"My country" is the United States of America. One would imagine that if this policy was a point of contention on whether to admit someone or not, it would be a topic of discussion
Seriously? Trump got elected on the promise of restricting the influx of refugees from the Middle East and South America, as did many conservative European leaders. Voters in Western democracies are rebelling against the enormously generous migration and refugee policies. The reason you likely don't realize that this was a "point of contention" is that anybody critical of these generous policies is dismissed as a "white supremacist" or "alt-right troll". But mainstream conservatives in both the US and Europe have asked for a tightening of these laws. The German governing coalition nearly split over it.
Your misinterpretation comes from not realizing the authors already included a triple interaction where the baseline internet usage, facebook activity, internet accessibility, and (because if you understand there are four levels here).
The SEM (such as it is, it really is just a simple linear model) is in Equation 2, plus a bit of heuristic reasoning about coefficient magnitudes. I leave it to you to work out for yourself why you can move RefugeePosts to the LHS and Attacks/Refugee to the RHS and still get a strong relationship despite the "triple interaction".
write your own formal response and get it published in a journal as a response
Why? The implication of this paper is that censoring Facebook would reduce refugee attacks. Since I couldn't care less about either Facebook or the civil liberties of Germans, I encourage you to try this and report back to the world!
Look, you're perfectly entitled to believing that the current system is the only possible system for handling workplace safety. Personally, I prefer more choice, more self-determination, more personal responsibility, and higher salaries. I'm happy with insurance, mediation, and liquidated damages and use them whenever I can. But different people have different tradeoffs.
But the tradeoff itself isn't a matter of preference: if you impose strong workplace safety requirements and mandatory benefits, salaries will suffer in proportion. It's this link that you keep denying. You'd think that if health care costs of gone from 9% of GDP in 1980 to 17% of GDP, with no better health outcomes, it's pretty obvious where at least around 8% of salary increases have gone.
Instead you posit... what exactly? Where do you think the money has gone other than benefits and regulatory compliance? Don't say "management" or "CEOs"; obscenely wealthy as some of them are, they aren't even close to being able to account for the missing salary increases.
So, if they are adjudicating and there are criminal penalties, what else would that be unless you want a regulatory agency AND a redundant private organization.
No regulatory agency. Criminal penalties are handed out by courts based on case law.
I presume you would have them write the standards too? And there's no way they would do the whole thing to be favorable to the people writing the check
Well, it is certainly less likely that it is "favorable to the people writing the check" than what we have right now, where special interests write checks to politicians and regulators, and employers and employees have no choice but to submit to that corruption.
Asylum is a permanent situation. I have consulted with immigration lawyers (casually, not professionally) to ask if asylum seekers have to go home when the crisis that caused them to leave is resolved -- and the answer is NO.
That may be the legal situation in your country, but it is not an automatic part of international human rights. It is also inadvisable because if asylum automatically implies permanent residency, countries will be far more reluctant to grant it. Note that most people seeking asylum in the west don't even meet the rather loose definition of the UN, let alone the original intent of asylum law.
You need to read more. Try actually reading the Universal Declaration on Human Rights that Germany and every other signatory nation has agreed to uphold. Article 14, "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution".
Yes, that's what it says. But it doesn't say "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy asylum from persecution in countries of their choice". Asylum seekers are supposed to seek asylum in the first safe country they enter. Now, unless France or Italy have been taken over by North Korea, I can't think of any nation for which Germany would be the first safe country. Furthermore, asylum is a temporary arrangement, not a permanent one.
And to be clear, I have lived as a guest worker in Germany, among other countries. Gerrmany's problem isn't the AfD. As an immigrant, I have no problem with countries telling me that they don't want to let me settle, that's their good right. No, Germany's problem is a deep-seated, nearly universal embrace of authoritarianism and xenophobia, something you find across the political spectrum in Germany.
Because litigation is famously inexpensive and efficient. It's also well known for bring the dead back to life. Perhaps you missed the part about the radium girls dying.
Perhaps you missed the part about the people who killed them getting away with murder.
Meanwhile, the courts, employers, employees, and law enforcement would need some sort of standard to measure negligence. Some sort of agency, perhaps the American for Health and Safety Organization would be needed to set standards.
Yes, a private agency that provides insurance, certification, and fast adjudication and compensation, backed up by criminal penalties. That's as opposed to the byzantine bureaucracy that protects murderers from just punishment and is a hotbed of corruption, which is what you favor.
Donâ(TM)t try to appeal to a nearly 20 year old paper while the field has advanced continuously.
I'm not appealing to a paper at all. I made a couple of mathematical statements. First, I'm saying they aggregated the data incorrectly and hence can't distinguish causality. Second, at the very least, they need to test both causal directions (1) and (2). Now, if you understand my points and have a response, please feel free to make it.
And you're right that the field has advanced continuously over the last 20 years. In particular, we have learned that many applications of SEM are incorrect in just the way in which this paper applies it incorrectly
Here is a summary of the self created thorn position of that party. Their beliefs are contrary to the declaration of human rights
The article doesn't even mention "human rights", and all it says is that the AfD is anti-immigration. Where do you see beliefs "contrary to the declaration of human rights"? And what does that have to do with violence?
Like this [wikipedia.org] In light of that, what makes you thing that without regulations, the training won't put worker's safety and well being dead last as a priority?
Notice that the mechanism by which the workers received compensation was a lawsuit; the regulation happened afterward. Also notice that because this was treated as a labor safety issue, the people responsible (company owners, doctors, etc.) weren't criminally charged; many should have gone to jail, and some should have received the death penalty because what they did amounted to murder.
And yes, it's often cheaper to buy something that looks like safety gear than something that provides actual safety. At least until you need the gear to actually protect you.
Which is another reason why the person with the most interest, the worker, is the best person to select and use the safety gear. Of course, managers and supervisors ought to be subject to criminal prosecution if they fail to disclose any and all dangers.
Safety regulations are soft on companies; criminal liability is a better standard.
You sure are reading a lot into my posts that isn't there. I am not exactly a supporter of DRM, it's enforcement, or of the DMCA in general.
But you are a supporter of government regulations and generally bigger government; crony capitalism (of which DRM and DMCA are instances) are the inevitable consequences of bigger government. That is, if you give government more power, special interests will invariably hijack that power for their own corrupt ends.
In particular, understanding these results requires some understanding of the actual role of the AfD in German politics,
And what "role" would that be? Has the AfD ever called for violence against anybody? Or have they asked people to remain calm and use democratic means for achieving their ends? What is the causal mechanism by which the AfD Facebook page alone would account for so many refugee attacks?
It isn't obvious if you don't have modeling background but "structural evidence" refers to structural equation modeling, which is rigorously designed to determine causality.
I hadn't looked at the paper beforewriting, I went by the article. Looking at it now, yes, you're right, they used more than simple correlation. But, as Wright himself put it, he "never made the preposterous claim that the theory of path coefficients [=SEMs] provides a general formula for the deduction of causal relations." That is, causal relations are an assumption that goes into the SEM model, not a result that comes out of them. Causal assumptions determine the form of the equations you write down.
In this paper, they just aggregate data weekly. When you look at Figure 3, it suggests that, even aggregated weekly, anti-refugee posts lag (rather than lead) attacks. And when you look at Figure 4, it would imply that nearly all refugee attacks are due to Facebook posts on the AfD page, which is completely implausible. On the other hand, it is almost certain that ever refugee attack generates lots of comments on the AfD page, if not from anybody else than from opponents of the AfD. So, between the two hypothesis (1) posts cause refugee attacks and (2) refugee attacks cause posts, (2) seems far more likely.
How can they apply SEM to this problem? At the very least, they need to write down SEM models for both (1) and (2) and compare them. If they do, they'll almost certainly find that (2) is an even better fit for their data than (1).
So you figure it makes more sense for the worker to go deaf or die of lung disease? Due to the lack of a $3 set of ear plugs or a $6 pack of masks?
As I was saying, I figure that it makes more sense for the worker to spend $0.20 on earplugs himself and pocket the $1.80 in difference as extra salary.
You are so steeped in the idea of big government and regulation that the only way you can conceive of a worker getting ear plugs is for OSHA and a gigantic enforcement apparatus to force employers to buy them for workers. The idea that the worker can buy them himself, or that the employer is motivated to buy them for his workers simply doesn't occur to you.
Unregulated dumping of pollutants into the air and water. That leaves everyone to fork over money to either clean up after them or to deal with health issues and lost productivity.
Emission of pollutants infringes on other people's property rights and is hence legally actionable in a free market system. If you look at US history, it was the US government that prevented such lawsuits because it wanted to protect supposedly important (and politically well connected) private businesses against such claims. That is, when the EPA sets "upper limits" on pollutants, that's not to protect you, it's giving polluters a free license to pollute that much.
Then there is the issue of market distortion. It's funny how many people here claim to want the government to quit interfering with the market EXCEPT for granting patents, copyrights, and corporate charters.
Indeed. And people like me, who advocate free market capitalism, are saying that the government should tell these companies to take a flying leap. It is people who advocate bigger government and more regulations that enable this kind of cronyism.
Much of the topic of this discussion is based on companies wanting no government interference with how they can use DRM, but when it comes to cracking it, they want the full force of the federal government to prevent it.
Well, and what do you know: DRM enforcement is another example of government regulations and laws interfering in the free market. So, it is people like you who advocate giving government more power who are responsible for that. Free market capitalists like myself want to take away that power from the government.
Except you're handwaving. And actually, due to automation, both McD's and retail staff have seen productivity increases.
Productivity increases due to automation are the result of capital investments and hence should go to the investors who paid for the capital investment. And in terms of salaries, partial automation of a job function like hamburger flipping decreases the demand for hamburger flippers, so their salaries certainly shouldn't up. That's true for all of the examples you list.
As for beneficial regulations, see OSHA. It's good that workers now get filter masks when painting or working with toxic gases.... It's good that employers have to actually pay them what they promised.
Employers don't pay for these, they simply reduce the value of, and hence the take-home pay of, workers (in many cases, to zero; that is, employees don't get hired at all because OSHA compliance is too costly). And because it is an OSHA regulation, employers need to impose this kind of safety gear in many situations where it may not be needed.
Let's say OSHA regulations force an employer to spend $500/month/worker on masks, back braces, and other safety gear, plus the salaries of additional employees monitoring and reporting on OSHA compliance. Without OSHA, these $500/month/worker would go to the worker, who could then decide where and when he needs safety gear and spend significantly less on it, because he doesn't have to pay for monitoring and reporting.
So, no, OSHA regulations are not an example of beneficial regulations. Not only do they depress salaries relative to free market approaches, if anything, OSHA and the attendant legal framework results in a socialization of employer liability.
Perhaps an example will help. A worker at McD's does not recieve benefits at all unless they're in management. The VAST majority of McD's employees are not management. This is not somehow counterbalanced by the expense of employee benefits, they're getting none.
Well, and have those people become any more productive? Presumably, they flip as many hamburgers per hour today as they did thirty years ago. If anything, given the potential for automation, those workers are less valuable to McDonald's today. And if you try to force McDdonald's to pay them more benefits and improve their working environment, Macdonald's will just fire them and replace them with machines.
More generally, your statement about wage stagnation is basically "average productivity has gone up but average wages have not". And I responded with "that's because, on average, benefits and regulations have eaten up the gains. For any individual job, there may be many reasons why wages have stagnated, fallen, or gone up.
I note that you declined to name one.
Correct. I don't know of any regulation that is beneficial to employees. I note that you don't seem to know of any either.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously? Trump got elected on the promise of restricting the influx of refugees from the Middle East and South America, as did many conservative European leaders. Voters in Western democracies are rebelling against the enormously generous migration and refugee policies. The reason you likely don't realize that this was a "point of contention" is that anybody critical of these generous policies is dismissed as a "white supremacist" or "alt-right troll". But mainstream conservatives in both the US and Europe have asked for a tightening of these laws. The German governing coalition nearly split over it.
You're delusional, as usual.
The SEM (such as it is, it really is just a simple linear model) is in Equation 2, plus a bit of heuristic reasoning about coefficient magnitudes. I leave it to you to work out for yourself why you can move RefugeePosts to the LHS and Attacks/Refugee to the RHS and still get a strong relationship despite the "triple interaction".
Why? The implication of this paper is that censoring Facebook would reduce refugee attacks. Since I couldn't care less about either Facebook or the civil liberties of Germans, I encourage you to try this and report back to the world!
Look, you're perfectly entitled to believing that the current system is the only possible system for handling workplace safety. Personally, I prefer more choice, more self-determination, more personal responsibility, and higher salaries. I'm happy with insurance, mediation, and liquidated damages and use them whenever I can. But different people have different tradeoffs.
But the tradeoff itself isn't a matter of preference: if you impose strong workplace safety requirements and mandatory benefits, salaries will suffer in proportion. It's this link that you keep denying. You'd think that if health care costs of gone from 9% of GDP in 1980 to 17% of GDP, with no better health outcomes, it's pretty obvious where at least around 8% of salary increases have gone.
Instead you posit... what exactly? Where do you think the money has gone other than benefits and regulatory compliance? Don't say "management" or "CEOs"; obscenely wealthy as some of them are, they aren't even close to being able to account for the missing salary increases.
No regulatory agency. Criminal penalties are handed out by courts based on case law.
Well, it is certainly less likely that it is "favorable to the people writing the check" than what we have right now, where special interests write checks to politicians and regulators, and employers and employees have no choice but to submit to that corruption.
Where did I say anything like that?
Criminal penalties are handed out by the state, for murder, theft, and other violations of the non-aggression principle.
Civil penalties (i.e., what OSHA actually is responsible for) can be handled by private insurance companies and mediation.
That may be the legal situation in your country, but it is not an automatic part of international human rights. It is also inadvisable because if asylum automatically implies permanent residency, countries will be far more reluctant to grant it. Note that most people seeking asylum in the west don't even meet the rather loose definition of the UN, let alone the original intent of asylum law.
You need to read my comment all the way. And then you need to explain why they shouldn't test for causality in the other direction.
Yes, that's what it says. But it doesn't say "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy asylum from persecution in countries of their choice". Asylum seekers are supposed to seek asylum in the first safe country they enter. Now, unless France or Italy have been taken over by North Korea, I can't think of any nation for which Germany would be the first safe country. Furthermore, asylum is a temporary arrangement, not a permanent one.
And to be clear, I have lived as a guest worker in Germany, among other countries. Gerrmany's problem isn't the AfD. As an immigrant, I have no problem with countries telling me that they don't want to let me settle, that's their good right. No, Germany's problem is a deep-seated, nearly universal embrace of authoritarianism and xenophobia, something you find across the political spectrum in Germany.
Perhaps you missed the part about the people who killed them getting away with murder.
Yes, a private agency that provides insurance, certification, and fast adjudication and compensation, backed up by criminal penalties. That's as opposed to the byzantine bureaucracy that protects murderers from just punishment and is a hotbed of corruption, which is what you favor.
I'm not appealing to a paper at all. I made a couple of mathematical statements. First, I'm saying they aggregated the data incorrectly and hence can't distinguish causality. Second, at the very least, they need to test both causal directions (1) and (2). Now, if you understand my points and have a response, please feel free to make it.
And you're right that the field has advanced continuously over the last 20 years. In particular, we have learned that many applications of SEM are incorrect in just the way in which this paper applies it incorrectly
The article doesn't even mention "human rights", and all it says is that the AfD is anti-immigration. Where do you see beliefs "contrary to the declaration of human rights"? And what does that have to do with violence?
Notice that the mechanism by which the workers received compensation was a lawsuit; the regulation happened afterward. Also notice that because this was treated as a labor safety issue, the people responsible (company owners, doctors, etc.) weren't criminally charged; many should have gone to jail, and some should have received the death penalty because what they did amounted to murder.
Which is another reason why the person with the most interest, the worker, is the best person to select and use the safety gear. Of course, managers and supervisors ought to be subject to criminal prosecution if they fail to disclose any and all dangers.
Safety regulations are soft on companies; criminal liability is a better standard.
Yes, that's your belief, not fact.
In general, it's cheaper for either the employer or the employee to buy safety equipment without the cost of OSHA compliance than with.
Training addresses that; you don't need OSHA regulations.
Really? How exactly do you think things "worked before the regulations"?
But you are a supporter of government regulations and generally bigger government; crony capitalism (of which DRM and DMCA are instances) are the inevitable consequences of bigger government. That is, if you give government more power, special interests will invariably hijack that power for their own corrupt ends.
And what "role" would that be? Has the AfD ever called for violence against anybody? Or have they asked people to remain calm and use democratic means for achieving their ends? What is the causal mechanism by which the AfD Facebook page alone would account for so many refugee attacks?
I hadn't looked at the paper beforewriting, I went by the article. Looking at it now, yes, you're right, they used more than simple correlation. But, as Wright himself put it, he "never made the preposterous claim that the theory of path coefficients [=SEMs] provides a general formula for the deduction of causal relations." That is, causal relations are an assumption that goes into the SEM model, not a result that comes out of them. Causal assumptions determine the form of the equations you write down.
In this paper, they just aggregate data weekly. When you look at Figure 3, it suggests that, even aggregated weekly, anti-refugee posts lag (rather than lead) attacks. And when you look at Figure 4, it would imply that nearly all refugee attacks are due to Facebook posts on the AfD page, which is completely implausible. On the other hand, it is almost certain that ever refugee attack generates lots of comments on the AfD page, if not from anybody else than from opponents of the AfD. So, between the two hypothesis (1) posts cause refugee attacks and (2) refugee attacks cause posts, (2) seems far more likely.
How can they apply SEM to this problem? At the very least, they need to write down SEM models for both (1) and (2) and compare them. If they do, they'll almost certainly find that (2) is an even better fit for their data than (1).
As I was saying, I figure that it makes more sense for the worker to spend $0.20 on earplugs himself and pocket the $1.80 in difference as extra salary.
You are so steeped in the idea of big government and regulation that the only way you can conceive of a worker getting ear plugs is for OSHA and a gigantic enforcement apparatus to force employers to buy them for workers. The idea that the worker can buy them himself, or that the employer is motivated to buy them for his workers simply doesn't occur to you.
How often do people need to be reminded of it?
Emission of pollutants infringes on other people's property rights and is hence legally actionable in a free market system. If you look at US history, it was the US government that prevented such lawsuits because it wanted to protect supposedly important (and politically well connected) private businesses against such claims. That is, when the EPA sets "upper limits" on pollutants, that's not to protect you, it's giving polluters a free license to pollute that much.
Indeed. And people like me, who advocate free market capitalism, are saying that the government should tell these companies to take a flying leap. It is people who advocate bigger government and more regulations that enable this kind of cronyism.
Well, and what do you know: DRM enforcement is another example of government regulations and laws interfering in the free market. So, it is people like you who advocate giving government more power who are responsible for that. Free market capitalists like myself want to take away that power from the government.
Productivity increases due to automation are the result of capital investments and hence should go to the investors who paid for the capital investment. And in terms of salaries, partial automation of a job function like hamburger flipping decreases the demand for hamburger flippers, so their salaries certainly shouldn't up. That's true for all of the examples you list.
Employers don't pay for these, they simply reduce the value of, and hence the take-home pay of, workers (in many cases, to zero; that is, employees don't get hired at all because OSHA compliance is too costly). And because it is an OSHA regulation, employers need to impose this kind of safety gear in many situations where it may not be needed.
Let's say OSHA regulations force an employer to spend $500/month/worker on masks, back braces, and other safety gear, plus the salaries of additional employees monitoring and reporting on OSHA compliance. Without OSHA, these $500/month/worker would go to the worker, who could then decide where and when he needs safety gear and spend significantly less on it, because he doesn't have to pay for monitoring and reporting.
So, no, OSHA regulations are not an example of beneficial regulations. Not only do they depress salaries relative to free market approaches, if anything, OSHA and the attendant legal framework results in a socialization of employer liability.
Oh, corporations can certainly pay lots of money to politicians they like.
The question you haven't answered is how that gets those politicians elected.
How would "the free market people" "socialize the losses"?
It is only government that can force people to fork over their money to support money-losing businesses. In free markets, that's impossible.
Well, and have those people become any more productive? Presumably, they flip as many hamburgers per hour today as they did thirty years ago. If anything, given the potential for automation, those workers are less valuable to McDonald's today. And if you try to force McDdonald's to pay them more benefits and improve their working environment, Macdonald's will just fire them and replace them with machines.
More generally, your statement about wage stagnation is basically "average productivity has gone up but average wages have not". And I responded with "that's because, on average, benefits and regulations have eaten up the gains. For any individual job, there may be many reasons why wages have stagnated, fallen, or gone up.
Correct. I don't know of any regulation that is beneficial to employees. I note that you don't seem to know of any either.