For the last 100 years, every productivity study in every industry has come to the same conclusion: After about 40 hours in a week, the quality of your work starts to degrade,” she writes. “You make mistakes. That’s why working 60 hours may not save you time or money: You’ll spend too much of that time fixing the mistakes you shouldn’t have made in the meantime. That’s why software companies that limit work to 35 hours a week need to employ fewer QA engineers: There isn’t as much mess to clean up.

MANILA, Philippines — A group of Filipino teachers employed in the United States has filed a class suit against their foreign and local recruiters for alleged extortion, wire fraud and human trafficking.          

According to Partido ng Manggagawa (PM), hundreds of Filipino migrant teachers who are working under H1-B visa and employed in different school districts in Louisiana filed the charges against Universal Placement International (UPI) and its Philippine-based partner, PARS International.      

9. The material world will not bring you true happiness. My generation was taught to think that happiness and success come from consumption. Materialism doesn’t bring you happiness. The media keeps feeding our need to buy more (appealing to our inner lizard of lack) and then we end up in our 50s or 60s with too much stuff and chained to The Man. We ask ourselves, “Is this all there is?” I am not saying that having abundance is a bad thing. What I am saying is that it is not the answer to happiness.

Judge Richard Posner of the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals does a lot of reading—but he apparently hates boilerplate as much as the next person.

Appearing at a recent American Constitution Society conference, Posner recalled his encounter with hundreds of pages of documentation for his home equity loan, Above the Law reports. Posner got a laugh when he said he didn’t read it; he just signed it.

The most interesting issue in this article is not it’s focal one, i.e. that a judge ignored the fine print when getting a loan as a consumer.

Most interesting, to me, is that this is a striking example of REAL consumer behavior (e.g. people generally don’t read the fine print of important documents before signing them), as compared to legal fictions (e.g. people are presumed to have read, understood and willingly signed the contract at issue). To me, the scariest aspect of this scenario is not that a judge didn’t read the fine print. Far scarier is that our legal and political systems are based on the legal fictions, rather than the realities.

The first reality: most people don’t understand most of the complex documents they sign. Another reality: many companies take advantage of people who don’t read or understand their contracts. And more companies will do this, the way the trend is headed. That is, if existing economic and legal incentives remain intact, and continue to reward companies who lay traps via fine print.

Scariest of all, note the central element that allows all such contractual transactions to unfold: trust. When people sign contracts they don’t read and/or understand, they do so with the belief that the company that drafted the lengthy fine print can be trusted. That is, our internal monologue that says, “I don’t know what all that stuff in this contract means, but I assume the other party does not intend to take advantage of me.” Judge Posner’s scenario exemplifies the huge role that trust plays in the consumer’s mind– even a very sophisticated consumer who is exceptionally well-versed in law and economics. If all THAT consumer has to rely on is trust– given the lack of law and/or enforcement with teeth for most such scenarios nowadays– yikes.

This is a very interesting talk about the nature of happiness by Daniel Kahneman, behavioral economist and Nobel Prize winner.

Some key points:

- People have two selves: (1) an Experiencing Self, i.e. YOU, as you are reading this, feeling the feelings you feel in real time; and (2) a Remembering Self, i.e. the self we are when we look backward or forward, and think about how satisfied we are about something we did or plan to do.

- Spending time with people we like is the biggest factor that causes happiness in our experiencing self.

- Money earned above $60,000 annually does not increase happiness, according to scientific studies.

- However, poverty definitely causes unhappiness, with a person becoming progressively unhappier the further he or she falls below the $60,000 annual income mark.

An example that comes to my mind that sums this up: BP’s CEO’s Remembering Self probably feels very satisfied (understandably so) with his life accomplishments and earnings. But his Experiencing Self, not feeling much support from other people right now, is probably not happy, notwithstanding his income being substantially higher than $60k.

These 7 tips describe very practical approaches and attitudes for life challenges. The quoted tip below reminds me of the Supreme Court, and all the confirmation-process talky-talk where Justices are described with labels like “activists” (bad label) or “umpires” (good label). Behind all the labels and analogies, as well as behind the intellectual rationalizations of complex legal decisions, there are concrete benchmarks– actions by the Justices– that are much more predictable and telling than what is said about and by the Justices. Is a Justice an “umpire,” as described, or do the Justice’s actions on occasion reflect idealism and contradict the umpire ideal? Not to pick on Justices. This is something we all struggle with, to make sure our actions constantly back up our stated ideals.

1. Andrew Carnegie on paying attention to the more important things.

“As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.”

I have to agree, I pay less and less attention to what people say. Because in the end, what someone does is the most important thing. Talking is easy, but walking your talk is harder. And walking it consistently even though you fall, slip back into old habits and make mistakes is a huge part of success.

These 7 tips describe very practical approaches and attitudes for life challenges. The quoted tip below reminds me of the Supreme Court, and all the confirmation-process talky-talk where Justices are described with labels like “activists” (bad label) or “umpires” (good label). Behind all the labels and analogies, as well as behind the intellectual rationalizations of complex legal decisions, there are concrete benchmarks– actions by the Justices– that are much more predictable and telling than what is said about and by the Justices. Is a Justice an “umpire,” as described, or do the Justice’s actions on occasion reflect idealism and contradict the umpire ideal? Not to pick on Justices. This is something we all struggle with, to make sure our actions constantly back up our stated ideals.

1. Andrew Carnegie on paying attention to the more important things.

“As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.”

I have to agree, I pay less and less attention to what people say. Because in the end, what someone does is the most important thing. Talking is easy, but walking your talk is harder. And walking it consistently even though you fall, slip back into old habits and make mistakes is a huge part of success.