saint

I am really happy that the younger generation is re-evaluating views on work.

From the article:

Yuki Watanabe used to spend 12 hours every day toiling away in the office. And that’s considered a short day.

Asking to leave work on time or taking some time off can be tricky enough. Even trickier is tendering a resignation, which can be seen as the ultimate form of disrespect in the world’s fourth-biggest economy, where workers traditionally stick with one employer for decades, if not for a lifetime.

In the most extreme cases, grumpy bosses rip up resignation letters and harass employees to force them to stay.

...She turned to Momuri, a resignation agency that helps timid employees leave their intimidating bosses.

For the price of a fancy dinner, many Japanese workers hire these proxy firms to help them resign stress-free.

At a cost of 22,000 yen (about $150) – or 12,000 yen for those who work part time – it pledges to help employees tender their resignations, negotiate with their companies and provide recommendations for lawyers if legal disputes arise.

“Some people come to us after having their resignation letter ripped three times and employers not letting them quit even when they kneel down to the ground to bow,” she said, in another illustration of the deferential workplace culture embedded in Japan.

Japan has long had an overwork culture. Employees across various sectors report punishing hours, high pressure from supervisors and deference to the company. These employers are widely known as “black firms.”

Human resources professor Hiroshi Ono, from Hitotsubashi University Business School in Tokyo, said the situation had become so pressing that the government had begun publishing a list of unethical employers to hamper their ability to hire, and warn job seekers of the dangers of working for them.

So why did these resignation agents only emerge in recent years? That, experts say, is down to young people’s changing approach to work.

Many of them no longer subscribe to older generations’ thinking that one should do whatever they are told regardless of the job’s nature, Ono said, adding that when there is a mismatch of expectation, they won’t hesitate to quit.

“We honestly think that our resignation agency service should disappear from society and we hope for that. We think it’s best if people can tell their bosses themselves, but hearing the horror stories of our clients, I don’t think that our business will disappear anytime soon,” she said.

For now, Momuri offers a 50% discount for those who seek their service to resign the second time.

Fascinating, I like this kind of Magick.

Highlights

Broadly speaking, the role of an establishment economist is to come up with new ways of saying, "actually, your boss is right."

Now, Lowe's has 285,000 employees, half of whom earn less than $33,000/year. Divide Ellison's $18m among those workers and each of them would net a paltry $126/year. But if you were to share out the $43 billion Ellison had to piss up against a wall on stock buybacks among those workers, you'd be able to give every worker a $30,000 bonus, every year:

The largest 20 companies in the Low-Wage 100 spent nine times more on stock buybacks than they spent on worker retirement plan contributions. Chipotle spent $2b on buybacks – that's 48 times what the company put into its workers' 401(k)s. That's because 92% of Chipotle employees can't afford to have a 401(k).

In incentivizing CEOs to keep share prices high above every other consideration, establishment economists set the stage for a corporate America where CEOs were punished for investing in a living wage, a dignified retirement, or even a non-lethal product. Instead, we have a business environment that boils down to a competition to see who can eat their seed-corn the fastest.

Podcast related to the book: http://www.hilaritaspress.com/portfolio-item/the-sex-magicians/

This is interesting and potentially useful for anyone, who works in the corp which does not allow Linux laptops, but you can get your hands on Macs.

A vulnerability was discovered in Infineon’s cryptographic library, which is utilized in YubiKey 5 Series, and Security Key Series with firmware prior to 5.7.0 and YubiHSM 2 with firmware prior to 2.4.0. The severity of the issue in Yubico devices is moderate.

An attacker could exploit this issue as part of a sophisticated and targeted attack to recover affected private keys. The attacker would need physical possession of the YubiKey, Security Key, or YubiHSM, knowledge of the accounts they want to target, and specialized equipment to perform the necessary attack. Depending on the use case, the attacker may also require additional knowledge including username, PIN, account password, or authentication key.

A reminder

Highlights

Many systems use encryption of one sort or another. However, when we talk about encryption in the context of modern private messaging services, it typically has a very specific meaning: the use of default end-to-end encryption to protect message content. When used in an industry-standard way, this feature ensures that all conversations are encrypted by default — under encryption keys that are only known to the communication participants, and not to the service provider.

Telegram clearly fails to meet this stronger definition, because it does not encrypt conversations by default. If you want to use end-to-end encryption in Telegram, you must manually activate an optional end-to-end encryption feature called “Secret Chats” for each private conversation you want to have. To reiterate, this feature is explicitly not turned on for the vast majority of conversations, and is only available for one-on-one conversations, and never for group chats with more than two people in them.

Even though end-to-end encryption is one of the best tools we’ve developed to prevent data compromise, it is hardly the end of the story. One of the biggest privacy problems in messaging is the availability of loads of meta-data — essentially data about who uses the service, who they talk to, and when they do that talking.

;)

The major story of the past couple of weeks has been Ukraine’s Kursk offensive and the seizing of over 1100 square kilometres of Russian territory in the past ten days. This has been a stunning change in the direction of the war. At least five Ukrainian brigades, or elements of those brigades, and possibly more have seized the initiative and remained on the move since surprising the Russians in their initial crossing of the border into the Russian Kursk oblast.

Highlights

So the point of the American UI system is not to make it easier to quit a job. But a few economists are now beginning to ask: Should it be?

A safety net program that would encourage more Americans to quit their jobs has generally been seen as a bad thing.

Boosting UI generosity doesn’t affect overall employment rates one way or the other. Instead of loafing around in subsidized unemployment, more generous benefits can support people to quit their jobs in search of better ones, which benefits workers through higher wages and better job satisfaction, and the economy through enhanced productivity as people find better uses for their skills.

The real losers would be lousy jobs, which would struggle to retain workers with a greater cushion to quit and go looking elsewhere.

A major barrier facing lasting reform has been that most people do not care about improving the unemployment system long enough to build the kind of political momentum that gets laws through Congress.

Without financial support, quitting in search of better work just isn’t always a viable option, especially for the more than one in 10 US households that have zero wealth to fall back on.

The unemployment insurance system was established during the Great Depression as part of the Social Security Act in 1935, when the unemployment rate was about 20 percent; helping those workers who still had jobs quit wasn’t exactly a policy priority. About half of American workers were excluded from coverage, including agricultural and domestic workers (many of whom were Black).

The surge of quits during the pandemic and the expansion of unemployment insurance created a unique dataset that caught the attention of economists Zhifeng Cai and Jonathan Heathcote.

After an extra $600 was added to weekly UI checks, along with a major expansion to who is eligible for the benefits, studies found no connection between the boosted UI and laziness or joblessness (echoing findings around unconditional cash transfers more broadly, where giving people cash doesn’t undermine their desire to work).

Economists have historically held equality and efficiency at odds with each other, with higher UI benefits seen as an equality booster that trades off against economic efficiency. But Cai explained in an interview with Vox that “if you give nothing to people who quit, it’s actually not an efficient choice, because there are too few people quitting. Our point is that even from an efficiency perspective, you still want to have some UI going to quitters.”

Federal agencies must start migrating to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) now due to the “record-now, decrypt-later” threat, which anticipates quantum computers decrypting captured data in the future.

Looks fun!