like holidays more than vacation. Maybe its the family/friend aspect, or that everyone is off at the same time.

View on HN

This. This is it.

If 4th of july is off for everyone I know, you know I'm hosting a BBQ and having a grand time.

If I take a day off and have to coordinate 5 friends trying to take a day off at the same time with some having and some not success... That's different.

Also holidays are better for businesses than pto. Holidays are planned for in advance.

The main issue is that minimum wage workers especially restaurant and retail workers often don't get to partake.

> The article basically says people like holidays more than vacation. Maybe its the family/friend aspect, or that everyone is off at the same time.

At one point, in a moment of supreme rationality, the Soviet Union implemented "continuous production week," which eliminated common weekends in order to increase the utilization of factory equipment and to stamp out religion. Even they failed because of the irrational desire of people to have time off at the same time as their friends and family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar

Why is it irrational to have time off at the same time as your friends and family?

I read the comment you're replying to as very sarcastic - I'm assuming they don't actually believe wanting time off together with friends and family is irrational.

The Soviet Union had 28 days of paid vacation, which workers were strongly incentivized to take.

Part of the reason the revolution happened in the first place was the normalization of the work week and time off work.

You can blame the Soviet Union for a lot of things, but preventing workers from taking vacation is certainly not one of them. Doing so betrays a large gap in history knowledge.

> You can blame the Soviet Union for a lot of things, but preventing workers from taking vacation is certainly not one of them. Doing so betrays a large gap in history knowledge.

Except I didn't do that. Maybe you should read my comment again. I was talking about weekends, not vacation, and said they staggered them, not eliminated them completely.

> everyone is off at the same time

In Europe it is generally understood that nothing gets done in August. Not much gets done in July. Everyone’s at the nearby vacation spot.

As a kid in Slovenia, going to the seaside in Croatia was always fun. Slovenians would completely over-run the coast and you could barely find any locals. Meanwhile on our coast, everyone suddenly spoke German.

This European vacation is funded by American workers. If the Europeans had to spend in defense what the Americans give them, they would be forced to work more and give up theirs extended vacations and culture of “summers off”.

Before we wrap ourselves too tightly in the flag, let’s not forget the Vietnamese children spending their summer making those Speedos.

This might be overstating it a bit, but Europeans get salty when you note that their generous social safety net is subsidized in part by the fact that most NATO nations don't spend the mandated 2% of gdp on defense.

I often wonder what we could accomplish with even half of the ~ 700B / yr we spend on defense if we actually put it towards the public good. The US has two friendly neighbors and thousands of miles of blue water between us and peer adversaries which have no real ability to project power far from their shores. We could make do with less, but then of course the rest of the world would have to step up responsibility for their defense and not hide behind our coat tails

Let’s not forget that the Pax Americana is very beneficial to USA economically speaking. Yall ain’t doing this out of the goodness of your hearts.

The problem is those 'benefits' are largely going to the rich vs the average man, and voters are starting to wake up to that fact. You can expect the US to shift more isolationist in the future, even with, or maybe because of the troubles of the world

The US defense industry is a public-private wealth transfer mechanism (or "jobs program", if you don't wish to put so fine a point on it) to force taxpayers (and cash-holders, via inflation) to pay billions of dollars, every day, to the military-industrial complex (and implicitly to transfer value to its shareholders).

It has nothing to do with "making do", or protecting anyone. That's a side effect.

That's an exaggeration. The difference in military spending between the US and the EU is less than 2% of GDP. If all military spending was a complete waste of money, with no economic or social benefits at all, that would correspond to about 4 working days/year. But because military spending contributes to the economy in some ways, the actual cost to the American worker is probably closer to 2 days/year.

Is that what your boss told you when you negotiated vacations?

I learnt after my first year living in a Muslim majority country to never schedule anything important during Ramadan. Everything slows down, most offices let people go home early, and then there’s a week off for Eid.

I can’t read the rest of the article without upgrading, but federal holidays are basically suggestions anyway for most jobs. People who got Juneteenth off might be in a bubble that didn’t see all the people and industries that ignored it.

Plane ticket prices go up around public holidays. When taking a vocation one may choose dates when ticket prices are affordable.

If I had a month off in the summer I could find some family and friends to visit :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com