Labor Day is a recurring event in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between August 10, 2021 and August 06, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "If you're in the US, be careful around Labor Day weekend"; "never wear white after Labor Day"; "If you're in the US, be careful around Labor Day weekend since a lot of people will be away". It most often appears alongside ACX, Aztecs, Scott.
- Article page
- Labor Day
- Mention count
- 6
- Issue count
- 6
- First seen
- August 10, 2021
- Last seen
- August 06, 2025
Outbound links
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221104130431/https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/1m-bet-rules
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221129133112/https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaim-accepts-500000-challenge-on-covid-vaccine-safety-efficacy/
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221224061743/https://www.skirsch.com/covid/SaarWilf.pdf
- https://archive.ph/pY4gF#selection-663.103-683.190
- https://web.archive.org/web/20230104080248/https://www.rootclaim.com/
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/business/media/heather-cox-richardson-substack-boston-college.html
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
Since I will post the list of meetup times and dates around August 23, please choose sometime after that. I recommend a weekend since it's when most people are available. Late August, September, or early October would all be fine - some people have mentioned the weather doesn’t get bearable in their city until October, so they might want to hold off until then. If you're in the US, be careful around Labor Day weekend since a lot of people will be away. If you’re in a college town, maybe wait until school starts.
1: My parents’ and grandparents’ generations had lots of weird rules about fashion like “never wear white after Labor Day”. I’d always been baffled by this kind of stuff - why not? What would happen if you did? In 1922, someone wore a straw hat after official stop-wearing-straw-hats date September 15, leading to the week-long Straw Hat Riot in New York and several hospitalizations.
Inline links: Straw Hat Riot
Since I’ll post the list of meetup times and dates around August 24, please choose sometime after that. I recommend a weekend since it's when most people are available. You’ll probably get more attendance if you schedule for at least one week out, but not so far out that people will forget - so September or early October would be best. If you're in the US, be careful around Labor Day weekend since a lot of people will be away. If you’re in a college town, maybe wait until school starts.
Adraste: Is that so bad? All of our best holidays have begun as anti-holidays to neutralize older rites. Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration. Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre. Hanukkah was originally a minor celebration of a third-tier Bible story; American Jews bumped it up several notches of importance in order to neutralize Christmas. Labor Day was invented to screw up Communists’ attempts to coordinate around May Day as a labor protest holiday. This isn’t something modern liberals invented. It’s a tradition as old as the West. Give anti-holidays enough time and they become proper celebrations; in a hundred years, your descendants will be horrified at the thought of missing an Indigenous Peoples’ Day observance!
Fashion is a set of rules, like “don’t wear white after Labor Day”. Why shouldn’t you wear white after Labor Day? Google tells me that it’s because in the old days, it was hard to keep white clothes clean in the autumn, so if you wore them anyway, it seemed like boasting that you could afford a staff of hard-working maids, and boasting is uncultured. This sort of kind of makes sense. But I find it hard to believe that people were ever really going around deeply offended at other people’s implied braggadocio when they wore a white shirt in late September. It seems more like the sort of thing someone came up with as a clever rule that could sort of be justified, and then announced to great fanfare in a fashion column. Presumably that person was important enough that other people listened, and then afterwards anyone who saw someone wear white after Labor Day had an instinctive cringe reaction: “Wow, what a faux pas”.
We saw this in our discussion of architecture too. Someone proposed that if you insist on having fake shutters as ornament on your windows, they should at least be the right size to actually shutter your windows - otherwise it’s tacky and unrealistic. Most people said they’d never thought about this before and didn’t care, but - fine - I agree if you think about it really hard, there’s some sort of extremely vague sense in which this resembles being true, the same sort of vague fake sense where it makes sense that you shouldn’t wear white after Labor Day. Get enough people like this together, and then if you use the wrong kind of shutters you’re “not sophisticated” and “don’t really understand architecture”.
People enjoy each other’s company and keep having meetups throughout the year. The form will ask you to pick a location, time, and date, and to provide an email address where people can reach you for questions. It will also ask a few short questions about how excited you are to run the meetup to help pick between multiple organizers in the same city. One meetup per city will be advertised on the blog, and people can email you if they have questions. Organizing an ACX Everywhere meetup can be easy. Pick a time and a place (parks work well if you think there will be a lot of people, cafes or apartments work fine for fewer) and show up with a sign saying “ACX Meetup.” You don’t need to have discussion plans or a group activity. If you want to make the experience better for people, you can bring nice things like nametags/markers, food/drinks, or games. Meetups Czar Skyler can reimburse you for the nametags, markers, food, and drinks. If you feel more ambitious, collect people’s names and emails if they’re interested in future meetups. You could do this with a pen and paper, or if you’re concerned about reading people’s handwriting you could use a QR code/bitly link to a Google Form. Here’s a short FAQ for potential meetup organizers: 1. How do I know if I would be a good meetup organizer? If you can put a name/time/date in a box on Google Forms and show up there, you have the minimum skill necessary to be a meetup organizer for your city, and I recommend you sign up. Don't worry, you signing up won't randomly take the job away from someone else. The form will ask people how excited/qualified they are about being an organizer, and if there are many options, I'll choose whoever I think is best. (Or whoever Meetup Czar Skyler thinks is best.) But a lot of cities might not have an excited/qualified person, in which case I would rather the unexcited/unqualified people sign up, than have nobody available at all. This spreadsheet shows the cities where someone has filled out the form, updated manually after a basic check. Lots of cities have existing meetup groups and we’ll probably prioritize them, but we always appreciate more options. Sometimes people assume their city is big enough that someone else will do it, nobody signs up before the announcement, and then afterwards people say they wish there was a meetup in their city. Beware the Bystander Effect! If you are the leader of your city’s existing meetup group, please fill in the form anyway and say so. 2. How will people hear about the meetup? You give me the information, and on August 24 (or so), I’ll post it on ACX. An event will also be created on LessWrong’s Community page. 3. When should I plan the meetup for? Since I’ll post the list of meetup times and dates around August 24, please choose sometime after that. Any day September 1st through October 31st is okay. I recommend a weekend, since it's when most people are available. You’ll probably get more attendance if you schedule for at least one week out, but not so far out that people will forget - so mid September or early October would be best. Check your local calendar for holidays where people might be busy: If you're in the US, that probably means avoid Labor Day and Halloween. 4. How many people should I expect? Last spring, meetups ranged from one person (just the organizer) to around two hundred. Meetups in big US cities (especially ones with universities or tech hubs) had the most people; meetups in non-English-speaking countries had the fewest. You can see a list of every city and how many people most of them got last time here. (If it’s blank, it means either no ACX Everywhere was run or we didn’t get a count of attendees in the post-event survey.`) Plan accordingly. 5. Where should I hold the meetup? A good venue should be easy for people to get to, not too loud, and have basic things like places to sit, access to toilets, and the option of acquiring food and water. City parks and mall common areas work well. If you want to hold the meetup at your house, remember that this will involve me posting your address on the Internet. 6. What should I do at the meetup? Mostly people just show up and talk. If you’re worried about this not going well, here are some things that can help: Have people indicate topics they’re interested in by writing something on their nametag