throwaway91321

The Czech Republic was often held up as a big success during the first few months of the pandemic, and had much lower deaths than Sweden for a while. Then last fall, things quickly changed.

A good reminder that people need to be patient and stop prematurely declaring victory or defeat.

Also, that sentence shifts from cost per hour to cost per pair without an explanation. Is 1 pair/worker/hour a realistic estimate?

I did some work with manufacturers who were in the process of moving manufacturing overseas some years ago. From my experience, the way the article presents the issue is detached from what really happens.

For instance, people look at a labor difference of $3 and $12, and assume that if these things were manufactured in the U.S. they would cost five times as much. But the thing is, labor is just one part of the cost. You also have things like R&D, advertising, raw materials, transportation, machinery, the cost of the manufacturing plant, etc. Some of those (like advertising) are going to stay the same no matter where you make your product, some would probably cost less overseas (real estate needed for factories), some would cost more overseas (transportation cost). There are also other issues that come up (like quality control issues) that come up when moving operations overseas that can be quite costly.

Here's the thing, though - let's say that a manufacturer makes a product for $10 and sells it for $12.50 - they're making $2.50 per unit sold. Now let's say that moving things overseas, when everything is taken into consideration, they can now make a product for $9.50, of which they keep 25 cents and pass the remainder 25 cents forward. Now they've increased their profit 10%, which is pretty big for them.

But what about the consumer? For simplicity, let's say that the 25 cents goes directly to them and the middlemen don't take a cut. And let's say that the final retail price doubles (the results would be even more extreme if they quadrupled like the article says). So the price goes down from $25.00 to $24.75 - they save 1%.

Now, obviously things are a lot more complex, and things are going to vary greatly depending on what's being manufactured. But from my experience, moving manufacturing overseas can often be profitable for companies while being only negligibly beneficial - or even detrimental (for instance, with poorer quality control) - for the consumers.

I've noticed that there were a number of high profile social experiments around that time (50's-70's) that tried to show something inherent elements of humanity that cause us to turn evil. The Stanford prison experiment, Robbers Cave experiment, The Third Wave, etc. When you start to look deep into any of these, they all seem to have mostly been done by charlatans who manipulated results and sensationalized findings in order to get publicity.

The original blog post is pretty silly for a number of reasons, but I think this reply post is also pretty bad. For instance, the author makes it sounds like cheaper and better prisons would be a bad thing:

In other words, when Snow focuses on making prison safer and cheaper, he’s working on the wrong problem...If your solution only mitigates the symptoms of a deeper problem, you may be calcifying that problem and making it harder to change. Cheaper, safer prisons make it easier to incarcerate more Americans and avoid addressing fundamental problems of addiction, joblessness, mental illness and structural racism.

He later goes on to dismiss worries about violence in prison, and chalks up the fear to people like Shane imagining the people in prison as being "so other." Prison violence is a very real problem, and it's hard to feel like someone actually cares about the prisoners when they're casually dismissing it like this and acting as if it's misguided to try to make prisons safer. The other issues he talks about are important, but they don't negate the importance of improving prisons. It's like arguing that the worries about the Boeing 737 Max are unimportant because we should be riding high speed trains instead of flying.

Furthermore, there seems to be a severe lack of imagination. For instance, he writes:

Furthermore, will contact with humans through virtual worlds mitigate the mental problems prisoners face in isolation or exacerbate them? How do we answer any of these questions ethically, given the restrictions we’ve put on experimenting on prisoners in the wake of Nazi abuse of concentration camp prisoners.

He's not wrong that switching prisoners who are used to human interaction into isolation with VR seems like it would end up badly. But a mere two paragraphs before this, he writes about how there are already supermax prisons (among others) where the prisoners are isolated. We wouldn't need to do Nazi-esque experiments to see if VR has potential, we could offer it to prisoners who are already isolated. I can't see how it wouldn't be an improvement for most of those who are already isolated.

Again, I don't disagree that the original article was extremely goofy. But this response doesn't seem to be much better, especially for someone who teaches courses on social change.

To add to this, "sex trafficking" to most people means "sex slavery," but if you look at the definition it's a broad term that includes things like helping a prostitute immigrate illegally. And then law enforcement takes things a step further, often referring to any form of prostitution as "sex trafficking" because they know that if they simply call it prostitution, most people won't see the big problem.

It's gotten to the point where I'm skeptical of any news stories I read where authorities are claiming "sex trafficking." It's simply astounding how many of those, if you follow-up on them, end up being simple prostitution cases in the end, with the supposed victims being charged by authorities for engaging in prostitution.

The Robert Kraft case is a good recent example. Authorities made a big announcement of saying Kraft and other men were involved in a sex trafficking ring, and the media uncritically spread their claims. If you look at online comments from the time, most people assume that Kraft and others were taking advantage of unwilling sex slaves. But months later the charges against the men were dropped, and the only people that ended up being punished were the women themselves, for prostitution. Authorities have a habit of making a big deceitful announcement that they're saving these women, then when the public and media attention goes elsewhere, the women are the ones the authorities end up punishing.

A few other points - first, from what I can tell, the third pounder used two 3 ounce patties while the quarter pounder used one 4 ounce patty. So it's possible that it looked like less to people.

Second, the third pounder later changed it's name to the Papa Burger. Though there's a lot of discussion claiming the name "third pounder" hurt sales, I can't find any information about how the change in name effected sales. And even after the name change, it still doesn't seem to have been nearly as successful as the quarter pounder or the whopper.

Third, the way A&W management talk about this makes it seem like if they just offered up a larger burger a good chunk of the population would come to them instead of McDonald's. It sounds like they convinced themselves that "bigger burger" was going to be a hugely successful campaign, but it's likely a lot of people didn't care that much.

I wouldn't be surprised if some people opted for the quarter pounder because they're bad at fractions, but my guess is that there are other, more important factors involved. When choosing a fast food place I doubt the first thing that pops into most people's minds is "how many ounces are in everyone's signature burgers?"

This isn't just an issue with the elites, though. Locally I've noticed that when you look into the perpetrators of a lot of violent crime, they often have a string of prior cases where they were let off with almost no punishment (pleading down to a lesser crime, given probation that's not followed up on, suspended sentences, etc.). Then you have other cases where someone has done something relatively minor (or doesn't seem to have done anything at all), and the book gets thrown at them.

I'd say the American justice system is capricious more than anything. Plea bargains - which is extremely common in America but extremely rare to non-existent in most countries - also play a big roll. The guilty can reduce their sentence, while the innocent are threatened with years in prison unless they forfeit their right to defend themselves.