low-information voters into not voting?
We really will bend over backwards to avoid saying "idiots".
Ok, he was an "idiot" for thinking that black voters who didn't follow politics closely were dumb enough to fall for his stunt.
No amount of gaffes, nor even Biden's death, nor even Biden dropping out of the race and endorsing Trump, could convince democrats to vote for the worm brain RFK Jr. running against him.
It didn't say who the candidate was, there was a legit Democrat running against Biden at the start but he later dropped out.
I agree RFK Jr. was never winning the Democratic nomination in any circumstance.
Tell this guy. He was convicted for a meme that stupid people took seriously.
https://reason.com/volokh/2023...
You mean he tried to trick low-information voters into not voting?
If you try to mug someone and they kick your *ss you still go to jail.
If you try to illegally suppress voters and they don't fall for your BS you still go to jail.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politi...
It's an impersonation of Biden telling voters to save their vote for the November election. It would be a very concerning call if there wasn't a 100% guarantee of Biden winning the Democratic primary against what's-their-face.
Long shot candidate does better than expected in an early primary, then Biden has a couple of big gaffes, and things get interesting. Things are rarely as inevitable as they seem.
Besides, lowering prices in order to try and hide an obvious recession
Who is lowering prices?
What observables make you say there's an obvious recession?
How many decades too late?
is that someone developing AI for a tech giant will admit it
I think in general full time telecommuting does lead to lower productivity both in lower engagement, and in worse communication due to the loss of those (sometimes annoying) office interactions, not to mention the weaker bond between co-workers makes retention a bit tougher.
Found the little, petty middle-manager who’s too incompetent to measure work without having his cattle toiling in front of him, and who makes a power trip out of demanding petty, annoying stuff who wants to show he’s the boss!
I'm a fully remote co-founder of a startup who has deliberately avoided grabbing a fancy title and who has zero people reporting to me (and no real desire to change that).
But nice guess though.
So economists have studied this and the answer isn't obvious.
It seems (surprisingly to me) as if coercion could significantly improve the productivity of slaves. It's also the case that coercion was expensive, and some slave owners found it was easier to give their slaves relatively high levels of autonomy and even wages.
The economy in the confederate states significantly suffered after the US Civil War, seemingly more than would be expected just from losing the war.
Either way, there seems to be some evidence that in agriculture slaves were actually more productive than free labour due to the fact they couldn't take days off. It seems hard to square this possibility with the idea that the slaves were unprofitable for the slave owner themselves except for the fact that the price of slaves would tend to rise towards their level of expected value. The price of a prime aged slave was about $40k in modern dollars, it's hard to justify this price in the market if the slave provided negative value.
Honestly, this feels like one of those arguments where X is bad, so every single thing about X is also bad. I'm fine with the idea that slavery was horrific and morally wrong, but that it was profitable for slave owners and possibly even the society as a whole (though I'm more doubtful about this part).
At one point, possibly more than a decade ago, Switzerland changed traffic laws and gave pedestrians right of way at crossings.
That's how it works where I am, and pedestrians just walk out in front of oncoming cars without even looking up.
I think the law is backwards, because the person who screws up isn't the one who gets hurt. If cars had the right-of-way, then the person who screws up would be the one that gets hurt, perhaps motivating the pedestrian to look and think.
If you do a deep look at chattel slavery, between the poor productivity and outright hostility of a captive and the need to provide food, clothing , and shelter to avoid losing "assets". Imagine, a workforce that will be better off if they burn your house and fields and skedaddle kept in line with bosses ready to destroy your asset should it turn liability.
Really? Then explain why slavery was so ubiquitous in history? Did the majority of cultures make the exact same mistake?
There's resources needed to keep the slaves in line, but realistically, you just need to treat them well enough so that they're not willing to embrace their own certain deaths through revolt. And the biggest deterrent is local law enforcement that ensures that even if the slaves take over your house they're still screwed.
It was only seen as better by the owners because of limited analysis and vision. The slave owners SHOULD have been glad when slavery was over, but they weren't because they were dinosaurs who couldn't see past next week.
Again, this weird insistence that slave owners must have been deluded irrational actors acting against their own self-interest.
Why not accept the obvious? That slavery was pretty great for the slave owners, and that in spite of that fact it was still extremely wrong! If you actually think on it the argument you're pursuing is actually fairly problematic. If it could be shown that slavery was not only good for the slave owners but the overall productivity of the society do you think that slavery would be justifiable? Because your argument kind of implies that.
A lot of people work worse and more error prone if they feel like someone is breathing down their neck.
Looking over shoulder != breathing down their neck.
Most people do need a bit of pressure to be at their most productive, that's pretty much the core of a procrastinator, which most people are to some extent.
Sure, there's people who maintain high productivity with no external pressure or close oversight but they're rare.
Agreed WFH is an over-all positive for both employer and employee.
This is the argument that bugs me. WFH is a positive for the employer in the sense that it reduces wages and real estate costs to some extent, but I think the productivity cost is real and negative for some employers.
This claim that WFH is clearly a positive for employers (and explain away all the employers against it as somehow corrupted/delusional) just feels like an attempt to dodge the fact that it's a trade-off.
Let me frame it another way. I think we can both agree that chattel slavery was a very bad thing and it's a good thing it was banned (in most of the planet).
However, it was probably in the economic interest of slave owners for it to continue.
The argument against slavery isn't "oh, it was bad for the slave owners and the slave so everyone will be happy when it's gone". The argument is "even if it was good for the slave owners it was horrific for the slaves and the cost to the slave owners from abolition is nothing compared to the benefit of the now freed slaves".
Not to say that working in an office is remotely comparable to slavery, just that for something to be a good thing doesn't mean every single party involved has to like it.
Part of that is just lack of imagination on management's part. Why not set up a chat roulette server for employees and ask that they give it a spin every so often mid-day? Or SMALL video chats every once in a while between team members?
Possibly, but I don't think it's as effective as in person.
I wonder how much of the lost "productivity" management feels was actually just them not being able to cube farm, which was never a productive activity at all.
I think there are a lot of people who work better with the feeling that someone is looking over their shoulder.
Meanwhile, I'll bet that if the employer had to pay for gas, vehicle maintenance, and commute time, the urge to RTO would vanish over-night. Except, that is, in cases where upper management has an investment in the real-estate or a need to make their own long-term leasing decision appear to have been well thought out. Arguably, both of those are actually conflicts of interest that possibly rise to the level of malfeasance that should be investigated.
Upper-management personally owning the real estate could be malfeasance, just trying to justify a bad decision wouldn't be.
As for gas & commute time, those are are paid by the employees so not a cost to management, which is the core of my argument.
WFH has a slight productivity loss with a relatively small reduction in expenses (it's hard to downside offices) and the lease isn't that big compared to salary, so it totally makes sense for management to want people back in the office.
However, it's a big increase in life satisfaction for the employee, not to mention a reduction in commuting expense. So overall, WFH is an overall positive even with the productivity loss.
Why is it considered news when someone says something that is 100% predictable?
The only commitments corporations have are to their shareholders.
Which is about the most damning thing you can say about them.
Is an individual's only commitment to acquire the most money possible? Would/should we ever expect them to do anything else?
New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. - David Letterman
