Kudos! Met Our Fourth Goal, On to Our Fifth: Karōshi Prevention

If you’ve been watching our fundraiser headings, you’ll see our fourth goal, that of bonuses for Lambert, Jerri-Lynn and Nick plus other honoraria, was close to being met before your enthusiastic responses yesterdy to the “Double Your Donation” challenge.

And you blew past that target quickly! We are now more than halfway to our new target of $22,000 for Karōshi, aka burnout, prevention.

This year, we’ve had generous and modest gifts, and the latter are often particularly meaningful, since those donors often tell us they are on tight budgets but want to do what they can to support this community. Please give now at our Tip Jar if you haven’t had a chance to do so yet, by check, credit or debit card, or PayPal. And if you doing well, dig deep to bolster the donations from people who gave despite having limited means.

We are on our way to meeting our fifth target, support for extra manpower so we can keep the make our 365 day a year, just about 24/7 coverage more sustainable. If Yves the publisher and Yves the employee were two different people, Yves the employee would have gone on strike a long time ago.

Perhaps you’ve heard of karōshi, a Japanese word that translates roughly into “death by overwork”. The Guardian reported on this phenomenon:

Japan has again been forced to confront its work culture after labour inspectors ruled that the death of a 31-year-old journalist at the country’s public broadcaster, NHK, had been caused by overwork.

Miwa Sado, who worked at the broadcaster’s headquarters in Tokyo, logged 159 hours of overtime and took only two days off in the month leading up to her death from heart failure in July 2013….

Sado’s death is expected to increase pressure on Japanese authorities to address the large number of deaths attributed to the punishingly long hours expected of many employees.

Admittedly, Yves did sneak away to Maine this year after having been so fortunate as to have Lambert, Jerri and Nick cover for her when she was getting her titanium hips…but did you even much notice her absence? Perhaps that was due to the great job everyone on this site does, but it was also due to Yves taking off as little time as possible…including working on her nominal vacation. Jerri also had not one but two urgent needs for treatment, but you readers are lucky enough that everyone pitched in to work around these schedule changes.

Even though your generous support of the site have allowed her to have a day and a half off from posting every week, and shift more of daily Links duty to Lambert, this hasn’t translated into more personal time for Yves. Even on her days off from posting, Yves is managing the business of the site, discovering and responding to e-mails she embarrassingly didn’t see, sometimes catching up on research, and often vetting story ideas or articles pitched to her.

A big reason that the site consumes more writing/production time than in the past is that we’ve kept improving our output and expanding our beats. Our Links section used to be 25-30 links. It is now 55 and sometimes more.

Similarly, in runup to the crisis, when anyone who knew about finance was a one-eyed man in the land of the blind, many of our posts had only a few hundred words of commentary on an extract or extracts from news articles. Now, a significant portion of what Naked Capitalism does is quick turn-around political economy analysis of a very high caliber. We often produce think tank level work but with the aim of stripping away obfuscation and holding people accountable. That means more writer time on average per post.

We joke that we run the site with 1.6 people, although with our increased commitment as a result of Covid-19, it might be up to 1.8 writer equivalents. Regardless of the precise figure, it’s a way to highlight that we provide a remarkable level of output and the consistency of coverage with very thin resources.

The amount we are seeking for this target, $22,000 for weekend, holiday, and “shit happens” support.. We hope you’ll recognize how essential this is and donate generously to keep Yves in fighting fettle and have other talented writers like Lambert and Jerri-Lynn Scofield contribute more regularly.

Donors keep sending kind notes. A sampling. From Phil P:

I still get the most from this site every day. I’ve gotten terrific book recommendations, articles, research, opinions, from the meaty to the tidbits to the personal to the questionable. All relevant to making sense of the world today. For a donation like this, it’s a bargain.

Please take care of yourself and the folks you work with.

And Jonathan D:

Very heart-felt thanks for all that you all are doing. It’s incredibly important, and no one else is even coming close to doing it.

There are multiple ways to give. The first is here on the blog, the Tip Jar, which takes you to PayPal. There you can use a debit card, a credit card or a PayPal account (the charge will be in the name of Aurora Advisors).

You can also send a check (or multiple post dated checks, if you want to spread out payments) in the name of Aurora Advisors Incorporated to

Aurora Advisors Incorporated
164 Peachtree Circle
Mountain Brook, AL 35213

Please also send an e-mail to yves@nakedcapitalism.com with the headline “Check is in the mail” (and just the $ en route in the message) so we can count your contribution in the total number of donations.

Our sick days, weekend and vacation coverage target is $21,000, and we are already over $4225 towards that goal. Thanks SO much for your generous support!