Skylord
2yr ago
Alabama tried actually hammering down on illegals. It lead to their agricultural sector having such a grave labor shortage of seasonal workers that they tried to get prisoners to do the work. The prisoners were woefully unproductive compared to the illegal migrant workers.
A year later the state legislature very quietly stopped cracking down and the migrant workers came back. This was circa mid 2010s if I remember right.
Skylord
2yr ago
It's great! Some scenes are too slow and I fast forward through, but all the battle and dialogue scenes are amazing. Every character has
multifaceted motivations (sometimes internally conflicting).
Skylord
2yr ago
Don't most of the faangs do refresher grants on promotions/ for staff they want to keep? If not I would always recommend jumping to another company but taking 6 months or so to figure out carefully what to do next and get a valuable offer.
Skylord
2yr ago
Drink 10x more in water or Gatorade than what you had in alcohol. You'll pee alot before going to bed and may wake up middle of night but my mornings always feel better for hangovers.
Skylord
2yr ago
We should have more detailed top level posts like this one. Good work and hope you stimulate more debate.
Similar to how Tesla sparked an electric car investment boom, I'm hopeful that entrepreneurs continue to tackle issues that are cost prohibitive currently but with sufficient commodity chain/labor cost reductions could become feasible. The Boring company definitely falls into one of these, blows my mind how much tunnels cost to dig in NYC per feet.
Skylord
2yr ago
Re race. They changed the valyrian pure bloodedness to being mostly hair color. The black velaryons all have silver hair too.
While scientifically this is a different genetics than our own world and yes they definitely reconned the baratheon black hair, I think the show runners have done an admirable job keeping the core plot alive while drawing in more woke modern audiences.
Who knows, maybe Laenor will turn out to be LGBTQIA+ and Rhaenyra will cuck him?
Question: Is it possible to raise wages high enough in U.S. Government to once again attract high caliber talent, without making jealous/discouraging the current batch of "lower quality" talent occupying the roles currently? I'm thinking of attracting young, top generalist talent of the type that otherwise would work on wall street or tech startups.
Full context of my thought experiment:
I've been very mildly sad lately thinking about the low quality of talent within the U.S. government. I don't remember the last time that one of my smarter friends decided to work for the bureaucracy. In particular I'm convinced that the wages are so obscenely low relative to the private sector, that unless you are already independently wealth or expect to benefit from the revolving door, there is not sufficient incentive at all to join the government other than favoring laziness/ work life balance.
Take public school teachers for example. A school district like Scarsdale NY, can afford to pay $150k+ for each high school teacher, its a chicken and egg thing though because the taxpayers there highly value education and would rather have a good public school with high taxes rather than paying comprable or more money to send them to private schools if their local public schools were shitty. This is an extreme anomaly like 3+ standard deviations above the average US teacher salary.
However, even if we decided nationally to pay teachers nationally as much as Scarsdale. 1) you would probably strains the budgets & bankrupt every local & state government 2) you would be grossly overpaying for the existing, less talented talent currently in the roles.
In theory you could gate new hires with a much higher salary and a much higher bar. But my suspicion is this breeds resentment amongst folks already in your workforce who are lower quality and lower paid. In its initial, smaller batch, more prestigious incarnations Teach for America did something like this where it got the 2nd rate students from Ivy Leagues to try it out for a few years. However, it seems like this barely made a dent and over time it seems to have gotten less prestigious as well. My 5000 ft view largely unresearched interpretation is it was "dragged down" to closer to the average of the teaching profession as opposed to "dragging up" the teachers at the schools they were dispatched to.
This problem isn't public sector specific, there are plenty of bloated legacy business model companies in the world that face the exact same problem as they scale and grow to the lowest common denominator. But at least in theory market competition should be a healthy force of creative destruction and prune out the truly unproductive companies. However, in the public sector there is no such mechanism and we in the U.S. seem to be okay with the government being a walk out the office after 35 hours and go fishing type workplace, with the tradeoff being secure employment albeit with low pay and hence unable to attract the best and brightest. Yes you do have subcontractors like the Anduril's or Mckinsey's of the world hired by government to go solve things, but that doesn't feel efficient to me.
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