The American workforce has been redlining on poorly staffed overworked jobs for decades. It's not surprising that we're losing workers left and right to fatigue. They treat the equipment better than the people who are doing the job and that is saying something because the equipment is poorly maintained as well. Nurses, doctors, teachers, railroad workers, truckers, clerks, salespeople, developers, builders, contractors, and everyone else.
However, with our current political system, the solutions to these problems are nearly impossible to accomplish. Unions, socialized health care, workers rights, mandated vacation time, overtime limits, minimum wages, and UBI are all lightyears away. Instead our politicians are stripping women of their human rights and attacking children while placing migrants into concentration camps.
> However, with our current political system, the solutions to these problems are nearly impossible to accomplish. Unions, socialized health care, workers rights, mandated vacation time, overtime limits, minimum wages, and UBI are all lightyears away.
All of those (except the UBI) exist in most developed countries.
There are many problems, from taxes (the poor already pay zero, the rich avoid them, the middle class gets fucked), to foreign/illegal worker (why pay a fair pay to a local worker, if you can employ a foreigner for cheaper), to widespread corruption, anti-covid measures (mostly printing money and giving it around, bringing high inflation), to political sanctions (eg. ukraine war - it's no different than eg. the war in afghanistan or iraq or libya, syria, etc., but somehow we act as if it is, and with many political steps inbetween, the gas prices and food prices are soaring high), to people abusing all the buzzowords you've mentioned in countries that have them.
Honestly, if just the police and courts did their jobs, and all the corruption was punished (from heads of government, to paying plumbers under the table and people abusing social benefits), a lot of the problems would be solved.
In my country, we just had an election, and the two most pressing matters were healthcare (fscked) and housing prices (double fscked). Noone on TV ever mentioned how much an average worker pays for healthcare (it's automatically deducted in two different ways from your "gross-gross" paycheck), because people would get mad and ask where does all the money (a lot of it) actually go,... and also noone asks why we can have cornfields and cows in prime locations of our capital city, and even more prime development land in other cities, and the government (from national to local) doesn't allow building there, to bring the prices down.
> and also noone asks why we can have cornfields and cows in prime locations of our capital city, and even more prime development land in other cities, and the government (from national to local) doesn't allow building there, to bring the prices down.
For one, healthy good soil is rare and expensive. We're already wasting too much of it.
And as for "prime development land" - I know the thoughts as a Munich resident and every time I see a rare piece of land that's not been built I always think "just how much housing could be built there". The thing is, a city also needs un-obstructed green space for local micro-climate reasons [1]. You can't just build up everything and expect livable temperatures, especially not with climate change looming.
We should ask politicians instead why they let the rural areas rot to hell and beyond and people are forced to coop together in extremely dense unhealthy urban monster areas.
I'm literally talking about an area inside the city highway ring or on the outer edge, with high congestion, where noone wants to eat food grown there.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have rural areas, where locals have been basically thrown out by airbnb (have kids, want them to live in your village? Good luck, no way), and we still don't let people build more houses there, even with a ban on airbnb.... one example, city of "lesce" where a friend wants to live, but can't neither buy or build anything there, nor extend his parents house:
> it's no different than eg. the war in afghanistan.
I agree. But that doesnt mean that we should care less about Ukraine though (which still makes sense bc its closer to 'home'), it means we should have cared way more about the same war happening in the middle east.
But you didn't care back then... also noone cared about yugoslavia/serbia in 1999, and it was even closer,... you just justified it the same way putin is now justifying the attack on ukraine. Yes, including bombing school, bridges, busses and trains full of people, etc.
The current sanctions are hurting european people a lot more than they are hurting putin, and thus should be removed. European/american/NATO soldiers should go home, since they are currently occupying more than one sovereing country (the same way putin is), and preferably do it a bit better than they did when they left afghanistan. Only after all of yours and ours (since my country is a part of nato too) soldiers are back home, can we point fingers at putin.
First, 1999 was a generation ago (about 25 years). Priorities are allowed to change in a generation, in this case for the better. Sorry that your first response to drawing a line at bombing schools, bridges, busses in Ukraine is to shout 'what about...' instead of to be glad people are willing to you know, be against bombing schools, bridges, and busses in at least one situation.
Second, do you believe in preventative maintenance? In this case, Ukraine is preventative maintenance for future actions Russia will take (Russia has already shown from 2014 to now that it will make a peace deal, build strength, and attack again) that will result in more lives lost and worse economic impact. While the price is painful now, it is much less than it would be in 10 years.
Third, what countries meet the definition of being occupied by European/American/NATO soldiers in Europe? Definition: control and possession of hostile territory that enables an invading nation to establish military government against an enemy or martial law against rebels or insurrectionists in its own territory. Your twisting of you know, the actual meaning of words shows your comment is nothing but propaganda, in this case propaganda promoting the bombing of schools, bridges, busses and trains full of people because it has been done in the past and appeasing violence because it impacts your pocket book.
We from the balkans still remember nato plans flying above our heads bombing a country 400km away. The problem is that, when americans do something like that (dorne bomb a wedding), people treat that as "ok", and the bombers even get a Nobel peace prize.... if it turns out, that the people they kill are eg. Reuters journalists, they punish the leaker and the person who publishes that... there was sam public backlash for wikileaks, but practically zero sanctions from any country against americans killing civilians, even if it was cought on video.
Nato is currently not occupying any european country (unless we count kosovo US base as an occupation), but currently even ours (slovenian) soldiers are in quite a few countries as a part of nato, eg. Syria being one of them.
So yeah... why does Obama get a peace prize for bombing weddings and occupying sovereign countries, and we get expensive gas when putin is saving their minorities in ukraine (atleast this was the narrative when nato bombed serbia)?
Ah, much better post, where you actually outline your agenda. Your stance appears to be that because others suffered from war, Ukrainians should suffer too, especially if otherwise it means you have expensive gas. Do I have your position right?
I can't find anything about a NATO deployment to Syria. Can you point me to something? NATO aligned countries in Syria <> NATO deployment in Syria. Like your definition of occupation you continue to blend facts and false claims to push your position. Again that is what is known as propaganda. Stretch the truth (NATO aligned countries in conflicts) to appear to have support for your false claims (NATO occupation/NATO deployments that don't exist).
I have many Russian speaking friends in Ukraine. Before the war they identified themselves as 'Russians from Ukraine'. They were educated at Moscow University, speak Russian not Ukrainian, and carry Ukrainian and Russian passports. They now identify as Ukrainian. They are not being saved. But again you are not above using propaganda. In this case you present a false casus belli (that Russia is saving minorities in Ukraine) to sanitize your position of supporting (or at the least not opposing) Russia's war of aggression because bad things happened in the past and also gas prices.
Yes, the USA sucks. Yes, the USA has done bad things. Yes, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has destabilized oil and food markets. I don't see how any of that justifies that Ukrainian should surrender their right to self determination or should prevent governments choosing to take actions to support Ukraine. You present classic 'What about'ism in order to prevent doing good now because bad has been done in the past. It is a form of propaganda not designed to get people to believe something, but to manipulate them into doing nothing, and leads to nothing but apathy. If you can get the good decent people paralyzed with your what aboutism (because oppressors don't care about past atrocities) only aggressors like Putin benefit because there is less resistance against them. You want to setup a world where aggressors go unchecked because we can't have our gas prices going up and bad things have always happened. That sounds like a horrific world, and one we suffered through in WW2. Should England not have fought in WW2 because they had a horrible record of repressive empire? That seems to be your argument.
There are way too many jobs where management doesn't give the front-line worker an appropriate amount of time and/or resources, and when things inevitably go wrong, the front-line worker is blamed, and the problem is studied as if the only factor was the front-line worker.
I saw that regularly as a patent examiner. Examiners aren't given a lot of time, and when a bad patent is issued, tons of ignorant people on the internet start insulting the examiner. They have no idea what the job is like, and I strongly doubt they'd do better than an experienced examiner, even given a lot more time than an examiner gets.
Also I think the real estate disaster is one of the main culprits of most 'common people' problems. One cannot afford an early retirement from a taxing job, cos guess what mortgage is a criminal 10-15x their yearly salary..so good luck pensioning before 70...if at all. Here in the UK this has reached absurd levels and nobody in the goverment says a word about it in real (and no, 'easier access to credit' is absolutely not the right answer)... pay 5-6 pounds for a filter coffee and a plain croissant.. cos the tiny shop has to pay 100k / year in rent.... it's just a road to civil war... hopefully soon.
Trillions of dollars spent on U.S. healthcare, but hospitals are running hyper-efficient, lean staffs, with barely any ability to scale up to meet demand during a crisis.
Wondering out loud - with non-profits, the IRS can enforce that status by forcing them to spend if they have too much money saved. Am I getting this correct?
What about forcing hospitals to spend on staff if they are too profitable?
I’m being purposefully vague to fill in the holes with discussion.
Feel free to throw tomatoes at me if it’s a dumb idea. I’ve had dumber.
> What about forcing hospitals to spend on staff if they are too profitable?
Why do I suspect we'd see 'hollywood' accounting for medical if this ever were to be a 'thing'?
'Medical accounting' would become such a thing that we'd end up seeing every hospital running in the red all the time, to avoid this sort of thing. Someone would still be bringing in profits, but much much harder to spot.
It's an excellent analogy: The triumph of beancounters turns out to be brittle and costly when, in this case track maintenance, unprofitable but necessary activities and capex are reduced. "It worked fine this quarter!"
I regularly see executives incentivized and rewarded for short term thinking.
I never see executives pay a price for the results of years of short term thinking - they only get punished for failing to meet quarterly targets.
Execs often jump around before the results of their shortsightedness bear fruit.
I dream of a world where the performance of leaders and decision makers is linked with the long term performance of the organizations that they used to manage as well as the one that they currently lead.
The sickest part is the "billed to insurance" value. You get a medical bill that looks like this:
Cost: $1000
Paid by patient: $200
Billed to insurance: $800
Paid by insurance: $150
Remaining to be paid: $0
I get statements that look like this all the time, where the provider "bills" the insurance for $N, but the insurance pays a fraction of it, and apparently that's "good enough".
But when they tell me "that'll be $200 today, please, we take Visa and Discover", I don't have the option to say "actually I'm gonna pay $50 and that's good enough"
I have heard that for a birth (since you have some advance notice), you can go in to the hospital, sit down, and say "I will be having a baby here, and I will pay in cash, in full. Let's hammer out some costs" and maybe actually negotiate something acceptable.
Hyper efficiency isn't about you, it's for the corporation and, to no small degree, the insurance company.
I'd have to imagine that the amortized cost (millions?) for the MRI machine, it's operation and storage, and the trained personnel isn't free, but obviously much less than you and your insurance pay.
That word is being used in a different way in this case. Maybe it's an economic definition of "efficient" but I'm not sure. It means they are spending bare minimum on staff/expenses to achieve whatever goals they have. Like "lean".
I think you are a bit overstating the situation. No matter what's your opinion on how the pandemic was handled, I think it's safe to say that the measures were unprecedented and caused a massive, massive shock in almost every corner of the economy and society in general. That we are still doing...fine (!!) After entire sections of the world's economy were put on hold, on and off for years while other portions were , as you said , overdriven by necessity is a testament to how resilient the US and the world are.
In hindsight, it's tempting to try to frame the recent events as just the logical ans predictable results of a bad system that was slow crumbling anyways... But I just completely disagree that this was just the result of decades of neglect, in no small part because workers were actually doing much better now than they did a decade ago. The pre pandemic times were extremely prosperous all things considered, real wages were actually getting higher, infrastructure was worked on, etc. I wouldn't describe that period as a slow decline, and we were steadily revving down from the "redline" of the early 2000s. Even in my poor home country, that historically has been pretty devoid of opportunities, things were looking really good and people were optimistic.
But then the pandemc hit. And there has been an insanely massive contrast between how, say, an office worker was affected by the pandemic versus how a healthcare worker experienced it. Imo, that obviously lead to unprecedented fatigue and not just physically. Both of my parents are nurses, and I remember them being almost completely burnt out while everyone else was almost enjoying the perks of WFH and not having things to do. But once the decision was taken to lockdown/shutdown what were the options? Food still had to be moved, patients had to be treated, etc.
But again, imo we are still doing surprisingly well and while sinking into doomerism can be tempting, I'm acrually more optimistic now than ever before. Because beyond the culture war, the punditry, the push to divide and the moments that genuinely scared me (like when when normal people started rabidly turning in- and on- their neighbors)... we still kinda made it through?! And we all kind of made that possible, though some more than the others!
It's easy to be optimistic when your friends aren't starving and struggling to afford transportation or find work. I'm not talking from a doom-scroll, I'm talking from lived experiences where I'm seeing people drop like flies in a system that is rigged to wring every drop of their energy and time from them for the least amount of compensation.
How many people do you know who work for Wal-Mart? How are they doing right now? How many unemployed people do you know? People who are getting evicted? I know at least 5 and they are all doing terribly. The cost of living has nearly doubled for the poorest among us and wages have barely budged. They can't afford to live close to their jobs because of skyrocketing rents and can't afford cars to drive to work. They have no savings and are a hairs breadth from homelessness which is becoming a bigger target for police.
> socialized health care, workers rights, mandated vacation time, overtime limits, minimum wages, and UBI are all lightyears away.
do you mean software developers?
I don't see why developers need all those. Developers are one of the highest paid people on the whole planet, like top 10% in USA. Most people not in the know think levels.fyi must be fake.
This seems like ridiculous entitlement to expect even more. Why can't they spend their own money to buy the things they are lacking.
I'm sure a lot of enjoy cushy, well-paid, low-stress jobs (myself included) but its not all of us.
Game development is one area that could benefit from these. People in that industry suffer from a lot of stress and high rates of burnout due to overwork. edit: they're also paid significantly less than people working in web-dev.
You wouldn't ask a teacher or nurse to change careers because their employer or government is treating them poorly.
You'd tell the employer to stop treating people like garbage.
I know this is mostly about developers but not everyone is able to just make a job change like you're suggesting. We should be giving people the things they need to be happy and successful in their current jobs.
Software engineers can buy worker rights, overtime limits, etc? That's news to me. Also, goes without saying, not every engineer is making FAANG-level salaries.
what overtime limits? Its a myth that software developers in usa are working overtime. I've been a developer for last 15 yrs and must have worked overtime < 20 days.
Do you really think developers at banks and insurance companies are working overtime? If they really have problem with overtime at current job they can switch to one of these under the radar jobs at banks.
And yes you can "buy" overtime limits by hiring a nanny, getting catered dinners, hiring a tutor for your kids, hiring a personal trainer ect.
A huge number of teams and companies have 24/7 oncall rotations. While it is still possible to say "I'll never work on a team that has continuous oncall" it is becoming harder and harder.
It's more that a critical mass of Americans have been duped into believing such things come with evil strings attached. Money buys voters, because the more eyeballs you put in front of overly emotional arguments which appeal to the mythologies people were raised with (along with their egos) - all very easy to construct - the more likely you are to win. The ability to influence is disproportionately granted to those who already have wealth & power, regardless of their actual agendas.
By nearly any measure, we are in a new Gilded Age at least as bad as the first one, only with way more people and way more sophisticated tools of manipulation. Yet almost anything we try to do to reduce the wealth gap is easily batted down by armies of idealogues who often don't even realize their opinions have been bought. There is no easy answer to this I can see, it may take a massive crisis and unthinkable loss of life (history doesn't repeat but it rhymes) before we're able to adjust course... which will also be temporary.
The battle for anything resembling equality will never end for this species as we know it.
This is what boggles my mind. My parents that worked government jobs, both worked in a union, both on pensions, both with state sponsored medical care, and on socialized health care now after they retired; they are both Republican conservatives.
Maybe the problem is that the workers are worse, including management and CEO's. The quality of the American workforce is declining. This also puts a burden on unions because qualified and motivated people do not want to unionize with lazy and unproductive people.
I would love to take all your money, put you back to living paycheck to paycheck and see how 'lazy' you get after the daily struggle to house and feed yourself with no way to get ahead and no light at the end of the tunnel.
It's insensitive, out of touch people like you that make it hell to be a front line worker.
>I would love to take all your money, put you back to living paycheck to paycheck and see how 'lazy' you get after the daily struggle to house and feed yourself with no way to get ahead and no light at the end of the tunnel.
Been. There. Done. That. And now I have an office job.
He's onto something. I can't quite put my finger on it but it seems like a pervasive societal problem at all levels, or at least all levels I've experienced. It's like society has developed some weird way of denying people their agency when it could benefit them but hold them responsible when it is bad for them.
>It's insensitive, out of touch people like you that make it hell to be a front line worker.
It's out of touch. People like you are why it's getting worse and not better.
You tell me how to flip my burgers. You tell me doing it this way is for my own good or it's the efficient way, or it delivers the optimum burger, or whatever. But I can't meet my stupid KPIs doing it the approved way. So I have to do it "wrong". If I fail to meet my KPIs doing it "wrong" I get fired. When I do meet them I don't get anything for it. The best I can hope for is get lucky and not get unlucky long enough to use my "experience" to get some better job. In our effort to make everything consistent, risk free and all those other buzzwords that the MBAs and the clipboard warriors jack each-other off to we've done the opposite, we've made everything reliant on luck instead of skill. In your quest to quantify everything, minimize the bad and maximize the good you've denied everyone any possible upside that could come from putting in any extra effort, owning their work, taking pride in their craft, whatever you want to call it. And this Kafkaesque situation seems to have permeated every industry and every profession. (I dare one of the people who will inevitably take issue with this paragraph to rebut it.)
The parallel to some freight train engineer barreling across some flat state with a train that's too big and too fast who's just hoping it all works out should be obvious.
There are a significant number of workers who are not even trying to better themselves. Some are just lazy, but part of the reason some people are that way is because they see that the game is rigged. A huge percentage of executives spend their time ensuring that they don't get blamed for fired when something goes wrong and ensure the low level employees get the blame.
Why must there be an expectation for every worker to strive to better themselves? Why is it not acceptable for a person to show up to work every day, complete their work, then go home?
In context of the above discussion there is a general idea that fewer people are trying to get better at their job or career, leading to lower quality work as fewer people are trying as hard as before.
I'm not saying those people are wrong for not trying harder or should be trying to meet my expectations, it is their lives to do with what they want.
> It's like society has developed some weird way of denying people their agency when it could benefit them but hold them responsible when it is bad for them.
For every task in corporate America there's a Process that defines how the work should be done. The goals are twofold: increase corporate profit, and reduce corporate risk. Both of these are harmful to the individual. Autonomy and innovation are at best limited, at worst punished. When something goes wrong blame is directed at the individual, who can then easily be fired (the cheapest 'solution'). Process benefits the individual worker only to the extent to which it can clearly be shown to increase profits and reduce risk.
And, to your point, it's nearly impossible to meet the expected KPIs unless you find a creative alternative to the approved Process, or simply work your fingers and mind to the bone in order to keep up.
Okay, let's buy into the idea that across the board, workers are worse than workers of the past, for whatever definition of worse you like.
In what way is this a tractable problem? Like, what solution is there that wouldn't involve massively importing workers from other societies where workers aren't worse?
Getting a bit off topic here, but I agree it's fully fixable with policy changes.
I'm not disagreeing that it feels like the workers are getting fed up, leaving and putting in less effort. It's why, and you can't blame them for feeling exasperated.
I mean I fully support increasing immigration. More tax revenue, more growth, everybody wins.
The workers ARE worse. But not because this generation or that generation doesn't have the correct moral philosophy or some such nonsense. It's because in general, employers are not training or maintaining a competent work force. Instead they spend all their energy on exploiting existing talent to the fullest before they burn out.
No training is creating new work force and terrible working conditions are destroying the existing hard core of competent workers.
However, with our current political system, the solutions to these problems are nearly impossible to accomplish. Unions, socialized health care, workers rights, mandated vacation time, overtime limits, minimum wages, and UBI are all lightyears away. Instead our politicians are stripping women of their human rights and attacking children while placing migrants into concentration camps.