DataDive
Money they probably don't have.
IMHO jobs were far less specialized in the past. Working in a factory is not that different from working in a kitchen or laying tile.
Take Muhammad, a fresh arrival from Syria, who drives a taxi. What will his next job be that is that easy and he already knows how to do?
You don't have to be "productive" all the time. As you put it, driving the car is not just a chore - things happen along the way. It can be a chore - I just contest the most unproductive label here.
By this token, sleeping is the most unproductive thing in the world. Except you recharge.
I returned two products, got two different return codes, was supposed to send each back separately.
During the return (it was a Kohl's return), I forgot about the two different codes and gave both items to the clerk, who then packaged both items with only one code.
I got credited for the first item a few hours later. At that point, I realized my mistake of packaging both in the same return, but thought it was a lost case and chalked it up as a loss.
Imagine my surprise when, a few weeks (!) later , I got credited for the second return as well. How did they figure that one out? I don't know.
The most amazing customer service, where I did not even have to mention it and the error was still rectified.
That "shopping around" for with price being the sole factor is the problem. That's what drives quality down. Not the Amazon markup.
Kitchen scale, $20 bucks, looks and operates exactly as described; three years later, it still works fine.
Bed sheets, $16, two days later delivered, better than I thought - at least for the price that is. Best price/quality ratio I could get.
If I don't like something, returning is super convenient; I drop it off at Kohl's over the weekend. Time and again I am stupefied of how is it possible that in small town USA, I can get something shipped by next day while paying a one time yearly fee.
I think Amazon is the best online shopping experience on the planet.
At the employee side, the minimum pay at Amazon is $20 per hour. Walmart is $14, AliExpress ... we can be only guessing at that
A better analogy: look at all these highly trained engineers, mathematicians, doctors, writers, philosophers, writers, scientists.
How many dumbass politicians do we need to keep it all running smoothly?
Turns out no matter how dumb politicians were, overall society has been developing positively over the history of mankind.
They would have to either pay the tax on gains or write off losses.
In bigger cities, it might be closer to 20-30% of their economy.
Take that away, and it would have a cascading effect through entire countries.
Since they can't fix the real problem are trying to go "green" in counterproductive ways that make things worse: blowing up nuclear plants or taxing cow fart.
Why bother learning any editor when you do not need to write code, and there is no reason to enter
gg=G``zz
I do not know much about Iceland, only that, like New Zealand (and Canada), it is sometimes painted as some sort of progressive heaven that the US should aspire to.
Then, as you learn more, it turns out life isn't that great there.
Doesn't the price fluctuation reflect an economic reality?
Related: couldn't a country adopt euros voluntarily without joining the EU? Like Ecuador adopted US dollars.
The amazing videos and photos carried the promise that I could experience that for real. They were aspirational.
Today I suspect every cool shot is made of pixels arranged on a 2D screen by an algorithm. It doesn't do it for me.
That makes me sad...
In this particular case that makes the message more trustworthy for me ;-)
I am saying we are not selecting for those people.
When we hire at the university, we ignore creative, tenacious people and instead select mediocre people with a nice woke story that meets the woke requirements.
The recruiting at a typical research university has an woke dimension to it - and I am reporting my personal experience, not hearsay:
Out of five scores each student was graded on, three were basically pure wokism like: describe how you overcame a difficult prejudice in life, or talk about how your presence will contribute to an inclusive environment ... only one was probing actual skills ...
PS: I have nothing against immigration - I am an immigrant myself ... a former immigrant student at that ...
I am against the selection process that ignores talented, skilled people and replaces them with mediocre people with some (probably made-up) nice woke story.
I would say the overwhelming majority of even university faculty members lack a basic understanding of statistics.
In their heads, they’re doing something closer to informal Bayesian reasoning: they have prior beliefs based past observation, previous research, experience, etc., wich is then all baked into every choice and decision
But when it comes time to write the paper, they translate that into frequentist statistics: p-values. As if all should be compared to random chance: significance thresholds, confidence intervals.
They do this to give their conclusions formal credibility: oh look how compelling my result is, I found all this new surprising stuff.
Close to 100% of life sciences research works that way.
Would free healthcare reduce deaths in uranium miners that are smokers? Probably some, but would it bring that to the same levels as non-smoking, non miners? Unlikely so. Hence it would be silly to pretend all the cancer deaths are due to lack of health care.
The smoking uranium miner example has a surprisingly realistic story, comes from real data; the dangers of radon in the basement were deduced from comparing cancer rates in smoking uranium miners with high radon in their basements, then they removed what they thought was the smoking and uranium contribution, then fitted to the general population.
> An “attribution study” is the name I’ve given to studies that purport to provide estimates of important real-world quantities through extrapolations from estimates in other, uninformative studies. There are a lot of these papers and they often come with conclusions like ‘Gas stoves responsible for 13% of American asthma’, ‘68,000 die each year due to health insurer denials’, ‘DOGE killed a million billion Africans with its program cuts’.
> This style of study is not inherently bad. There are ways to do it right, but they require more effort than multiplying what are oftentimes pretty random numbers together.
Seems like a simple solution.
Viruses do not multiply endlessly. Most viruses exist in stable ecological cycles.
Most viruses are beneficial to life. We complain about the few (and tiny minority of viruses) that infect humans and we do so from a selfish perspective, but forget about all the other that make life and evolution possible.
As a matter of fact evolution favors reduced lethality in many cases because wiping out hosts is bad for viral survival.
Agent Smith is way off on this one ...