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There's a better way to use a standing desk
[...] some research suggests that even regular exercise—as much as 60 minutes per day—is not enough to offset the effects of sedentary workdays.
A standing desk, seems like a great way to combat this problem, since it's unlikely that computer use will decrease anytime soon. But turns out that when you do the opposite of sitting—standing for incredibly long periods of the day—well, that's bad for you, too. A highly-cited study out last year in the Journal of Epidemiology on 7,000 office workers found that, "Occupations involving predominantly standing were associated with an approximately 2-fold risk of heart disease compared with occupations involving predominantly sitting."
Alan Taylor, a physiology expert at Nottingham University, told the Chicago Tribune that the expansion and popularity of standing desks has been largely driven not by scientific evidence, but rather by popularity and profit.
Welcome to medical science.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday February 28 2018, @11:04PM (5 children)
I'll defer moral equivalent comparisons of bureaucracy to your vaste experience.
My observation is that large organisations will develop bureaucracy over time and, at equivalent time frames, those two will be indistinguishable in the manifested ways of behaviour. Sort of a qualitative observation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 01 2018, @02:01AM (4 children)
There's not much point to observations that don't distinguish. Here, look at what you mentioned: "develop bureaucracy", "ways of behavior". First, "bureaucracy" is not a bit you set. A small business with some paper pushers on the payroll has a bureaucracy. So does the California DMV. They are not both equivalent in their degree, size, or complexity of bureaucracy just because they both have bureaucracy. Second, no one has claimed that private side bureaucrats behave differently. Rather the claim is that private-side bureaucracies can't afford to be as inefficient as their public counterparts - their employers run out of money and go bankrupt. A hotel can't afford to let its guests sit ignored for an hour while a typical government bureaucracy can - where else are they going to go? A business with a slim profit margin can't afford a $400 billion boondoggle like the US Air Force can.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 01 2018, @11:06AM (3 children)
That's bookkeeping, a healthy habit for a small business without too much fat to cushion hard falls.
And yet, they do exactly so. Because in the mind of a bureaucrat, they are doing nothing wrong - come hell or high water, they are just exercising the authority of the position they were higher into. After all, it's not his money, it's the business money they are playing with
As you seem to like "anecdotes", here's one with the power of a typical "for the want of a nail" example.
Some 10 years ago, before renting in the cloud was ubiquitous, we were running our own ESX Server as a host for the test bed machines.
Functional/integration tests have higher time than unit-tests when it comes to the setup/tear down phases, so we relied on capturing VM snapshots with the system in the necessary preconditions, thus the "setup" was just "revert machine to snapshot X" and tear-down was "don't care" - with the price of one-off investment in capturing those VM snapshots, we were saving heaps of time from the testing of each build.
Ah, yes, there was another price to pay: disk space. Which space was running shorter as the automated test coverage increased.
Until one day, that space was starting to run out. 1TB HDD at the time was around $200-something.
And we waited for the approval for that acquisition to bounce between 3 continents for 3 level of approvals - you see, the acquisition was falling in the CAPEX category. After a 1.5 month, the HDD space on the server ran out, and I took money from my pocket to buy those HDDes and throw them inside the server (against the internal regulation) to get the good work going - that's what a manager does, keeps the ball rolling, isn't it?
The bureaucratic approval for the acquisition came after 4 months and, by God, the acquisition dept both them.
This is bureaucracy - the exercise of the authority/power (as with the case of any -cracy) within the rules of "position responsibilities", in complete disregards to the context and the cost of following the rules. The paper-pushers in a small business don't qualify.
And, whaddaya know? It was indeed an "efficient use of resources" case, except they 'managed those resources out of my pocket'. Not that they took advantage of it, 'cause they made a now-unneeded acquisition anyway. Rules are rules and none of them permitted the disbursement of the sum that came from my pocket.
Yeah, you are right - the organization is now dead. Along those $200+ from mine, it wasted some other hundred of millions from the shareholders pockets during the time it took the monster to die. Such a wonderful "efficient use of resources" example indeed.
So please spare me of useless comparisons of "degrees of bureaucracy", it's hair-splitting.
Bureaucracy is bureaucracy no matter where it happens and large organizations are prone to suffer from it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 01 2018, @03:47PM (2 children)
And yet, I can point to numerous examples of government waste that are two or more orders of magnitude larger than that one. Further, why did you even bother with the bureaucracy? It's clearly not meant for reimbursing one-time $200 purchases. You had all the authority you needed to do what you did.
I bet your local government squandered more of your money than your employers ever did by at least an order of magnitude.
Except that it's highly relevant when one makes, as you did, "qualitative" assertions about the bureaucracy. Again, bureaucracy is not a bit you set.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday March 01 2018, @04:12PM (1 child)
And yet, I can point to two or more orders of magnitude number of enterprises doing the same, dying and wiping out a total value of the same order of magnitude as a single government.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 01 2018, @05:45PM
No, you can't. First, value is not a resource. It's a collective opinion. So stuff like the dotcom bubble collapse of 2000-2001 or the real estate crisis of 2007-2008 aren't waste of resources - the build up to them are as is the subsequent reshuffling of resources away from the former bubble markets. But that only takes up a portion of the valuation and the whole affair only lasts for a limited time. For example, Pets.com [wikipedia.org], a famous casualty of the dotcom burst, had at the time of its IPO in 2000 a net valuation of almost $300 million ($290 million with share price of $11, shortly rose to somewhere just around $400 million at a share at a share price of $14 and then fell like a rock), but it actually had investment of $121 million [businessinsider.com] and raised an additional $86 million in the IPO. It then died less than a year later with something like $23 million cash [cnet.com] on hand. It never had $400 million in resources to match its valuation and hence, never wasted $400 million. And of the money it did squander, some was recovered.
Second, dying and wiping out value in a quick flash is far less wasteful than creating a lingering economic inefficiency that lasts many decades which is a common government agency outcome. In the former case, we have a dispersal of resources followed by a massive shuffling of resources following the revaluation crash. That's inefficient, but often means that they quickly shift to somewhere else where they can be used more productively and even in the midst of the mess were redistributing resources to outside the problem area.
But public sector inefficiencies are more pernicious and persistent with effects that often stretch outside of the program itself. Consider my raisin cartel [soylentnews.org] example from the US. In addition to the direct costs of the program over a 66 year period, we have a legal market manipulation which drove up the cost of raisins for a lot of people and opportunity cost - the organization is a reactionary force inhibiting innovation in raisin growing and marketing and of course, employs people to break markets rather than do something productive. It cast a long shadow for a long time.
Finally, some of the waste associated with the private sector actually comes from the government. For example, following the real estate crisis, some repossessed real estate was kept off the market while the housing market recovered. The wastehere is in unused property and was encouraged by government accounting rules which allowed banks to keep real estate off of markets for up to seven years while valuing (for purposes of establishing the bank's reserve) the real estate at its pre-crisis price. And of course, much of the legal and bureaucratic burden of a business comes from conformity with poorly thought out government regulation and intervention.