AnarchyDice
13d ago
Not getting healthcare, retirement, overtime, unemployment insurance mean their compensation package is lower. Those items are generally considered part of pay. Also, getting paid in cash to avoid taxes and wage garnishing are artificial boosts to their pay that are not available to citizens. That makes for two directions that illegal labor undercuts the citizenry, they cost less and keep more of their wages.
Considering healthcare/retirement/unemployment can easily add 40%+ on top of wages and taxes would take a 20%+ bite out of wages, someone working under the table could easily surpass the above-board worker in take-home pay despite much lower paper wages. Above board $15/hr worker + $6/hr benefits costs the employer $21/hr while the employee only takes home $12/hr. Below board $13/hr worker costs the employer $13/hr and the worker takes home $13/hr. They could hire almost twice as many below board employees or simply keep the $8/hr difference. That would be a huge negative pressure on the wages the above board employees could demand. All the while the employer could complain that no one wants to work for the $15/hr wages, so they're forced to hire below board employees even though they have a large conflict of interest in such a declaration.
Secondly, I can guarantee solve any "labor shortage" anywhere with more pay. What they have is a labor shortage at the low pay they want. That might be a sort of tautology, labor is not some worker placement with limited figurines to put in jobs, it is a function of many variables most important of which is the compensation. If burger flipping was paying more than neurosurgery, you can guarantee they would never have an empty shift. How many people are even joining the workforce is also a function of compensation. If the market sucks, they may choose unemployment, underemployment, education, retirement, gig-work, greymarket, blackmarket, welfare, homemaking, or self-employment.
AnarchyDice
2mo ago
I'm getting back into Kendo after a long absence. Anyone else here practice? Any big changes in the last fifteen or so years to the best practices or equipment that I should be aware of?
AnarchyDice
2mo ago
The teacher/TA that is doing the grading would likely prefer to have all their work ready at once rather than piecemeal as it trickles in, especially because they will often have more than one class to grade and those classes have many sequential assignments so added time for one pushes into the time for the next.
It might not even be kind to the student asking for more time, as the extra time they take for this assignment/chapter bleeds into the time they have available for the next one. Even extra test time eats into the time they have available for other classes, relaxation, and extra-curriculars.
AnarchyDice
2mo ago
Kindness, even among other vague descriptors, seems like an exceedingly terrible terminal goal to have. Kindness could justify just about any atrocity, terrible system of governance, or scheme. Is it kind to allow a third generation of imbecile, allow colonizers to continue to poison mother earth with their existence, or even to fail to secure a future for a people?
You could say that you are talking about net kindness, but that doesn't solve any issue because any unkindness can be weighed as worth the cost, and humans are notorious for not weighting the unkindness done to others against kindness done to them fairly.
AnarchyDice
2mo ago
Double check that your policy doesn't let you spend that on eye exams, contacts, glasses, co-pays, etc.
AnarchyDice
2mo ago
Por que no los dos? Governments have repeatedly acted in ways that are both contrary to their citizens and have also done so in insane ways that plainly would not accomplish the very goals they set. Not only would I say that madness and evil are not mutually exclusive, but often the same things that safeguard against one are correlated with safeguarding against the other.
AnarchyDice
2mo ago
How did the finger get put in a position of danger? It is not so much that governments should sacrifice themselves to keep each individual citizen safe, but that it should at least stop putting them in danger to advance government interests.
AnarchyDice
3mo ago
As far as I can tell, the only lawsuits filed by nintendo against palworld have been patent claims. Most of those were rejected by the courts and the only surviving patent claim is now getting a second look in US courts.
AnarchyDice
3mo ago
I agree that living longer will definitely skew the LFPR, but I think it definitely introduces blindspots into the data to set the cutoffs at 25 and 54. A 55 year-old, more than anytime in the past, still has many productive years ahead of them. If those people are retiring earlier because of strong entitlement programs, real estate bubbles in their favor, credentialism/ageism pushing them out of the work-force, etc. I would think we'd want those numbers to be involved in the conversation.
Living longer to enjoy retirement, taking it earlier, and spending more time in school learning are good things, so long as the cost of those benefits are accounted for. One of those costs includes having fewer people creating resources while still consuming resources.
I puts a finger on the scale to set the age range to 25-54 when talking about gainful employment of the overall populace. It masks some of the problems of credentialism hitting the young and hides the effects of detrimental policies pushing out the old. Having said that, increasing the age range to, say, 18-65 would not be the end-all-be-all of labor statistics either, but another hand to feel for the shape of the metaphorical elephant.
AnarchyDice
3mo ago
Agreed, although we would need some way to sort between voluntary vs involuntary retirements vs "voluntary" retirements. Although it is probably another spectrum, so we're looking at marginal changes that could be pushing people to retire early, some positive and some negative: High 401K returns & buy-out deals vs poorly timed layoffs & onerous regulations.
AnarchyDice
3mo ago
I think you should be careful just using the 25-54 age range, as that excludes any trends for early retirement and delayed starts. It would show the same rate for a society where people work from 25-54 exactly the same as one where people work from 18-65, despite the latter having 18 more years of productivity (47 vs 29).
The trends across different demographics and age groups all tell different angles of the story, enough that I do not think it is simple to say labor participation doing just fine. I would not go so far as to say it is dire, but there are troubling signs when you look across the whole age range. Going from a high of 67% participation to 62% drops the ratio of participants to non-participants from just over 2 to 1.63. Unlike earlier decades, there is a smaller ratio of children to adults to explain the lower rate. Perhaps it will level out as the boomer generation starts to pass away, but I can understand why people are troubled looking at these numbers.
AnarchyDice
4mo ago
I have to disagree strongly on the zenzai. Having a warm, sweet soup on a cold winter day is like a mug of hot cocoa. The toasted mochi on top is like a savory toasted marshmallow.
I'm curious if you just don't like anko in general, what are your thoughts on taiyaki, anpan, and daifuku?
AnarchyDice
6mo ago
AnarchyDice
6mo ago
The point is that a battery storage system is not hooked up to the theoretical total energy contained in fossil fuels or nuclear rods or solar irradiance, it is connected to the output of the power plants and solar fields. That output (and corresponding residential/commercial/industrial usage numbers) is what the battery needs to be sized in relation to. Heat pumps may help on the margins with that number but there are no low-hanging fruits to pick up in the world of energy usage and production.
AnarchyDice
7mo ago
I think that Tesla is being more than a bit optimistic on just how much ramping up can be done and how cheap it would be at scale, but even they list 10% of 2023 GDP (i.e. the output of 1 in every 10 working adults from 2023 devoted to just batteries for an entire year). For comparison, 10% of US working adults, roughly, work in all manufacturing combined.
One item to note about the waste heat figure, is that it is calculated based on the energy contained within the fossil fuel molecules that is ultimately expended as heat instead of being converted to electricity. This is setting the denominator based on fuel pulled from the ground, not as an efficiency metric of how much electricity is lost. The fair comparison for renewables would be the amount of wind/sun/hydro potential energy not converted to electricity after engaging with the PV module, wind turbine, or hydro turbine. I design solar systems as part of my job and even I think that is a dubious way to promote the technology.
That also means there is not a can of efficiency to be opened up once switching to renewables, we still need the same number of watt-hours to power cars, grids, equipment, etc. There are marginal gains to be had in some cases, sure, but if we were to wave a magic wand and eliminate that waste heat from fossil fuels, all that would mean is our fuels would last two to three times longer. Eliminating production based waste heat would not change the throughput of the systems because those are limited by quantity of plants, turbine design, transmission lines, and ultimately end-user needs.
AnarchyDice
7mo ago
The problem with grid battery storage is one of scale. Yes, we might be producing 8TWh of batteries across the world, but global energy usage is north of 20,000 TWh each hour. If you want a reasonable ride-through of a mere 90 minutes, you would need 30,000 TWh of storage assuming no added losses. That would be over 3,000 years of production going just to grid level storage. Sure, that production will ramp up, but so does energy consumption.
I say a mere 90 minutes of ride-through but that 90 minutes won't happen all at once, it has to account for the cumulative minutes where production dips below consumption, at least until you can spin up another turbine.
The other point against batteries is that they are still very expensive compared to just about any other option. Projects I have been on considering battery energy storage systems (BESS) typically looked at a BESS then declined based on cost. They instead look to add more solar, local UPS systems, or other mitigation strategies against power losses. The only projects that have done it have either been mandated to (think airports or other government critical infrastructure) or have been heavily subsidized to (critical data centers, solar farms).
The use case of grid level storage batteries does have a great use-case though, but not generally for storage. They are great as the article you linked pointed out for smoothing out voltage/current/frequency. Those dips in power characteristics can put serious dents in their ability to provide power and especially at a level of quality their customers expect. Before cheaper batteries, this was done with specialized clusters of capacitors using complex electrical equipment and/or accepting bigger tolerances of fluctuation.
Overall, battery prices still have a long way to come down before we will see meaningful levels of grid energy storage as grid level energy storage. California for example is still only at about 1/3 of their goal of ~55,000MWh which is about 90 minutes of their roughly 35,000MWh hourly consumption. I am optimistic that battery prices will continue to fall and we will see market adoption of them as they do.
AnarchyDice
9mo ago
I'll give them a look to see if I'm interested, thanks!
AnarchyDice
9mo ago
I passed the N3! While I probably won't take a higher level test, I will be continuing to build up towards full fluency. Anyone else get their results back? Any suggestions for new anime to watch, podcasts/books to listen to, web-serials to read, or japanese shows to watch?
Also, I finished the first part of an overhaul project porting my personal DMing tool from Netbeans to Excel. The main driver was how clunky the java was but I also lost the central file and only had the executable. Rewriting it in netbeans wasn't going to happen and if I was doing it from the ground up, I wanted something easy to edit and use on other devices. Lots of interesting math and structure, but the basic foundation is using Excel to pull random magical items, groups of magical items, and treasures based on a central, fixed seed. Since I wrote the original, I've changed how I DM in some major ways so I've been meaning to update it for years. Next steps are to add back in the random encounters, rooms, and other things back in. https://anarchydice.wordpress.com/2025/03/16/random-item-generator/
Update on the liqueurs: https://www.themotte.org/post/1259/tinker-tuesday-for-november-19-2024/271334?context=8#context Those walnut and pecan liqueurs? They aged really nicely and mellowed into a delicious, well-rounded, nuttiness. Definitely moved up the list to be right around the brown-sugar oatmeal.
The whole thing stands out to me like an amalgam of two memes that live rent free in my head: Schitt's creek: "I cannot show you everything, David!" "Can you show me one thing?" and Simpson's: "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."
I glance around at stores begging for employees to apply then I see their posted hourly wage to see that they are at most $0.25 above the going rate for the area while offering short hours at unusual times. I'd respect them a lot more if they actually tried raising wages and had to shutter, but instead they just muddle along until the lack of employees cascades into quality and coverage problems and the place closes with a whimper at the next shock or demand drop.
I see similar shotgun, canned openings for skilled positions in the engineering field that aren't really trying to be competitive if you look at their offered compensation, they feel more like dangling a hook hoping to get a bite from a desperate engineer they can snap up for cheap even as the engineering field as a whole supposedly has huge engineer shortages.
It can't be both a labor shortage companies desperately want to solve and also an immovable object that cannot see its budget increase. The fact that it is sold as both, to me, reads as a budget exercise to maximize profits rather than the desperate plight it is advertised as. Consequently, if it is not a desperate plight, then the off-the-book cheats they've been pursuing are in fact not necessary concessions but are instead just cheats.
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