Would agree with that, but just very briefly: the main characteristic that defines fascism is a strong cult of personality. The Afd doesn't have that at all. They also don't display any kind of expansionist ambitions, but are rather nationalistic in an isolationist kind of way similar to most of the right-wing populists who have gained popularity throughout Europe. I have very little doubts that some of the hardliners in the party and possibly even some of the more moderate people are authoritarian, but fascists they are not.
But we talk about Musk, who is absolutely clear how he views workers and at this point we know how he treats them too (and himself, which is a textbook example of unhealthy obsessive behavior among other unhealthy stuff coming from high performing broken mind). He makes it trivial to have a love/hate 'relationship' with him, for better or worse.
Fun to watch from the distance, just not grokking all those early adopters. I have small kids, there are risks I take also with them but they are always calculated and control is on our side. This is just blindly trusting some startup mentality scales well into giga factories level.
Some people like 12 hour shifts? You make more money and your commuting expense per hour of work goes down.
The alternative is that someone who wants to make more money takes a second job somewhere else. Then they're working 16 hours a day and have two commutes. What does 16 hours of work and 6 hours of sleep do for quality?
A bunch of people think they're good at working 12 hour shifts. Almost none of them are. There is an absolute mountain of fatigue research that bears this out. Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain amount of hours in a given period because if their performance suffers, people die. Personally, I'd prefer the same apply to whoever happens to be installing the accelerator pedal on my car.
Sure, you can let people work as many hours as they possibly want, you're just making a decision that someone other than those workers and the companies that employ them is going to pay the externalities for all of their quality deficiencies. We have hour restrictions because people can't consent to being killed by a tired truck driver.
> There is an absolute mountain of fatigue research that bears this out.
Any kind of sound research is going to conclude that a physically fit and healthy person has more endurance than a sickly and out of shape person. The former can work more hours than the latter in actual fact.
> Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain amount of hours in a given period because if their performance suffers, people die.
Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain number of hours because some of them are sickly and out of shape, if those ones were to work 12 hour shifts then people would die, and that provides a convenient excuse for their lobbyists to demand rules that reduce the labor supply.
It's a truism to say healthy people are healthier than unhealthy people. Of course they are. The point isn't that healthy people can work more than unhealthy people, it's that all people - even healthy people, even young people, even experts - have a much lower tolerance for stress and fatigue than they think they do, and their performance at the limit degrades quickly.
The issue is that the limit is in a different place for different people. One person's performance is degraded by hour 6 as much as another's is by hour 10, so it makes no sense to limit them both to 8 hours -- the first presumably shouldn't even be working 6.
There is also the question of where to stop. Suppose that the average person's performance is degraded by 5% after 4 hours. Should everyone stop after 4 hours then? They're not at peak performance anymore. But 95% is often good enough. And maybe 90% is good enough. Maybe 80% is good enough. Maybe 75% is good enough and one person is at 75% after 8 hours. Maybe only 90% is good enough but it's a different kind of work and then the same person is still at 90% after 14 hours. Maybe you're at 85% after 8 hours but get back to 90% with a cup of coffee.
It's not necessary to think that one size fits all to think that 12 hours is too long. There is plenty of evidence that long shifts affect cognitive functioning[1] and so it could well be reasonable to say we don't know where the safe threshold is for each person so there may be some individuals who might otherwise safely work with no impairment but in the interest of safety for users of the cars we can set some cap at less than 12 hours.
Secondly, even if someone was to show that some workers are still able to function well, make good decisions and not make manufacturing errors that would likely impact safety after 12 hours it might still be reasonable to not have such long shifts because the length for some workers would tend to compell all workers (including some for whom that shift length would be too much) to work the long shift if they want to keep their job. There is lots of research associating long shifts with chronic health problems[2] and poor wellbeing for example[3] .
> There is plenty of evidence that long shifts affect cognitive functioning[1]
That study attributes much of the deficit to interrupting circadian rhythms, which is the thing that isn't required with 12 hour shifts, because the other 12 hours a day can contain a consistent 8 hour block for sleeping at night. Whereas the alternative where you bring on a second shift with different workers does exactly that, because now the second shift is e.g 5PM-1AM and by the time those workers go home, eat a meal and get ready for bed, they're sleeping in the daylight. Or if the business is one that operates 24 hours, using 8 hours shifts causes there to be two night shifts instead of one.
> Secondly, even if someone was to show that some workers are still able to function well, make good decisions and not make manufacturing errors that would likely impact safety after 12 hours it might still be reasonable to not have such long shifts because the length for some workers would tend to compell all workers (including some for whom that shift length would be too much) to work the long shift if they want to keep their job.
This is a fully generic argument. Maybe some workers have heart disease and shouldn't do a job that involves lifting. Does that mean no one should be able to do it? People over 65 disproportionately suffer from various forms of dementia. Should they be prohibited from working if they want to, even the ones who are healthy?
Most jobs don't use 12 hour shifts because they don't want to pay overtime, so it's hard to see how anyone who prefers a job with 8 hour shifts could be forced to take one of those instead of the majority of other jobs that use 8 hour shifts.
> There is lots of research associating long shifts with chronic health problems[2] and poor wellbeing for example[3] .
We need to be extremely careful with correlational studies. There is evidence that all kinds of negative outcomes are associated with poverty, and the people working long hours are typically doing it because they don't have enough money. What happens when you say they can't work that much and make them even poorer?
It depends what kind of work it is, and what kind of shape you're in. Some people have more endurance than others. If you're not capable of doing some work, you can do other work; that's no reason to say that someone who is capable of it should be deprived of the income.
While young and in as good shape as I ever have been I once worked a low-wage manufacturing job in a factory. After a long shift I once sliced through my fingernail[1] because I fell asleep while operating an industrial bench saw. At the time (before this incident) I would certainly have said that I had plenty of endurance to work long hours in the job and I definitely needed the money.
Worker protections exist partly to prevent low-wage earners from having their economic desperation exploited by the unscrupulous to their detriment.
[1] It's only through a pure miracle that I didn't lose a finger. The specific miracle being I was so tired setting up the saw that this one time I set the depth of cut wrong meaning that instead of chopping my fingers completely off as would have happened had I set the saw up correctly, it just sliced through the very top of my fingernail.
> Worker protections exist partly to prevent low-wage earners from having their economic desperation exploited by the unscrupulous to their detriment.
"Worker protections" exist mainly because people misunderstand the causes and solutions to economic desperation.
How does it benefit you to have to take a second job and work 16 hours a day instead of allowing your first employer to give you overtime that you actually want? Would you have been less tired by adding a second commute to your day?
What kind of work are you imagining where there's no brainwork involved and no danger to the project or other employees if a tired worker makes mistakes?
I think you're operating on too many hypotheticals and not quite enough personal experience.
Many types of manufacturing. If you're making e.g. textiles, and being tired means you occasionally produce something that gets tossed out by quality control, this is not obviously a danger to anyone so it's just a cost trade off in wasted material vs. benefits of operating the factory for longer hours.
Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens. The cost of mistakes you make from being tired can be less than the cost of waiting 16 hours before responding to the emergency or leaving it to someone unqualified.
Generically anything where the cost of occasional mistakes is low or they can be detected before they have a major impact.
But also, the point is that different people have different levels of endurance. Some people will be making more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be making after 12.
> Many types of manufacturing. If you're making e.g. textiles, and being tired means you occasionally produce something that gets tossed out by quality control, this is not obviously a danger to anyone so it's just a cost trade off in wasted material vs. benefits of operating the factory for longer hours.
Do you have any idea how much those machines cost, how easy it is to destroy them, or how quickly they'll remove the skin from your body? If some exhausted bonehead crashes a line how long will it take for repairs? Do you have spare parts on hand? Do they still make spares?
> Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens.
That's not a 12 hour shift, that's an 8 hour shift moving into triple overtime. Everyone involved in your scenario is fully aware that they're rolling the dice on people's lives due to an emergency.
> But also, the point is that different people have different levels of endurance. Some people will be making more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be making after 12.
I'm assuming everyone has the same level of endurance because I'm not willing to gamble my livelihood on the self-awareness of some random asshole off the street. It doesn't matter how much they want to work if their output isn't making us money.
> Do you have any idea how much those machines cost, how easy it is to destroy them, or how quickly they'll remove the skin from your body? If some exhausted bonehead crashes a line how long will it take for repairs? Do you have spare parts on hand? Do they still make spares?
Sewing machines? Not that expensive, not that easy to destroy and the typical injury would be that you get stuck with a sewing needle.
It seems like you want to assume that every job involves some kind of delicate yet fatality-inducing industrial equipment. It doesn't.
> That's not a 12 hour shift, that's an 8 hour shift moving into triple overtime. Everyone involved in your scenario is fully aware that they're rolling the dice on people's lives due to an emergency.
It's a person working for 12 contiguous hours, because the benefits outweigh the costs.
> I'm assuming everyone has the same level of endurance because I'm not willing to gamble my livelihood on the self-awareness of some random asshole off the street. It doesn't matter how much they want to work if their output isn't making us money.
And if they're willing to work and the output is making you money?
The proposal is to ban people from working for more than 8 hours. You don't need a law for any of the cases where it isn't in the employer's interests to do it anyway. They just won't choose to do it in those cases then.
So far your thought experiment involves someone with an athlete’s endurance who’s willing to spend half of their day on a menial task for three days out of five? A little unclear on the last part since you don’t seem to understand how overtime is calculated.
> So far your thought experiment involves someone with an athlete’s endurance who’s willing to spend half of their day on a menial task for three days out of five?
It could just be a job that isn't that tiring.
And why does it have to be three days out of five? Paying time and a half for four out of twelve hours could be worth it over paying benefits and overhead for another employee.
> A little unclear on the last part since you don’t seem to understand how overtime is calculated.
How are overtime calculations even relevant? If it isn't worth it for the employer to pay overtime in some context it would be required then banning 12 hour shifts would be irrelevant there because they wouldn't be happening to begin with.
> Your concerns are a corner case.
12 hour shifts are a corner case. Stop trying to ban everything atypical.
If someone is capable of doing work, and wants to because they'd make more money, what right do you have to prohibit them from doing it just because you can't?
I wouldn’t have believed this when I was a teenager but as an adult I know it to be true. I’ve worked with guys who knock out 10 hour days everyday with an hour commute to and from work. I could only keep it up for three months at a time but immigrants and guys fresh out of the military are machines.
How about two hour shifts that pay a million dollars an hour? You can't change the market rate for that kind of labor by magic; employers are operating in a competitive market. You can get more money by working more hours.
Let's see; Musk is demanding that the board give him a 56B pay package.
Tesla seems to have about 130K employees. They could afford to give every employee a 400K raise and Musk still gets a fortune from the left over money.
So money doesn't seem to be very tight there, it's just that greed demands that a single person gets it all.
The shareholders would pay for Musk's pay package by having their shares diluted. It's not as if Tesla has to provide any money for that, so it's not really comparable to giving employees a raise.
Money is money. In theory they could dilute the shareholders by issuing new shares into the market and use the money to pay employees more. But this fails to identify what magic is to be used to cause them to want to do that.
Employers (and employees) generally have a pretty good idea what the market price is for a particular job. If they have to fill 100 positions and offering $25/hour causes them to get 100 qualified applicants who accept the position, they could offer $35/hour, but this is like saying that the employees could accept $15/hour when another employer is offering $25. Some explanation is required for why they would.
Tesla is a public company. If the board doesn't think Elon Musk is worth that amount of money, they don't have to pay it to him, and have the incentive not to -- the shareholders would get to keep the money instead. But maybe he is worth that amount of money; he's a one-man marketing machine and owns a major social media company that can influence the public perception of the company. That could very well be worth that amount of money to the company over a period of years -- and it isn't a single year's compensation.
So then we're back to it being a competitive market. If the company gets e.g. $60B in value from having Elon Musk, and he knows this and demands $56B, the company can either pay the market price or have a net loss of $4B relative to the alternative. And then have even less money to pay employees.
Or maybe he isn't worth that much and if the shareholders give it to him then it's costing the company money. But then that's maladaptive and the company will lose business to some other company that pays its executives less and uses the money to lower the price of their cars and gain a competitive advantage while still paying the market rate for other types of labor.
Either way it doesn't change the market price for those other types of labor, which are much easier to estimate than the value of certain unusual executives.
The compensation package was approved by the shareholders, not just the board, but then the judge didn't like the disclosures for the shareholder vote and invalidated it. Musk obviously didn't like that and is now behaving in the usual way, but whatever. He's going to put it up for another vote and the shareholders are going to approve it again or they won't.
Magic does exist. Rephrase it as regulation. Just think the minimum wage with current day inflation for 1968 is just less than $15 an hour. Deregulation and push for top 1% profits and shareholders has pushed wages down over 50%. This cuts into long term economic growth and mobility.
Reading most of your comments. You support treating works terribly by rejecting work life balance. For example, my brother in law will boast about working 100 hours in a week and in the same breath complain about having no time for himself or his family.
A strong labor force is only true when it is mentally, physically, and emotionally healthy.
> Just think the minimum wage with current day inflation for 1968 is just less than $15 an hour.
Less than 2% of people make minimum wage and the few who do wouldn't be making significantly less if it didn't exist. The primary effect of minimum wage laws is to eliminate internship opportunities. The primary effect of raising them to the point that they applied to a non-trivial percentage of workers would be to accelerate automation and offshoring.
This is why workers keep getting screwed. People ask for the wrong things.
> Reading most of your comments. You support treating works terribly by rejecting work life balance.
These are individual choices, and this is the problem with most feel good regulations. If someone is working 12 hours, maybe it's because they can't otherwise afford rent -- but then instead of doing something about high rents, you want to prohibit them from working enough hours to pay their bills.
> Deregulation and push for top 1% profits and shareholders has pushed wages down over 50%.
Younger generations are struggling because things cost more, specifically housing, medicine and education. These all have regulatory causes.
Zoning rules, licensing rules and building codes inhibit housing construction, keeping supply low and prices high.
The law promotes employer-provided health insurance, preventing employees from choosing not only where to get healthcare but even where to get insurance, since that's chosen by their employer. Then we pretend this is a market-based system even though we've disconnected choices from costs through the law, and wonder why Americans pay more for healthcare than anyone else.
The government promotes student loans. It doesn't pay for tuition, it subsidizes loan interest and prohibits the loans from being discharged in bankruptcy, allowing colleges to raise tuition into the sky without losing students. Then people have to repay that debt for decades, instead of using the money to buy a house.
"Deregulation" is a nonsense word with no specific meaning. If the state government passed a law removing local zoning restrictions, is that regulation or deregulation? It doesn't matter. What matters is that they haven't done it and now housing is unaffordable.
Yeah, it is impossible to compete against chinese / indian / kenyan slaves.
It is also hard to compete against people earning hardly enough to eat and sleep in a crowded apartment, no healthcare, even no papers. (In the US, I mean)
The problem is not regulation / deregulation. The problem is the right regulation for a few (your Musk) but wrong for the rest (your 12hrs, 16hrs, or whatever hours a day you think are fair)
> Yeah, it is impossible to compete against chinese / indian / kenyan slaves.
Not actually that hard. You build a machine that does the work of 1000 sweat shop workers, then you have a domestic job maintaining the machine, and paying one salary when it used to be 1000 causes the transportation cost to dominate over the cost of labor so now you're back to domestic manufacturing being cheaper.
But only if you don't pass dumb laws that discourage the automation and convert it into offshoring.
> It is also hard to compete against people earning hardly enough to eat and sleep in a crowded apartment, no healthcare, even no papers. (In the US, I mean)
Why is that hard? The majority of the population is already doing it. You learn to do skilled labor and then earn more money.
> The problem is the right regulation for a few (your Musk) but wrong for the rest (your 12hrs, 16hrs, or whatever hours a day you think are fair)
The problem is that people think these kinds of laws are the problem. If you can't afford rent working 8 hours and have to work 12, how is prohibiting you from working 12 going to help you make rent? It's misdirection to keep people from solving the actual problem, which is high cost of living.
Would also recommend Kleppmann's book. After reading this you should be able to read some foundational papers. [1] is a good list for that.
I also learned a ton by reading the jepsen analyses [2]. [3] is also helpful, but was recently put "behind a paywall" via an O'Reilly online book, but the internet archive should still have all the content ([4]).
Slightly off-topic, but I have worked with another tool by the author (Jepsen), which is also written in Clojure and in fact a Clojure library. I'm fairly proficient with functional programming in general, but had never touched Clojure before. My experience working with Jepsen was quite frustrating simply because of the fact that it's a Clojure library. Clojure is dynamically typed and it happened fairly frequently that I had to dig into Jepsen's source code simply because some type errors were only caught very deep in the call stack. Jepsen itself is a really great tool and I'm a very big fan of it's creator (Kyle Kingsbury), but the fact that you can only use it through Clojure is kind of sad. I guess it gets better with more clojure experience, but a dynamically typed functional programming language is kind of too much of design flaw for me to want to invest more time in the language.
> but a dynamically typed functional programming language is kind of too much of design flaw for me
And for others it's the opposite. Unless the language have good primitives for distributed computing and is a functional and dynamic language, it's usually not worth spending the time to learn it, for me at least.
Good thing there is at least one language out there for everyone, so we have choices :)
> We started as a freemium product and built a unique business data set. We used this dataset to launch NBI.AI - a Generative BI platform that can be connected to virtually any structured data source
We don't use customers' data (eg data from your data sources) for training purposes. What we use is meta-data like objectives, behavioral data, preferences and feedback loop (was it helpful y/n) to personalize the insights.
Isn't video prediction a substantially harder problem than text prediction? At least that was the case a couple of years ago with RNNs/LSTMs. Haven't kept up with the research, maybe there's been progress.
