I loved the round-up. Thanks for the good work and the big laughs.
I'm an editor of commercial fiction (i.e., genre, not literary). My clients would be tantalized by the prospect of the data (much as they already are by Kindle reviews and bestseller rankings). Since most watch their Kindle data closely, they'd likely dip into any such reader-reaction data. My sense is the least successful and least skillful (often not always the same) authors would gain the most from the information. Specifically, when they lost readers. And if they accessed data from the sample portion -- versus the purchased edition -- it would be extra helpful for them.
Authors who've published Kindle books can already learn which passages got highlighted most by readers. So there's a trickle of info out there. I think they'd welcome more.
As to the corporate publishers accessing reader-reaction info and/or influencing novelists' future work, the results would vary widely. It wouldn't mean guaranteed interference, but I agree in general it wouldn't be better for authors, either.
FYI, novelists can and do update the digital editions of their published novels. Paper publishers often take and hold onto changes -- mostly corrections -- for future printings. Overall, it's less certain with paper books -- either that there'll even be a future printing or inclusion of any corrections.
Thanks. That all checks with what I know. For the novels, I think fixing errors is fine (especially transcription mistakes) but that you shouldn't do anything beyond that, even if you realize you could have done it better.
Re road costs, Urban kchoze had this post in 2015 arguing that cost analysis of roads that neglects their land use costs severely understates their costs compared to railroads (in this case talking about urban highways vs subways).
I recognize that this is a bit of a, "we're burning down the goal to save it," response, but I'm actually a little surprised* that, re: the Niskanen piece, Code for America hasn't shipped a LLM-based tool that looks at your resume and the government requirements and helps you rewrite it quickly into the government resume format.
If the adversarial process requires that you bullshit, crash the marginal cost of bullshit to zero.
Of course, eventually non-desirable candidates find the tool, etc., but it might enable you to get a critical mass of people-who-actually-have-the-skills into government first to enable further steps.
*Ok, it hasn't been that long since LLMs became a thing, so maybe they will build it someday. But you get the point.
This seems entirely unnecessary! Candidates don't need to rewrite their resumés – they can _literally_ copy+paste the requirements! Of course, some candidates will – rightfully IMO – respond 'fuck this' when confronted with this horrific bullshit.
This reminds me of similar advice I received from friends about applying to non-government jobs, e.g. 'Everyone lies on their resumés and in their cover letters.'. I think why I ignored that advice is that I knew – in some (until now) unarticulated sense – that doing so would be far more corrosive to my principles and integrity than the limited benefits I might have otherwise enjoyed. I don't judge the people that _do_ lie in such ways very harshly, but I also have no desire to join them either.
Just a comment, some of the content is just a llink to Twitter, and none of these links work for me, presumably due to recent Twitter changes / self-immolation (I just see a page saying "something went wrong"). I'm curious what your in-the-works backup plan will be for this (after the usual "wait a week for them to randomly walk to a different point in strategy-space")
Re: publication formatting, I have previously worked under a highly regarded professor who's response to reviewer comments about formatting were always "No, don't be ridiculous I will format properly once it is accepted." Never saw it cause issues. Don't know if it would work for an early career scientist.
I think you could find some way this ties into slack, or at least something in concept space that’s pretty close. I’m not in management so maybe this is just a total blind assumption, but I get the sense that morale management has become a lost concept in modern executive culture.
I’ve been thinking about slack a lot because my current job has tons of it in comparison to my previous ones (and, as an employee, is palpably better for it), but there’s an increasing undercurrent of my current employers succumbing more and more to obsessions with metrics in the same way that I witnessed causing chains to harshly cut employee hours. (Chief psychiatrist about a month ago: “Why am I being pressured to care about refusal rates???”) Was thinking just last week about what you’d need to do to, say, make slack a metric to encourage management to think about it but in a way that would also be resistant to the obvious mandated breaks Goodharting.
(Also need to have a talk with my boss involving a certain image of an airplane with red dots because he thinks we should focus on improving the quality of the tasks we do that can’t be relocated to central fill vs what could be, in order to justify our current staff budgeting, instead of doing literally the opposite.)
The Niskanen Center article was extremely relevant to me and there’s stories I could tell about how applying for a permanent version of the (California) state job I’m currently contracted to do is absurdly Lovecraftian. You have to apply for certification to be able to apply for jobs. Been getting a wave of interviews for positions I applied to 3-6 months ago, all scheduled without any input from me between 5(!) to 14 days in advance for a single day that can’t be rescheduled or done remotely. I went into the first one somewhat unprepared in the sense that I hadn’t realized that the interviewers (the PIC, 1 HR person, 1 other healthcare exec) had possibly not even seen my resume? I mentioned I was already a contractor for what is basically the same position at another facility and they all started furiously taking notes. This is also against the backdrop of the fact that I got the original contract position over the course of two days with no interview after applying to an Indeed posting. Can personally verify that this is not getting them higher quality pharmacists.
Reading the Poland story in google translation, it’s not clear to me they actually expect 400k (!) immigrants so much as that many people taking advantage of the new application procedure, which could just mean applications. Anyone who reads polish care to weigh in?
I never see any discussion in articles about immigration about the difference between immigrants and migrants (the former assimilate into the local culture, the latter retain their own culture and, depending on birth rates, can come to dominate the local culture). In establishing an immigration policy, it seems to me to be a necessary component to know at what point critical mass is attained, such that immigration tilts over into migration. Europe has disregarded this, to its cultural detriment.
The China proposal seems like it ignores the potential second-order effects by which importing an enormous population inculcated with the values of the PRC for twenty-five years of life might, perhaps, solve the problem of American / Chinese competition by forcibly aligning America towards China. "The government has seen fit to dissolve the people and elect another." etc.
To the extent that one believes that "we must beat China" but also that "making America more like China is a bad solution", I'm not sure there's as much incoherency in the position as asserted. It could still be a good idea to allow more Chinese immigration, but excluding "potentially compromising the values alignment giving rise to the initial competition through massive demographic shifts" doesn't seem like a strong assumption or unjustified epicycle to tack on to restrictionist viewpoint -- arguably it's a widely-shared more or less implicit corollary of the position.
The Zurich and Winterthur minimum wages do only affect a very small number of people mainly because many hourly paid workers already get that much!
My 16yo son is working as an assistant woodworking teacher at summer camps since he is in-between school and uni, and he is getting CHF 25 a hour normally or CHF 35 if he is alone with the class.
He has of course no formal training relates to woodworking he is just a former student who really likes woodworking and (a bit less so) teaching and is pretty good at both.
Since editing does not appear to work, maybe a mobile interface issue, I should add that he does not have any formal training he is just a former student who was good at both woodworking and teaching and kept in touch with the owner.
That's always my first question when someone talks about a minimum wage or a MW increase - how much do employees make now? In the US, there are very few jobs that would be affected by an increase in the federal MW rate of 40%. 40% should be massive! But really, wages aren't determined by a minimum rate set by the government, but by what it takes to get an employee to do the job. Very few people in the US get paid less than $10/hour anymore (roughly 40% above the federal minimum).
This isn't true if the government were to set the wage above what actual prevailing wages are. Apparently about 30% of US employees make less than $15/hour. Since very few employees make less than $10 and a lot make between $10 and $15, an increase to $10 will have very few effects but an increase to $15 would have a lot.
And these effects are not universal - wages in big expensive cities are already much higher than in rural areas. A middle-class comfortable living in rural parts of the South or Midwest might be less than $15/hour. A *national* MW would be a huge tax on rural areas and make little difference to urban areas. For that reason I'm very against a national MW and especially a high one. Let SF make their MW $18 if they want, which is the equivalent in cost of living of about $9 in Birmingham Alabama.
I can't think of any reason why a $100k bill would suffice, but an IOU wouldn't.
The government is much better than you at thinking of such reasons.
I believe that! Still – WTF?
I loved the round-up. Thanks for the good work and the big laughs.
I'm an editor of commercial fiction (i.e., genre, not literary). My clients would be tantalized by the prospect of the data (much as they already are by Kindle reviews and bestseller rankings). Since most watch their Kindle data closely, they'd likely dip into any such reader-reaction data. My sense is the least successful and least skillful (often not always the same) authors would gain the most from the information. Specifically, when they lost readers. And if they accessed data from the sample portion -- versus the purchased edition -- it would be extra helpful for them.
Authors who've published Kindle books can already learn which passages got highlighted most by readers. So there's a trickle of info out there. I think they'd welcome more.
As to the corporate publishers accessing reader-reaction info and/or influencing novelists' future work, the results would vary widely. It wouldn't mean guaranteed interference, but I agree in general it wouldn't be better for authors, either.
FYI, novelists can and do update the digital editions of their published novels. Paper publishers often take and hold onto changes -- mostly corrections -- for future printings. Overall, it's less certain with paper books -- either that there'll even be a future printing or inclusion of any corrections.
Thanks. That all checks with what I know. For the novels, I think fixing errors is fine (especially transcription mistakes) but that you shouldn't do anything beyond that, even if you realize you could have done it better.
Small typo
Until McKenzie, I do begrudge the bank and the salesperson here
Should be
Unlike McKenzie
Also s/sing/sign for the Kenya treaty
Also "you can’t then are held responsible"
That does not mean the bot has one horribly wrong.
Should be
That does not mean the bot has gone
s/cantor/canton of Winterthur
also "principal"-agent, not principle-agent.
Re road costs, Urban kchoze had this post in 2015 arguing that cost analysis of roads that neglects their land use costs severely understates their costs compared to railroads (in this case talking about urban highways vs subways).
http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2015/01/worlds-worst-investment-why-urban.html?m=1
There's another post dealing with highways and boulevards here
http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2015/01/highways-and-boulevard-capacity-cost.html?m=1
)
I recognize that this is a bit of a, "we're burning down the goal to save it," response, but I'm actually a little surprised* that, re: the Niskanen piece, Code for America hasn't shipped a LLM-based tool that looks at your resume and the government requirements and helps you rewrite it quickly into the government resume format.
If the adversarial process requires that you bullshit, crash the marginal cost of bullshit to zero.
Of course, eventually non-desirable candidates find the tool, etc., but it might enable you to get a critical mass of people-who-actually-have-the-skills into government first to enable further steps.
*Ok, it hasn't been that long since LLMs became a thing, so maybe they will build it someday. But you get the point.
This seems entirely unnecessary! Candidates don't need to rewrite their resumés – they can _literally_ copy+paste the requirements! Of course, some candidates will – rightfully IMO – respond 'fuck this' when confronted with this horrific bullshit.
This reminds me of similar advice I received from friends about applying to non-government jobs, e.g. 'Everyone lies on their resumés and in their cover letters.'. I think why I ignored that advice is that I knew – in some (until now) unarticulated sense – that doing so would be far more corrosive to my principles and integrity than the limited benefits I might have otherwise enjoyed. I don't judge the people that _do_ lie in such ways very harshly, but I also have no desire to join them either.
Just a comment, some of the content is just a llink to Twitter, and none of these links work for me, presumably due to recent Twitter changes / self-immolation (I just see a page saying "something went wrong"). I'm curious what your in-the-works backup plan will be for this (after the usual "wait a week for them to randomly walk to a different point in strategy-space")
Re: publication formatting, I have previously worked under a highly regarded professor who's response to reviewer comments about formatting were always "No, don't be ridiculous I will format properly once it is accepted." Never saw it cause issues. Don't know if it would work for an early career scientist.
re: “providing employees with experiential goods”
I think you could find some way this ties into slack, or at least something in concept space that’s pretty close. I’m not in management so maybe this is just a total blind assumption, but I get the sense that morale management has become a lost concept in modern executive culture.
I’ve been thinking about slack a lot because my current job has tons of it in comparison to my previous ones (and, as an employee, is palpably better for it), but there’s an increasing undercurrent of my current employers succumbing more and more to obsessions with metrics in the same way that I witnessed causing chains to harshly cut employee hours. (Chief psychiatrist about a month ago: “Why am I being pressured to care about refusal rates???”) Was thinking just last week about what you’d need to do to, say, make slack a metric to encourage management to think about it but in a way that would also be resistant to the obvious mandated breaks Goodharting.
(Also need to have a talk with my boss involving a certain image of an airplane with red dots because he thinks we should focus on improving the quality of the tasks we do that can’t be relocated to central fill vs what could be, in order to justify our current staff budgeting, instead of doing literally the opposite.)
The Niskanen Center article was extremely relevant to me and there’s stories I could tell about how applying for a permanent version of the (California) state job I’m currently contracted to do is absurdly Lovecraftian. You have to apply for certification to be able to apply for jobs. Been getting a wave of interviews for positions I applied to 3-6 months ago, all scheduled without any input from me between 5(!) to 14 days in advance for a single day that can’t be rescheduled or done remotely. I went into the first one somewhat unprepared in the sense that I hadn’t realized that the interviewers (the PIC, 1 HR person, 1 other healthcare exec) had possibly not even seen my resume? I mentioned I was already a contractor for what is basically the same position at another facility and they all started furiously taking notes. This is also against the backdrop of the fact that I got the original contract position over the course of two days with no interview after applying to an Indeed posting. Can personally verify that this is not getting them higher quality pharmacists.
I can't view a single one of the twitter links, which is very annoying. Thank you for the writeup though!
Behold! Your work here is excellent
The bodybuilding argument must be viewed in its intended form: https://youtu.be/teC_uksSPBU
Reading the Poland story in google translation, it’s not clear to me they actually expect 400k (!) immigrants so much as that many people taking advantage of the new application procedure, which could just mean applications. Anyone who reads polish care to weigh in?
I never see any discussion in articles about immigration about the difference between immigrants and migrants (the former assimilate into the local culture, the latter retain their own culture and, depending on birth rates, can come to dominate the local culture). In establishing an immigration policy, it seems to me to be a necessary component to know at what point critical mass is attained, such that immigration tilts over into migration. Europe has disregarded this, to its cultural detriment.
Any air-filter you can recommend?
We went with Levolt and they seem good.
The China proposal seems like it ignores the potential second-order effects by which importing an enormous population inculcated with the values of the PRC for twenty-five years of life might, perhaps, solve the problem of American / Chinese competition by forcibly aligning America towards China. "The government has seen fit to dissolve the people and elect another." etc.
To the extent that one believes that "we must beat China" but also that "making America more like China is a bad solution", I'm not sure there's as much incoherency in the position as asserted. It could still be a good idea to allow more Chinese immigration, but excluding "potentially compromising the values alignment giving rise to the initial competition through massive demographic shifts" doesn't seem like a strong assumption or unjustified epicycle to tack on to restrictionist viewpoint -- arguably it's a widely-shared more or less implicit corollary of the position.
The Zurich and Winterthur minimum wages do only affect a very small number of people mainly because many hourly paid workers already get that much!
My 16yo son is working as an assistant woodworking teacher at summer camps since he is in-between school and uni, and he is getting CHF 25 a hour normally or CHF 35 if he is alone with the class.
He has of course no formal training relates to woodworking he is just a former student who really likes woodworking and (a bit less so) teaching and is pretty good at both.
Since editing does not appear to work, maybe a mobile interface issue, I should add that he does not have any formal training he is just a former student who was good at both woodworking and teaching and kept in touch with the owner.
That's always my first question when someone talks about a minimum wage or a MW increase - how much do employees make now? In the US, there are very few jobs that would be affected by an increase in the federal MW rate of 40%. 40% should be massive! But really, wages aren't determined by a minimum rate set by the government, but by what it takes to get an employee to do the job. Very few people in the US get paid less than $10/hour anymore (roughly 40% above the federal minimum).
This isn't true if the government were to set the wage above what actual prevailing wages are. Apparently about 30% of US employees make less than $15/hour. Since very few employees make less than $10 and a lot make between $10 and $15, an increase to $10 will have very few effects but an increase to $15 would have a lot.
And these effects are not universal - wages in big expensive cities are already much higher than in rural areas. A middle-class comfortable living in rural parts of the South or Midwest might be less than $15/hour. A *national* MW would be a huge tax on rural areas and make little difference to urban areas. For that reason I'm very against a national MW and especially a high one. Let SF make their MW $18 if they want, which is the equivalent in cost of living of about $9 in Birmingham Alabama.