There’s a big reason airports and resorts are booked up this summer: Americans are taking off work and vacationing more than they have in over a decade. In some cases, their employers are forcing them to. From a report: The pandemic, along with jitters about a potential recession, dampened U.S. workers’ eagerness to take paid time off in recent years. Now, many vacation-bound employees say they’re over such worries. More working adults took vacation days in the first half of 2023 than they did in prepandemic years, according to data from the Labor Department.

Company vacation calendars show more workers are checking out, and for longer stretches, this summer. The number of employees logging vacation days climbed 11% in June compared with the same month in 2022 and 20% compared with June 2021, according to human-resources technology firm Gusto, which tracks time-off requests from workers at more than 300,000 small and midsize businesses. The amount of time they took off also rose, by 5% from last year to an average 32 hours.

[…] Many executives say they are also getting away for longer breaks, even if they don’t fully unplug from work. In a July survey by executive search firm Korn Ferry, 53% of the nearly 300 professionals polled said they planned to take a longer summer vacation this year than in years past. While a quarter said they never connect with work while on vacation, half said they do so once or several times a day.

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Source: Slashdot – US Employees Are Vacationing More Than They Have in Over a Decade

A coalition of a half-dozen open-source AI stakeholders — Hugging Face, GitHub, EleutherAI, Creative Commons, LAION and Open Future — are calling on EU policymakers to protect open source innovation as they finalize the EU AI Act, which will be the world’s first comprehensive AI law. From a report: In a policy paper released this week, “Supporting Open Source and Open Science in the EU AI Act,” the open-source AI leaders offered recommendations âoefor how to ensure the AI Act works for open source” — with the “aim to ensure that open AI development practices are not confronted with obligations that are structurally impractical to comply with or that would be otherwise counterproductive.”

According to the paper, “overbroad obligations” that favor closed and proprietary AI development — like models from top AI companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google — “threaten to disadvantage the open AI ecosystem.” The paper was released as the European Commission, Council and Parliament debate the final EU AI Act in what is known as the “trilogue,” which began after the European Parliament passed its version of the bill on June 14. The goal is to finish and pass the AI Act by the end of 2023 before the next European Parliament elections.

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Source: Slashdot – Hugging Face, GitHub and More Unite To Defend Open Source in EU AI Legislation