ANOTHER ANOMALOUS ELECTRICAL PHENOMENA IS

ST. ELMO'S FIRE WHICH IS OFTEN MISTAKEN FOR BALL LIGHTNING

2018
A weather phenomenon called St. Elmo's Fire as seen form the cockpit ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B51GcGIqLlY
Video for st elmo's fire lightning▶ 3:54
Feb 20, 2018 - Uploaded by mightymkl
In this flight you'll see a phenomena called St. Elmo's Fire. It started on the First Officers window. St. Elmo's ...

2017
Sep 28, 2017 - Watch the rare and dazzling St. Elmo's Fire as seen from flight cockpit ... across the plane's windshield, arcing like small lightning bolts along ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/watch-the-rare-and-dazzli…/

Man has bizarre encounter with St. Elmo's Fire on a frozen lake ...
https://cottagelife.com/…/man-has-bizarre-encounter-with-st…...
Jun 12, 2017 - Not to be confused with the 1980s coming-of-age film, St. Elmo's Fire is an eerie electrical phenomenon that's often confused for lightning.

2016
St. Elmo's Firе – Ancient Plasma Phenomena Seen By Sailors
www.messagetoeagle.com/st-elmos-firе-ancient-plasma-phenome…...
Mar 3, 2016 - St. Elmo's Fire and “ball lightning” are two different things. The scientific community cannot agree on what ball lightning is, but it is definitely not ...

2015
How St. Elmo's Fire Works? - Geekswipe
https://geekswipe.net/scie…/physics/how-st-elmos-fire-works/
Dec 25, 2015 - Hence, it is neither a fire nor a lightning. It is more of a static discharge. Before we see how St. Elmo's fire work, it is essential to do a quick ...

2014
St. Elmo's Fire - University of Waterloo
https://uwaterloo.ca/…/ca.phys1…/files/uploads/files/149.pdf
electrical and magnetic influences around them. From common occurrences like lightning, magnetic attraction, and static electricity to the rare Saint Elmo's Fire,.

Physics Buzz: The Ghostly Glow of St. Elmo's Fire
physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/…/the-ghostly-glow-of-st-elm…
Oct 31, 2014 - "Everything is in flames, — the sky with lightning, — the water with ... They are in fact a natural phenomenon known as St. Elmo's fire, first ...

2013
Scientists Have Recreated St Elmo's Fire in the Lab - Gizmodo
https://gizmodo.com/scientists-have-recreated-st-elmos-fire…
Aug 20, 2013 - A team of US researchers has finally worked out how reproduce ball lightning—sometimes referred to as St. Elmo's fire—in the lab.

In this incredible photo, St. Elmo's Fire lights up an observatory
https://io9.gizmodo.com/in-this-incredible-photo-st-elmos-f…
May 31, 2013 - Unlike things like fire or lightning (both of which have plasma components), St. Elmo's Fire can be fairly cool. It was known for gathering around ...

St. Elmo's Fire - The Wild West
https://www.thewildwest.org/…/wildwestcowboy…/227-stelmofire
St. Elmo's Fire, skylight and cattle ranching term of the American wild west. ... and just before a lightning flash, reaches ten thousand volts per centimeter. Thus ...

2010
What is St. Elmo's Fire? - io9 - Gizmodo
https://io9.gizmodo.com/what-is-st-elmo-s-fire-5541289
May 21, 2010 - Saint Elmo's Fire is the lightning-like glow that gathers around a ship's mast, usually towards the end of storm. Sailors considered it the saint's ...

1998
Weather Elements: The Fire Of St. Elmo - Islandnet.com
https://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/elements/stelmo.htm
May 30, 1998 - St. Elmo's Fire has long served as an omen of heavenly intervention to ... lightning rod, church spires and metal weather cocks, St Elmo's Fire ...

OTHER ARTICLES
What causes the strange glow known as St. Elmo's Fire?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/…/quotwhat-causes-the-s…/
If we lived in an atmosphere of neon gas, then St. Elmo's fire would be red/orange, and lightning would be white with orange edges. Our atmosphere is nitrogen ...

St Elmo's fire | The Electric Universe Theory
https://www.electricuniverse.info/st-elmos-fire/
Physically, St. Elmo's fire is a bright blue or violet glow, appearing like fire in some circumstances, from tall, sharply pointed structures such as lightning rods, ...

#balllightning #stelmosfire #electricity #anomaly

Stonehenge and the Ice Age: The Neolithic Revolution came from the east, and t...

Stonehenge and the Ice Age: The Neolithic Revolution came from the east, and t...: There is a flurry of research at the moment which is suggesting that the "Neolithic Revolution" came with  immigration from the east, across the English Channel and from the near continent.  Since time immemorial, of course, this has been speculated about by archaeologists and historians, with some thinking that waves of immigrants came in around the coasts via the Celtic Sea or southern Ireland,  and others thinking that the natural routeway was via the shortest sea crossing, on the reasonable assumption that travellers would have preferred to walk rather than row or sail, with all the extra attendant risks involved in using flimsy vessels in stormy waters.

Stonehenge and the Ice Age: The Yamnaya -- peace-loving travellers bearing gif...

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Sweethearts Of The West: GERTRUDE SIMMONS BONNIN, INFLUENTIAL LAKOTA ACTIVI...

Sweethearts Of The West: GERTRUDE SIMMONS BONNIN, INFLUENTIAL LAKOTA ACTIVI...: Those of you who read the previous post by Doris McCraw (writing as Angela Rains) will understand my next sentence. I started out researching the former Western Cherokee Chief Wilma Mankiller. I stumbled onto another amazing woman and will report on her instead. *Zitkála-Šá* (1876–1938), also known as *Gertrude Simmons Bonnin*, her missionary-given and later married name, was a Yankton Dakota Sioux writer, editor, translator, musician, educator, and political activist. Her Lakota name means Red Bird or Cardinal. One of the most outspoken voices raised on behalf of Native Americans.

EconoSpeak: Prisoners of Overwork: A Dilemma

EconoSpeak: Prisoners of Overwork: A Dilemma: The New York Times has an illuminating article today summarizing recent research on the gender effects of mandatory overwork in professiona...

Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout: Chicago’s Anarco-pacifist Poet of the Streets—Joff...

Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout: Chicago’s Anarco-pacifist Poet of the Streets—Joff...: Joffre Stewart in his winter garb, a stocking cap and old Army coat. Word went out last month a Joffre Stewart , perhaps the quintes...

NOW THEY ARE CALLED #UPA
Just Don’t Call Them #UFOs
The U.S. military wants pilots to report strange sightings in the sky, but doesn’t want any of the stigma that comes with it. 

MARINA KOREN

KURT STRUMPF / AP

Pilots are about to receive a new memo from management: If you encounter an unidentified flying object while on the job, please tell us.

The U.S. Navy is drafting new rules for reporting such sightings, according to a recent story from Politico. Apparently, enough incidents have occurred in “various military-controlled ranges and designated airspace” in recent years to prompt military officials to establish a formal system to collect and analyze the unexplained phenomena. Members of Congress and their staffs have even started asking about the claims, and Navy officials and pilots have responded with formal briefings.

The Washington Post provided more details in its own story:

In some cases, pilots—many of whom are engineers and academy graduates—claimed to observe small spherical objects flying in formation. Others say they’ve seen white, Tic Tac–shaped vehicles. Aside from drones, all engines rely on burning fuel to generate power, but these vehicles all had no air intake, no wind and no exhaust.

The Navy knows how this sounds. It knows what you must be thinking. But the fact stands that some pilots are saying they’ve seen strange things in the sky, and that’s concerning. So the Navy is trying to assure pilots that they won’t be laughed out of the cockpit or deemed unhinged if they bring it up. “For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report,” the Navy said in a statement to Politico.


Yet even as the Navy indicates it’s willing to discuss the taboo topic, it’s also shying away from three notorious little letters. UFO carries an airport’s worth of baggage, bursting with urban legends, government secrecy, and over-the-top Hollywood movies. The statements and quotes that the Navy provided to news outlets are devoid of any reference to UFOs. Instead, they’re called “unexplained aerial phenomena,” “unidentified aircraft,” “unauthorized aircraft,” and, perhaps most intriguing, “suspected incursions.”

Read: When a Harvard professor talks about aliens

The message is, if you see something, say something, but for God’s sake, lower your voice. Don’t call it a UFO. Which is funny, since the military came up with the name in the first place.

The earliest government programs dedicated to investigating UFO sightings in the late 1940s treated the claims, unsurprisingly, as a big joke. As a rule, officials dismissed and debunked any reports as hoaxes and hallucinations, according to UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry, a textbook-style deep dive published in 2012. This apparently didn’t sit well with some of the higher-ups.

In some ways, the Navy’s modern-day attempt to take seriously reports of UFO sightings is a rerun of what happened next. “I want an open mind,” Major General Charles Cabell, then the head of Air Force intelligence at the Pentagon, reportedly demanded at a meeting with subordinates in 1951. “Anyone who doesn’t keep an open mind can get out now.”

A new, secretive program, dubbed Project Blue Book, was quickly organized to investigate claims of strange visions in the sky without ridiculing them. Its director, Edward Ruppelt, introduced the term unidentified flying objectsometime around 1953. The definition carried no hint of extraterrestrial life; in a national-security official’s scariest daydreams, the objects were probably Russian spycraft. For the military, a UFO was simply “any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object.”

By then, there had already been several high-profile reports of objects flying through or falling from the sky. For the public, these sightings didn’t just seem unfamiliar—they seemed not of this world. A civilian pilot had seen nine somethings flying in formation near Mount Rainier in Washington State. A rancher found mysterious wreckage on his property outside Roswell, New Mexico. Multiple people spotted a series of lights hovering over Washington, D.C., and moving toward the White House. The military even mobilized jets to intercept them, but found nothing.

In the meantime, UFOs further infiltrated the public consciousness. They sailed into Hollywood, which to this day remains obsessed with stories about aliens, from friendly creatures to nightmarish monsters. The fourth Men in Black movie is coming out this summer, and it’s probably not the last.


Read: What UFOs mean for why people don’t trust science

Elsewhere, the lines between fiction and reality blurred. People told harrowing stories of nighttime abductions. UFOs became the focus of conspiracy theories about government secrecy. A disheveled, wild-haired man on the History Channel suggested that extraterrestrial beings helped build Stonehenge. Over time, a collective opinion emerged about those who truly believed UFOs proved the existence of aliens, and it wasn’t a flattering one. “Let’s face it—believing in the paranormal has become shorthand for crazy,” wrote Alexandra Ossola in Futurism in 2017, on the lasting stigma surrounding UFO truthers.

Military pilots are well aware of the taboo. Christopher Mellon, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton and Bush administrations and an advocate for UFO study, has said service members worry that reporting UFOs puts their careers at risk. They also worry that staying silent could threaten national security, in case one of those mysterious objects turns out to be a new form of aircraft from a rival country.

“Nobody wants to be ‘the alien guy’ in the national-security bureaucracy,” Mellon wrote in a Post op-ed last year. “Nobody wants to be ridiculed or sidelined for drawing attention to the issue.”

After two decades in operation, Project Blue Book eventually concluded there was “no evidence that [UFOs] are intelligently guided spacecraft from beyond the Earth.” They attributed most sightings to, among other things, clouds, weather balloons, and even birds. “The report brushes aside the demands of some scientists and laymen for a large-scale effort to determine the nature of such ‘flying saucers,’’ The New York Times wrote in 1969. “Such a project, the report says in effect, would be a waste of time and money.”

Read: But, seriously, where are the aliens?

Future generations at the Pentagon thought differently. From 2007 to 2012, the Department of Defense operated a top-secret, $22 million program dedicated to investigating UFO reports, known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The New York Times revealed its existence in a jaw-dropping story in 2017. “The program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift,” the Timesreported.

Although the funding eventually ran out, officials say Defense officers continue to investigate claims reported by service members.

Edward Ruppelt probably didn’t imagine the journey his three-letter abbreviation would take over the years. In 1955, five years before he died, he dumped everything he had learned about UFOs into a nearly 300-page report. “People want to know the facts,” he wrote. “But more often than not, these facts have been obscured by secrecy and confusion, a situation that has led to wild speculation on one end of the scale and an almost dangerously blasé attitude on the other.”

As his successors in the U.S. military draft their reports and memos and guidelines, carefully avoiding any mention of that word, they will no doubt run into the same trouble he did. “The report has been difficult to write,” Ruppelt wrote in 1955, his frustration hovering above the page like the air over pavement on a hot day, “because it involves something that doesn’t officially exist.”

THE U.S. NAVY'S DECISION TO CREATE NEW GUIDELINES FOR REPORTING UAPS, UNIDENTIFIED AERIAL PHENOMENA, SIGNALS THAT THEY MIGHT BE TAKING THIS MATTER MORE SERIOUSLY. 

By Marcia Wendorf April, 27th 2019

Pixabay

A story published on April 23, 2019, on the website of POLITICO, described new guidelines set out by the U.S. Navy for its pilots and other personnel to report Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAPs), which is what is called UFOs, or Unidentified Flying Objects in popular culture.

The Navy told POLITICO, "There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years."

"The Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft."

A UAP and F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets play cat and mouse

In late 2017, both POLITICO and the New York Times reported on an office that had been set up within the Defense Intelligence Agency to study UAPs. It was called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, and was run by a man named Luis Elizondo. During that reporting, the puzzling 2004 case of the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group came to light.
The carrier group, which was operating off the coast of San Diego, California, had for two weeks been tracking UAPs. One day, it got lucky when it happened to have three F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets up in the sky just when the UAPs showed up.

The three fighters caught up with a UAP as it was hovering mere inches above the ocean surface, and churning up a considerable amount of water.
Catching sight of the fighter jets, the UAP rose almost instantaneously to a height of 12,000 feet, where it and the fighters began a game of cat and mouse. Luckily, it was all caught on video by Raytheon Corporation's Advanced Targeting Forward Look Infrared (ATFLIR) sensor on one of the jets:

Last year, Commander David Fravor, the pilot whose voice can be heard on the above video, appeared on Fox News where he described the encounter. When asked where he thought the craft came from, Fravor said that it was, "something not from this world."

November in Chicago is cold and cloudy but apparently, not boring

On the afternoon of November 7, 2006 at Chicago's O'Hare airport, a United Airlines employee was pushing United Airlines Flight 446 back from the gate when he looked up and saw a metallic, saucer-shaped craft hovering above.
The man radioed Flight 446's flight crew who also saw the craft. Eventually, twelve airport employees were observing the craft, as well as witnesses from outside the airport.

Apparently, having seen their fill, if you've ever been to Chicago in November, or been to O'Hare Airport, you know what I mean, the craft shot upwards through the clouds at such a high rate of speed that it left a clear blue hole in the cloud layer.

Initially, both United Airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) denied the existence of the sighting, until the Chicago Tribune newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. That unearthed a call made by a United Airlines supervisor to an FAA manager in the airport tower concerning the UAP.

March in Phoenix is much more pleasant than November in Chicago

On the night of March 13, 1997, a man in Henderson, Nevada reported seeing a huge V-shaped object with six lights that was heading toward Arizona.
In Paulden, Arizona, a former police officer saw a V-shaped cluster of reddish or orange lights overhead. He watched until the lights disappeared over the horizon. Next, the police switchboard in Prescott, Arizona lit up with callers reporting a V-shaped cluster of lights flying overhead.

Prescott resident Tim Ley and his wife Bobbi observed the craft pass directly over their heads, before it began heading straight for Phoenix. Witnesses in Glendale, a suburb of Phoenix, watched the object pass directly over them, while in Phoenix, truck driver Bill Greiner observed the lights and said, "Before this, if anybody had told me they saw a UFO, I would've said, 'Yeah and I believe in the Tooth Fairy.' Now I've got a whole new view, and I may be just a dumb truck driver, but I've seen something that don't belong here."

Also observing the lights in Phoenix was a former Air Force pilot named Fife Symington.

As a former pilot, Symington knew the lights were unusual, and his observation would carry a little more weight since, at that time, he was Arizona's governor. Symington went on to say, "I'm a pilot and I know just about every machine that flies. It was bigger than anything that I've ever seen. It remains a great mystery."
In response to the U.S. Air Force's claims that the lights were flares, Symington responded. "... it couldn't have been flares because it was too symmetrical. It had a geometric outline, a constant shape."

My personal experience

Early one morning, I took our dog outside to do his business. Everything was quiet in the rolling hills outside a western U.S. city. I was standing facing due south and not paying attention to much of anything, when the rays of the sun rising to my left struck something in the sky, and reflected back down to me. Looking up, I saw an oval-shaped craft hovering motionless in the sky.

At first, I thought it was an airplane flying at such an angle to me that it appeared stationary, but then I recognized it for what it was. While the dog nosed along the ground, both the craft and I remained motionless for several minutes. Then, at a dizzying speed, the craft made two zig-zags in the sky, drawing a "W" open to the east, and it came to rest more directly overhead.

Are we alone in the Universe?

That afternoon, I reported my experience to MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network. MUFON is the oldest and largest civilian UFO investigation and research organization in the world. Their stated goal is to answer the age old question: "Are we alone in the universe?"

MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) was started in 1969 by groups located in Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, and the "M" originally stood for Midwest. MUFON began cooperating with the Center for UFO Studies located at Northwestern University, and run by former Project Blue Book director Dr. Allen Hynek.

By 1971, MUFON had developed a Field Investigator's Manual, and in the late 2000s, it developed a computerized Case Management System (CMS), which allows anyone to report a UFO incident anywhere in the world. Currently, the case management system contains over 80,000 entries.

Click the "News" tab on MUFON's website, and you can read dozens of recent UAP cases reported by ordinary citizens. They are chilling in their "ordinariness". Currently, MUFON has a membership of over 4,000, publishes an online journal, and has trained more than 500 field investigators. On July 26 - 28, 2019, at the Hotel Irvine, Irvine California, MUFON will host its annual symposium. Scheduled presenters include Stanton Friedman. (CANADIAN UFOLOGIST)

In May 2019, the History Channel is starting a six-part series on the UAP phenomenon that will be presented by Luis Elizondo., the former director of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. It comes on the heels of another show that aired on the History Channel entitled, "Project Blue Book."

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PASSPORT TO MAGONIA leading directly into the monument. And on June 15, 1952, they discovered a long flight of stairs going down through the enormous.

GIG ECONOMY = POSTMODERN SWEATSHOP

'I just broke down crying': Canadian video game creators face gruelling 'crunch' hours

In an industry built on fun, some employees are pushed to their breaking point

Canadian video game designer Osama Dorias works at 

his computer with his son sleeping on his shoulder 

in this picture from 2008. (Osama Dorias)

EUGENE'S NOTE: 

THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE CONTAINS VIDEO'S NOT AVAILABLE HERE 

It was Osama Dorias's first job in the video game industry.


He was thrilled to be working as a designer with a company in Montreal.


Then he got his first real taste of what's known in the business as "crunch" — when a team crams for weeks or even months to complete a game in time for its scheduled release."Seven days a week, between 14- and 16-hour days," he recently told CBC News of that experience back in 2008.


The punishing schedule went on for three months.


Dorias's first son had just been born, but he was working every day from 8 a.m. until it was time to catch the last subway ride home.


Watch: Video game designer Osama Dorias describes the toll of working 16-hour days to finish a game on deadline.





'I had to learn how to be human again.' The toll of video game crunch

Video game designer Osama Dorias describes the personal toll of working extreme overtime a.k.a. "crunch."3:10


One day, while on a diaper run, he had a breakdown in a drugstore. In tears, he called his friend.


"My mind was racing and I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to live and I didn't know how to tell him I'd left the house without asking what size diapers my son wore."


Dorias had no idea about the proper size because he was rarely home.


When the game was finally completed, he got a few days off and a thank-you note, but no overtime pay. Welcome to crunch in the gaming industry. It's a long-standing feature of the sector's workplace culture, but the calls for change are getting louder.
Big business, bad habits


The video game industry long ago powered up from basement workshops to big business. The multiplayer game Fortnite now competes with Netflix in terms of the number of eyeballs they attract. In 2018, revenue for the U.S. gaming industry reached a new high score of $43.4 billion — far surpassing the film industry.


With big-name companies such as Ubisoft and BioWare, Canada is a major player — the world's third largest producer of video games, behind the U.S. and Japan.




Elbi@derElbi

Managers: "This game isn't doing well! The only way to save it is to crunch!"

Managers: "This game is doing incredibly well! The only way to keep up with the demand is to crunch!"


Yet devs still sacrifice mental & physical health for bosses earning 1.000x their wage 

Polygon
✔@Polygon
How Fortnite’s success led to months of intense crunch at Epic Games https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/23/18507750/fortnite-work-crunch-epic-games?utm_campaign=polygon&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter …



9:16 AM - Apr 23, 2019


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But as the industry grows, crunch appears to be a bad habit that some companies have yet to break.


Part of the problem is that the practice of pulling all-night coding sessions is baked into the DNA of video game creation.


A 2017 survey by the International Game Developers Association found 53 per cent of employees said crunch was expected at their workplace.


Recent news reports also suggest crunch is still common. Earlier this week, the gaming website Polygon reported that workers at Epic Games in Cary, N.C., are allegedly toiling for brutally long hours on the hit game Fortnite.


In the piece, the company says its success has put added demands on its team, but it is hiring more staff and improving its planning process to reduce the workload.



Allegations of crunch also became part of the narrative of what went wrong with the new BioWare game Anthem. After the much-anticipated title debuted to low ratings, the gaming news site Kotaku published an article describing what appeared to be a troubled development process. Citing numerous anonymous sources, Kotaku reported on instances of crunch and how some employees were put on doctor-mandated stress leave.


The Edmonton-based company quickly responded to the story in a blog post. "We put a lot of focus on better planning to avoid 'crunch time,'" the statement says.


"The health and well-being of our team members is something we take very seriously."
Crunch culture takes a toll


Dave Chan, an audio designer who worked with BioWare beginning in the late 1990s, says the industry has a big problem with "wearing fatigue and overwork as a badge of honour."


He remembers enduring months of what he called "death march crunch," consisting of 12- to 16-hour days, seven days a week.


He says at one point an executive asked him how he was doing. "I told him I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and almost lost my marriage."


Chan says he was always running on empty, and that crunch was part of the reason he left the company in 2004.





 

Dave Chan worked at BioWare in Edmonton. 

He says crunch brought him to 'the verge

 of a nervous breakdown.' These days he's

 a biweekly columnist on video games fo

 CBC Edmonton's Radio Active show.(CBC)


But some managers see a place for crunch.


Former BioWare co-founder Trent Oster, who was with the company for 15 years, remembers working 212 hours in the final two weeks before the game Neverwinter Nights shipped.

He says crunch can be valuable in short spurts.

Trent Oster, right, is CEO of Edmonton's independent video game company Beamdog. He co-founded BioWare in 1995. (CBC)

"When it first happens, it's really empowering because you're letting all the excess details of your work life disappear and you're focusing in on the core problems."

But when weeks become months, the value of crunch plummets.

"You're sitting at your desk for 12 hours a day, but you're getting eight hours of work done," he said. "Then you're sitting 14 hours a day to get eight hours of work done."

Oster says while he was working at BioWare they actively tried to avoid crunch. If crunch is required, he says, it's because something has gone wrong.

"Crunch is a disaster-mitigation strategy. When things have gotten so sideways it's like, 'Oh my God, this is on the edge of failure.'"

Watch: Trent Oster breaks down the pros and cons of crunch.







Video game creator Trent Oster explains the pros and cons of crunch. 0:55


According to Oster, another part of the problem is the pressure from shareholders looking to see if the company can deliver what it promised.


"These are publicly traded companies. They have earnings obligations. They put products into a kind of timeline and they're under a lot of pressure to hit those timelines."


Oster left BioWare in 2009, long before Anthem was released.
Do you work in the gaming industry and have experiences with crunch? Contact Eli Glasner at eli.glasner@cbc.ca


At his new company, Beamdog, they keep crunch to a minimum of a few weeks and staff are paid when they work overtime.


CBC News reached out to BioWare and many of Canada's top gaming companies for comment on crunch. None would talk to us.


Many of the gaming employees who spoke with CBC News and shared concerns about their work conditions were afraid to go public for fear of being fired or blacklisted by employers.
The crunch pushback begins


But some creators who have been caught in the crunch are taking a stand.


At last month's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, talk about crunch took centre stage.

One of the hosts, narrative designer Meg Jayanth, spoke passionately about how she'd suffered as a result of crunching.





Game Workers Unite @GameWorkers


· Mar 21, 2019


If you missed the #IGF and #GDCAwards last night, you should really go back and watch. We'll highlight some of the best parts.






Game Workers Unite @GameWorkers


We thought @betterthemask was an absolutely killer host. Dropping truth all night about the need to deroot white supremacists from our communities and improve our industry with worker power and collective action! pic.twitter.com/JRdCWnwgGI

597

11:24 AM - Mar 21, 2019


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On the conference floor, the pro-unionization movement Game Workers Unite held a panel touting the benefits of collective bargaining.


Chapters of GWU are gaining new members in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. Again, supporters who shared their experiences with CBC News said they were worried about speaking publicly.


Daniel Joseph, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto working with GWU, says interest in unionization is growing as crunch culture forces more and more people out of the industry they love.


"When people hit 35, they leave the industry because they can't keep up with the amount of work that's required, while [companies] exploit the passion of young workers who've always wanted to make games."


These days, Edmonton's Dave Chan channels his passion for gaming into his CBC Radio column. He believes unionization will happen "when the meat grinder of development stops being fed by college graduates or when it stops being economically viable to run things this way."



 

Osama Dorias has more time to spend with his

 video-game loving family now that he found a

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2019/04/domestic-1401-16-apr-2019-behind-996.html

 company with a no-crunch policy. (Eli Glasner/CBC)

In Montreal, Osama Dorias is now the lead game designer at Warner Brothers Games, where he says there is a no-crunch policy.


Dorias feels the anti-crunch conversation is getting louder — and he hopes more companies are listening.


From how we think about our jobs to where and when we do them — the stress of modern work is affecting Canadians in a lot of ways and across industries.


This week, CBC News — led by The National — takes a look at the forces behind this stress and the ways we can avoid burning out. We'll examine new approaches to productivity and creativity, how we structure shift work, the mental health effects of telecommuting and what Canada can learn from other countries.

For more on our series "Burnout: Stress At Work", watch The National or read more at CBCNews.ca.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR







Eli Glasner

Entertainment reporter and film critic

Eli Glasner is a national entertainment reporter and film critic for CBC News. Each Friday he reviews films on CBC News Network as well as appearing on CBC radio programs coast to coast. Covering culture has taken him from the northern tip of Moosonee, Ont. to the Oscars red carpet.

Behind '996' schedule: Work to a better life, not ICU

Updated 16:48, 16-Apr-2019

Bi Ran

When we think of tech workers, we think of plaid shirts, mobile game work breaks, instant food, and enviable high salaries. Not surprisingly, their profiles in the public's eyes are always linked with financial success, crazy working hours, creativity drives, and, recently, 996 and ICU. 

What is "996.ICU"? 

It is a popping-up GitHub project by Chinese tech workers to protest "996 schedule" — work 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — which makes people sick, literally, ending up in ICU, the hospitals' Intensive Care Unit. 

The second most starred repository

This social protest happened in late March. 

996.ICU repo becomes the second most starred repo of all time with so far 220k stars of support clicks. 

996.ICU repository and web page. /CGTN Photo 

It is not like a usual social promotion appeared on Twitter or Weibo with preplanned buzz strategies. It is a repo (repository, or you may call it a collaborative project) on Github, an online code-sharing community, detailing labor laws, showing blacklisted companies and firms with better working conditions. They are collecting and sharing more proof and information about tech companies' work conditions, discussing their own troubles, and trying to find more similar cases internationally. At the bottom of the repo page, there is the campaign slogan, “developers' lives matter,” speaking out from anonymous tech activists. 

Tech workers have flooded GitHub in the past month, not to convey anger and rage, but to let their comments seen by more people. Facing a situation that they cannot change work conditions by complaining to HRs, 996 campaigners chose this very "geeky" way to raise concerns. 

The repo did become a tech workers' social platform though. Many 996 campaigners even see this repo as a job-hunting guidance for them to filter employers as the blacklist and whitelist are quite credible. 

Under Chinese labor laws, workers should not be forced to work over three hours of overtime each day and not over 36 hours of overtime every month. The law also stipulates that workers should get 150% of their usual salaries for prolonging hours, and three times of their regular pay if they work during a national holiday. Zhang Yi, the senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the overtime work could be legal only when the labor contracts include specific related terms and the employers establish a system of the compensatory level.  

Given the stipulations, the social discussion has raised the question of whether it defaults to work overtime or it's just an option. The reality could be worse actually since a lot of tech companies do not provide any compensation or stipend to overworking employees. 

Chinese tech giant Alibaba pledged to use its platform to stimulate consumption and generate more orders for the manufacturing and services sectors this year, February 22, 2019. /Xinhua Photo

Ezra Zhang, who's invested in several tech start-ups in Beijing, said the campaign can be a reminder for the industry to pay more attention to balancing workers' work and life. 

"The protest is very tender and civilized, which will possibly lead to some practical changes, "said Ezra, adding that it's a good thing to see the industry has to face such long-existing problems and think about solutions together. 

'Take it as a blessing'

"996.ICU" repo has dragged the IT industry heavyweights into the spotlight. 

"I don't defend '996' schedule, but I salute to those very diligent workers. Tech workers should take it as a huge bliss for they got the opportunity to work that way," said Jack Ma, the founder of China's tech giant Alibaba, said on his Weibo Friday which however stirred up much backlash from netizens calling him out for only endorsing the overtime work culture because it benefits his own wealth. 

Jack Ma then posted another Weibo out of pressure to justify his early comments, explaining that he was persuading young people to be hard-working instead of promoting an unhealthy way to work. China's richest person highlighted the importance of passion and ambition when choosing a career, as vaguely mentioned that money (extra pay) should not be a decisive factor if your companies need you to work more. 

Jack Ma's Weibo. /CGTN Photo

Other business tycoons also joined this working schedule debate with various stands. Founder of China's e-commerce giant JD.com Richard Liu posted a short story pointing out that JD.com will never force employees to work in a "996" way, though he does require the workers to fight tooth and nail in work. He even said he could work under an "8116+8" schedule: 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. for six days, plus eight hours every Sunday. Brian Shen, CEO of China's mobile communications company Oppo, posted that people with different goals choose different career path; personally, he would definitely backup 996 work schedule because he loves his job. 

Yet, the founder of China's book retailing website Dangdang.com, Li Guoqing is sharply against "996" schedule, as he believes it negatively affects employees' work and life balance without enhancing work effectiveness. 

"It's tougher for employees to maintain a healthy work-life balance considering the extremely high demands on their professional front, even a short piece comment encouraging prolonged work can be a huge buzzkill," one interviewee told CGTN, who preferred to remain anonymous for fear of losing her job. 

She said as one of the new-age employees facing fierce competition, she is well aware that only hard work can help them achieve the dream. She was pretty angry that comments like Jack Ma's obliterate most people's contribution if you are not a 996 worker. 

In a Twitter poll created by CGTN digital, most of the netizens are willing to have a work-life balance for they think work is not everything. /CGTN Photo

Work toward a better life ≠ Compulsory 996

As the agitation escalates, people started to dig deeper into how the debate triggers such a tide. 

During my interviews, many young tech workers have made it very clear that there's a misunderstanding at the value level: their protest against 996 is not about being lazy or losing passion.

"I am willing to make every effort to working toward success, but it doesn't mean the company can force me to work overtime without adequate compensation," said Mr.Yuan, who is working at Huawei as a Java technician. 

Many enterprises are struggling under the pressure of economic downturn, while new-age workers do understand they need to work more hours than they would like to for the survival of their companies. However, this can never be a legit reason for no-limit working hours and the so-called "struggle spirit". Linking a legal 9 a.m.-5 p.m. work schedule to poor work ethics is not logically persuasive, let alone calling this a lack of eagerness to succeed. 

Unfortunately, thought the protest against this long-existing ineffective work culture is on, the latest Healthcare and Life Sciences Predictions by Deloitte pointed out that the Chinese are suffering worse health, while overwork death accounts for one of the reasons. 

The discussion initiated by "996.ICU" is an opportunity for us to rethink China's tech corporate culture and business ethics. A beautiful life does not simply mean earning more money for today's Chinese people, and a respected enterprise is definitely not only chasing after profits. The growth of overtime work culture has shown its unhealthy social costs. It's taking a toll on workers' families, communities, and ultimately on employers themselves.

Abusive work schedules in tech industry under fire

(China Daily) 08:15, April 10, 2019

Activists are calling for more supervision over labor exploitation in an online crusade spearheaded by software developers against the so-called 996 work schedule, which is widely practiced in China's tech industry.


The rules-which require employees to work from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week without overtime pay-came under fire after a programmer created 996.ICU, a page on code-sharing platform GitHub.com. The page garnered immediate attention at home and abroad.


The name 996.ICU refers to a saying among Chinese developers that following the 996 schedule puts you at risk of ending up in an intensive care unit.


In the weeks that followed the creation of 996.ICU in March, the page has accrued almost 200,000 stars-which indicates popularity among users.


Users listed tech companies that use the 996 schedule, and then created a licensing agreement that would ban such companies from using their codes.


The 996.ICU page was soon blocked on multiple platforms including the messaging tool WeChat and the UC Browser.


The 996 schedule was allegedly first adopted in 2016 by 58.com, a major online classified advertisement site.


Jiang Ying, a professor at China University of Labor Relations and a leading expert on China's Labor Law, said the rare protest by sleep-deprived tech firm employees underscored the difficulties facing workers who defend their rights.


"When resorting to the legal system for protection, there is a price to pay: time, money and the risk of losing your job. And as a result they took to cyberspace," she said.


Employers are obliged to provide overtime pay, bonuses and welfare benefits to employees working overtime. But many tech company employees said it was too much to hope for.


A senior developer with the e-commerce giant Alibaba, who asked not to be named to protect his career, said employers seldom say the schedule is compulsory, but failure to follow the rules could lead to low performance scores and layoffs.


"Defiant behavior can also lead to losing your annual bonus, which is a lot of money," he said.


To better protect workers from harsh treatment, Jiang suggested that oversight should be beefed up, and systems for lodging complaints should be improved.


China's Labor Law prescribes that the working hours of an employee should not exceed an average of eight hours daily, or 44 hours a week.


Employers may extend working hours after consultation with an employee, but shall not exceed three hours a day or 36 hours a month.


The 996 work schedule, however, can easily ratchet up weekly work to 60 hours.


Jiang said tech firms represent the country's most advanced productive force and should have the wisdom to adopt a more effective way to improve productivity.


Zhao Wei, an industrial sociology professor at Beijing Normal University, said the new industries led by internet companies have revolutionized how workloads are calculated, thus dimming the distinction of working overtime.


"Labor laws should be revised with new industries in mind-which in today's case is the information industry," she said.

.https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2019/04/gig-economy-postmodern-sweatshop.html