Automation vs Today's Jobs
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@MZH said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Oh, shit, not this again. It's a misleading chart that only looks at the hourly wage and ignores other compensation.
Previous discussion here. (
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@boomzilla So let me ask this. The insurance I'm offered requires me to pay 10%. The 90% from the employer goes straight into an insurance executive's pocket. I never even see it. My 10%, which also goes straight into an insurance executive's pocket, is also a net drain on my compensation. Further, as insurance rates rise faster than salary, that 10% becomes a bigger and bigger drain. If I refuse the insurance, I receive nothing.
How would you model that? The business uber alles crowd would have you believe it's a magnanimous gift. But in the real world, where products and services are purchased with money, it's not relevant. So the middle ground might be to ignore it.
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@Zenith said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
So let me ask this. The insurance I'm offered requires me to pay 10%. The 90% from the employer goes straight into an insurance executive's pocket.
The drug prohibition thread is
.How would you model that? The business uber alles crowd would have you believe it's a magnanimous gift. But in the real world, where products and services are purchased with money, it's not relevant. So the middle ground might be to ignore it.
Fine, ignore it. Just don't come back and make specious arguments like the one about productivity and wages.
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@Zenith
I mean, on the other hand, if you purchased a managed medical plan on your own in the individual market, would you really be paying less than 10x what you pay through work? If not, then clearly you are receiving the value of the full premium from your employer, so why does it not make sense to count at least the employer 90% as compensation?(Obviously, on the if so side, there's kind of this no man's land where most people can't really negotiate with their employer to pay them the amount that would have gone to insurance premiums if they opt out, so there's that degree of suck, since the employee portion of group managed medical plans will always be less than individual managed medical plans...)
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@izzion said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
(Obviously, on the if so side, there's kind of this no man's land where most people can't really negotiate with their employer to pay them the amount that would have gone to insurance premiums if they opt out, so there's that degree of suck, since the employee portion of group managed medical plans will always be less than individual managed medical plans...)
There's only so much you can negotiate about wages, too. Either way, it's compensation that they're paying out, which is the point. The hows and whys of us getting to this point is a lot of interesting stuff but pretending that it shouldn't be considered in a comparison of productivity and compensation is ludicrous.
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@MZH
Hmmm, what other non-benefits costs of employing an employee have gone up drastically since the 1970s...
I couldn't find data on relative change in Unemployment "Insurance" and Worker's Compensation tax rates over more than a few individual states in the last decade, but that doesn't seem to be quite as monotonic within the past 10 years even in states like CA or IL. But when you see Social Security & Medicare taxes withheld on your W-2 or pay stub -- the SAME AMOUNT was also paid by your employer! The government is legally mandating that they hide half of the tax on your wage from you, so you only feel like you're paying 7.65% instead of the actual 15.3% that you pay.
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@boomzilla said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@izzion said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
(Obviously, on the if so side, there's kind of this no man's land where most people can't really negotiate with their employer to pay them the amount that would have gone to insurance premiums if they opt out, so there's that degree of suck, since the employee portion of group managed medical plans will always be less than individual managed medical plans...)
There's only so much you can negotiate about wages, too. Either way, it's compensation that they're paying out, which is the point. The hows and whys of us getting to this point is a lot of interesting stuff but pretending that it shouldn't be considered in a comparison of productivity and compensation is ludicrous.
I would not say ludicrous, and yes this is being a bit obtuse but here it is.
The cost of the 90% by the employer could be categorized in one of two ways but not both. It is either compensation that is paid out by the company to give benefit to the employee that the employee does not actually see, or it is part of the cost of doing business and having employees and therefor not compensation. I can see an argument for either side of this pure due to the fact that opting out does not give that 90% to the employee, if it did then I would be fully on the side that it is compensation. Since it is not given to the employee if they opt out I see it as a cost of business that some employees will make cheaper for the company in a way that, in my opinion, is short sighted by the employee.It's easy to argue the other side, but you can't have both sides at once and it is all about perspective here.
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@KattMan said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
I would not say ludicrous, and yes this is being a bit obtuse but here it is.
The cost of the 90% by the employer could be categorized in one of two ways but not both. It is either compensation that is paid out by the company to give benefit to the employee that the employee does not actually see, or it is part of the cost of doing business and having employees and therefor not compensation. I can see an argument for either side of this pure due to the fact that opting out does not give that 90% to the employee, if it did then I would be fully on the side that it is compensation. Since it is not given to the employee if they opt out I see it as a cost of business that some employees will make cheaper for the company in a way that, in my opinion, is short sighted by the employee.Nope. That argument doesn't hold water for me. They are literally buying something for the employee. It makes sense to call it "a cost of doing business" but only in the same way that the employee's wage is, too.
Employer provided health insurance really began as a way to get around FDR's wage controls in order to compete for employees.
Whether employees opt out or not doesn't change the fact that employees who don't are getting health insurance as part of their compensation. The employer FICA taxes that @izzion mentioned are a variable cost for the business that I wouldn't include as compensation, though there is a kind of a case that it should be considered.
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@Zenith said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
The business uber alles crowd would have you believe it's a magnanimous gift.
Actually, most of those "business uber alles crowd" people as you called them, think that US health insurance system - especially post-ACA - is one giant tumor on American society and must be surgically removed.
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@boomzilla said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
There's only so much you can negotiate about wages, too. Either way, it's compensation that they're paying out, which is the point. The hows and whys of us getting to this point is a lot of interesting stuff but pretending that it shouldn't be considered in a comparison of productivity and compensation is ludicrous.
They may be paying it out but it's not going to the employee, who is the focus of this productivity vs wages comparison.
@izzion Last time I looked at a pay stub, insurance was half of my take-home pay. There's a long story behind it but I'll try to be brief. Public employment used to have lower take home pay because the money you didn't make went into benefits. Around when I started working, that stopped being the case, and they started taking more and more of that lower salary to "balance the budget" (ie waste more on H1B boondoggles and the like). At this point, there's an additional $4000 fine if you don't get an annual blood test at Special Friends Labs Inc which bought the Very Important "leaders" a nice cocktail dress for a night on the town.
That was when I finally had a look at that section of my pay stub. The explosion over 12 years was insane. Much of it I suspect is insurers bilking the hell out of good plans while they cried poverty over losing the right to sell no-coverage plans. I spent a few years in between as a contractor and the plans were too expensive but not even close (the federal fine was cheaper still).
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@Zenith said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@boomzilla said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
There's only so much you can negotiate about wages, too. Either way, it's compensation that they're paying out, which is the point. The hows and whys of us getting to this point is a lot of interesting stuff but pretending that it shouldn't be considered in a comparison of productivity and compensation is ludicrous.
They may be paying it out but it's not going to the employee, who is the focus of this productivity vs wages comparison.
So, if they bought you a car, that money didn't go to you either so it's not compensation!
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@izzion said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Obviously, on the if so side, there's kind of this no man's land where most people can't really negotiate with their employer to pay them the amount that would have gone to insurance premiums if they opt out, so there's that degree of suck, since the employee portion of group managed medical plans will always be less than individual managed medical plans...
There's another sticky wicket: many employers have what are called "self-insured" plans. That is, they pay a nominal administrative fee to the insurance company per employee (say, $5/month), and then pay the actual price of claims that come through. So there's no fixed premium amount for them to refund employees who opt out.
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@boomzilla The car would be physical property, titled to me, sitting in my driveway.
What did I get out of the insurance policy other than an obligation to pay for part of it, an obligation to pay for a blood test lest I be fined, co-pays every time I so much as go for a checkup or an ear ache, and, post-Obamacare, a higher income tax bill?
If it's compensation, let's see employers offer the equivalent amount of cash for those that forgo it.
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@Zenith said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
If it's compensation, let's see employers offer the equivalent amount of cash for those that forgo it.
Yeah, that would be nice, I agree. But you don't get to be a loon about stuff and not have people call you on it just because the world isn't nice.
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@Zenith said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@boomzilla So let me ask this. The insurance I'm offered requires me to pay 10%. The 90% from the employer goes straight into an insurance executive's pocket.
I'm not so sure that the 90% from the employer goes straight into an insurance executive's pocket. Some percent does, sure, but the majority is dispersed to providers. But I may be whooshing.
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@Unperverted-Vixen said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@izzion said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Obviously, on the if so side, there's kind of this no man's land where most people can't really negotiate with their employer to pay them the amount that would have gone to insurance premiums if they opt out, so there's that degree of suck, since the employee portion of group managed medical plans will always be less than individual managed medical plans...
There's another sticky wicket: many employers have what are called "self-insured" plans. That is, they pay a nominal administrative fee to the insurance company per employee (say, $5/month), and then pay the actual price of claims that come through. So there's no fixed premium amount for them to refund employees who opt out.
At two different employers (I don't know about the others), that was more or less how it worked. The insurance company basically guaranteed that the medical expenses would be paid, but the employer had to reimburse the insurance company.
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My experience makes me very sensitive to how numbers are used to lie.
My state has a site where you can look up public employee salaries. This number is the pre-tax cash compensation. People know there's a pension but aren't shown that employees pay into it. As is, it fuels a great deal of rage/envy over how "rich" all public employees are. Can't imagine why, seeing as how I took a big pay cut to go there and an even bigger raise to leave, but whatever.
Would you believe, looking at a pay stub, that employer-paid premiums one year were $17K? Yeah, seriously. Now go add that, plus the employer side of SS, to the published numbers. Don't forget to issue bullet proof vests to the folks on that list too.
What should happen is that all of these factors should be posted. What actually happens is that this crazy high number is published with zero context to "prove" how dirty lazy idiots are stealing from taxpayers. Or, for the private sector folks, dirty lazy idiots stealing from captains of industry. It's no better than the cash-only number. In fact, it's worse, because people default to cash-only and thus misinterpret a figure that secretly counts more.
Interestingly enough, contractor rates are nowhere to be found on this watchdog site. Because then we'd see how they're losing hundreds of millions of dollars paying 2-7 times per body for 10 times as many H1Bs to "save" on labor costs.
The purpose of publishing wacky half-baked numbers is to make wage earners fight amongst themselves to lower wages. Automation is still more expensive and more limited than they'd have people believe.
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@Zenith said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
At this point, there's an additional $4000 fine if you don't get an annual blood test at Special Friends Labs Inc which bought the Very Important "leaders" a nice cocktail dress for a night on the town.
$4000? Wow. It sounds outrageous that it's a requirement at all, and even more so if the penalty is so high. What is the stated justification?
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@boomzilla said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@MZH said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Oh, shit, not this again. It's a misleading chart that only looks at the hourly wage and ignores other compensation.
Previous discussion here. (
)The problem with that graph is that it is a sum of all compensation, essentially a mean if you do a per-capita calculation. This means that large compensations of a few individuals can pull the mean far away from what most people experience. If you look at median income, you can see the separation between productivity and income for most people. The divergence of mean and median income is an indication of the increasing concentration of wealth. For example, this uses 2013 census data:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/upshot/you-cant-feed-a-family-with-gdp.html
It's trivial that total productivity should equal total compensation (including non-wage income). Money doesn't disappear, so productivity output has to go to someone. As @dkf mentioned in the other thread, what's missing is the distribution. The median household income in 2013 was $51,939. At this level, the primary source of income is wages, which is why wage income is more indicative of most American's income. The non-wage income of the wealthiest far outstrips their wages, which is why Warren Buffet has said that he pays less income tax than his secretary.
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@MZH said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
The problem with that graph is that it is a sum of all compensation, essentially a mean if you do a per-capita calculation. This means that large compensations of a few individuals can pull the mean far away from what most people experience. If you look at median income, you can see the separation between productivity and income for most people. The divergence of mean and median income is an indication of the increasing concentration of wealth. For example, this uses 2013 census data:
Median income doesn't say anything about the productivity of the worker. In any case, both the graph I posted and the one I replied to will have the same potential issues.
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@boomzilla I've got an opinion and here's a graph that supports it.
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@PleegWat
E_MISSING_GRAPH
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@Gąska said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Gurth you can calculate sliding scales by hand just fine too.
It quickly gets impractical to do a great many calculations by hand, especially if you need there to be very few or preferably no errors.
In the Netherlands, import duties are based on the declared value of the imports, ignoring any decimals in the latter, even though including those probably results in a fairly substantial net gain in income for the state. Why? My guess is because providing tables (to save time and reduce errors) to look up the duties payable for ƒ100, ƒ101, ƒ102, etc.¹ is doable, but it’s just not practical for ƒ100.00, ƒ100.01, ƒ100.02 etc.²
¹ Example uses guilders (ƒ) instead of euros because at the time this was relevant, that was the currency in use.
² Yes, you could have the officials use the entry for (value × 100) and then divide the resulting import duties by 100. See above concerning errors.
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@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@brie said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
there should be a graduated reduction in benefits
Welcome to the 19th century way of calculating stuff that governments cling to: sliding scales seem to be something they’ve never heard of, the only method they know is a hard cut-off point that you’re either above or below. This is a good way to get the work done if you have to calculate everything by hand, but in an age of affordable computers, it makes no sense at all.
I can tell you that at least one government is trying to implement a sliding scale (and cutting benefits at the same time, so we have these lovely pointless arguments where one side talks about making every hour of work pay etc. etc and the other replies about how much less money vulnerable people are getting and no-one at all addresses the fact that those are completely orthogonal and both true. But I digress.)
I am... somewhat uniquely placed to tell you an automated system to reduce benefits on a sliding scale with income it's easier said than done. The sliding scale bit is fine. It's the income that's the problem. It would probably be relatively easy if all employers submitted payroll completely correctly, but unless someone invents a way to make that happen, I don't really know if they are going to iron out all the edge cases that result in wrong calculations.
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@boomzilla said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Median income doesn't say anything about the productivity of the worker.
Diverging medians and means tells you about the distribution of income, which is probably the more important factor politically. It's a fact of life that people define their perceived wealthiness by comparison to those other people that they see around them, including via venues such as TV and social media. It's just how our social primate brains by-and-large work. The strong divergence in median (and modal)
incomeeffective spending power from that enjoyed by the elite is a major warning indicator for future unrest. I'm not sure to what extend there's also generational separation, but that's also trouble because bored poor prospectless young men are so much more strongly primed than average to cause trouble. There's other stuff going on too, but I fret so much that there's not enough reasons to be hopeful for self-reinforcing stability.BAD ANALOGY: It's not the spark that sets the forest fire going that I worry about — sparks happen all the time and most just fizzle — it's the large-scale piling up of kindling-dry underbrush.
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@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Gąska said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Gurth you can calculate sliding scales by hand just fine too.
It quickly gets impractical to do a great many calculations by hand, especially if you need there to be very few or preferably no errors.
That's another problem with governments around the world: they love super-complicated tax and welfare systems when doing everything by yourself becomes basically impossible. They could've made it all fairly simple. Buy they've decided not to.
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@dkf said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@boomzilla said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Median income doesn't say anything about the productivity of the worker.
Diverging medians and means tells you about the distribution of income, which is probably the more important factor politically.
Undoubtedly. It's just orthogonal to the issue that was brought up, at least without additional information.
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@CarrieVS said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
The sliding scale bit is fine. It's the income that's the problem. It would probably be relatively easy if all employers submitted payroll completely correctly, but unless someone invents a way to make that happen, I don't really know if they are going to iron out all the edge cases that result in wrong calculations.
Around here, the way it basically works is that the person receiving benefits must declare they’ve had income, and how much. This is deducted from the next benefit payment. No sliding scales involved or necessary. The problem, as someone else pointed out, is that other things don’t have sliding scales: rent subsidies, for example, are only available if you have less than a certain income per month. If you’re on benefits, you are guaranteed to be below that threshold, but get a minimum-wage job and you’ll probably lose the rent subsidy and so end up at a net loss compared to being on benefits. This could easily be solved by using a (probably quite simple) formula that determines how much rent subsidies you get based on income.
@Gąska said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
That's another problem with governments around the world: they love super-complicated tax and welfare systems when doing everything by yourself becomes basically impossible. They could've made it all fairly simple. Buy they've decided not to.
Have you ever written rules for something? They often begin simple and straightforward, but if you’re not careful, end up convoluted because you find you also have to take into account all kinds of minor cases you didn’t think of at first.
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@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Around here, the way it basically works is that the person receiving benefits must declare they’ve had income, and how much. This is deducted from the next benefit payment. No sliding scales involved or necessary. The problem, as someone else pointed out, is that other things don’t have sliding scales: rent subsidies, for example, are only available if you have less than a certain income per month. If you’re on benefits, you are guaranteed to be below that threshold, but get a minimum-wage job and you’ll probably lose the rent subsidy and so end up at a net loss compared to being on benefits. This could easily be solved by using a (probably quite simple) formula that determines how much rent subsidies you get based on income.
The aim with ours is to make all of it taper with your earnings so that "every hour of work pays." It actually tapers off slightly more slowly than earnings increase so if you earn more your income goes up rather than stay the same. The only thing they're having issues with on that account is free school meals because it's hard to give a kid dinner on a sliding scale.
But in order to be automated, and account for changes in income, people getting into work, or people whose earnings fluctuate ... and well, because the powers that be decided it would be so ... the taxman tells them what everyone's earned in the last month and the system tries to add it all up and .... chokes on seventy thousand different ways that earnings can be irregular or incorrect. A great deal of sweat and occasional tears (but no blood fortunately) have gone into trying to handle it.
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@CarrieVS said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
The only thing they're having issues with on that account is free school meals because it's hard to give a kid dinner on a sliding scale.
Not that difficult. Some kids here get food totally free, others get a less than 100% discount, depending on their situation. Pretty much all payments are handled electronically. The kids get a code. You can send money to the school or pay online to put money in their accounts.
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@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@CarrieVS said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
The sliding scale bit is fine. It's the income that's the problem. It would probably be relatively easy if all employers submitted payroll completely correctly, but unless someone invents a way to make that happen, I don't really know if they are going to iron out all the edge cases that result in wrong calculations.
Around here, the way it basically works is that the person receiving benefits must declare they’ve had income, and how much. This is deducted from the next benefit payment. No sliding scales involved or necessary. The problem, as someone else pointed out, is that other things don’t have sliding scales: rent subsidies, for example, are only available if you have less than a certain income per month. If you’re on benefits, you are guaranteed to be below that threshold, but get a minimum-wage job and you’ll probably lose the rent subsidy and so end up at a net loss compared to being on benefits. This could easily be solved by using a (probably quite simple) formula that determines how much rent subsidies you get based on income.
@Gąska said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
That's another problem with governments around the world: they love super-complicated tax and welfare systems when doing everything by yourself becomes basically impossible. They could've made it all fairly simple. Buy they've decided not to.
Have you ever written rules for something? They often begin simple and straightforward, but if you’re not careful, end up convoluted because you find you also have to take into account all kinds of minor cases you didn’t think of at first.
That's part of it. But then the tax code starts to accumulate decades of wheeling and dealing. In the beginning, banks will point out that even though they can use their customers money, it's not really theirs. Next, because of separation of church and state, churches aren't taxed. Next came other charities. Then if you're growing the right kind of tress on your land, it's taxed less, etc., etc., etc.
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@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Gąska said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
That's another problem with governments around the world: they love super-complicated tax and welfare systems when doing everything by yourself becomes basically impossible. They could've made it all fairly simple. Buy they've decided not to.
Have you ever written rules for something? They often begin simple and straightforward, but if you’re not careful, end up convoluted because you find you also have to take into account all kinds of minor cases you didn’t think of at first.
Have you ever refactored something? You can shorten the ruleset several times and retain the same effect. You can even get down by a factor of 20 or so if you allow yourself to change the behavior just a little. But lawmakers never refactor law. It takes actual effort and experise, unlike slapping a few minor changes here and there, or introducing something brand new that doesn't integrate with the rest of the ecosystem at all (still a hard thing, but an order of magnitude easier than doing things the right way and cleaning up the earlier mess properly).
Also. In programming, rules are complicated because they much integrate with the existing environment nicely, and take into account all two millions of its idiosyncracies. In sports, rules must take into account every single possible thing that player(s) might do at any moment, and for each of them there needs to be a decision whether to allow it or punish it somehow, and what the punishment should be exactly, and account for all the consequences and unintended interactions with other rules. Much of the law has very similar characteristics as mentioned above, but there are huge areas of law that are very simple in their essence, and most of the complexity is due to lawmakers' own fault. And taxation is exactly this. It could have been done simple. But the lawmakers have deliberately come up with complexity entirely on their own. For various reasons, good or bad. But in the end, it's entirely within their power to unroll almost all of that complexity. They could've made it so there are 5 or 6 kinds of taxes in total. And the effect would be virtually the same as the current system in terms of how much of your paycheck goes to the government - except it would be orders of magnitude less administrative overhead, and that translates to billions of dollars saved in government upkeep, as well as billions of dollars saved on accounting and tax advisory services. Also, there would be many less mistakes, further increasing savings.
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@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Around here, the way it basically works is that the person receiving benefits must declare they’ve had income, and how much. This is deducted from the next benefit payment. No sliding scales involved or necessary.
I'd say that "payout is equal to base value minus your income" is itself an example of a simple sliding scale. And it could be made infinitely better with just one small change - "payout is equal to base value minus half of your income".
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@jinpa What's the justification every time they want you to jump through more hoops? It's ye olde falsehood about "keeping your premiums lower."
They played the old boiling frog trick too. It started out at 1%. Then it was to 3%, unless you took a health survey. Then it was 5%, unless you took a blood test. Then you only got the discount going to Special Friends Lab. Then it was a fixed dollar fine if you didn't go to Special Friends Lab.
Believe me, barely trusting my doctor to administer necessary shots, I held out as long as I could but I couldn't afford to lose two months take-home pay for insurance contributions.
Next step will probably be either a chip in my arm or a gym membership (certified partner gyms only please).
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@Zenith said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@jinpa What's the justification every time they want you to jump through more hoops? It's the ye olde falsehood about "keeping your premiums lower."
They played the old boiling frog trick too. It started out at 1%. Then it was to 3%, unless you took a health survey. Then it was 5%, unless you took a blood test. Then you only got the discount going to Special Friends Lab. Then it was a fixed dollar fine if you didn't go to Special Friends Lab.
Believe me, barely trusting my doctor to administer necessary shots, I held out as long as I could but I couldn't afford to lose two months take-home pay for insurance contributions.
Next step will probably be either a chip in my arm or a gym membership (certified partner gyms only please).
But, I mean specifically, what is the blood test for? Cholesterol? And then you have to enroll in a cholesterol-lowering program if your cholesterol's too high?
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@jinpa said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
But, I mean specifically, what is the blood test for? Cholesterol? And then you have to enroll in a cholesterol-lowering program if your cholesterol's too high?
There are seven or eight numbers that come out of the test. Blood pressure and cholesterol types for sure; I think BMI is there too. For some reason, they're not screening for whatever metric tracks diabetes yet.
If your score is on the high side, they harass you about "getting in shape." If you outright fail, I don't doubt that there's a financial punishment. What's really stupid is how many health issues are a direct result of work. My blood pressure was fine before the needful doers and all of the related problems happened.
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@Zenith said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@jinpa said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
But, I mean specifically, what is the blood test for? Cholesterol? And then you have to enroll in a cholesterol-lowering program if your cholesterol's too high?
There are seven or eight numbers that come out of the test. Blood pressure and cholesterol types for sure; I think BMI is there too. For some reason, they're not screening for whatever metric tracks diabetes yet.
If your score is on the high side, they harass you about "getting in shape." If you outright fail, I don't doubt that there's a financial punishment.
Pretty disturbing. China now has its citizens on a point-system to determine how good citizens they are, and there are rewards and punishments depending on how you score. I assume you're talking about America here. Apart from the military, I didn't realize they had that much control over the personal lives of government employees.
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@boomzilla said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@PleegWat
E_MISSING_GRAPHHere's a couple:
Spurious Correlations
Correlation is not causation: thousands of charts of real data showing actual correlations between ridiculous variables.
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@Gąska said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
But lawmakers never refactor law.
Actually not true. It's just that it's often not reported on much because it isn't interesting news for anyone outside the legal profession (or even most of those inside it). Just like we don't really report refactorings as newsworthy features that should entice users to upgrade their software: their purpose is really just to enable us to keep things and working and deliver desired changes with less overall effort.
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@dkf well, maybe it's just another instance of US politicians, with all their shittiness, still being infinitely better than Polish politicians (not terribly surprising to be honest). But over here, law changes really are minimal. It's always either a new paragraph, or a tweak to an existing paragraph, or a whole new chapter that does things completely differently than before, which requires recalling earlier laws wholesale and updating tons of references between paragraphs. I've yet to see a single instance of a comprehensive cleanup of some lawbill that doesn't contain any functional changes. And if it was a regular thing, I'd be bound to have seen one by now.
For lawmakers to get anywhere close to the level of refactoring that's being done in software world, there would have to be an entire committee or two that do nothing but rewrite old laws to say the exact same thing but in a different way. I don't think that's a thing even in the US.
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@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
the person receiving benefits must declare they’ve had income, and how much. This is deducted from the next benefit payment. No sliding scales involved or necessary. The problem, as someone else pointed out, is that other things don’t have sliding scales:
That's a problem, but not the only one. Even worse, it disincentivizes earning other income.
Let's say I'm unemployed and get $500/week in Unemployment Insurance. Let's also say I have the opportunity to get a full-time job at somewhat better than minimum wage, but still fairly menial, $10/hour. Would I take it?
Heck no! I'd work 40 hours and earn $400. But $400 would be deducted from the $500 UI benefit, so I'd end up with exactly the same $500 at the end of the week as if I hadn't worked at all.
Except I wouldn't, because I'd no longer be unemployed; therefore, I'd no longer be eligible for the benefit. So I'd have only the $400 I earned, not $500. But it wouldn't even be $400, because it would have taxes, insurance, etc. withheld from it, so I might end up with $300 for a week of menial labor.
$300 for working, or $500 for not working? That's not a difficult question to answer; even high school dropouts can figure that out.
BTDT. The numbers weren't that simple, but when I was unemployed, I calculated that I needed to earn something like, IIRC, $11.50 to equal the loss of UI, not accounting for the withholding.
Of course, you have to go to work eventually (if you can find a job), because the benefits are only temporary. And if your budget is based on a usual income that's 4x–5x the UI benefit, there's a strong incentive to get a real job ASAP, regardless. But it does impose a floor on the sort of job you'll apply for.
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@jinpa said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
Pretty disturbing. China now has its citizens on a point-system to determine how good citizens they are, and there are rewards and punishments depending on how you score. I assume you're talking about America here. Apart from the military, I didn't realize they had that much control over the personal lives of government employees.
Especially when it's based on stuff like cholesterol recommendations that turned out to have been wrong for decades.
Recommended in the general context of this scoring bullshit: Weapons of Math Destruction
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@Gąska
It might also be an historical thing. Until a decade ago law had to be printed out on paper to be active. In
we used double the paper because the French and Dutch (and sometimes German) translations are equally important. So pages where split between a French and a Dutch column with every article starting at the same height. This thing ate threes like there was no tomorrow. In this setup it was easier to "add" a new article that scrapped or partially scrapped a previous one then to re-do the whole countless pages. Additional bonus rounds can be achieved because typo's, translation errors, ... can be corrected by a published cabinet update and no parliament sign off is necessary.
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@Luhmann whatever the reason, the end result is that law doesn't get refactored, and that's bad.
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@Gąska said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
And if it was a regular thing, I'd be bound to have seen one by now.
The people who work on that sort of thing in the UK are (AFAICT) busy looking at reducing the number of 16th century laws still on the books…
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@Gąska said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
in the end, it's entirely within [the lawmakers’] power to unroll almost all of that complexity.
Not quite. Yes, technically they can make any changes (including vast simplifications) that they want, as long as they can get a majority vote on it. In practice, no matter what change they make, someone will complain. With major changes, a large number of people will usually complain even if the change is clearly for the better in the long run. Politicians tend to keep these sorts of things very much in mind.
@Gąska said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
I'd say that "payout is equal to base value minus your income" is itself an example of a simple sliding scale.
Now you mention it: probably, yes.
And it could be made infinitely better with just one small change - "payout is equal to base value minus half of your income".
Even keeping 10% of your income would indeed encourage people a lot more. I remember making a net loss of €8 on declaring income to a benefit agency at one point: I had done some freelance writing for an American publisher, who mailed me a cheque (
) for a certain amount in US dollars. Cashing this cheque gave me the equivalent in euros, that I declared to the agency like a good boy should, and then the bank charged my account with an €8 transaction fee. Long-term result: I kept writing freelance but didn't cash the cheques anymore.@HardwareGeek said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
I'd work 40 hours and earn $400. But $400 would be deducted from the $500 UI benefit, so I'd end up with exactly the same $500 at the end of the week as if I hadn't worked at all.
See above :)
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@Luhmann said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
This thing ate threes like there was no tomorrow.
Sounds like a pitch for a new Sesame Street monster.
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@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Gąska said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
in the end, it's entirely within [the lawmakers’] power to unroll almost all of that complexity.
Not quite. Yes, technically they can make any changes (including vast simplifications) that they want, as long as they can get a majority vote on it. In practice, no matter what change they make, someone will complain. With major changes, a large number of people will usually complain even if the change is clearly for the better in the long run. Politicians tend to keep these sorts of things very much in mind.
That's not much different from sheer laziness and prioritizing short-term benefits over long-term sustainability.
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@Gąska said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Gurth said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
@Gąska said in Automation vs Today's Jobs:
in the end, it's entirely within [the lawmakers’] power to unroll almost all of that complexity.
Not quite. Yes, technically they can make any changes (including vast simplifications) that they want, as long as they can get a majority vote on it. In practice, no matter what change they make, someone will complain. With major changes, a large number of people will usually complain even if the change is clearly for the better in the long run. Politicians tend to keep these sorts of things very much in mind.
That's not much different from sheer laziness and prioritizing short-term benefits over long-term sustainability.
Possibly, but you have to consider that not everyone agrees on what is actually a long term benefit.
Scott Winship on Twitter
