It is useful to see how the per capita infection rates have diverged based on the response to PH rules and vaccination rates. This highlights the differences which can be lost when comparing the accumulated infection and death rates that show relatively similar outcomes.
What is concerning is that even when presented with such evidence, there is no acknowledgment that just maybe this is a problem to be corrected. Rather, it seems this is the desired outcome as it scares the blue states' voters that red-state voters will eventually nurture a variant that will sweep through the blue states. Is this a mentality akin to the Confederacy losing a larger %age of their population but after Reconstruction claiming they had "shown those damn Yankees"?
It is enough for a technocrat to cry over their analyses.
I live in a California county with just a 35% vaccination rate. For a while it seemed as though many locals thought the pandemic was over and were going about maskless. Fortunately, this seems to have changed somewhat. This gives me some hope, especially as there is some evidence the current surge may have peaked. But with the latest research suggestion that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is less effective than the Moderna vaccine with the delta variant, we are not out of the woods yet.
The LeonHardt article in the NYTimes suggesting that Democrats were over-cautious based on the probabilities, it was based on a static analysis of the pandemic. Caution is still advisable as new variants may puncture the immunity of the vaccinated, booster shots or not. Plus, mask-wearing and social distancing is still effective in reducing transmission rates and therefore the opportunity to become infected or ill, as well as reducing the probability of locally generating new variants. Better to let those variants appear elsewhere and give us time to prepare updated vaccines before a really deadly variant emerges more like the 1918 Spanish Flu.
"Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel – not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God”…"
I do not know who or what is humanity's God is. But IIRC, Christianity was quite supportive of slavery and its supporters made arguments why it was moral and supported by God. What we call white supremacism today was accepted as the natural place of Caucasians as the superior "race" and therefore to be on top of the evolutionary pyramid and therefore could subject other races to a lower standard, much as humans had subjected the animals. This strain of thinking has never completely been expunged, especially in the US.
It was mainly the sect of Quakers that started the abolition of slavery movement in England in the 18th century. Their opponents were mostly the mainstream Church of England. So two Christian sects had opposing views of slavery backed by their different interpretations of the Bible.
I find it interesting that Adam Smith argued against slavery as it was inefficient. Had it been determined that slavery was more efficient, would he have supported slavery?
"The pro-WFH group probably underrates how psychologically discombobulating it can be for extroverts to interface w/ peers via only screens for too long…"
Extroverts are a cost sink: they make decisions for social reasons, they won't generally allow quantified analysis to be constraining on their preferences, they're relentlessly handsy, they're frequently incapable of being quiet or focused, they insist things are about their feels in a makes-demands way (rather than an avoids-harm way) and they take it drastic personal if they're expected to follow a process that won't make exceptions confirming their personal specialness.
Fewer extroverts in the business is a net win. The only reason you need some now is to deal with the other firm's extroverts. It's not like this is news, either; any of the "let's make a cult out of systemically effective process" approaches _need_ to be cults to get enough social articulation to suppress the extroverts, and you have to suppress them to scale past a certain point because you can't afford the terrible feels-based decisions.
Now, perhaps I am being unjust to some quiet diligent persons who just like people more than the population median; it is indeed likely that I am. But it is also likely such persons will do just fine in a distributed environment. The back-slapping extroverts can go work in performing arts, where they'll be happy, and the folks doing the stuff that just isn't in any way feels-based will be happier to not be trying to get work done around the extroverts.
(It is also surpassingly likely that a distributed environment with systemic support to be a distributed environment works just fine. Distributed work environments are not new, and there are bunch of successful examples from long before VLSI.)
The extroverts I know have been having a rough time, but even during the peak of the epidemic, they've been able to get a dose of social interaction. If nothing else, they've managed to get together with the introverts for socially distanced dinners and outings. Maybe it's because the extroverts I know have aged out past their I-need-a-rave younger years.
AfAIK, it is extraverts that have been demanding "return to the office". This despite the anecdotal claims by many that remote work is more productive. Anecdotally, for people working as software engineers, it has been suggested that every interruption by a colleague costs 15 minutes for the engineer to get back into the "flow". If that applies to a lot of work - creative, analytical, etc, it would indicate remote work is both preferred by some fraction of the population and more productive. It should be obvious that remote work removes the time commuting, for many an unproductive and stressful experience. For single people, remote work provides far more flexibility to manage household chores that cannot be done while at an office.
The losers from remote work are the micromanaging middle managers and the extraverts who desperately need to interact physically with others. It is often claimed by senior (extravert?) executives that face-to-face meetings are important to making deals, justifying luxury company-paid travel and expenses. But given how much can be accomplished remotely, one has to wonder if this isn't just self-serving nonsense.
The problem for those doing remote work is the demand that they be monitored by computer "spies". This is micromanaging by automation. The idea that productive output should be the important metric, not time at work, seems hard to convey to managers, in my experience.
Nearly a decade ago, Susan Cain made a good case for introverts in the workplace. As introverts work better without forced contact (meetings, intrusive managers, gossipy colleagues) they should be given the opportunity to work remotely now that the technology for audiovisual communication is maturing. Wouldn't this be a productivity gain from computer technology?
This is what Caitlin Rosenthal demonstrates. But there is the question of how much institutions are marked by their origins. We have a good book, 3 Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, on how governments differ across the North Atlantic region. But I have not seen anything as good for how business management cultures differ...
I think it's obvious by inspection that business culture has the usual local maximum problem; you can't change it very much without going "downhill", which the market forbids you to do. It's much much easier to change the environment (regulatory or political or social) than it is to change the business culture. (This is just what we see happening! institutional response to climate change has been to remove the ability of the wider society to require them to change. This maximizes the length of time the institution exists, but not the wider society or the human species. Institutional continuation goals do not involve wider concerns or insurance calculations.)
I think there are only two significant inputs to business culture; how it constructs hierarchy, and how inherently beholden it is to incumbents.
(I think it's obvious that "constructs hierarchy" is immensely sticky; an expensive generational project to destroy unions was preferable to accepting an alternative construction of hierarchy, and it looks like historically there's only much variation or constraint on hierarchy when the incumbent oligarchy is dependent on the general population for something it can't coerce.)
I'd expect that the ability to usefully cross-compare say, Finland and the UK on that basis to be extremely interesting but also nigh-impossible to actually do.
"business culture has the usual local maximum problem; you can't change it very much without going "downhill", which the market forbids you to do. "
IOW, it is Darwinian, and most successful businesses have reached the local maximum. To find a higher peak requires a new approach. This may come from "creative destruction" but more likely, as we see today, external changes push these businesses off their peak by erasing that peak and in the direction of a new, peak.
Just as in the natural world, success does not mean an improvement in the local ecosystem or larger biosphere. The Great Oxidation Event was probably devastating to the anaerobic population, but from our vantage as aerobes, it allowed life to reach a higher peak. Businesses intent on burning fossil fuels may be successful for their shareholders, but devastating for the wider stakeholders. In a wider context, nations that institutionally refuse to change their energy mix are a problem for the globe too. Economists might argue that the externalities are insufficiently costed into the price of these companies' output, but foot-dragging by paid-for legislators and even denial by the population is a major hurdle. The only solution may be a collapse, allowing new nations, political and social systems to be created in an analogous version to Schumpeter's creative destruction.
Darwinian selection requires Darwinian individuals; born, die, recognizably themselves in between those times, (which might apply to corporations), and that they reproduce with a chance of variation (which does not).
The folks doing general forecasting for the outcomes of our collective climate forcing are discussing how you tell if it's the Eocene Thermal Maximum, the End Cretaceous, or the End Permian. Humans might live through an ETM equivalent. Living through the other two is not plausible and not possible, respectively. Accepting collapse is perhaps even less practical than usual under the circumstances.
Computer aided micro-managing has long been a thing. It isn't just about WFH. It's been in use for decades in warehouses, big box stores, call centers and lonely trucks out on the interstate. It's just that it has usually been targeted at the working class. COVID and WFH now has it targeting the business class. Maybe this will remind people that they are just peons like everyone else. Getting a monthly salary instead of a biweekly paycheck doesn't mean you are any more than a cog in the machine.
Ages ago, I took a course on Soviet economics given by Evsey Domar. I learned all about the various control mechanisms the Soviet government, really the only employer, used to make sure people were working. I also learned about all the clever ways people figured out to totally bollix the metrics. To be fair, this is one of the reasons that middle managers love all those metrics. They can be gamed. Still, it doesn't bode well for a non-peasant society.
I was shocked about its use on a professional software engineer who worked from home back in the mid-1990's. I had never heard of such a thing before, especially not used on professionals. My local university is apparently doing the same for staff who have elected to work from home during the pandemic, although the MO is somewhat less intrusive, AFAIK.
It is useful to see how the per capita infection rates have diverged based on the response to PH rules and vaccination rates. This highlights the differences which can be lost when comparing the accumulated infection and death rates that show relatively similar outcomes.
What is concerning is that even when presented with such evidence, there is no acknowledgment that just maybe this is a problem to be corrected. Rather, it seems this is the desired outcome as it scares the blue states' voters that red-state voters will eventually nurture a variant that will sweep through the blue states. Is this a mentality akin to the Confederacy losing a larger %age of their population but after Reconstruction claiming they had "shown those damn Yankees"?
It is enough for a technocrat to cry over their analyses.
I live in a California county with just a 35% vaccination rate. For a while it seemed as though many locals thought the pandemic was over and were going about maskless. Fortunately, this seems to have changed somewhat. This gives me some hope, especially as there is some evidence the current surge may have peaked. But with the latest research suggestion that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is less effective than the Moderna vaccine with the delta variant, we are not out of the woods yet.
The LeonHardt article in the NYTimes suggesting that Democrats were over-cautious based on the probabilities, it was based on a static analysis of the pandemic. Caution is still advisable as new variants may puncture the immunity of the vaccinated, booster shots or not. Plus, mask-wearing and social distancing is still effective in reducing transmission rates and therefore the opportunity to become infected or ill, as well as reducing the probability of locally generating new variants. Better to let those variants appear elsewhere and give us time to prepare updated vaccines before a really deadly variant emerges more like the 1918 Spanish Flu.
"Robert Lee was a traitor and a rebel – not indeed to his country, but to humanity and humanity’s God”…"
I do not know who or what is humanity's God is. But IIRC, Christianity was quite supportive of slavery and its supporters made arguments why it was moral and supported by God. What we call white supremacism today was accepted as the natural place of Caucasians as the superior "race" and therefore to be on top of the evolutionary pyramid and therefore could subject other races to a lower standard, much as humans had subjected the animals. This strain of thinking has never completely been expunged, especially in the US.
It was mainly the sect of Quakers that started the abolition of slavery movement in England in the 18th century. Their opponents were mostly the mainstream Church of England. So two Christian sects had opposing views of slavery backed by their different interpretations of the Bible.
I find it interesting that Adam Smith argued against slavery as it was inefficient. Had it been determined that slavery was more efficient, would he have supported slavery?
On "sorta work": PCR analysis is the very best example.
"The pro-WFH group probably underrates how psychologically discombobulating it can be for extroverts to interface w/ peers via only screens for too long…"
Extroverts are a cost sink: they make decisions for social reasons, they won't generally allow quantified analysis to be constraining on their preferences, they're relentlessly handsy, they're frequently incapable of being quiet or focused, they insist things are about their feels in a makes-demands way (rather than an avoids-harm way) and they take it drastic personal if they're expected to follow a process that won't make exceptions confirming their personal specialness.
Fewer extroverts in the business is a net win. The only reason you need some now is to deal with the other firm's extroverts. It's not like this is news, either; any of the "let's make a cult out of systemically effective process" approaches _need_ to be cults to get enough social articulation to suppress the extroverts, and you have to suppress them to scale past a certain point because you can't afford the terrible feels-based decisions.
Now, perhaps I am being unjust to some quiet diligent persons who just like people more than the population median; it is indeed likely that I am. But it is also likely such persons will do just fine in a distributed environment. The back-slapping extroverts can go work in performing arts, where they'll be happy, and the folks doing the stuff that just isn't in any way feels-based will be happier to not be trying to get work done around the extroverts.
(It is also surpassingly likely that a distributed environment with systemic support to be a distributed environment works just fine. Distributed work environments are not new, and there are bunch of successful examples from long before VLSI.)
The extroverts I know have been having a rough time, but even during the peak of the epidemic, they've been able to get a dose of social interaction. If nothing else, they've managed to get together with the introverts for socially distanced dinners and outings. Maybe it's because the extroverts I know have aged out past their I-need-a-rave younger years.
"If nothing else, they've managed to get together with the introverts for socially distanced dinners and outings."
Yep, inflicting themselves on the introverts. It was always thus. Where is the religious leader who tells us the "Introverts will inherit the Earth"?
AfAIK, it is extraverts that have been demanding "return to the office". This despite the anecdotal claims by many that remote work is more productive. Anecdotally, for people working as software engineers, it has been suggested that every interruption by a colleague costs 15 minutes for the engineer to get back into the "flow". If that applies to a lot of work - creative, analytical, etc, it would indicate remote work is both preferred by some fraction of the population and more productive. It should be obvious that remote work removes the time commuting, for many an unproductive and stressful experience. For single people, remote work provides far more flexibility to manage household chores that cannot be done while at an office.
The losers from remote work are the micromanaging middle managers and the extraverts who desperately need to interact physically with others. It is often claimed by senior (extravert?) executives that face-to-face meetings are important to making deals, justifying luxury company-paid travel and expenses. But given how much can be accomplished remotely, one has to wonder if this isn't just self-serving nonsense.
The problem for those doing remote work is the demand that they be monitored by computer "spies". This is micromanaging by automation. The idea that productive output should be the important metric, not time at work, seems hard to convey to managers, in my experience.
Nearly a decade ago, Susan Cain made a good case for introverts in the workplace. As introverts work better without forced contact (meetings, intrusive managers, gossipy colleagues) they should be given the opportunity to work remotely now that the technology for audiovisual communication is maturing. Wouldn't this be a productivity gain from computer technology?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0KYU2j0TM4
The idea that productive output should be the important metric, not time at work, seems hard to convey to managers, in my experience.
US business culture is significantly derived from and normalizes the practices of managing slave plantations.
This is what Caitlin Rosenthal demonstrates. But there is the question of how much institutions are marked by their origins. We have a good book, 3 Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, on how governments differ across the North Atlantic region. But I have not seen anything as good for how business management cultures differ...
I think it's obvious by inspection that business culture has the usual local maximum problem; you can't change it very much without going "downhill", which the market forbids you to do. It's much much easier to change the environment (regulatory or political or social) than it is to change the business culture. (This is just what we see happening! institutional response to climate change has been to remove the ability of the wider society to require them to change. This maximizes the length of time the institution exists, but not the wider society or the human species. Institutional continuation goals do not involve wider concerns or insurance calculations.)
I think there are only two significant inputs to business culture; how it constructs hierarchy, and how inherently beholden it is to incumbents.
(I think it's obvious that "constructs hierarchy" is immensely sticky; an expensive generational project to destroy unions was preferable to accepting an alternative construction of hierarchy, and it looks like historically there's only much variation or constraint on hierarchy when the incumbent oligarchy is dependent on the general population for something it can't coerce.)
I'd expect that the ability to usefully cross-compare say, Finland and the UK on that basis to be extremely interesting but also nigh-impossible to actually do.
"business culture has the usual local maximum problem; you can't change it very much without going "downhill", which the market forbids you to do. "
IOW, it is Darwinian, and most successful businesses have reached the local maximum. To find a higher peak requires a new approach. This may come from "creative destruction" but more likely, as we see today, external changes push these businesses off their peak by erasing that peak and in the direction of a new, peak.
Just as in the natural world, success does not mean an improvement in the local ecosystem or larger biosphere. The Great Oxidation Event was probably devastating to the anaerobic population, but from our vantage as aerobes, it allowed life to reach a higher peak. Businesses intent on burning fossil fuels may be successful for their shareholders, but devastating for the wider stakeholders. In a wider context, nations that institutionally refuse to change their energy mix are a problem for the globe too. Economists might argue that the externalities are insufficiently costed into the price of these companies' output, but foot-dragging by paid-for legislators and even denial by the population is a major hurdle. The only solution may be a collapse, allowing new nations, political and social systems to be created in an analogous version to Schumpeter's creative destruction.
Darwinian selection requires Darwinian individuals; born, die, recognizably themselves in between those times, (which might apply to corporations), and that they reproduce with a chance of variation (which does not).
The folks doing general forecasting for the outcomes of our collective climate forcing are discussing how you tell if it's the Eocene Thermal Maximum, the End Cretaceous, or the End Permian. Humans might live through an ETM equivalent. Living through the other two is not plausible and not possible, respectively. Accepting collapse is perhaps even less practical than usual under the circumstances.
Computer aided micro-managing has long been a thing. It isn't just about WFH. It's been in use for decades in warehouses, big box stores, call centers and lonely trucks out on the interstate. It's just that it has usually been targeted at the working class. COVID and WFH now has it targeting the business class. Maybe this will remind people that they are just peons like everyone else. Getting a monthly salary instead of a biweekly paycheck doesn't mean you are any more than a cog in the machine.
Ages ago, I took a course on Soviet economics given by Evsey Domar. I learned all about the various control mechanisms the Soviet government, really the only employer, used to make sure people were working. I also learned about all the clever ways people figured out to totally bollix the metrics. To be fair, this is one of the reasons that middle managers love all those metrics. They can be gamed. Still, it doesn't bode well for a non-peasant society.
I was shocked about its use on a professional software engineer who worked from home back in the mid-1990's. I had never heard of such a thing before, especially not used on professionals. My local university is apparently doing the same for staff who have elected to work from home during the pandemic, although the MO is somewhat less intrusive, AFAIK.