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Apple Planning for Employees to Return to Corporate Offices Soon
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No, I do analytics for a living at a Fortune 10 company and that is a completely misleading statement.
If I told you I made 50% on my money using this “simple trick,” you might want to know how much I risked. If I risked $10 and turned it into $15, you wouldn’t care. $1,000,000 into $1,500,000, you might want to listen for several reasons.
The virus being far more dangerous to people with underlying conditions, hardly dangerous to healthy people, and literally a nothingburger to people under 20 without conditions are undisputed facts.
Point is, raw numbers matter, small number percentages can be misleading, and details inside the numbers matter a lot.
I’m not doubting you but you’re anonymous and could be the Dali Lama for all I know. Second, I’m sure you’re good at your job but more generally speaking having a job and being good at it are separate things. The Twitter clown that tweeted the Sweden data quoted earlier in this thread has a PhD in economics but can’t read a simple graph. Knowledge has a way of proving itself.
ROI is a metric that stands separate from the magnitude of the investment. $1M to me is $10 to someone else. ROI says how good the investment turned out, the invested amount is personal circumstance.
This goes so far beyond “misleading statements” it makes it really hard to lend a sympathetic ear to your “using percents are scary” assertions. How can an analyst take incomplete data, ignore inconvenient data, and pepper a conclusion with such decisive words as “literally”, “undisputed” and even “fact”? Is ”nothingburger” a technical term?
That statement has certainly been disputed at the very least. I don’t know if we know enough yet to declare it false.
It’s statements like this that show your analytical side is being overridden by some other impulse.
Nobody has disputed that details matter, but you’re arguing around my point— there are no details that suggest Sweden is a positive role model for Apple when it comes to reopening their business, or at least you haven’t presented any. You gave a lot of non-analytical “mights”, and hyperbolic statements and deflections, but no definitive statistics.
The data we have today mostly leans against Sweden’s approach. You might argue that it’s within margins of error, which is a fine argument against Sweden being a disaster, but it isn’t a sufficient argument in favor of Sweden being a role model.
You do analytics, so you understand that saying it’s not proven to be one thing doesn’t stand as proof that it is the opposite, right?
My point is that Sweden is not a role model at this moment in time. I understand the interest in seeing how Sweden evolves over the long term, but at this moment it’s mostly bad news and wishful thinking. If Sweden thinks they can teach us anything, they’ll have to wait.
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You are using an argument from authority here, which is a phalacy if you think that this makes your assessments correct.
In your example, and as an analyst wouldn't you be looking in to both of these examples as they both lead to a 50% increase of capital? With out any other information you have no idea on how or if it can scale. Or are you trying to make the case that the common person doesn't understand statistics? It's not very clear which point you are trying to make here.
I'd go so far as to say people as a whole are not very good at understanding statistics, and even the so called pros can get things pretty wrong as well.
Don't forget that diseases also mutate, and we are now seeing cases of young people with covid19 getting Kawasaki disease (maybe related, maybe not), so potentially not a nothing burger.
Point is, raw numbers matter, but details outside the numbers you work with also matter a lot.
You are right, I checked the literature 4 weeks about before starting up a SARS-CoV2 point of care development project. However, there were only smaller studies suggesting these are risk groups but we are learning all the time so the list might also be far longer in the end.
What are you implying with this incomplete list of risk groups?
Latest news from a preliminary investigation indicate that Spain is that 5% of the population has been infected (positive for antibodies) and that gave 27000 deaths. The study has not been published yet but it could be a key study and an interesting read. Antibody tests are not perfect but we could then expect 10-20 fold more dead people or 250.000-500.000 people if we extrapolate to the whole Spanish population. It also means that we might accept 300.000-400.000 deaths to get flock-immunity. Is that acceptable or should we take the time to reinvent society?
Are you saying that these number of deaths does not matter because most of those that died are elderly or has (expensive) underlying medical problems? If these people does not matter for the greater good of the society, who should we not treat? People with cancers, hearth failures, diabetes? Where should we draw the line?
Maybe we can start with learning how to read a chart? That graph conveniently omits the lag in cases which would explain the precipitous drop-off in cases. I guess some of us are still learning how to play musical chairs.
John Gruber is pushing back on this story, mostly the narrative around it. He’s clearly not a fan of Mark Gurman (though he did have Gurman on his podcast once). I am curious if Gurman writes his own stories or if they get filled out by others at Bloomberg. It’s very possible he didn’t choose the headline.
daringfireball.net
Bloomberg Publishes Clickbait in Break From Rivals
“Apple Is Approaching Return to Office Work Cautiously and Humanely, Just Like Other Companies in Tech, Albeit With the Added but Obvious Burden of Having More Employees Who Work on Hardware” isn’t much of a headline, though.
daringfireball.net
I’m talking about several things and using simple terms for emphasis. No one is going to listen to deep analytics here.
I am not saying Sweden is definitely doing the right thing, but they could be ahead of the game and some evidence supports it. Long term quarantines will be ineffective and pose greater costs than a virus that doesn’t impact healthy people.
I would say that Sweden’s approach wouldn’t necessarily work everywhere, but our approach has not worked everywhere either and doesn’t make sense in many areas.
I also have said you don’t get to credit social distancing with projected lives saved, which was a guess made by a ridiculous model with many issues.
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I only mentioned it because I know what I‘m talking about when I say numbers are misleading and using percentages with tiny numbers can be very misleading.
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The detail in those 27,000 deaths is everything. Without the detail, it’s just a number that scares people That probably shouldn’t be scared.
Every life matters...that was never the point.
It is relevant to know that healthy people shouldn’t be hiding in their houses forever Because they have almost no chance of death and their symptoms would be minor if infected.
The peanut butter approach to policy is not the correct path. Apple should open stores And take precautions. If you’re in a risk group, you will Handle life differently.
Doctors shouldn’t make policy because they would shut down everything if it meant saving 1 life. That’s their job. That’s not the way the real world works and there are many non virus examples.
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And yet when I use simple terms for emphasis you call it misleading and try to pull rank— but still have provided no information to support your point.
It didn’t take deep analytics to prove the Twitter interpretation of the R plot of lag corrected mortality data out of Sweden was a crock, but you still have your name signed to “liking” that post. That doesn’t bolster your analytic credentials here.
I started simple and succinct for a broad audience and specifically in response to someone who believes what they read on Twitter, but I’m happy to dive in deeper if there’s something to learn. If you need deep analytics to make the point you want to make, there are certainly people here who would enjoy the intelectual stimulation.
You’ve shared none of the evidence you claim (let alone evidence that is more statistically significant than what you’ve dismissed from others) and you’re again drawing hard conclusions on what’s effective without applying your analytical superpowers.
I’m not arguing with either of your points here. I’d take it a step further though and say I don’t see convincing evidence that Sweden’s approach works in Sweden.
Wait, why? Why can’t you say social distancing saved lives? There’s room to debate the exact numbers, sure, and we can debate opinions about how many lives we should trade for ”freedom” until the cows come home, but to say we shouldn’t credit it with saving lives because we only had projections seems extreme. And why do you talk as though there is only one model?
Ceteris paribus, social distancing saved lives.
Numbers are misleading?! You “do analytics” and want to say we shouldn’t use numbers but should instead focus on broad statements of nothingburgers and what might be true and unbacked assertions of what’s indisputable?
There’s nothing misleading to say that 3 is 50% bigger than 2. It is no more misleading than saying 3x10^23 is 50% bigger than 2x10^23.
What you are trying to say is that you want to focus on something different.
There’s this thing about the germ theory of disease— it states that disease transmits among people. People aren’t staying home just to protect themselves, they’re doing it to protect others.
- As one example, we’ve seen that all it takes is a small leak into a nursing home and the results are swift and tragic.
- The employees have to shop for food like the rest of us, but then they have to report to work at that nursing home. If they get infected in the grocery store, the people in their care can die.
- To minimize the risk of infection in the grocery store, we want to minimize the infected people in the grocery stores.
- To minimize the number of infected people in grocery stores we want to minimize the number of people in the store and we want to minimize the infection rate.
- To minimize the infection rate, we need to minimize how many people are exposed to infected individuals, even to infected healthy individuals who have almost no chance of death themselves.
- Since we aren’t able to test everyone effectively yet, and we likely don’t know people are infected until well after they show symptoms, and healthy people with almost no chance of death have only minor or no symptoms at all, we are all minimizing our contact with one another to avoid setting off this whole chain reaction.
I don’t think anyone believes one size fits all is the right place to end up, and I don’t think doctors are making policy anywhere. Policy is made by politicians. Doctors have outsized input, as they should in a healthcare crisis. Economists have outsized input, as they should in an economic crisis. The rest of us also have input. I presume you’re writing to your government officials and sharing the views you’ve been sharing with us?
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The point about percentages was a broad point and you know it was misleading...it was a ridiculous way of framing the numbers.
I read nothing else you posted because this is getting way too dank for me and I no longer care, lol
Apple is talking about opening their campus in Santa Clara county, California.
The reported death rate in Sweden is 130% that in the US.
It is 450% that in California.
It is 500% that in Santa Clara County
That‘s not misleading, it’s... what did you call it?... an undisputed fact. It’s not ridiculous, it’s division. I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient to the world view you want to hold, but there’s nothing deceptive in those numbers.
I hope and expect that, if Apple proceeds, they’ll do it with caution but I see nothing in the current data that suggests that there is something to learn from Sweden.
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You are kinda straw manning here. I don't think anyone is talking about a peanut butter approach, or that healthy people should be hiding in their houses forever.
The lock down has never been about keeping healthy people inside so they don't get it. It's so they don't get it and pass it on to someone who isn't healthy. It's about reducing the amount of active cases to reduce strain on health care facilities, and to stop the spread of the virus through the whole population. The longer this diseases is around, the more people it will kill.
Like I said, this is a very new disease and there is so much we don't know about it yet. We have just started to see a marked increase of Kawasaki disease in young people which is likely linked to covid19 too.
You seem to be coming from a point of view of the economy matters more than deaths here, and not taking in to consideration that death and illness have an adverse effect on the economy too. Have you even thought about what the cost of increased death and illness will have on the economy? Because there is a chance that it will be more damaging than shutting down for a few months and dealing with it properly now.
Covid-19 is also being implicated in a rise of strokes in younger people.
I agree with all you’re saying, but I don’t think it’s strictly true that the longer the disease is around the more it will kill. Now that we’ve accepted the fact that we’ve lost control of the situation I think we’re resigned to the fact that it might change form but it likely isn’t going away. Our goal now is to keep the infection rate down to what our healthcare system can handle effectively and buy as much time as we can for vulnerable populations in the hopes of developing improved treatments in the short term and potentially a vaccine in the long term. Technically, I think that approach is actually making this process longer, not shorter, but hopefully at a lower overall mortality rate.
Looking through their posts, in this thread at least, aside from a passing reference to a ”ruined economy” it doesn’t seem that they’re making an economic argument, at least not explicitly. They’re spending far more time saying there’s nothing to be afraid of and that everything we think we know about this disease is wrong.
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I do, and only Tesla makes autos in CA. Honda and everyone else exist in CA for design and such only. This is my home state, and my home cities are both Los Angeles and San Jose.You have no idea who else are in CA...
Category:Motor vehicle assembly plants in California - Wikipedia
Keywords "will have." If your only defense for a country's plan is that they outdid some specific model, sorry. Sweden is doing worse than its Scandinavian neighbors for now. Maybe it'll pay off later, but idk. I don't fault them for trying.
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Ah, I see where is the disconnect.I do, and only Tesla makes autos in CA. Honda and everyone else exist in CA for design and such only. This is my home state, and my home cities are both Los Angeles and San Jose.
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en.wikipedia.org
Keywords "will have." If your only defense for a country's plan is that they outdid some specific model, sorry. Sweden is doing worse than its Scandinavian neighbors for now. Maybe it'll pay off later, but idk. I don't fault them for trying.
By automakers, I do not simply mean the assembly workers.
That seems to be the direction my job is going.
My team's manager has been thrilled by our performance, even with the havoc involved. People are currently working from home with their kids, spending more time on errands due to more cleaning and stuff, and just generally experiencing more havoc and stress, and we're doing better than ever. It's pretty crazy lol. The part I can't think of a good "compromise situation" for is how do you accomodate "healthy people" and "higher risk people" the way all these open-everything-back-up economic geniuses suggest?
You can't have a high risk person run a nursing home. Likewise, it's not right to break up families of healthy people and high risk people living together.
I think that stupid idea came from the ultra-independent ****-the-relatives-put-everyone-that-cant-work-in-a-home mentality. Out of sight, out of mind! It's a mental illness in itself that spread through the country like wildfire lol.
I think there are simpler things we could do:
1. No more open floorplan offices. This was a stupid idea.
2. Wear a mask everywhere for the moment
3. Food stores & restaurants should require washing hands at the door. Install sinks by the door. No washing hands == no entrance.
4. For now, more curbside pickup and delivery stuff? I dunno.
My post is going to get ripped to shreds by people who just want a haircut and a trip to the Golden Corral. XD
Actually, they do.
Especially those who work in design studios or high security future products (family member and friends belong in this category).
Where do you think clay models are made?