301–310 of 451 posts
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Median (average) measures are the refuge of the scoundrel. Refuting the (willful) abuse of statistics is like trying to refute numerology with reason.
Refuting numerology with reason works quite well for most people.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ 1971, 1968, doesn't really matter. But - many such "negative" effects only really show up after 1981, that is after the peak of the interest rates. RIP Volcker, the last Fed president with vision. If you're into slightly crazy sounding theories about the cyclical nature of human progress I recommend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio... . Ray Dalio is also wri…
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That graph is not very well laid out; in order to see the effect it purports to show, you'd want to scale the SWE salary to all salaries to compare them; otherwise, you're just looking at "SWE is paid more than most occupations" → "SWE is still paid more than most occupations". Both clearly experienced growth, but did SWE experience more growth, or did it grow proportionally? The SWE line in that graph grows by ~74%,…
I am confused on why you don't consider that 2nd paragraph as an answer to the 1st. "Did SWE experience more growth, or did it grow proportionally?" It "grows by ~74%, and all other occupations by ~57%". So yes, SWE expeirenced more growth. By measuring the percentage change you are scaling the salaries to each other.
It is not a contradiction to say the presentation doesn't help show the conclusion, and that the conclusion is (nonetheless) correct.
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The really awful thing from that story (Planet Money did a great recent episode on the ProPublica coverage) is that they are able to get away with this through Arbitration clauses. By way of their contracts, they strongarm their contractors into dealing with any "misclassification" issues (eg. exerting too much control over a contractor) individually, silently, and outside of court. Contractors have no ability to sue…
Arbitration is actually very expensive for the company but generally they can rely on the fact that most people will not utilize it for a variety of reasons. If people large scale started taking companies like this to claims it could quickly become more expensive than class action lawsuits trying to arbitrate each individual claim. If you feel strongly against arbitration clauses, activism to get people to use them i…
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/12/21135474/doordash-workers...
And if they had kept up since 1949, minimum wage would be $4.22 an hour. Two can play the game of cherrypicking troughs and peaks. Additionally, average productivity is not minimum wage productivity. They are separate statistics, and the bulk of the efficiency gains have not been made at the burger flipper level, but at higher levels, where there have been huge gains in pay. The productivity gains in engineering and…
Also, "total compensation" is the correct thing to compare with, not "wage". Total compensation includes the value of benefits and the (so-called) employer contribution to taxes. Total compensation can be up to 40% more than salary.
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I would argue for a fourth point in this case * Purchasing X through a third party allows us to circumvent laws and regulations meant to protect workers and/or consumers
These "laws and regulations" still apply to the agency that hires those workers. You're simply paying for them to carry the risk. You can argue that such agencies are more likely to disregard laws and regulations, but how would you fix that? With laws and regulations?
I can think of a couple different legal metaphors for this:
1. Something similar to banking's Know-Your-Customer could work... maybe call it Know-Your-Suppliers.
2. People are criminally liable for possessing child pornography even if they had no participation in the direct crimes of its creation. In other words: in this case there is no immunity just because the crimes happened somewhere "upstream".
When a whole market can make 10x more solar panels for the same cost, solar prices go down by you guessed it - about 90%.
You don't suddenly have 10x more profit to pay your employees. Maybe a monopoly would, but not a competitive market like most businesses are in. These people have absolutely no clue what they are talking about.
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> Now many stores have intelligent inventory tracking that requires little to no work from employees. > Why isn't the benefit of that efficiency passed on to those employees who are now more efficient? It is, though, right? It is passed on to the employees who were responsible for the efficiency gains. Those employees who built those innovations — could be employees of retailer, or employees of the companies, say tec…
It feels very arbitrary to claim the employees responsible got the gains. Like take Walmart, the biggest beneficiaries by far are the relatives of Sam Walton. Yet they did nothing to build the automated inventory tracking, the statistical modeling, or the digital systems. Or take the programmers who worked on Walmart.com. They didn't invent the transistor, Linux, or Java. They just used them to build a crud app.
Likewise, the shelf stockers who work at Walmart didn't invent pasteurization, the tin can, or the grocery cart. They just move the cans around.
What does that have to do with the fact that programmers contribute (on an ongoing basis) to improved productivity, while shelf stockers do not?
There's a lot of reasons for this but one of the largest is the near invisible (to me) structural shift from direct hire to contractors for jobs at the lower end of the wage/salary spectrum. There is a fantastic long form article that articulates this better than I can at: https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenn... The portion relevant to this discussion: "Thirty years ago, she says, you could wa…
I agree, this is one of those slow moving trends that you just don't see but has really large effects after decades of compounding. It used to be normal for companies to have much larger work forces and to in-source all tasks, even if they were not a core competency. Now the emphasis is on lean everything, to only focus on your niche, and outsource as much as possible. Remember IT departments? It's all been outsource…