Roundup: Layoffs; Workaholism; Right to Disconnect; 4 day work week; CA and NY bills to regulate AI in employment decisions

I get that people are expensive. There are wages and all those pesky benefits like healthcare and paid sick leave. It adds up fast. If you need to polish up a P&L real quick, laying off employees is a tempting choice.

But it may not the be the best one.

Take care of yourself, get rest, disconnect from work completely every day. And if you can't do it for yourself, do it for the people who love you until you can do it for yourself. Nobody can rest for you.

There's nothing magic about a 5 day work week. It was a combination of religious days of rest, factories where people had to show up and leave at the same time to do the work, and Henry Ford's realization in 1926 that people would buy more cars if they actually had time to do stuff besides work.

Here we are a century later and we're still figuring out the relationship between time, work, and compensation.

The California legislature is considering ways to protect employees and consumers from people and companies letting tech make their decisions for them. And the biggest problem with that is if the tech is really good and useful and the people take the suggestions most of the time, is that evidence that the tech is making the decisions?

AI is already part of most HR technology and employment decisions are still made by people. Trying to figure out the role of AI is employment decisions is kind of silly. Let's focus on the discrimination.