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Bay Area Transit (BART) a San Francisco institution is at risk of big cuts in service closing 15 stations, closing at 9 pm,  as work from home pandemic period changes cut ridership from 389000 in Jan 2020 to 170000 in Jan 2024. It now has a $400 million structural deficit. BART management proposes a half percentage point additional sales tax on counties in the San Francisco area- Alameda, Contra Costa, Mateo, Santa Clara, 1 percentage point addition in San Francisco. This may not address the problem fully as the ridership is declining not only because of the keyboard post pandemic economy, the fact that downtown San Francisco has a 30% vacancy rate in buildings and the lifestyles have changed from before, but also because it is less safe, reported use of crack, and a less clean friendly ride on BART. This shows how life in the San Francisco area has changed decades after Silicon Valley took over the city, and how the state of California has changed. Silicon Valley and Wall Street though it had changed America and the World when right in its own backyard institutions such as BART are falling apart, and downtowns are less safe. New York City home of Wall Street has a subway system also in bad shape, and infrastructure badly in need of repair right in the backyard of Wall Street, decades behind in quality of experience from anything found in China or Japan- and now even India. ...

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Adam Schiff Senator from California interview in Senate Office Feb 2026 Wash. Post- a Democrat joins the Agriculture Committee and attends farm bureau meetings. Adam Schiff talks about his role in Congress as a Democrat in Feb 2026 to deliver for the people of California for the 3 more years of the DJT administration. As Senator he sees himself as representing 40 million people of Califonria as opposed to the 800,000 people in his congressional district in the Los Angeles area. In that sense he has to take into account that DJT turned up a significant vote in California, exceeded only by Texas and Florida in 2024. He sounds ambivalent about his earlier positions opposing the president and the president's rhetoric. He has to work with administration offficals if he is to deliver on projects that help Californians. This is a position taken by Kathy Hochul governor of New York state, and by Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, both Democrats. Projects include saving a couple of rural hospitals and seeing to it that Department of Agriculture offices remain open in remote parts of California. He has sought out an assignment on the Senate Agriculture Committee. He now realizes that the Democrats have not done enough for Californians or for America, and had not looked for new ways to tackle tough problems-  working people voted for DJT he says “because they were struggling. They were working harder than ever. And they could barely get by. And the Democratic Party had come to be viewed as the party of a status quo. They found the status quo was deeply unsatisfactory.”  Like Ruben Gallego in Arizona there is a sense that a lot has to change in the Democratic party down to grassroots work and efforts which is why Schiff now attends farm bureau meetings up and down the state. ...

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Getting savy employers to pay attention and getting employees to have a better sense of who they are, provides the topic of this article in the WSJ. It shows that different types of employee behaviour can be seen after two years of the pandemic, and employers need to pay attention to their needs.  There are ambitious employees and work to live types. Work to live advocates have put lifestyle and health as priorities learning from the pandemic. The great resignation and employers facing worker shortages have given them an opportunity to look for more flexibility in work life situations. Related to work to live type are double duty professionals of which women form the larger part. During the pandemic women took on more responsibilities for children with lockdowns and school closures. This also meant a more stressful life. All of these types of employees are now in the workplace. Employers can get better results by paying careful attention to worker needs. The types are not exclusive as double duty professionals also have the drive and the resilience to match ambitious employees in tackling new positions and responsibilities. The double duty professionals also share the aspirations of work to live advocates for a better work life balance that gives rest and relaxation, home and family, the importance it deserves for a full and complete life. There is one more type which is also part of the workplace that is entirely different. It is the disoriented new employee who has been left alone to find out about new responsibilities at work virtually without the necessary human contact. Related to this type is the desperate to connect type which is the type that has lived in relative isolation during the pandemic and is now hungering for human contact. There is also one more type closer to retirement that is the zest for life type that can be very productive in the workplace because of its experience and talent if given the chance. This type is not just there for the paycheck or career progress. Here the zest for life means the desire to connect with others and learn new things. Companies and management can accomplish more and be more responsive to needs of their employees by understanding these types and their different needs. Dorie Clark ,who teaches executive education at Duke and Columbia University ,says this is important for companies to retain talented employees and get the most out of them by understanding early on what motivates them. ...

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Where does US president DJT get his "good genetics" for his health? It comes from his mother's side where for generations his grandparents and previous generations were fisherman on the shores of the northern British Isles islands. Specifically Tong, a village on the island of Lewis in Scotland. These were rugged coastlines where fisherman fought hard to make a living in the 19th century. His mother immigrated from Scotland to the US as a young girl seeking a better life. She later married a up and coming builder of homes in New York state.

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Shorter work hours can provide time for yoga classes, time with children, travel overseas, and other activities for a healthier and more satisfying life. This report in WSJ shows people in different professions from medicine to environmental engineering taking a different approach to life. After the pandemic there is a rethink of what is a better way to work and combine work with attention to healthier living. Healthier living provides the concentration power that enables doing a lot more work in fewer hours creating a new way of working with time for healthy activities outside work. WSJ shows how this works in the lives of 5 workers and their families. For many workers it is possible to earn close to what they made with longer hours by utilizing the time more effectively, with all the added benefit of healthier lives- this adds up over the years reducing many of the health problems that come from neglecting healthy activities during prime work years. 

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A short biography of one of India's best leaders after Gokhale, Tilak, Vivekananda, Mohandas Gandhi. He may well be the best leader of India after 1950- who set India on the course to modernization and becoming one of the 3 largest economies in the world. Without him one would find it hard to imagine Modi having the opportunity to make the experiment of modernization in Gujarat state in 2000, that is now being carried out throughout India. Nehru's leadership held great promise but like Mao's failed to achieve the modernizaton and rapid economic progress that both the Indian and Chinese people sought and aspired to. Much of this is achieved through hard work, and ambitious efforts, steady planning and investment, in cooperation with America and Europe. China in 2025 is with it's efforts to bring Taiwan into the PRC, is a different China than the one that modernized working with US, Germany and Japan over 2 decades. India under the leadership of Vajpayee and now Modi is in a position to work in cooperation with the US and Germany, Japan for modernization and rapid economic progress to show the vitality and strength of the parliamentary systems that have evolved from the British model for 500 years since 1500 and the scientific advancement that happened after the Renaissance in Europe after 1600. ...

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This report in the BBC shows the effect of the highly competitive nature of business in Sweden on young women who face burnout from long hours and lone achiever culture. The individualistic culture in Sweden where young people at an early age become independent also increases burnout compared to living in a culture that is friendlier and more community centred.

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What is life like for millions of laborers in the construction industry in India, for migrant workers, for household help, for small electrical and bicycle shops, for security workers, as India gradually reopens and more people get back to work. The Hindustan Times provides this look at pictures of these workers, their earnings during lockdown and their return to work.

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Laura Carstensen of Stanford Center of Longevity says half of the people over 65 years work for the money, and the other half love their work. For healthy people the brain and cognitive processing do not change into the age 60's and 70's. Instead of dividing one's life with today's outdated norm of early life for education, middle life for work and later life for leisure, what if we could weave education and leisure throughout our lives?

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US president DJT speaks at the Economic Club of Detroit, looking back at a year of rapid action on the US Border, Big Beautiful Bill, Tariffs action, Cutting Cost of Living action on several fronts, and action against drug/people trafficking by Venezuela, Mexico. Highlights of the speech which comes to a state that decided the 2016 election for DJT and which is the center of America's automobile industry started by Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan. He had restored the automobile industry to the days when it was the leader in the world and when names such as Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan of General Motors, were the envy of the world, by bringing auto manufacturing back from places like Mexico, Japan and Germany. Back to America after years of reckless outshoring by American business under the Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, on the advice of equally reckless economists and advisors to these administrations. The president did not say this but this restoration continued in a different way for labor under the Biden administration that followed DJT policies but focused on the other side of the coin for the auto industry - protecting worker's wages by Biden standing on a picket line for the strike by unions for higher wages. After these wages were restored from years of outshoring and pressure on wages, the need to do the work of bringing companies back through tariffs on imports as leverage in tough negotiations with Japan, South Korea and Germany was left to DJT and his administration. The president stated clearly that the economists and predictions were proved wrong on tariffs as none of these predictions of tariffs passed on to American buyers have come true. As DJT made certain the companies not to lose their business in the US decided to avoid taking that road and acted to reduce their profit margins and costs. As Scott Bessent, a veteran of Wall Street and now Treasury Secretary who conducted these negotiations for DJT, has repeatedly pointed out the tariffs were a way to get these tough negotiators and their governments from Japan, S. Korea and Germany to cooperate. It is nowhere written in the code of fair conduct of nations that the US should helplessly after decades of letting these countries benefit put its workers out of work and its industries get destroyed, when the US was taking on the additional burden of protecting these nations from hostile neighbors. ...

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How the pandemic changed how a new generation sees work success and health priorities in life. Young people in their thirties describe their experiences in life before and after the pandemic and the challenges at work in careers that made them think about the importance of health and mental health in the twenties and and thirties, so that by middle age 40-60 years the do not face health problems. A deterioration in health that they see in the population of older people makes young people ask questions how to incorporate healthy living as a top priority in their choices.

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Carter's work for Habitat for Humanity continued right up to 2019, five years before his death at 100 years. This report shows a picture of Carter and wife Rosalynn after he had 14 stitches from a fall at his home, still back to a Habitat for Humanity site in Nashville in 2019,  at 95 years of age. It shows Carter at sites in New York City in 1984, and the couple doing wood work at a site in 1992.

In addition to eradication of Guinea worm and other parasitic diseases in Africa Jimmy Carter lived a life right out of the Biblical teachings that he delivered at Sunday School at a local church in Georgia.

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What the future can look like for a Ford Motor workers family, in which a husband and wife work long hours, 12 hours shifts with overtime, 7 days a week just to make ends meet. Dave and Bailey Hodge are shown here and tell their story to the NYT.

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Ruffenach gives an excellent account of how many people describe their expectations and how it actually turned out in retirement, the good and the bad. He cites numerous examples to give as broad based a picture as possible. Health and active life, passions and interests, loss of self esteem in work for some and finding substitute interests, taking risks to try something new and the rewards. More people describe positive experiences in those surveyed. Health is the main concern for 41% in actual retirement, children and other things are all less than 10%. Travel should be planned early as it becomes harder as the years go by and one gets older. It is not as difficult as people think to make new friends in retirement, and this active social life with new friends can play a positive part in spending time. In addition there is the opportunity in retirement to take things slowly and leisurely, and spend time more on oneself and one's own interests.

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Office buildings are being turned into apartments in large American cities like this one at 55 Broad Street in New York City. Hybrid work has made the huge office space of daily commuters obsolete. Subways and transport is also used at a fraction of its capacity. The remote working trend is sending vacancies soaring in office markets in the US and in the big cities. Businesses using hybrid work are leasing less space and migrating to newer buildings with modern designs, good locations, outdoorsy feeling, and abundant amenities.

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Astonishing distortion of a concept that is basically about better designing cities to reflect lessons learned from the pandemic and the importance of quality of life, worklife balance, healthy lifestyles. It involves bicycling to work popular in countries such as Netherlands and other parts of Europe. Utrecht in the Netherlands is a model city for this concept of working closer to where one lives and being able access sports, exercize activities, and community social meeting places within short distances. Because this is in line with climate change action where it is important to reduce huge carbon footprint of transportation and use of fossil fuels to get to and from work, and also promotes healthy lifestyles, community living, it is an idea that makes sense.

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Quiet quitting has become a phrase that means workers are working hard and doing things the way they did before, except that they are not letting a work culture that may have gone astray because of bosses  who set the wrong rules guide their lives. Even as companies such as Stellantis are taking on a new culture because of a new respect for workers work-life balance and getting a lot more from them, other companies are following older set patterns that did not include work-life balance or rejected work-life balance outright without saying this openly. Stellantis, Europe's largest car company itself shows why this is dependent on who is the CEO and what he believes in. The previous CEO had poor health habits including frequent smoking and irregular long hours without a structure of any sort that led to this being carried over into the work culture. The CEO changes and new rules are set and soon it permeates who is hired at different levels that are consistent with his habits and sense of work life balance. A new culture develops over time and gradually you have new work ethic that respects the mental health and fitness of workers and of managers, and that of the CEO. This report in WSJ starts with the premise that workers should'nt feel bad because worker are "quiet quitting" anyway after the pandemic. But in reality the statement is a bad one, as it does not say there are better models out there few as they are, that need to take pre-eminent place after the pandemic rejecting the old ones that recklessly ignored health and mental health and were less motivating for workers, and leading to less productive culture in the workplace. At Stellantis a lot gets done in regular hours so that the time after 5 or 6 pm is devoted to workers getting into exercize taking a bike ride, doing things that revitalize and build a healthy body and mind so essential for productive and good thinking type concentration in work. Emails over weekends need not be replied till Monday, and bringing up work during the weekend is discouraged. And still a lot gets done, the company will take the leading role in EV vehicles in Europe and has aggressive plans for 2030 for new EV models. See the link to Stellantis to see how this new CEO runs a company of about 100,000 employees around the world. His name is Carlos Tavares and he took charge of Fiat, Peugeot, Chrysler combined operations called Stellantis in January 2021. This is important as it is the new trend that will take hold of the work culture after the pandemic only if workers and managers ask that it be so and as the word spreads that better more productive companies that can get a lot more done is the result of such an educated workplace that respects health and mental health, and the dignity of workers and families. Look, how can it not be so when the word still has to be spread on climate change in the business world? How can one take place without the other? There is a new sense of dignity in respecting the dignity of the environment, of water, soil, and air, how not so for the mind, the body and its connection to nature around it? And no better place than Stellantis and its CEO Carlos Tavares where the old CEO ran himself down with poor work and health habits and passed away while at work in 2018, to show a new way.  In Germany this new way of work-life balance based work culture is called by a more respectful term "Feierabend" than "quiet quitting" showing that what is wrong is with the work culture and bosses who do not grasp the importance of health, mental health, and what it means to be revitalized for truly productive and thoughtful work. Quiet quitting has that sense of workers having to feel a bit of guilt about this and still thinking it is right  doing it anyway. In Germany"feierabend" is popular and accepted, it means breaking away from work at normal times such as 5 pm or 6 pm when a workday ends so that one can go out and relax with a bike ride  or something that is good for health and fitness and rejuvenates. No email, no nothing so the mind can rest and revitalize. ...

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The world would need 3 Germanys to provide the resources that one Germany consumes today. Earth Overshoot Day looks at the sustainable resources and how much each country consumes of resources. By July 28 planet earth had already consumed all the natural resources it could sustainably regenerate for the year. Experts say Earth would need three quarters of another Earth to provide the amount of resources consumed by our planet today. Everything makes a difference as European Union plans to cut energy use by 15%. Drying clothes on a line instead of in the dryer, shorter hot water baths, turning off lighting for monuments in cities, changing household lights to LED's, lowering the thermostats by a few degrees in winter, cutting out meat for just one or two days a week. The way Overshoot Day works out the arithmetic 1970 was the year when Earth passed the line where sustainable resources that could be regenerated and the consumption of these resources were equal. From then on it was a wild spree in places like Germany and then China, and it is how countries like India take up the work of renewable energy and limiting use of valuable resources that will affect the future. ...

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Brad Stulberg reflects in this article on the idea of groundedness and how it creates internal strength and a sense of fulfillment in life. The pandemic has worsened mental health and created the need to reflect on living a better healthier life. Here he points out that one needs to accept the present, the mess of vulnerabilities he says we find ourselves in, as a natural part of life. To build on a good process that gets us there. This means clarity, simplicity, and concentration so that one does not end up wasting one's energies in different directions. Focus on one or two tasks, what he calls deep focus work, play and connection. Experts say it is not true that there are sudden leaps in performance. Most work is diligently done each step preparing ne for the next step which eventually with patience and persevering on tasks brings results. They only appear to be sudden achievements, but always build on work done before patiently and step by step. This can be seen in the work of recent Nobel prize winners in science who have worked on a new discovery for decades with failures that were overcome, and obstacles that were surmounted with patient work day after day. Stolberg quotes St. Augustine and the Buddha on the importance of close knit groups, companionship and being part of a deep community. When Buddha's disciple Ananda says this is half of the spiritual life, Buddha says in response -  not so, this deep community is the whole spiritual life. Stolberg's new book is "The Practice of Groundedness." Much of this is also seen as important in the Bhagavad Gita and in Christianity- the ideas of simplicity and concentration in life on just one or two tasks, the clarity of mind that comes from this free of tensions.  The Cistercian monasteries all over Europe in the Middle Ages attest to this. One such abbey the restored Abbey of Fontenay in France, embodies this idea. Written about the restored abbey are the words- "The sun brings life to the austere bareness of Cistercian architecture, the way God's light spreads grace through the simplicity loving souls of the monks." ...

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About 2.5 million women in the US have experienced burnout as a result of unequal demands of home and work life. Women have borne the brunt of childcare and work inside the home during the pandemic. Working women have two jobs, one at home and one at work, resulting in them being more prone to burnout as demands increase.

With the closure of schools childcare became a constant and many women quit work so that husbands could continue working. This affected the mental health of women with loss of work and professional life, and increased stress of work at home during the pandemic. Women also put on extra weight as a result. Experts say that the way societal structures and gender norms intersect plays a significant role in women experiencing burnout more than men.

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People in Japan are living longer healthier lives. So much so that people are working well into their 70's. In Nagano, Japan, people say that those in their 40's and 50's are like a child with a runny nose, and people in their 60's and 70's are in the prime of their careers. In this WSJ report, 38 years old Norohiro Aizawa is a part time farmer, who says he plans to work into his 70's like many farmers in Japan. Today his father in his early 70's is active and in charge. Sachiko Kobayashi runs a crafts business, has a job making box lunches, and a garden full of pumpkins and radishes. She is 65 and gets up at 3 am. In Nagano she is called by the term pre-elderly, not elderly. For elderly she has a long way to go. Japan has 29% of the population in under over 65 years group, Europe 21% and US 17%. Yet something else is happening. People are just taking better care of themselves and their health, and living, working longer. A 70 year old today in Nagano is in health status like a 60 year old one or two generations ago. Perceptions of what is elderly have changed.    Japan's White Paper on the Elderly in 2021 shows studies suggesting that many in the 65-74 year group do not share traits associated with the term elderly.  Only 6% require care by others. Half of 65-69 year olds hold jobs, and a third of those in their early 70's also hold jobs. Life expectancy in Japan stretches into the late 80's for women, and early 80's for men. This is almost 5-8 years more than countries like the UK with a strong national health service. In April 2021 a revised Employment Law took effect, telling big employers to offer work to workers until age 70, up from previously government sanctioned retirement age of 65 years. Government says it is meant to protect the right of people to work longer. There is even a term called late-elderly.  Oshima 82 of Nagano, leads a volunteer group that shoots video of community festivals and works late into the night, and is cited in this WSJ story as saying that even if people called him late elderly, his response is oh yeah? I don't care. It is all about living a full life, terms don't matter at all when one stays healthy.   ...

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Living longer and healthier lives the sixty year old of today may look like a 40 year old. Working years may now be much longer say experts. Instead of 30 years, it could be 40 or 50 years. People may need to engage with meaningful work longer to have the stimulation that comes from work that interests them. The work may even be broken up in increments of 20 years, each devoted to different areas of interest. Experts say the friendship and stimulation from work is better than that in bingo halls, beaches or on a golf cart. Working part time or going back to school is in the works. It makes more sense too to accumulate savings longer as the official social security retirement ages are being extended to beyond 66 years. In fact the only age group where labor participation is already growing is in the over 55 years age group. In this sense the struggle to preserve older pension schemes retiring early look more like a thing of the past, even though they arouse passions such as in mass protests in France on this issue. ...

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The term "lazy girl job" is a misnomer because it refers to work life balance choices made by women who prefer to do remote work, avoid micro manager bosses, and pay attention to health and exercise, lifestyle choices. Being able to take a walk midday and take a bike ride in the evening at 5.00 pm with work cut off times is a preference for many young people. It follows the trend of quiet quitting where lifestyle choices and health take precedence over existing flawed ways of work that ignore family, health and exercise needs. The pandemic has created a new awareness about what is important in life and a new set of priorities. Young people are following their heart.