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Shift Work Dulls Brain Performance
davidshenba writes: Scientists warn that working in unusual shifts can prematurely age the brain and dull intellectual ability. Three thousand people in France were given tests of memory, speed of thought and wider cognitive ability. People with more than 10 years of shift work history had the same results as someone six and a half years older. The brain naturally dulls as we age, but the researchers said working antisocial shifts accelerated the process.
When did they test these candidates? If you're testing everyone at 8 AM that's going to show a bias for the people just woke up and had their coffee compared to the night shift workers who are getting ready for bed.
France has been "innovating" on work rules based on their pet notions of what is right for a long time.
The "traditional" French baguette is not traditional at all, it was invented less than a century ago because laws about working conditions forbid bakers from baking bread in the wee hours of the morning (swing shift), so they needed to invent a loaf that took less total processing time.
Now, I'm not saying that it wouldn't be nice to live in the French dream world, but (speaking as a scientific atheist) we do need to bear in mind that there is no stress free disease free immortal existence for humans, and that the human condition entails suffering and risk, and I value free will and individualism more highly than the French, because I value a small percentage of the population achieving great things and propelling our species forward more than I value a more pleasant dreary existence for multitudes of undistinguished people. And before you push back on that, remember that I'm not conceding at all that a pleasant dreary existence is the best way to go for the multitude, we need to keep sacrificing ourselves to propel society forward so the picture of the pleasant dreary existence painted in Federation Space can come about.
Many things that cavemen evolved to do probably led to not only dull minds, but caved in skulls, death in childbirth, and child mortality rates of greater than 50% before adulthood, etc. If only they had lived long enough to get all the cancers they were flirting with eating smoked, salted, rotted, etc. foods.
Al that to say, I don't even agree with the metrics they are using for this type of study, and coming out of France we can be certain that it simply reinforces preexisting notions along the lines of "c'est ironique, non?" "c'est l'amour", "c'est la guerre", "c'est la vie" et cetera. LOL French.
I think Lavoisier might have been the last Frenchman who contributed anything of interest.
The general population doesn't even know how to fight. The general population thinks "our troops" are "over there" doing some kind of "stuff" to "protect our freedoms!"
Well... guns anyway. Balls? I'm less convinced.
The history of US warfare is filled with one-sided confilicts, late entries and early pullouts. The modern American talks big but lacks the will to see things through (see the current situation in Iraq... ISIS taunts the US as a recruitment strategy because they know you're not willing to take the kind of casualties necessary to go back in and squash them).
I remember in the 90s I was on "swing shift" (3-11pm-ish) and we got an extra 17 cents. Lots of people preferred it because they had mornings free during business hours. "Graveyard" shift (11pm-7am) got an extra 91 cents, and "nobody" wanted to do it. Oh, they had people willing; people who were told they were being moved to that shift, and who wanted to keep the job hoping that after a couple years they could switch back. But they had too many new people, production was so much lower they shut it back down.
I'll bet for many manufacturing jobs they could do fine now without more than a few cents extra, because that sector hasn't recovered and isn't projected to.
As far as ordering parts, these days you should be able to do that online and you can have them there by the start of the next shift if your supplier has rush service and starts early. Most parts suppliers start their first shift an hour or two before the companies they service, so that isn't unusual. Day shift can't get parts until the middle of the next day, unless you're at the start of the special delivery route, because they're not going to deliver in between shifts.
As far as appointments and things, you've got it backwards. Day shift has the hardest time, because they have to take time off work to get anything done, and that has a cost for the worker. Workers who constantly ask for time off to run errands are not valued team players. Night shift, if you keep a normal sleep pattern, but just at a different time, then you can set your appointments for after work (evening for you, morning for everybody else) and then sleep afterwards. No problem. Even if you use a lopsided pattern (sleeping immediately after getting off work, which makes for a sucky worker the last few hours of their shift) you still wake up during business hours. Most of the people with this sort of "problem" that I saw were going to the bar at opening (7am) drinking until 9, then sleeping until 6pm, and complaining there was no time they "could get anything done." On a 3 shift schedule it is normally an 8 hr shift, so you have 16 off hours, and 8 of those are business hours. Compare to day shift, who has 16 off hours, none of which are business hours. And if you have a schedule like 10hrs 4 days on, 3 off, then you have at least one whole business day off every week to schedule stuff.