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U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

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Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#721
“No one knows why”: No, lots of people know why, but many of them refuse to acknowledge it because it contradicts the orthodoxy.

The first sentence lists cause and effect (though it makes the same mistake of fact that leads to the mystification here): “As workers slowly return to offices after the pandemic, productivity has been dropping in the U.S. economy.”

It is not “after the pandemic”, it just after everyone has decided to quit acknowledging the pandemic. But COVID doesn’t give a rats ass about whether people acknowledge it, so when you stop control measures (by having “workers return to offices”) and stop accommodation measures (like additional paid sick leave) you get more people catching COVID at work, and more working hours where workers are impacted by the effects of acute or long COVID.

There are lots of people out of the labor force due to long COVID (which is part of the reason for the tight labor market), but there are also even more people in the labor force, and working, with long COVID; see, e.g., https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-data-shows-long-covid...

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#722
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe i'm too stupid to decipher your message entirely but the healthy people moved away? To where?

Not to you, obviously. It was a reference to participation (the lack thereof) And I should have linked a source, but business outsourcing was more of referring to manufacturing in china and the counterfit goods. Software is obviously easier to hijack too. It is cool seeing the karma go up and down on this post. Its back to (1) :) A global forum is always fun :p Its simple. The healthy people moved away.

Your post is a mish-mash of thoughts that might be coherent independently but put together is just indecipherable. Consider re-writing your comment to get the point across.

But let me try to respond anyway even though I am unsure of your point:

>In the states, we can see that the illegal migration dumping is caused by the unskilled labor needed to support archaic GDP numbers.

The native population's costs to maintain those jobs locally would make the underlying business untenable. Perhaps this is the end state of all these businesses taken by illegal immigration. Maybe robotics might save the day. People are not going to pay for 14-20$/hr picked strawberries. Maybe they will but that 20$/hr will eventually become 30$/hr and so on.

>As a technology native, I was too young to work when the H1-B economy started to spring up, but the linear from that is easy to see.

H1-B was a miracle program that allowed numerous non-white people a sliver of a chance to experience the fruits of the western empire. A large portion of the white population came over to the new world without any papers and/or none of the roadblocks that current immigrants face. After they established themselves, they slammed the door on everyone else. At the same time, the third world is recovering at a snails pace from decades of exploitation and wealth extraction by the western nations. Put yourself in the shoes of people who want to experience a kind of life that westerners live. What options do they have? They can't easily just waltz into the western countries like their white counterparts did...meanwhile they were born into an environment that was fundamentally destroyed and stripped bare by those same western powers. They can't fight back to take that wealth back because the western military might will crush them, they can't improve their countries in any reasonable timeframe because there are too many forces working against them. But then comes along H1-B and it gives many ambitious people an opportunity to get exploited by the ownership class in exchange for an economy class seat into the first world. Who are the healthy people in this scenario? The white American working class whose ancestors walked into abundance with much less effort than people today and whose descendants couldn't muster up the effort to fill those in demand tech jobs? From the point of view of the ownership class, they were never in the game to begin with. From my point of view, the healthy people are the H1-B people.

>Businesses that outsourced gave away their whole business model is an easy conclusion, so now they all have lower quality/priced competition (obviously speculation, but plausible remains entertaining).

Maybe the ownership class is smarter than you. China and the rest of the Asian workshops are aging much faster than the US. China is projected to drop to 600 Million by the end of the century. The current state of them taking all the healthy people is a mirage.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who worked in the electronic health records industry, closely with design teams, and has thought more deeply about certain aspects of this problem than anyone else in history (not exaggerating), I think you're missing major factors. First, yes, productivity was one of the goals of the forced move to electronic health records systems. The federal government passed the HITECH Act in 2009 creating economic in…

What do you see as the way out of this mess?

Hmm. There are many layers of problems in the healthcare system, EHRs with bad design only one.

I will say that small, private clinics who only accept private insurance don't necessarily need to use a federally certified EHR. They are legally allowed to build their own system. One example is OneMedical. When you ask the doctors/PAs/nurses at OneMedical about their EHR, they actually love it.

I think the first step would be validating my anecdotal experience here by polling doctors using non-certified EHRs to see if they like them more. If they do by an overwhelming amount, I'd first take that evidence to the Office of the National Coordinator (the government agency created by the aforementioned HITECH Act who makes the certification criteria). I'd tell them that if they vastly simplify the criteria and add more flexibility, they'd make doctors happier.

I guess the problem is that happy doctors, unfortunately, isn't necessarily aligned with the existing federal laws. Probably you'd need to pass a new statute at Congress, this time around with the benefit of talking to a lot of people with experience making EHRs.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#724
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never heard about them until I saw that news interview. What a wild ride. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yUMIFYBMnc

antiwork started off good but quickly went downhill. I abandoned it some time ago because it is now a "pro-union eco-chamber". I once advocated serious changes to the labour laws are what is needed, and was inundated with "join a union" posts. It really speaks to just how out-of-touch these people are. Unions only care about large corporations because they can get a lot of members and union dues. The issue with this…

You want everyone to join in unison for a collective effort to change the laws for everyone, right?

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good example. --- The system distinguished between errors that halted the machine, requiring a restart, and errors which merely paused the machine (which allowed operators to continue with the same settings using a keypress). However, some errors which endangered the patient merely paused the machine, and the frequent occurrence of minor errors caused operators to become accustomed to habitually unpausing the machine…

This sounds like poor consideration for edge cases - not really a problem with the UI or people clicking through it too fast. Anything that could be interpreted as remotely fatal should've shut the machine down.

The control software should not be physically able to command the hardware to enter an invalid state. You can do that by only exposing the 3 valid modes to the software or only enabling power to the emitter if every piece of hardware is in the correct place when the software request arrives.

You also have a hardware lock on the power - this can be as simple as a hardware timer (a RC circuit siffices) which limits how long the emitter can be on within in a given window to be safe.

Never trust the software. If you must trust some software, create a minimal set you CAN trust which isolates the rest of the software from the hardware.

You are correct, the discussion about how to exercise this bug (fast UI, blah blah) is interesting to hear but totally irrelevant to the lesson (don't trust software).

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prevalence of "Long COVID" is hard to measure at this point, but based on symptom reporting, about 15% of people who test positive for COVID have some symptoms more than 2 months later.[1] More data is available for people who have had heart and brain MRI scans, which show inflammation. It may be possible to diagnose this with a special eye exam that detects inflammation in the eye's blood vessels. The tests are stil…

In support of this, I want to mention that there are known and measurable biomarkers that connect reported symptoms to undeniable physical symptoms. Low cortisol is very common. That’s just one example. With low cortisol it’s hard to feel good or function 100%. One paper of many that show this kind of relationship (a preprint): “Distinguishing features of Long COVID identified through immune profiling” — https://doi.…

The best explanation I've seen thus far, assuming there aren't other complicating factors (which there often are) is that the immune system stays hyperactive in some people after infection. This causes excess production of IL-6 and IL-10, which in turn causes something called the kynurenine shunt. That in turn results in lowered central serotonin rates in the brain and heightened glutamate. This off balance results in lowered dopamine as the production of serotonin and dopamine are comingled. Dopamine usually breaks down to your typical epinephrine and norepinephrine levels. But since dopamine is at a lowered state, you get less epinephrine and norepinephrine. I'm guessing, but do not know the pathway, that lowered epinephrine and norepinephrine explain the lowered cortisol.

Either way, the treatment should be the same. Take a corticosteroid to lower the IL6 & 10 levels, ensure the patient is getting proper sleep and nutrients, and not doing anything to exacerbate lowered serotonin/dopamine levels, and cross your fingers.

I've started to hear of companies that are testing for elevated cytokines as a proof of long covid, and my family member's hospital has started educating their staff on cytokine release syndrome in the rare patient who has a reaction to a vaccine shot, both of which, for me, imply the industry might be moving in this direction for explanation. fingers crossed

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Long COVID" and medical journals.... Even the highest estimates only have it as a very small percentage of symptomatic patients which is already a subset of the general population.

I've been reading it's 10 to 20% of people who test positive have symptoms at least a month, and as much as 5 to 7% three to six months later. The US workforce is around 160 million people. About 60% of the population is estimated to have had SARS-Cov-2 at least once. 60% of 160 million is 96 million. So 5% of that is 4.6 million people or so with at least a solid portion of a year of symptoms. There's mounting evide…

My understanding from other articles is its currently 1 in every 3 people currently unemployed cite long covid as the primary reason for inability to return to work, though that data may be a few months old now.

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#728
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to you, obviously. It was a reference to participation (the lack thereof) And I should have linked a source, but business outsourcing was more of referring to manufacturing in china and the counterfit goods. Software is obviously easier to hijack too. It is cool seeing the karma go up and down on this post. Its back to (1) :) A global forum is always fun :p Its simple. The healthy people moved away.

Your post is a mish-mash of thoughts that might be coherent independently but put together is just indecipherable. Consider re-writing your comment to get the point across. But let me try to respond anyway even though I am unsure of your point: >In the states, we can see that the illegal migration dumping is caused by the unskilled labor needed to support archaic GDP numbers. The native population's costs to maintain…

Again, with a global forum, the title was about productivity in the states. You do not sound like the intended audience.

Did the buffett joke about purchasing soda and dialysis stocks even make you laugh?

We are also on the cusp of automation, so unskilled is just an afterthought.

You can get 3 slivers for the price of one. Economics was never pretty words, its just a number.

https://www.sdrplay.com/beware-fake-sdrplay-devices/

I happen to look at their devices and see where increased support costs and possibly lower sales impacted their business model. I'm sure there are more if I look.

The world keeps on spinning. I can't say you even understood the "no one is sure why" speculation in the title.

Its simple. The healthy people like to laugh :p

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#729

I'm pretty sure I know why... The working environment changed. Bit by bit I moved from an environment with gentleman's agreements and so on towards something in which everything was codified, safetyism became rampant, etc. In the UK over the past few years I went from going into a nice office in a number of beautiful old buildings, getting my stuff done with cameraderie, having lunch together and playing board games,…

> towards something in which everything was codified, safetyism became rampant Those "gentleman's agreements" were not that great if you happened to be a woman, gay or any other minority. The upsides to HR, employment regulation and so on has been making the office a far better place to work for a lot of people. While I agree that there are rampant problems in a lot of sectors, from low skilled to medical, there have…

But what about the so on?

Re: U.S. workers have gotten less productive – no one is sure why

#730
post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the push to make software accessible (in a new-user, not disability, context) and intuitive has made complexity the enemy. Instead of having software that grows with the user's capability, features are hidden from the top layer of interactivity or just cut entirely. I was at the post office here in Australia a few years ago and saw the screen. It was one of those DOS-era full screen red and blue text inte…

For future reference (and anyone following along later), that is an "ncurses" terminal application. You should see the customized JBHIFI terminal + keyboard.

I dont seem to have a shot of the terminal app, but I do for the keyboard:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/fLeDNp8rU7wN7siXA

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