At the time, I remember wondering, how did one guy armed only with handguns take out 40-odd trained soldiers in the middle of a military base? Yes, it was a surprise attack, the shooter had combat training, and since he was a soldier, he could walk past security… but 43 soldiers??? WTF? This crazy bastard had to RELOAD. How is it that those 43 soldiers didn’t return fire seconds after the shooting began?

The soldiers weren’t armed.

Lt. General Robert Cone, the commanding officer at Fort Hood, told reporters that the soldiers were not armed: ““As a matter of practice, we do not carry weapons — this is our home.” WTF do you mean, you don’t carry weapons?

The United States is currently at war. At war in Iraq. At war in Afghanistan. At war in Pakistan and Yemen (even though they’re pretending they’re not). And now Libya. Do you think Iraqi soldiers are unarmed while on base? You think Taliban soldiers get out of bed in the morning without reaching for a pistol? How about Al Queda? You think they’re wondering around their terrorist training grounds, eyes turned to the sky, searching for missle-toting unmanned drones, without a weapon at the ready? How about Libya’s special forces? Can’t suppress a civil war without a few bullets now can they?

This shows that the U.S. military simply doesn’t take these threats seriously. In their arrogance, they don’t really think they can be attacked on domestic soil. In a way, they are right – the Taliban aren’t going to roll into Texas in tanks. But that’s not how it works anymore.

If there really is no threat to “the homeland,” how about you stop occupying sovereign nations. If there is a legitimate threat (and a lone gunman does not constitute a terrorist threat), hows about keeping a sidearm handy while on the military base?

Oh, and do you remember how the shooting at Fort Hood ended? The shooter was dropped by a single civilian police officer.

Universities are also supposed to be pure meritocracies, rewarding students and faculty primarily on their academic accomplishments. Unfortunately, the structure of modern universities and their surrounding educational-industrial complex includes myriad insidious elements that exacerbate the disadvantages faced by less financially secure students. Here are some of the worst offenders.

1. Student loans instead of grants

Student loans are supposed to provide funds for full time students to live on during their studies. Student loans systems generally suffer from two serious problems. First, the amount of money a student receives depends on their parents’ income, regardless of whether those parents are willing or able to contribute to their childrens’ education. Second, in the U.S., Canada and many other countries, you have to pay them back. A $120 000 loan to go to medical school is much more daunting to the child of a medical secretary than to the child of a neurosurgeon. (In some countries, like the U.K., you only pay back a portion of your student loan depending on how much money you make after your education.)

2. Busy work

Universities in general (and business schools in particular) inundate their students with repetitive, unchallenging assignments – busy work. Busy work serves no pedagogical purpose (by definition). You learn nothing from it, and it does not separate good students from bad students. It is primarily used in subjects like business where the material is straightforward. Since faculty cannot or will not provide challenging problems, they make getting through the endless barrage of menial tasks the challenge. This discriminates against students who have to work part time (or even full time) to fund their studies.

3. Lack of evening and distance classes

Again, as many poor students have to work to fund their education, offering classes only during conventional business hours forces students to choose between attending the class or making the money to pay for the classes.

4. Participation marks and punishing absenteeism

When a student has to choose between a work shift and a class, between next month’s rent money and this term’s participation marks, poor students’ marks suffer one way or another. Punishing absenteeism also facilitates pandemics, but that’s an issue for another post.

5. Market-priced student housing

The purpose of a University is not to educate the populace and produce high-quality research, not to turn a profit. When universities are located in areas with high real estate prices, they can accommodate financially challenged students by providing housing at cost. However, where “at cost” means $400/month, and similar apartments in the area go for $800/month, universities smell the opportunity to extract more money from students and provide “market-priced student housing”.

6. Pressuring or forcing students into volunteer work

When I was an undergrad, many professional programs pressured students to engage in “resume-building” volunteer work or unpaid internships. Volunteer work is all well and good when you’re on a full scholarship and daddy pays for your Benz. When you’re already pulling 20 hours/week cleaning a movie theatre to pay your tuition, volunteer work is money out of pocket, plain and simple.

7. Pathetic pay rates for research and teaching assistants

Many faculty view students as cheap (if not free) labour. I got paid less per hour as a research assistant in undergrad than most gas station attendants. Worse, foreign students’ visas often stipulate that they can only work within the university, so they take these jobs regardless of the pay, removing the pressure to increase salaries for lack of willing workforce. Poor students have to turn down more educationally beneficial research jobs in favor of better paying menial labour jobs. In the words of Chris Rock, that is fucked up.

8. The tuition-economy link

Recently the UK elected a conservative government, which drastically cut university funding. In response, universities are tripling their tuition fees, in the middle of a recession. Where tuition fees are directly linked to the economy, they are highest when people have the least money. This flies in the face of basic Keynesian principles … but then, since when have conservatives ever understood Keynes?

Conclusion

One could argue that there are good reasons for all of the practices criticized above. I would simply counter that improving social mobility in society and reducing class discrimination is more important.

Related Articles
Abolish Universities?
For Their Own Sake, Let Them FAIL
Nine Reasons why Bad Grades Don’t Mean Squat

1) Learn to shave with a straight razor

While shaving isn’t uniquely male, it is something most men do, and a close shave is something to be proud of. Both men and women will notice a truly close shave. Unfortunately, no two, three, four, five or 16 blade razor can do the job. These fisher-price razors yank and chop your facial hair. The only way to get a perfect shave is with a literally razor-sharp blade placed directly against the skin. Yes, while learning to use a straight razor you will cut yourself and get razor burn. But if anyone notices, you get to say, “oh, yeah, I’m learning to shave with a straight razor.” And when they reply, “why on earth would you do that?” you get to say, “because it’s manly!”

2) Play a team sport

Team sports like football, basketball and hockey are essentially popular war games. Yes, they’re good exercise, fun and improve sexual performance. But aside from that, they allow a man to exercise primitive battle instincts in a constructive environment. And you don’t have to be skilled to have a good time.

3) Cook over an open fire

Ancient man cooked meat over an open fire, and there’s still something deeply satisfying about the sight, sound and smell of roasting meat. Sorry, veggie burgers don’t cut it.

4) Join a martial arts club

We all know guys who sit around drinking beer and watching MMA. This is not manly. Getting intoxicated and gaining weight while arguing about the finer points of movements you have never tried is false manliness. MMA isn’t even manly. When a real martial artist hits you, you go down. Often in pieces. To get in touch with your inner power, try a traditional martial art. The precise art is not as important as finding a teacher who inspires you and club where you can train safely.

5) Play paintball

Like team sports, paintball is just an elaborate, stylized outlet for your battle instincts. With a paintball gun you can live out all your John Wayne fantasies without actually killing anyone, or more likely, getting shot, shooting the wrong guy, or ending up in prison.

6) Go camping (not glamping)

Ancient man covered miles of wilderness hunting game, traveling between villages, or just getting some peace and quiet. Hiking and camping is an excellent way to reconnect with your ancestral heritage. Note: camping is not the same as glamping. When you drive to your campsite, set up on a pre-made platform, sit in the nearby hot tub for an hour, party all night, pass out drunk on the picnic table, wake up and hit Starbucks on the way home, that’s glamping. Camping is when you put your gear in a pack, hike to your campsite, cook half a mile away so as not to attract bears, and go to bed early because you’re exhausted from hiking all day with a heavy pack. Glamping is false manliness. Camping makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something.

7) Watch a Manly Movie

And when all else fails, just have the boys over and watch a manly movie.

See also

Macho Men vs. Real Men: Top 15 Differences

Five Things that Make Gyms a Plague Upon Fitness

Laws imply the design of the systems that enact them

Lawmakers don’t know sweet fuck all about the systems their designing

Lawmakers know even less about how to design complex socio-technical systems

To this list, I would like to add a fourth indictment of lawmakers: they vote on bills without bothering to read them.

How many people have died because of stupid laws and the broken social systems they create? Everyone who ever died in a traffic accident, or in Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Vietnam, the Falkland Islands, and dozens of other politically-motivated wars. Everyone who died because they didn’t have medical insurance, because a nurse or physician made an error, or due to an addiction to something they didn’t know was dangerous until it was too late. Millions.

How many have gone to prison for “crimes” that arguably never hurt anybody, like growing marijuana for medical use? How many have just been inconvenienced or screwed over by airport security, border guards, unemployment insurance, etc.

Every member of every Congress, Parliament, Senate, etc. in the world who has voted for a bill without reading it is CRIMINALLY NEGLIGENT for the damage that bill has done. For the misery and suffering inflicted by a broken society. To prison with them – all of them. We must start over.

This must not be allowed to continue.

See also:
Why The World is So Screwed Up
A Seven Step Program for Democracy 2.0
How to Hold the Legal System Hostage Until the Laws Apply to Everyone

Want evidence do I have? Well, here are 10 ideas that were once considered radical. I think it’s pretty clear that these don’t seem very radical anymore.

10. Children should be required to attend school.

9. Ulcers are caused by bacteria, not stress.

8. The world is round.

7. Doctors should wash their hands before delivering babies.

6. Governments should be elected by the people they govern.

5. The earth revolves around the sun.

4. AC electricity.

3. People should not be killed for changing their religion.

2. Blacks are people.

1. Women are people.

A vast number of ideas that were once radical are now commonplace. Therefore, it seems likely that many ideas that will seem commonplace in the future, are currently considered radical.

So yes, I’m a radical.

I have recently read over the Investigative Powers for the 21st Century (IP21C) Act. Giving the police the power to take down online criminals is a virtuous enterprise; however, allowing police to view any internet communication information without a warrant is unacceptable. Bypassing the cheques and balances of the courts in this way is practically begging for corruption and abuse. This clearly contravenes the “right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure” provided by Canada’s Charter.

This makes no sense. If there is evidence of wrongdoing, the police can get a warrant. If there is no evidence of wrongdoing, the police should not be eavesdropping on private communication.

Worse yet, the only people this will work against are those honest Canadians who have nothing to hide. Everyone who has something to hide will encrypt their internet traffic. This can be accomplished with free software and little technical knowledge, at standards unbreakable by practical means.

Your administration is inviting Big Brother through the front door, and history will not view this kindly. Do you truly wish to go down in history as the Prime Minister who ended privacy?

I own a big-ass hammer drill, with a full set of wood, metal and concrete bits, hole saws, screwdriver bits – you name it. I use it once a year – max. So why do I own? Why do thousands of people in my city all own a drill they use no more than a few times a year? Because there’s no where you can go to borrow or rent one.

In contrast, although I own a bicycle, and tune it up every couple of months, I own very few bike tools. This is because I can go to The Bike Kitchen a non-profit bike shop where I can bring my bike, and pay only $7.50 an hour for access to a fully equipped bike shop and all the chain-oil, lubricants and duct tape I can use. And if I get in over my head, the staff will not only fix the bike for me (for a reasonable price) but teach me to do more complicated repairs myself.

I only need bike tools once every few months, so it would be a waste of money to buy them when I can just drop by a fully furnished bike shop. Similarly, I only need access to a car once or twice a month, so instead of buying one, I just borrow one from the Cooperative Auto Network, which has 10 cars within a two-block radius of my home. CAN is less expensive than other car sharing services (like Zipcar) because CAN is a non-profit.

This idea of collective use and a preference for renting/borrowing over owning is crucial to decreasing our consumption. Unfortunately, North American society suffers from a strong ownership-bias, which is continually fueled by corporatist interests. To overcome this destructively wasteful trend, two things must happen:

1. We must recognize candidates for collective use.

If you don’t use it at least once a week, you don’t need to own your own. Most people don’t need a fully equipped wood-working area. Or lawn mower. Or, second dining table. If you live in an apartment building, you may not need your own vacuum cleaner or washer/dryer. The casual ballplayer shouldn’t have to buy hundreds of dollars worth of sports equipment for a few games per year. Its simply more efficient to share rarely used items.

Another example that will become salient in the next few years is the EV (Electric Vehicle) range extender. When people hear that an all electric vehicle can only drive 100 km (or 50, or 200, or whatever) on a single charge, they freak out. Instead of thinking of the 99% of their trips within this limit, they think of the 1% that are longer. The way to combat this is through the collective use of range extenders (generally portable gas or diesel generators) that can be added to an EV for those rare longer trips. If you’re going to exceed your EV’s range once a week, it makes sense to own your own range extender, or have it permanently installed (as in a serial hybrid). If you’re going to exceed your EV’s range more rarely, you don’t want to be dragging around the extra weight of the range extender all the time, and why pay for it upfront anyway? It makes far more sense to pick one up from a nearby gas station (or some other sort of depot) before a big road trip.

2. We must develop collective-use infrastructure

It’s all well and good for me to sit here criticizing you for buying things instead of renting; meanwhile, nobody actually rents the things that you need! I’m not aware of any nearby organization that will rent me a tennis racquet or a set of drywalling gear. Three approaches to this problem are obvious.

First, before buying something you’ll use rarely, at least check to see if someone will lend or rent it to you. The least you can do is Google it.

Second, you can build your own rental cooperative around the things you already own but don’t use often. Talk to your neighbors. Stick up a website. Put an ad on your car. Just make sure you take a deposit or a piece of I.D. to make sure your belongings find their way home. Remember, the purpose of this is not to make you wad of cash, it’s to decrease consumption, so price reasonably.

Third, communities can take collective action to build sharing infrastructure. The city of Vancouver has been very supportive of the car co-op there. Citizens can pressure their city governments to support other kinds of sharing, such as community workshops where you build your own desk, depots where you can rent trailers or camping equipment and kid-meets where children can trade toys they’re tired of for “new” ones. The same can apply to communities of different sizes, including condo associations, streets, neighborhoods, schools, and so on.

It’s just like they teach in kindergarten: Share everything.

Related Posts:
The 10 Commandments of Everyday Minimalism
War on B.S. Humbug Edition – 25 Reasons I Hate Christmas
Kavan’s Top 5 Ways to Save Energy – The Big Picture

8. Rapid Extinction of Critical Species

Our food supply is composed of various interconnected plant and animal species. We sometimes forget just how interconnected they are. For instance, the entire oceanic ecosystem depends on phytoplankton (little floating plants). If phytoplankton were to rapidly die off, due to changing water temperature, acidity or perhaps a virulent disease, the entire oceanic ecosystem would collapse. Bye bye fish, sharks, whales, krill, crabs, lobster… everything. Our agriculture is also fundamentally dependent on a small number of key species: worms (which aerate the soil) and bees (which pollinate practically everything). If worms or bees were to suddenly die off, horrendous famine and mass extinction would follow.

7. Environmental Collapse

The theory of environmental collapse is based on the idea that most organisms are tightly interconnected. Thus ecosystems are web-like structures where each species depends, directly or indirectly, on many other species. Many scientists believe that there is a kind of diversity threshold such that, if we lose enough species, entire ecosystems will collapse. Given the alarming rate at which species are becoming extinct (somewhere in the order of 100 to 1000 times faster than normal), if such a threshold exists, we may be getting close.

This, of course, would not only cause horrifying environmental destruction for which our grandchildren would never forgive us, and eradicate all sorts of potential medicines, but also produce global famine.

6. Human Disease

The Black Plague killed half the population of Europe in the 14th century, when slow methods of travel (horses and tall ships) impeded its spread. A similar disease today could rapidly spread across six continents. It is possible that the right (wrong?) disease could kill practically everyone on the planet. This could be a natural occurrence or a biological weapon.

As a society, however, we like to flip out about every new strain of the flu and take dramatic, but entirely ineffective, steps to assuage public fear. We close schools and hassle airline passengers. What we don’t do is create a culture where it is unacceptable to go to work, go shopping, take public transit, or generally wander around coughing on people when you have a contagious infection. Meanwhile, we let sick people sit around cross-infecting each other in waiting rooms for hours because we don’t have enough doctors on staff. And more fundamentally, we don’t address the continual degradation of human immune systems due to nutritionally devoid diets and epidemics of obesity, diabetes and respiratory disease.

5. Climate Change

If you still think climate change is a hoax, get help. No scientific conjecture has received more thorough testing and analysis in history than man-made climate change. If the temperature continues to rise, three important things will happen:

sea level will rise

deserts will grow

storms will become more extreme

All of these have severe effects on the food supply. As sea levels rise, farmland close to sea level will be flooded. As deserts grow, they consume previously arable land. As storms grow more extreme, more food and farmland will be destroyed each year. You might think that as the temperature warms, we’ll be able to farm further north, and that will make up for the farmland lost to sea level rise and desertification. You would be wrong. The arctic is already a cold desert. Climate change will likely just make it a less-cold desert.

4. Nuclear War

Any open conflict between two nuclear powers, be they the US and Russia, India and Pakistan or China and North Korea, has the potential to end life as we know it. Even if initial blast only kill millions, the radioactive fallout from a large-scale nuclear conflict could poison not only billions of people but also our food and water supplies.

3. Supervulcanism

Sorry Trekkies, Supervulcanism is not about controlling emotions and mind melds. It refers to a sudden rise in global volcanic activity. Volcanos are like the Earth’s smokestacks. If they all start spewing out ash at once, the atmosphere would become opaque, blocking out the suns rays. Imagine a thousands years of twilight. Now imagine 99% of the worlds plants dying, shortly followed by 100% of the world’s animals, including us.

Supervulcanism contributed to at least three Mass Extinctions.

2. Supernova or Gamma Ray Burst

When two stars collide or a large star goes supernova (collapses into a black hole), it can create an extremely energetic explosion. This energy travels outward in the form of Gamma Rays, which are sort of like X-rays on steroids. If such an energetic explosion occurred somewhere ‘nearby’ earth, say anywhere in our galaxy, the resulting gamma ray burst could destroy the ozone layer and irradiate the earth’s surface. It would be sort of like Marvin the Martian finally getting his giant ray gun to work and frying Earth with it.

Everything dies but the cockroaches.

1. Astronomical Impact

There are a lot of big rocks floating around in space. Every once in a while, two of them come together. Whether it’s an asteroid or a commet or even something from outside our solar system, if any big chunk of space debris come crashing into Earth, we’re dead.

Strong evidence supports an impact causing the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event (the one that killed the dinosaurs). How did it happen? Well, when a 10km-wide rock slam into the ground, several things happen. First, there’s the initial explosion – several orders of magnitude more powerful than the nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Depending where the impact occurs, that could kill millions, or just a whole lot of fish. Then there’s the earthquake. We’re talking a 16 on the Richter Scale – 100 000 time more powerful than any earthquake in human history. The ground would move in waves, tossing people and building about like boats on a seething ocean. It would decimate buildings and infrastructure all over the world. Imagine the aftermath of the worst earthquake ever, and all the hospitals have been destroyed.

Assuming you survive all of that, you’ll have the pleasure to freeze and/or starve to death when all the dust thrown into the atmosphere blocks out the sun, just as in supervulcanism.

Only the cockroaches survive.

What follows these two fateful lines is inevitably an enumeration of common pastimes, most of which aren’t really fun at all. We just keep doing them because we want to get out of the house, and we don’t know what else to do. We are creatures of habit. Here are five habits, more specifically pastimes, that honestly suck.

5. Fast food Restaurants

Weight gain, heart attacks, bad food, uncomfortable chairs, unfavorable lighting, bad service, noise, being surrounded by obese rednecks. I rest my case.

4. Casinos

If you had any real expectation of making money, the casino would be out of business. Gambling is not fun, in any meaningful sense. It is a family-decimating, soul-destroying affliction on humanity. (Qualification: This applies more to pure games of chance, like slots, than to games that require skill, like poker). And the best part is when the degenerate gambler staggers home at dawn, still half-in-the-bag and out one paycheck, and yells at his kid for playing video games all night.

3. Bowling

How is this supposed to be fun? Have you SEEN The Big Labowski? Why bowling alleys attract scum and lowlives I don’t know. And I don’t care! Because whipping a round rock down some hardwood to knock over little white targets that don’t have the common decency to shatter, catch fire, explode, or even STAY DOWN, for the sheer enjoyment of spraining your wrist, is a stupid fucking past time! And don’t get me started on the bad food, bad drinks, nasty-ass shoes and wanna-be-pro assholes who think you have no right to be there because you didn’t your youth playing with someone else’s balls like they did.

2. Movies in Theaters

Yeah, I like movies. And yeah, I used to like going to theaters when I was a kid. But now? With people constantly talking, opening their “cell phones” (a.k.a. flashlights) to check or send text messages and pointing laser pointers at the screens, with the crappy, calorific, overpriced food, with hearing-damage-inducing volume, with picture and sound quality no better than what you can get at home with a Blu-ray player and a surround-sound rig… what the hell is the point of going to the theater? And then there’s the tedium of ads and previews before I can even see what I came for, despite my paying two or three times the cost of a rental to see it (more if you consider that one rental can be spread across the 6 – 10 friends that can comfortably watch a movie in a typical den.) You know why everything online is ad-supported? Because it’s FREE, that’s why. If I plunk down $20 for a ticket and a snack, I expert them to get on with the fucking show already!

Seriously. The only reason left to go to movie theaters is when you’re going on a date and lack any intelligent thing to say, so you have to hide the emptiness of your head by going somewhere you’re not supposed to talk.

1. Dance Clubs

Speaking of concealing the emptiness in your head, there’s going clubbing! With jailbait, risk of getting your drink spiked with drugs, date rape, getting drinks spilled on you, being felt up by cougars, more hearing damage, and a complete nullifying of conversation, what the hell is the point of this? If I wanted to ogle half-naked, objectified women, I’d watch porn. That’s what it’s for. And then there’s the douchebags on the prowl for some half-drunk bimbo to hook up with. We all gotta go sometime, but I’ll take a heart attack over syphilis, thank you very much. Oh, and lots not forget the brainless twats who think a dance club is a great place to meet Mr. or Mrs. Right. What the fuck are these people on? First, it’s too loud to talk to anyone, so it’s impossible to judge whether you’re talking to the Poet Laureate or Larry the Cable Guy. Second, it’s too dark to see anyone, so you don’t know if you’ve got Jessica Alba or Courtney Love. And to top it all off, you’ve been drinking!

If you want to dance, take lessons and be awesome. Otherwise, save it for weddings.

Honorable Mention: Watching the Oscars

For fucksake, what is wrong with the Academy? Did they even watch the movies before they voted? I booed vigorously every time the Curious Case of Benjamin Boredom won something. The gave best picture to a movie embroiled in legal controversy because it nabbed half its cast from the slums in India and then LEFT THEM THERE after the movie became an international hit. A bunch of kids! Oh, what I’d give to go Krampus on their asses!

At some point, the hollywood elites lost site of the purpose of movies: to entertain. You know what was an entertaining movie this year? Iron Man. You know what is not entertaining? Watching a midget-sized prune man transform into an average-sized douchebag over the course of two and a half hours.

Well, big surprise, conservatives are once again full of shit. The American work ethic is the worst thing to ever happen to the health and wellness of children in our country. This idiotic idea that employers should be able to pay their employees basically whatever they want, and it’s an employee’s responsibility to either work enough hours at that job or take on another source of income just to feed their kids has got to die for us to solve any of the real social issues we face as a nation.

Isn’t it interesting that the Republican party – the same politicians who tout family values – are the same people spouting the notion that people should work harder? And this in the country where we already work more hours a day than the rest of the world! It’s hard to raise your children when you never see them. I am often told that problems with crime, problems in education, and problems with drug abuse all start in the home; maybe parents would have an easier time dealing with these problems their children face if they actually saw them once in a while – and I mean more than the hour of homework they might do with them before the kids have to go to bed.

But equally important is the question why should we work that much? You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who enjoys their job more than I do, but even I am more than ready to go home and see my loved ones when the clock hits 6 o’clock. There is currently 7.6 percent unemployment in our country. Hey, you know how maybe we could give those people jobs so they aren’t just collecting the government checks Republicans despise so much? If the people with jobs weren’t working so goddamn much!

According to a New Yorker study:

Today, Americans work about as many hours each year as they did in 1970, and, instead of thirteen weeks of vacation, the average American now gets four (and that includes holidays). But there is a place that has got considerably closer to the leisure society of the futurists’ dreams—Western Europe. The French work twenty-eight per cent fewer hours per person than Americans, and the Germans put in twenty-five per cent fewer hours. Compared with Europeans, a higher percentage of American adults work, they work more hours per week, and they work more weeks per year.

Alright, but they aren’t as productive as we are, right?

One obvious result of this is that America is richer than Europe.

See? We make more money! But…

In effect, Americans trade their productivity for more money, while Europeans trade it for more leisure. Folk wisdom suggests that the reason for this difference is cultural, which, depending on your perspective, means either that Europeans are ambitionless café-dwellers or that Americans are Puritan grinds with no taste for the finer things in life. But, while culture undoubtedly matters, not that long ago it was the Europeans who worked harder; in 1970, for instance, the French worked ten per cent more hours than Americans.

You want to know what changed? Europeans realized that there is something more important than GDP. There is something more important than having the largest economy in the world, or the most powerful military. Your family and your life. Work should not be your life, and any society that thinks it’s all right for a person to put in 80 hours a week to feed their kids should seriously re-evaluate their priorities. I like my job, but I damn sure enjoy my weekend too. If you don’t, you’re as psychotic as Republicans.