(a) Treating human labor/capital as investment opportunity: One of the very first things talked about is reducing labor turnover, and being willing to re-train and invest in degree attainment by the existing staff - the story reports about a box-packer who got an MBA, very reminiscent of how AT&T and other larger vertically integrated companies in the post-WWII period would commit to an employee. Possibly this is a sign of a sea change in staff-management relations.

(b) Treating Supply-chain logistics as a core company competency (not something you can outsource for a quarterly report stock bump). This right here is one of the single largest roadblocks in my experience for manufacturers, if you don't understand the 2nd and 3rd hops in your supply chain, you are doomed. You dont need to own the supplier, but you darned well better understand their inputs and outputs since without their output going smoothly, your very expenive automated just-in-time factory will sit idle. Either pay for supply chain security (as Newell seems to do here), or get intrusive into your suppliers business (see Toyota, GM, etc.). Personally I think the first strategy (consider higher supplier costs to be an investement!).

(c) Ignoring the short term appearance of 'gain' from one time events like offshoring - classical accounting and bookkeeping can't tell the difference between a one-time gain for moving your factory to China, and the repeatable income for a sustainable business, they are both inflows of cash. It takes a longer time horizon, and prediction of future income in the face of realistic market activity to discriminate.

(d) Pride in your work. Right in the article they talk about the pens selling for $1 each, after $2 BILLION in investment in a 26 year old factory in Tennessee. They could easily have doubled the unit price and kept all the production in China, the CEO would have had a very nice new Gulfstream and yacht, instead he pushed for investment for long term sustainability, and considered customer retention through price and quality to be more important than personal immediate income. Shockingly effective...

The NBC reporting fails to ask an important question, is there a statistical analysis or underlying data-collection reason for the revision? At minimum the super-fine-tuned BS-detector you claim to be using should look for a counter-factual just to be sure this isnt a "vibe" reaction.

For a little more information WSJ asked the BLS folks about reasons and here's what they reported:

If this statement is to believed (and you may be correct about the pressure applied by Trump's staff, but I doubt the full magnitude of the attribution of malice you intuit given the fact as others have pointed out the new BLS head hasn't even been confirmed yet) then two noticeable things are involved:

• a. The BLS is using a very noise impaired data-collection method, they randomly sample employers. As an employer I have myself received BLS survey forms, but not regularly, in 13 years of paying salaried employees I have received the survey twice. It's a pretty nifty web-based data-entry system now (the prior survey I got in 2010 used paper reporting!!) but it still isnt frequent enough to detect a trend from any specific company. I imagine the BLS thinks they are doing a super-nifty good job with fancy statistical sampling algorithms to "fix" the sampling, but honestly I wonder why we are sampling at all, because:
• b.This very correction is based on actual payroll TAX reports - that's the supposedly iron-clad proof. Tax reports are made under penalty of perjury, and involve lots and lots of ways to get fined or jailed if you play hanky panky with them, and late reporting is usually a sign of either severe distress and/or theft, so there is at least a minimum threshold expected in the completeness and honesty of the data, whereas the sampled data is said (again by BLS) to have a self-selection bias by the very entities making the reports ('those that had been selected for the survey but didn’t respond'). The tax data has to be computerized for the state and local bureaurocracies to manage, so it seems hardly much effort not use sampling anymore. That would delay the jobs reports, but reduce the sampling noise and possibly restore some trust in the numbers?

•  

Also it sounds like maybe the story now is that this was triggered by a new database from Palantir using 'AI' to scan databases and applications looking for mortgage fraud. I haven't seen any direct connections reported (yet), but if this was the source of the complaint, imagine the sudden enforcement of every mostly ignored law in the 180,000 pages of the US Code of Federal Regulations, and the 110,000 pages in the US Federal Register. That's a lot of law breaking. There's no way the courts could possibly process them all, so there will be a lot of selective enforcement.

Why should this scare the living s**t out of everyone? Imagine the number of cross-tabs required to find just this one kind of violation from all those pages, and tell me that a human could reasonably do this at large scale? AI doing it? If you have enough data-center resources then searching every database of home titles, closings, the dates of the mortgage approvals and the application form checkbox for "I intend to occupy this property as my primary residence" for... $430 BILLION dollars in mortgage originations.... not actually that hard.

How is that not selective enforcement? Literally they selected the person to investigate, found something wrong on some form that was filed and now we have a national crisis. If the rule had been written such that the tradeoff of discouraged behavior and revenue, vs. side-effects and costs meant every mortgage was scrutinized, there wouldn't be a lurking un-prosecuted crime/ethics violation. Instead we have a rarely prosecuted crime available to use as political weapon. I don't hear many people saying "You know, maybe we should eliminate that law because it's ripe for prosecutorial abuse".

TFA wants to pass a law to make it a crime to change your mind about hiring someone without telling LinkedIn the job is no longer open. Yes its an ethical lapse on the part of "Evil-mega-corp", and yes it makes it much harder for the average job seeker to find a job. Job search friction from poor planning by employers is bad. But legal friction created by adding more laws is also bad, and likely worse than the original ailment! We could blindly assume it will only be used for good, but we have lots and lots of evidence it wont be used at all, until someone discovers they can use it for political leverage. Seems like a self-own to me.

Kind of like those darned mortgage application forms which you have to sign under penalty of perjury? Selective prior enforcement of even a very trivial rule/law is why suddenly a few congress people and Federal Reserve employees are finding out that we've become exactly like Laverenty Beria's Soviet Union Give me the man, and I will give you the case against him.

I'm pretty sure Stalinist Soviet "law enforcement" is not supposed to be a how-to guide for the 21st century.

Actually I'm pretty sure you wouldn't like how something like this would be enforced, the actual day to day operation of labor laws have the exact same properties as laws in general 'Laws are like sausages, it's better not to see them being made' - and I would add better not to see how they are enforced, because when a rule like this cannot actually be enforced without draconian intrusive measures, that is _EXACTLY_ what the government (state, local or federal) will do.

As a small employer I am barraged with lots of "friendly" and "helpful" rule-makings and regulations that are meant to ensure giant "Evil-Corp" never does "Evil-thing" again like the last great market meltdown, and all I need to do to follow this rule is fill in this "one little form". At the core, these are unfunded mandates for paperwork, and on a large scale they act to suppress company creation. Like this example - would it be illegal to hire yourself as an employee of your own LLC without posting the job online for 4 days before you start working for yourself? That may not be what the TJAAA was meant to combat, but theres a much larger than even odds that the law and the departments of labor that have to enforce this brilliant idea end up scooping up exactly this.

Anyone working at an employer that has an HR department who gets involved in hiring can tell you horror stories on the other side: Project Engineer: "we have to meet a deadline and need to hire a machine operation for this 2 week temporary job" HR response: "you need to fill in this 150 page request form and we have to post the job publicly for a week and you have to review all 2555 resumes we receive"

Oh, because Microsoft is totally unable to pretend to consent to the change, and not revert the TOS as soon as the bug fix is resolved? The expectation that they wouldn't unwind the change immediately seems a bit naive.

You'd need something much stronger than a vulnerability, you'd need to gain permanent data blackmail advantage to get that kind of change to last.

I've tried reaching out to local and state politicos and NFIB and other 'small business' interest groups about this - automation would tend to move in the direction of capital because it costs money to purchase a robot or robo-taxi etc. - but the concentration of capital that results from this is toxic in the long run for the community and the businesses that use automation. At some point not only will the low skilled labor jobs disappear, but the next ripple is that the technicians to keep those very self-same machines will disappear... (c.f.: industrial machining, US/North-America, 1990 to present).

My modest (no hyperbole intended) suggestion is that robo-taxis are a perfect test-case for resolving the Universal-Basic-Income dillema - we (American) generally dont give money to people for nothing, but we're very happy to subsidize and leverage government guarantees to give individuals access to capital (c.f.: mortgages) and that works hugely to grow markets AND get individuals to become stakeholders in their physical/local community through home ownership. In the same way providing financial backstops for owning/operating/maintaining robo-taxis would be an ideal way to provide effectively a Universal-Basic-Income using already existing systems like mortgages and public/private banking. Fund/support the purchase of robo-taxis by individuals, resulting in income for the people owning the robo-taxis, and now they can work a small amount of time to do basic car care & maintenance, and (hopefully) end up with a stable income source.

The only problem is that today there is no limit on the number of robo-taxies a corporation can own and gather profits from, so right now Cruise, Uber and others need merely tap their much cheaper capital to grow their fleets. This completely eliminates any likely entrant into the market to operate robo-taxis regardless of whether the machines themselves are purchasable on the open market - Uber can get every dollar to purchase such a car cheaper than you can, and the more they buy, the more power concentrates there. But if there as an ownership limit, coupled with robust GSE funding (FreddyMac) that would actually result in Uber growing faster even than they can now with direct financial operations.

Comments? Drawbacks I havent seen (yes I know its pretty pie the sky given today's political market, but one can at least ponder a liberty inducing solution to a rapidly growing crisis...)

Apple bought PARISC just for the engineers (not the IP), worked good for them, the IP acquired was obsolete but that team went onto making the ARM based processors for phones, pads and M1 Mac’s. So it could be a good win if the Human Resources are good.

Question is, would Qualcomm be acquiring revenue positive groups with lots of young innovative engineers, or marginal legacy product IP that has short term diminishing revenue with some ‘essential’ staff attached?

Uhh, did you not realize those listicles are limited so that you have to generate clicks? They measure engagement and harvest your eyeball-attention-usage data from those clicks. Even with JavaScript they don’t get much data from you scrolling through a page, but make it clickable and they can behaviorally profile your interest, consumption, and maybe even the person using the mouse, depending on whether we’re thinking Cambridge Analytica/Palintir level magic, or just make a good guess if you don’t believe in the BS. Either way listicles have not a single thing to do with data/bandwidth saving.

What’s the alternative though? Those same HR drones are maybe even _worse_ at resume analysis than a grep search, or they were the last time I had to work with one (hr drone) - they could not (or would not) tell the difference between a MS in Comp Eng. from a diploma mill and a 20 year veteran with a high school music cert (pro tip, the 20 year veteran was hands down the best software artist I’ve ever hired), they kept feeding me “highly qualified” people who were great at doing tests and paying tuition, but lousy at anything requiring independent thought, but then the HR drones were themselves bad at independent thought which is why they were in HR in the first place.

Humans are very bad at judging other people from paper resumes, computers are literal algorithms, even LLMs are limited by their training data, hiring is a risky business full of ways to do it wrong. Maybe we should do a better job teaching mid level developers to be talent scouts and ditch both the CV scanners and the basket-weaving degree holding HR drones?

Not sure if Lynch is somewhere on the spectrum (as in neurologically unable to judge his correspondent's attitude) or just as much of a scumbag as Sweeny (as the great statesman once said "Pity they can't both lose"), but apparently yes, yes he was mad, very mad. Mad enough to go to war with one of the largest companies on earth, lose epically (*snort*) in Federal Court, and keep on digging [cf: EU regulations of late]. At this point Sweeny is going to bankrupt Epic out of sheer spite against all the parties that seem hostile to him, and I'm not sure he's really wrong, just going about it in the most phyrric way possible.

So that begs the question, was Valve aware of how bad Sweeny is at persuasion and winning the long-game and they chose to purposely enrage him, or were they just as clueless about why all this rent-seeking makes the rest of the world hate them?

TFA

The authors mathematically correlate the recession with a reduction in mortality, this is non-controversial (that is if we agree that the mortality statistics are valid). What happens next is where I agree with Junta - this conclusion is some pretty broad hand waiving speculation that is certainly persuasive, but not actually justified as a proven fact:

(1) from Page5 of the article, the source data is CDC (for young people and all cause mortality) and Medicare data (for retiree mortality), Bureau of Labor Statistics for actual employment, EPA Air Quality data as a proxy for drivers of mortality from pollution, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey (BRFSS) to identify mortality driven by work activities, and Medicare Health and Retirement Survey for 2002-2014 to account for drivers of mortality amongst nursing home residents.

(2) they (page 10) then attempt to measure the "Shock" impact of the Great Recession in terms of mortality overall, in an attempt to remove confounders, they look at regional variations (between states) and level them out so as to approximate only the median effect of the recession upon Mortality (the claimed reduction),

(3) finally by page 20 the authors begin to make hypothesis about the causation of the decline (which pre-supposes their math in the above sections are sufficiently robust, as I am not a statistician I'll leave that debunking to others). The authors report first on "internal" effects which is about non-aggregate single-person behavior, like seeing your own doctor and eating healthily:

Then they look at external effects, communicable diseases, quality of healthcare, and then _finally_ pollution. They only consider these factors based on prior papers that suggest correlation, they don't provide a rational in the paper itself as to why you discount other possible sources of the change in mortality, so here's the first point where I think this is quite broad speculation masquerading as "hard statistical analysis":

Essentially they restrict the analysis to three possible causes, and with lack of proof of either of the first two analyzed causes they pull a Sherlock Holmes and "ergo the cause must be item number 3". While we can agree that there is correlation, and it seems valid to assume pollution does in fact lead to mortality, the nature of the causation is left as an "a-priori" statement and they proceed immediately to calculation of the magnitude of the connection.