Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Objectives This study sought to assess the association between long working hours, psychosocial safety climate (PSC), work engagement (WE) and new major depression symptoms emerging over the next 12 months. PSC is the work climate supporting workplace psychological health.

Setting Australian prospective cohort population data from the states of New South Wales, Western Australia and South Australia.

Participants At Time 1, there were 3921 respondents in the sample. Self-employed, casual temporary, unclassified, those with working hours 35 (37% of 2850) and participants with major depression symptoms at Time 1 (6.7% of 1782) were removed. The final sample was a population-based cohort of 1084 full-time Australian employees.

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Utah is in a drought. Utah is in the need of water. Yes I do live here; for the past 51 yrs. Snowfall has decreased and rainfall is scarce! I’ve started collecting water in gallon jugs, taking less showers. Peeps have been collecting rain in barrels. Utah has not been hit so hard. Wanna go boating, river rafting, kayaking — better check if there is enough water to support your sport.

Utah (ABC4) – Utah’s water supply is not looking good this year. It’s looking so bad that in March, Utah Governor Spencer J. Cox issued an executive order, declaring a state of emergency in Utah.

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“People are just exhausted.”

As COVID-19 restrictions loosen across the United States, the hospitality industry — which was walloped by the pandemic — is experiencing a new challenge: too few workers available to address soaring demand for dining out.

A furious debate is underway over what’s behind the labor shortage, which is prompting restaurants to adapt by modernizing with kiosks and digital ordering. Many are biting the bullet and ponying up more in compensation just to attract employees.

“A lot of us are paying over time,” Laurie Thomas, executive director of the Golden State Restaurant Association, said in an interview with Yahoo Finance.

Continue reading “‘Exhausted’ restaurants turn to technology to address worker shortages” | >

There are certain rules that even the most extreme objects in the universe must obey. A central law for black holes predicts that the area of their event horizons — the boundary beyond which nothing can ever escape — should never shrink. This law is Hawking’s area theorem, named after physicist Stephen Hawking, who derived the theorem in 1971.

Fifty years later, physicists at MIT and elsewhere have now confirmed Hawking’s area theorem for the first time, using observations of gravitational waves. Their results appear today in Physical Review Letters.

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Whenever there’s an issue, there’s no support. It’s you against the machine, so you don’t even try.

Amazon’s contract Flex delivery drivers already have to deal with various indignities, and you can now add the fact that they can be hired — and fired — by algorithms, according to a Bloomberg report.

To ensure same-day and other deliveries arrive on time, Amazon uses millions of subcontracted drivers for its Flex delivery program, started in 2015. Drivers sign up via a smartphone app via which they can choose shifts, coordinate deliveries and report problems. The reliance on technology doesn’t end there, though, as they’re also monitored for performance and fired by algorithms with little human intervention.

However, the system can often fire workers seemingly without good cause, according to the report. One worker said her rating (ranging from Fantastic, Great, Fair, or At Risk) fell after she was forced to halt deliveries due to a nail in her tire. She succeeded in boosting it to Great over the next several weeks, but her account was eventually terminated for violating Amazon’s terms of service. She contested the firing, but the company wouldn’t reinstate her.

Continue reading “Amazon is reportedly using algorithms to fire Flex delivery drivers” | >

Fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) is one of the most common chronic pain conditions out there, yet we still know shockingly little about it.

For decades, the debilitating condition — marked by widespread pain and fatigue — has been vastly understudied, and while it’s commonly thought to originate in the brain, no one really knows how fibromyalgia starts or what can be done to treat it. Some physicians maintain it doesn’t even exist, and many patients report feeling gaslit by the medical community.

New research on mice has now found further evidence that fibromyalgia is not only real, but may involve an autoimmune response as a driver for the illness.

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