canihasaccount @ canihasaccount @lemmy.world

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8

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137

Joined

2 yr. ago

Ich lebe in Amerika. Ich lerne Deutsche sprechen, aber das kostet Geld. Vielleicht wollen die Migranten Deutsche lernen, haben aber nicht das Geld dafür?

Sorry if the above is poorly worded; I'm still new to the language. My point is that there are lots of reasons that someone might not know a language well, including a lack of money, or a lack of time from needing to work full time to support one's migrant family on a low wage.

Mexican immigrants to the US are wonderful, but their culture is very different from non-Hispanic US culture. I don't expect them to learn English. They work like 60 hours per week to support their families. Like the person you're replying to has said, though, their children learn English and integrate into, but also uniquely contribute to, US culture. Rather than expecting the first-generation immigrants to learn English, I've learned Spanish specifically to speak with them. It's not like there are many more immigrants to Germany than there are immigrants to the US--even discounting the fact that the US has always been a country of immigrants, Hispanic and Latino/a/e Americans (the majority of which are Mexican Americans) are expected to exceed 50% of all Americans within a couple of decades. In some states, they are already the majority.

Diversity is a good thing, and we shouldn't require immigrants to become like us culturally or linguistically before accepting them.

That's not actually the abstract; it's a piece from the discussion that someone pasted nicely with the first page in order to name and shame the authors. I looked at it in depth when I saw this circulate a little while ago.

I was just in a smaller city in Germany and flew back to the US after that. I look German and speak German. When paying with card, Germany felt exactly like the US. At every restaurant, the tip request automatically came up within the thing used to process your card, just like in the US.

It did, actually: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881500Q

EU is still smaller

But the main reason the US can't handle the same stuff at a federal level that the EU can is population density. The US government can't afford to nationalize rural healthcare given how rural the US can be--especially with their debt/GDP at the moment. Give it another few hundred years and the US might catch up to Europe in that respect.

Sync does formatting correctly. I came to Lemmy only because I like Sync so much. I paid for the lifetime version of it with Reddit and will probably pay for the lifetime version of this eventually. To each their own wrt how Lemmy is viewed, I guess.

There's an ad for something, with the bell. We both use the free version of Sync.

At least it comes at a discount right now

I'm thinking of shorting it. My friend is definitely shorting it.

To a degree. The large subreddits, like AskReddit, get far fewer upvotes on the top posts of the week than they used to get. I think there's a good chunk of folks who left for a replacement, then left their replacement without going back to Reddit.

I go out of my way not to do so. Whenever I search for some specific items and see "Sponsored," I'll scroll down until I get the same listing without the ad link.

Would you, after devoting full years of your adult life to the unpaid work of learning the requisite advanced math and computer science needed to develop such a model, like to spend years more of your life to develop a generative AI model without compensation? Within the US, it is legal to use public text for commercial purposes without any need to obtain a permit. Developers of such models deserve to be paid, just like any other workers, and that doesn't happen unless either we make AI a utility (or something similar) and funnel tax dollars into it or the company charges for the product so it can pay its employees.

I wholeheartedly agree that AI shouldn't be trained on copyrighted, private, or any other works outside of the public domain. I think that OpenAI's use of nonpublic material was illegal and unethical, and that they should be legally obligated to scrap their entire model and train another one from legal material. But developers deserve to be paid for their labor and time, and that requires the company that employs them to make money somehow.

I'm so in the minority here, but I have a different perspective.

I worked at a grocery store for years, with about a third of my job being cart duty. I loved it when people left their carts outside of the corrals, for a few reasons.

First, if a lot of people did so, I would point it out to whoever was the manager on at the time before I went outside. My manager knew that I would take longer before coming back in, and that would give me more time to stroll/relax/enjoy the outdoors before coming back in to customer craziness. Having those extra minutes because my manager didn't know how long I should take was nice.

Second, sometimes I had to walk way the hell out to the edge of the parking lot, which was really nice for a long walk away from customer craziness. Such walks were very nice when the weather was nice.

Third, it was job security. Working during the recession made my managers want to let as many people go as they could, but customers who made it so even the most efficient cart duty workers took a while to clear the lot effectively kept more of us employeed than management would have employed otherwise.

For those reasons, whenever the weather is nice, I try to leave my cart in a weird spot that is anchored by something. I realize that many other cart duty folks probably dislike me for it, but I know I appreciated it when others did this. So I do it for the folks like me.

I know all of the arguments against it and I'm not trying to debate here. Just sharing a different perspective; sometimes, leaving your cart in a terrible spot can be nice for some of the workers.

Average monthly salary in the cities is listed at the bottom of that link I gave. The two cities differ in monthly salary by $14 dollars on average, per the available data. Those same submissions show that the cost of living is ~20% higher in San Diego than Austin.

Austin is cheaper than San Diego, even excluding taxes:

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+States&country2=United+States&city1=Austin%2C+TX&city2=San+Diego%2C+CA

No, it isn't; performance != ability, and it's not clear that cognitive performance declines at all--hence the word "may."

My claim is that

Cognitive performance may also decline in remote settings

Nothing more.

The RCT is free to access (if you haven't downloaded more than three NBER papers; if you have, open the page in a different browser). Scroll down on the page I linked and download it via the button.

Statistically, you can control for variables in OLS regression--that's literally exactly what the model does when you include more than one variable--and, provided that you got your doctorate in anything that uses statistics, I am sure you know that.

Seasonality is one of the more basic economics concepts. The influence of weather and seasonal illness trends on productivity has been shown in a number of studies (e.g., productivity declines during the flu season). The authors didn't "show" it because it would be like showing gravity in a physics paper. Some things can be assumed. Also, productivity didn't have a trend, as was stated in the text that I quoted.

You completely ignored the log transformed results, which the authors note were better fit by the regression than the untransformed data, and which showed less productivity in work from home regardless of whether seasonality was controlled.

Personally, I think people should be able to work from home all they want. Productivity isn't the only important thing in life, nor is it the only important thing to businesses (e.g., retention of top employees is important). I am wholly against WebMD and all other companies requiring employees to return to the office. All I was doing in my comments was trying to clarify the data on WFH and productivity. There are good reasons to continue to allow WFH, but increased productivity is not one.

I'm going to finish my course prep. You can have the final word here; I don't have time to continue debating anymore.

First, the RCT is a much stronger study. I'm not sure why you're picking a fight with a correlational paper when there is a causal manipulation that I linked first.

Second, did you actually read the paper? 1B isn't the graph of productivity; 1C is. You can't just look at a graph, either--you need statistics.

"For Output, figure 1B, there is no visible monotonic or linear trend, so a seasonal time correction might be more appropriate here. Moreover, average output appears to be slightly lower during WFH.

For Productivity, figure 1C, the graph is more volatile, which is not surprising for a ratio. There is no clear linear time trend before WFH, but some variation from month to month, so a seasonal correction might be more appropriate. Productivity drops visibly during WFH. Finally, figure 1D plots the log of Productivity, which drops considerably after the start of WFH.

To quantify the WFH effect, and to control for employee and team time-invariant variables (via employee and team fixed effects), we now turn to the regression analyses. Informally, the estimates give us average differences in outcomes before and during WFH for the same employee, controlling for team effects (since employees sometimes switch teams) and time trends.

Table 4 reports WFH effect estimates based on OLS regressions for all three outcome variables, plus the natural logarithm of Productivity, in each case with linear and seasonal time trend corrections. All estimates are in line with the visible effects in the raw data in figure 1.

...

Columns 5 and 6 show that both WFH effect estimates on Productivity are negative, but only the estimate with seasonal time trend is significantly different from zero. We prefer that specification, since both the plot and the linear time trend coefficient indicate that a linear trend is not as appropriate. According to this specification, productivity decreased by 0.26 output percentage points per hour worked. Given an average WFO productivity of 1.36, this estimate corresponds to a 19% drop in output per hour worked. This is economically significant: if employees worked a fixed 40 hours per week, this would imply a drop in output of 10.2 output percentage points in a week. In other words, if employees had not increased time worked during WFH, on average they would have completed only 90 of 100 assigned tasks.

Columns 7 and 8 explain the log of Productivity, which strongly increases the fit of the regression. The WFH effect is negative and significantly different from zero at all significance levels, irrespective of time controls."