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[MrRoboto75]

Cynically: I wonder if they holidized Juneteenth in order to specifically avoid giving election day off.

It was so we can say "we solved the racism"

[Starver]

I think we should get election day off, too. And all the feast days! :I

If it's not in the list of holidays that the Babylon 5 Post Office observes (see the Babylon 5 Security Manual, if you've got one handy - the Other Communications section) then it shouldn't be applied. If it is, then it absolutely must be.

[Doomblade187]

Cynically: I wonder if they holidized Juneteenth in order to specifically avoid giving election day off.

It was so we can say "we solved the racism"

But conservative heads said we did that back when we elected Obama!

[Bumber]

Biden.exe is not responding

[scriver]

Depends on what day it falls on and the workplace, practically. Weekend (federal) holidays tend to be observed work wise on the day before or after (depending on if it's saturday or sunday), since many gov't workplaces are closed weekends. Juneteenth (also idle props to one of the easiest holiday names to remember the date of) is on saturday this year, so a good number of the places that scrambled to observe it would have had their day off yesterday.

Except so many of the people that would celebrate this holiday are still so economically oppressed that they can only work jobs that still have to be performed no matter what. Federal holidays are for the privileged. (Same as with those that want to make election day a federal holiday - they don't think about the fact that so many of those that they want to give the opportunity to vote still have to work those days.)

I literally just had this exact conversation with a friend yesterday. Cynically: I wonder if they holidized Juneteenth in order to specifically avoid giving election day off.

I think we should get election day off, too. And all the feast days! :I

I'm actually not being sarcastic about the first part. The second part is about the reminder that in the medieval period, Europeans apparently got a lot more rest days than we do. You know: the peasants.

What about the paupers though. The burghers still need their water carried and their shithouses emptied

[MorleyDev]

Pretty sure most sensible countries do it so that if your employer requires you to work a bank holiday, they have to give you another holiday day to make up for it. So you just get to take it some other day.

But apparently in the USA ideas like "paid annual leave" are considered either a bonus or communism, instead of like...a basic right, like they're viewed as in every industrialised nation but the USA.

[Starver]

More than once I've had my line managers saying things like "You still have 20 days of holidays to take, and only three more months to take them in", forcing me to book a week here, a long weekend there, etc, because even with my opting out of Working Time Directive limitations[1] there was always something interesting to do.

In hindsight, I was probably overcommitting, and the number of times I planned a (forced, but flexibly so) week off to put me in the vicinity of a tech event, or sat at home cultivating something I would normally have done at work[2], but I was never forced into nigh-on indentured servitude like I've seen others, with an emphasis on those from The Land Of The Free. (Not as in Beer, and apparently not actually always as in Speech, despite everything.)



I'm not saying it works right, over here, just giving my own experiences. I've had good luck and bad luck in employment/otherwise, but that part was more than beneficial. And seemed to work for the corporation too (in at least one case, a US-based multinational that still enjoyed the benefit of a whole set of UK offices).


[1] I was on a partial or whole support-side job and I didn't have to be forced to do that, I lived for those times that it was me coming into work at 6AM and staying until midnight (sans mealbreaks, but often at the oddest of times) that truly helped against the latest email worm, ISDN dropout or database repair that needed doing. Sometimes it'd convert into TOIL, i.e. "Time Off In Leiu" - yet another darn 'vacation day' to add to my unused quota! I think I underreported my timesheets a bit, to avoid that.

[2] To be fair, I did that the other way round, too, but luckily some of my hobbies looked a lot like my work, and I could have argued value to them if presssed. Maybe not the MUDding.

[Vector]

What about the paupers though. The burghers still need their water carried and their shithouses emptied

The burghers can wait a day for the shithouse to be emptied like the rest of us :I

[MrRoboto75]

look at moneybags over here.

has an entire house just for his shit.

[Kagus]

What about the paupers though. The burghers still need their water carried and their shithouses emptied

Paupers, please.

[scriver]

This how you get people emptying their pots all over the street you know! You'll regret this once summer comes!

[Starver]

(Summer arrived this morning, and so now the days are shortening...)

[Random_Dragon]

(Summer arrived this morning, and so now the days are shortening...)

This isn't technically a politics thing, but this does remind me: what is up with everybody always labeling the equinoxes and solstices as the START of the season? It's always bugged me. By definition, the summer solstice is the part of the year where the day is longest relative to night due to axial tilt. And while there is a degree of seasonal inertia such that the greatest extremes of the season's weather are most likely to show up over the next two weeks afterward, calling it the "start" of a season instead of its peak has always seemed like goddamn nonsense to me.

[wierd]

Uhm... Its not?

The solstice celebrations are about the changing of the guard, folk-magic style-- more than anything.  Pagan rites held them sacred for this reason-- It is the peak of summer, and the dead of winter, after which, the power of that seasonal element goes into decline, and the new cycle gains power.


Same with equinoxes, where the forces are in balance.


I suppose in more modern settings, calling it "First day of summer" lets the religiously prudish pretend the day picked is not a pagan feast day, but who do they think they are fooling?

[scriver]

In Swedish it a called the midsummer and midwinter sun erections