The other thing to note when doing a compare and contrast is that China is a high savings country with no shortage of capital. Maybe in the very beginning of the reform and opening era they did but it hasn't been the case for over two decades. US on the other hand is the largest importer of capital in the world. So it can be expected that China with its thirsts for know-how and market access but not capital will behave very differently from the US, all else being equal. This is generally true for other East Asian countries as well.
There is tremendous waste in US healthcare. For every doctor there are a dozen accountants, marketers, insurance reps, sales reps, etc. Tons of bureaucracy trying to get a slice of that grotesque money pie.
The model you describe, a town subsidizing a few, is why the optimal state of healthcare affairs is the whole of a nation (through taxes) providing healthcare to everyone. It maximizes your healthy pool to offset the costs of the sick.
Turns out another part of keeping healthcare costs down is curing the sick as early as possible. In the US, even if you have insurance, you still often have deductibles and copays that strongly disincentivize you going to the doctor. So you don't, until that cold turns into pneumonia or you tear your trachea from a bad cough.
Theres a completely different mindset in the first world compared to how people in the US behave - if there is anything unusual "its better safe than sorry" in any European country. You still go to the doctor even with a "routine" illness because there is often no expense to you to do so.
But that is the right behavior. You want that at the societal level. Because for every false alarm there is someone developing a crippling or lethal ailment that will dramatically reduce their productivity and cost you substantially more than 15 minutes of consultation and 30 pills would have had they seen a doctor right away.
The US is killing its own citizens to line the pockets of the money hungry just by having its healthcare system be insurance based at all, regardless of if people are insured or not.
> False negatives means that your hiring process is longer, more difficult, more costly, and you therefore find it harder to grow, or to replace people who leave.
Exactly! If a couple of people on my team of six leave and they can’t be replaced for 6-12 months then I’m going to quit as well.
There will be more pressure on the remaining team to produce and most of the interesting long term work will be put on hold.
> I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring.
The top tech companies can reject 10 good candidates for every 1 that they hire because there is a massive surplus of engineers who want to work for these companies and so time to hire for them is actually reasonable.
99% of tech companies don’t have the overwhelming surplus of good applicants to make this work. So when they try they see time to hire jump from 4-8 weeks all the way up to 6-12 months without any real decrease in false positives.
I think we don't have the same definition of optional -- like someone else has noted, maybe the better word was "flexible". The way you're using it is the super manipulative "yeah it's optional, but why would you want the rest of your team to suffer?". Does that not sound manipulative to you?
As far as your impact-on-peers argument -- you could "optionally" also stay 5 hours after when you normally go home to help reduce workload for your peers and help them, do you do that? No? What about 4 hours? what about 3? 2? Where is it fair to stop? The rest of the adult world calls this professionalism, and you stop at what's required of you as your job duty, put forth in your employment contract. In the course of fulfilling that duty you're expected to be reasonably courteous, not to subscribe to some weird hostage situation where the rest of your team suffers if you don't do something that was marked as optional.
You seem to be assuming there is a lot of peer pressure placed on you if you don’t want to do it.
Why?
I’m simply saying there are always social costs. For example you probably won’t be listened to as much when there are conversations around improving system stability.
It’s like our after work Friday drinks are entirely optional - but lots of people build friendships and trust there and this can often lead to higher productivity.
If you can build these friendships another way or have a different path to an equivalently high productivity then not going doesn’t have an impact on you.
> For example you probably won’t be listened to as much when there are conversations around improving system stability.
That sounds like not listening to people about things they might be good at and know something about, because you want to punish them for something completely unrelated. Namely, punish them for not participating in "optional" activities. All the while you don't want to openly and transparently say what you expect from people.
Yes, it is manipulative and it is bad workplace.
> It’s like our after work Friday drinks are entirely optional - but lots of people build friendships and trust there and this can often lead to higher productivity.
It sounds sounds like nepotism where your ability to function and be promoted rests on your ability to make friends and be charming around beer.
No a meritocracy, but rather badly managed workplace.
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Seriously, you openly say that you would listen and judge system stability suggestions based on participation in supposedly optional activity unrelated to system stability. You also openly say that you trust people work based on Friday beer instead on how they act when working.
That sounds like horrible workplace for anyone who care about work and great workplace for charming bullshitters.
In all seriousness, you sound a little antisocial. I see where you’re coming from and I sympathize, but the environment described by the poster you’re replying to sounds very mildly manipulative at worst. I’m not sure you understand that the whole “bad mate” thing likely comes from his peers, not from management. Human beings are social animals, and you’ll be better off if you adapt to that reality rather than rail against it.
I think that I am simply working in better place. The one where people can but does not have to socialize at Fridays and the one where if they want you to do something, they say it.
That means that fathers don't have to drinking Friday evening and can be with their families. It means that parents who pick up kids after work are not disadvantaged by it. It means primary caregivers (women) have smaller hit on their career then they would otherwise. It means that people can so sport on Fridays, abstinents do well, anyone can use Friday evening to travel.
It is not merely mildly manipulative. It is literally bad office politics framed as "being social". Peers being passive aggressive is no different from management being manipulative or passive aggressive.
Lastly, it also means that I can make open transparent agreements about my work and preferences and salary compensation. Because in your setup, such things are not talked about openly and conflicts are not solved directly.
I guess it is best for whom? It is certainly fun to be part of such clique and everyone who has real responsibilities or relationships outside the office or who want to directly openly discuss workload will leave after a while having no choice.
As in, they are fun places if you single, but if you don't want to offload all children or sick relatives care to partner, you will be punished for drinking with buddies less. Your actual in-the-workplace behavior and output will be irrelevant.
They are fun places because of ping pong table and x-box console, but you wont be able to make explicit agreements about your workload and nature of work.
Of course they are! Propaganda is much less effective when you constantly see conflicting evidence with your own lying eyes.
There is a reason why trust in the mainstream media is at an all time low in the US.