This makes sense, thanks

Why would China turn against Putin for them using their nukes? I don’t keep up much on their relations.

The best time to start was decades ago, but at least they’ve started.

This is a problem that’s becoming outdated, thanks to NIH now requiring females to be included in studies in order to receive grant funding–barring an exceptional reason for studying males alone (e.g., male-specific problems). They are even requiring cell lines for in vitro studies to be derived, at least in part, from females, rather than from males alone.

Ich lebe in Amerika. Ich lerne Deutsche sprechen, aber das kostet Geld. Vielleicht wollen die Migranten Deutsche lernen, haben aber nicht das Geld dafür?

Sorry if the above is poorly worded; I’m still new to the language. My point is that there are lots of reasons that someone might not know a language well, including a lack of money, or a lack of time from needing to work full time to support one’s migrant family on a low wage.

Mexican immigrants to the US are wonderful, but their culture is very different from non-Hispanic US culture. I don’t expect them to learn English. They work like 60 hours per week to support their families. Like the person you’re replying to has said, though, their children learn English and integrate into, but also uniquely contribute to, US culture. Rather than expecting the first-generation immigrants to learn English, I’ve learned Spanish specifically to speak with them. It’s not like there are many more immigrants to Germany than there are immigrants to the US–even discounting the fact that the US has always been a country of immigrants, Hispanic and Latino/a/e Americans (the majority of which are Mexican Americans) are expected to exceed 50% of all Americans within a couple of decades. In some states, they are already the majority.

Diversity is a good thing, and we shouldn’t require immigrants to become like us culturally or linguistically before accepting them.

To a degree. The large subreddits, like AskReddit, get far fewer upvotes on the top posts of the week than they used to get. I think there’s a good chunk of folks who left for a replacement, then left their replacement without going back to Reddit.

No, it isn’t; performance != ability, and it’s not clear that cognitive performance declines at all–hence the word “may.”

My claim is that

Cognitive performance may also decline in remote settings

Nothing more.

The RCT is free to access (if you haven’t downloaded more than three NBER papers; if you have, open the page in a different browser). Scroll down on the page I linked and download it via the button.

Statistically, you can control for variables in OLS regression–that’s literally exactly what the model does when you include more than one variable–and, provided that you got your doctorate in anything that uses statistics, I am sure you know that.

Seasonality is one of the more basic economics concepts. The influence of weather and seasonal illness trends on productivity has been shown in a number of studies (e.g., productivity declines during the flu season). The authors didn’t “show” it because it would be like showing gravity in a physics paper. Some things can be assumed. Also, productivity didn’t have a trend, as was stated in the text that I quoted.

You completely ignored the log transformed results, which the authors note were better fit by the regression than the untransformed data, and which showed less productivity in work from home regardless of whether seasonality was controlled.

Personally, I think people should be able to work from home all they want. Productivity isn’t the only important thing in life, nor is it the only important thing to businesses (e.g., retention of top employees is important). I am wholly against WebMD and all other companies requiring employees to return to the office. All I was doing in my comments was trying to clarify the data on WFH and productivity. There are good reasons to continue to allow WFH, but increased productivity is not one.

I’m going to finish my course prep. You can have the final word here; I don’t have time to continue debating anymore.

First, the RCT is a much stronger study. I’m not sure why you’re picking a fight with a correlational paper when there is a causal manipulation that I linked first.

Second, did you actually read the paper? 1B isn’t the graph of productivity; 1C is. You can’t just look at a graph, either–you need statistics.

"For Output, figure 1B, there is no visible monotonic or linear trend, so a seasonal time correction might be more appropriate here. Moreover, average output appears to be slightly lower during WFH.

For Productivity, figure 1C, the graph is more volatile, which is not surprising for a ratio. There is no clear linear time trend before WFH, but some variation from month to month, so a seasonal correction might be more appropriate. Productivity drops visibly during WFH. Finally, figure 1D plots the log of Productivity, which drops considerably after the start of WFH.

To quantify the WFH effect, and to control for employee and team time-invariant variables (via employee and team fixed effects), we now turn to the regression analyses. Informally, the estimates give us average differences in outcomes before and during WFH for the same employee, controlling for team effects (since employees sometimes switch teams) and time trends.

Table 4 reports WFH effect estimates based on OLS regressions for all three outcome variables, plus the natural logarithm of Productivity, in each case with linear and seasonal time trend corrections. All estimates are in line with the visible effects in the raw data in figure 1.

…

Columns 5 and 6 show that both WFH effect estimates on Productivity are negative, but only the estimate with seasonal time trend is significantly different from zero. We prefer that specification, since both the plot and the linear time trend coefficient indicate that a linear trend is not as appropriate. According to this specification, productivity decreased by 0.26 output percentage points per hour worked. Given an average WFO productivity of 1.36, this estimate corresponds to a 19% drop in output per hour worked. This is economically significant: if employees worked a fixed 40 hours per week, this would imply a drop in output of 10.2 output percentage points in a week. In other words, if employees had not increased time worked during WFH, on average they would have completed only 90 of 100 assigned tasks.

Columns 7 and 8 explain the log of Productivity, which strongly increases the fit of the regression. The WFH effect is negative and significantly different from zero at all significance levels, irrespective of time controls."

Beyond self-reports and perception-based outcomes, most extant studies that I’m aware of have found decreases in real output. For example, a randomized controlled trial published by the NBER found that productivity of employees randomly assigned to work from home was 18% lower than employees randomly assigned to work in the office:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515

Another study found that output decreased by around 13% when employees worked from home, even though hours worked increased:

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/721803

Cognitive performance may also decline in remote settings:

https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1218/6445994

I haven’t heard of any ultra-rich person who wants to reduce the population. A population decline will lead to stock price declines as the majority of the population ages (automated 401k investments buy and thus increase stock prices, withdrawals from 401k sell and thus decrease stock prices; an older population means less investment and greater withdrawal). Do you have a source for your decrease surplus population claim?

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Linux is a hell of a drug

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You mean our lithium?

Sincerely,

The White House

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Donating plasma is particularly good at reducing your blood PFAS, and they pay you for donating plasma in lots of places in the US