Are we going to simply give up when it comes to understanding the fundamental nature of complexity? Why do multi-component systems undergo phase changes, why does it occur at the points at which they do, how could we design simple systems which, in sufficient quantity, exhibit useful properties upon phase shift? What techniques can be used to predict or derive macro-scale emergent phenomenon from micro-scale complex interactions? Why, exactly and with the same precision as quantum mechanics achieves, is more different?
When I had to come up with a company name back when I was doing freelancing, I chose Entropy Fueled Productions on a rationale quite similar to what was expressed in this article. Then I got to find out very few people know the word 'entropy' much less know how to spell it, and 'fueled' always gets mangled over the phone...
Years ago, Chrome included an experimental vertical side tabs feature. It was great. Worked perfectly. But, it disappeared one day. People created a bug on the tracker to get it restored. It got thousands of stars. It kept getting closed and re-opened and kept accumulating more and more stars. Eventually, someone at Google stepped in and said "we don't like how it looks. We have no other solution. But, we don't like how vertical side tabs look, so we will never permit them in Chrome." and ever since, if you want to open more than half a dozen tabs in Chrome you either need a monitor that's 9 feet wide or you use Firefox with the magnificent TabTree extension which is the correct solution to the problem.
There also might be an issue that recipes themselves can not be copyrighted. Article content and writing alongside the recipe can be copyrighted, but the recipe itself is not eligible for copyright protection at all. So if you're trying to make money off of a site, if it only had recipes, there is no protection whatsoever from someone setting up an identical copy and monetizing it themselves.
You would be atypical if you were less productive by normal standards. Most studies I have seen on the topic usually show a marked increase in worker productivity in working from home. There is a bit of a confounding variable, however... Homes are not open floor plan for the most part. And we know from over 1,000 studies that open floor plan offices massacre productivity to a huge degree. So it might just be the benefit of not having all of the kneecapping and hamstringing taken away that is usually inflicted by business on their workers through open floor plans.
They would not be atypical, because they are working during a pandemic, which is in itself a massive confounding variable. Even people who normally work from home are writing about being less productive than usual right now. This is not a good way to assess "working from home" vs "working in the office", any more than it would be to measure productivity of someone who was suddenly housebound with a broken leg.
What I didn't see mentioned that concerns me (although I admit it might be a concern born purely out of ignorance): No mention of whether employees would be provided with a minimum of 2 weeks paid sick leave should they show symptoms of COVID-19. Any employee who has a reasonable chance of becoming ill with COVID-19 at their work, and who does not also have a minimum of 2 weeks paid leave, should, by all logic I can think of, refuse to return to work. In a situation with no paid sick leave or less than 2 weeks of paid sick leave, the options are mostly reduced to 2: First, return to work, get sick, then get fired for absence while off sick. Or, second, remain home and get fired for absence while remaining healthy. I suppose there is the third options, the danger-face economic kamikaze model that most Americans will likely be expected to endure - go to work, hope you don't get sick, get sick anyway, get fired for absence. Then you can't even file for unemployment. There is no winning play.
Fundamental flaws in US health care and worker protection exposed. That's what this is.
Compare to the system in my native Belgium:
- a month of 100% paid sick leave, paid by the employer
- followed by five months 60% of wage in sick leave, paid by social security
- protected from redundancy within this 6 month period
- if made redundant afterwards while still ill after 6 months, obligation for the employer to pay (significant) damages
- 60% of last wage sick pay afterwards, capped to a generous maximum, unlimited in time as long as the illness lasts, paid by social security
- high quality healthcare regardless of employment status
- jobless benefits when healthy without a job, unlimited in time, recently made somewhat degressive
This makes for less of a power imbalance between employers and employees. Huge short and medium term social stabiliser. Certainly not without its flaws, but great to have in place during these times of severe economic crisis.
I'm happy to live in a country with such a strong social safety net as well, compared to the US (even though I don't profit from it at all being young, self-employed and unmarried...), but on the other hand I'm really concerned about our future. Someone has to pay for this and it's not like the government is encouraging people to roll up their sleeves and to learn some personal responsibility, with all the benefits they're giving for not working.
This is spot on. For all the praise of Belgian welfare I believe there is a 'dark' side to it. It is not doing well in motivating people to perform and there is a lot of systemic slack and abuse, like people claiming they're sick for a ridiculous amount of time every year.
*Note that firing an employee for not performing is quite difficult and the tax bracket at the top is outrageously high.
The thing is, people everywhere want to work, with extraordinarily few exceptions. A government doesn't really need to incentivize work in general, only some specific kinds of work which are underperformed.
Citation? I find it funny that no matter how many times history, and even contemporary events, have taught us otherwise, people still believe "People don't need strong incentives to work!"
You can look at employment rates in countries with generous social welfare and unemployment benefits, and notice that the percentage of the population sitting idle who are not sick is minuscule, and not significantly different format the idle population in countries with weak unemployment benefits.
It is true that there are systematic exceptions - especially people born rich.
According to the OECD, productivity per hour worked [0] in Scandinavia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland is comparable to the US, and in some cases significantly higher. All of these countries have much more generous social safety nets.
The average hours worked are significantly less for those small upticks in PPH. If you factor in hours worked, the US comes out far ahead of most if not all.
What does productivity have to do with people's choice of working or not? We were discussing whether people need encouraging to go to work or not. Productivity is a completely different metric, impacted by many other things.
Productivity is a part of the metric which you base that decision on. Do people need encouragement == will we produce 'enough' with less encouragement || is the long term reduction in production, and it's effect on future generations worth the increase in leisure time now.
That's by design. There's no winning play for the line worker, because providing one reduces the returns for the investors. If it wasn't already obvious before this, the corona response by the US has thrown into sharp relief how stacked the deck is - from top to bottom - against the common worker.
I mean, the name of the economic system is pretty blatant. "Capitalism" is exactly what it says on the tin, and it's pretty unbridled in the US, to its own detriment (long-term), IMO.
I can't speak about California specifically, but in Canada, if it can be reasonably be proven that the illness was obtained at the workplace, the employer is required to pay for the sick leave by the local health benefits service (State/Provincial/Federal level), which in this case would be two weeks.
The employer can fight the filing, but in the situation of COVID-19, it's reasonably easy to prove it was a workplace based infection (multiple people will get sick).
Side note, when you get payments from the local health benefits service, there's a %90 chance it's being paid by the employer to the health benefits service, which then transfers it to the employee
>also offers a glimpse into a potential future where companies of all sorts, not just auto insurers
No, not companies of "all" sorts. Just insurance companies. Other companies are regulated by Congress as part of antitrust regulations which would prevent them from doing this kind of thing. Insurance companies, however, are not regulated by antitrust laws. Insurance is declared to be "not commerce" and therefore not answerable to antitrust laws. They are permitted to break any antitrust law they please. This is why medical insurance companies, for instance, hold national meetings every few years to decide what price they are willing to pay for medical goods and services. This is price-fixing, and it is illegal in absolutely any industry - except insurance. In insurance, they can do it publicly because there literally is no law against it. There's a law PROTECTING it. It was called the McCarran-Ferguson Act. The plan was to repeal it as part of the Affordable Care Act. It was the clause that enabled the ACA to survive the entire revision process... and was then promptly removed from the bill immediately before its passage. This is why the insurers have never really fought very hard against the ACA. If it ever gets repealed, the McCarran-Ferguson act, that is, insurance companies will fall under antitrust regulation and have to change almost every business practice they follow. They will have to compete against one another on price, compete against each other on what prices they pay, etc. It would destroy their profit margins and probably result in the majority of them going out of business quite quickly. Don't hold your breath. It's why the insurance industry spends so much on lobbying and every lobbyist for every single industry will fight its repeal. In other words, it will NEVER happen. The law has been in place since 1945.
That idea of a critical period we're unaware even exists scares me. We know of several critical periods, like an infant with their eyes covered for the first two months of their life will never master binocular vision, a child born deaf can be given normal hearing with a cochlear implant if placed before or around age 2 with effectiveness falling off the later it is implanted, etc. What if there IS a critical period for learning how to develop deep and meaningful personal relationships? Everything about modern child life is designed to pervert and destroy any ability for a child to form such relationships. I have similar concerns about autonomy. Autonomy is a very strong need in all animals, so it would only make sense for this to be true of humans as well and we see plenty of indication of it throughout history and into modern times... but we continue to subject young people to almost total suspension of their autonomy during all of their formative years. What impact should we expect that to have on the kids later in life? The disturbing thing about critical periods is that even knowing you've missed one doesn't help, you just missed it and the most you can do is compensate.
It often surprises me when I hear about parents who are considering job-hopping and moving when they have children that are in the critical 11 - 15 age range. I had read ages ago, back in the late 90s I believe, that the chance of suicide skyrockets if an early adolescent is separated from their friend group. In my later reading and reflecting on my own experiences and whatnot I've come to believe that prior to the advent of agriculture, when most of humanity were nomadic hunter-gatherers (mostly gathering), when the single universally shared concept was of shared fatherhood, and when most children were raised in-common by the tribe, that friend group formed in early adolescence most likely functioned very much like your second family. First you get the tribe of adults, the family you're given, then you get to choose one and build it yourself. We spent the vast majority of human development at that stage, so it's a bit presumptive to think we can suppress it without significant consequence.
This sort of stealthy manipulation reminds me of an idea I had while reading 'Linked: The New Science of Networks.' It's a dangerous idea, I think. The book discusses what would be necessary to take the network of film participants and effectively 'break' the '6 degrees of Kevin Bacon' game. Most would presume the way you'd go about it is by finding the nodes connected to the most people and remove them. That's wrong. Because of clustering, removing the most-connected nodes results in almost no change to the general connectivity of other nodes.
Nodes which are actually important are 'bridge' nodes that provide a means of moving between mostly-disconnected groups. I started wondering what these ideas looked like in an actual social graph, like society. What would 'bridge' nodes look like, and what would eliminating the connection to them look like and what effect would it have? I think a social bridge node would be something like a biker whose main social group is his motorcycle gang, but who also participates in his elderly aunts knitting circle once a month. He provides a means through which ideas and concepts and information can flow from biker gangs, and those connected to them, to a group of elderly ladies and those they are connected to. They are, almost by definition, tenuous links. Ones which, if someone had influence over the communication networks they were using, it might be very easy to disrupt. What consequences would there be to breaking those links on a large scale? In the '6 degrees of Kevin Bacon' situation, you can get the average number of links needed to get to Kevin Bacon up over a dozen by only removing a couple handfuls of bridge nodes.
I think doing such a thing on a real social graph could be very quiet, possibly undetectable (drop messages from rarely-connecting pairs of users... they rarely connect, so how many of them will go through the trouble to re-establish contact? Have bridge nodes have something go haywire and they have to be issued a new phone number, 'their facebook got hacked', etc). And the consequence would be to freeze most things in place, or at least radically slow down any kind of large-scale social change. Disruption of the status quo on the scale of regime change in a government, say, requires buy-in from large and very mostly-disconnected segments of the population. If only pockets of people are interested in change, it doesn't matter how intensely they want the change to happen, it only matters if they can join forces with very disparate compatriots. If you had high-level control of communication networks and a vested interest in guarding the status quo against large-scale social upheaval, you could probably do it very quietly and without really needing anything more than the metadata of connectivity. No need to find out what ideas are being spread, you could just make sure ALL ideas remain trapped in their own little bubbles or that their spread is greatly contained.
Thank you for the book recommendation. Your description stands out to me because it feels like that’s the way “Russian” (as often claimed; sorry for a political example) influence on American and other societies via Internet manifests.
For the past few years specifically it feels like a story gets a suspicious amount of immediate and very widespread reach when they’re on the topic of an outrageous member of some certain political or other identity group. Any group, as in this is occurring in all directions simultaneously. I felt this way just yesterday when I saw a Reddit thread about some transgender sports participation drama and the “Other Discussions” tab had fifty other identical threads making sure the “link breakage” you describe is broadcast as widely as possible. Jessica Yaniv is another recent example. I don’t doubt that those divisive people themselves are genuine, but the absolute fervor around these topics just feels so fake. I could see the argument that it’s a natural feedback loop of people becoming more aware of and attuned to certain topics, but the truly scary thing is there’s no way to know.
