The Cost of Shadow Work

The government is concerned with more systemic issues. As an example, when there was $1.3 Billion dollars in harm across more than 11 million accounts, they stepped in with Wells Fargo: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-order...

Everyone -- and I mean everyone -- should just send a letter and go directly to your Attorney General's office if the letter isn't acknowledged with the issue resolved within 30 days. It takes about two minutes, almost never fails, and creates a much larger burden for the corporation.

I never sit on hold, and the letter takes about 2 minutes to write.

Once month I got the bill and it was nearly 50% higher with no explanation. After contacting them they informed that where I was supposed to be receiving credits was in fact getting additional charges.

Either Spectrum employees are dumber than the average 5 year old or this was an intentional act done in retribution.

Well govt is also busy in developing more self service solutions. Anything from Airport, fast food, grocery stores, banks they are putting the work on to customers which previously provider would have done.

Beside I think people are really excited about idea that technology and automation will fix human interaction problem. So that's what they are getting.

You can just submit a credit card chargeback in a few seconds online, and they will go through the rigamaroll. Likely that no further action will be needed on your part

Example: I met a person who started in a job like janitor and ended his career setting up video calls for the CEO. Seems likely that 50+ year career arc was possible because of employee training and all those jobs being in-house.

The lenders and the schools worked hand-in-hand to ratchet up the price tags and the size of the loans for college educations. All their incentives were to go up up up! The additional revenue to the schools didn't go to a better education, of course ... it largely went to administrative salaries. The administrative budget at US colleges has grown unbelievably while the instructional budget per-capita has been flat, driven down by the "adjunctification" of teaching staff.

I doubt the math works out well for lower-paid employees that are also required to juggle all kinds of tangential shit these days ( sorry :-( ) but I think it might for even mid-pay developers.

Just look at Intel, who recently slashed salaries so they could afford to pay a larger dividend. How do you think they'd react if you asked them to provide every engineering manager with a full-time assistant?

At some point, dealing with the system is somebody's job. It used to be slow on paper, now it's slow on a computer. Your wife is being asked to do that because the physician has offloaded that to her. Maybe she can offload it to somebody else, but then that person isn't freed up for actual medicine.

I have used what I think is a pretty good clinical system where you have a free text box but it has something like code auto complete so clinical coding is taken care of and data like physical obs gets stored in a structured way so it can generate charts.

When I was a scribe, our pay came directly out of the physicians pay so if they were making $100 per hour without a scribe, with a scribe they took home $85. I guess theoretically a physician could pay their scribe whatever they wanted to entice them to stick around longer than a year or two but I have never heard of this being done.

The key difference between a manager and a secretary is power. My manager can have me fired, a secretary probably can't (unless I really deserved it). By empowering the people handling bureaucratic bloat as their full time job, you incentivize the creation of more bloat.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/why-doctors-ha...

Here are two real examples of the mess we've collectively created. It will be painfully stupid to read, and it's filled with people in jobs that simply shouldn't exist in the first place. They aren't bad people, but every minute they spend at work is deadweight loss to the economy, and then they use up OUR time on top of it.

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I (1) got laid off in September, and switched to COBRA coverage on my previous health plan. The HR folks (2) at my old company worked with an insurance broker (3) to both set up the health plan (4), vision plan (5), dental plan (6), and set up the COBRA plan (7) on different companies.

I set up auto-pay with the COBRA middle-man (7) whose contribution to the process appears to be collecting $1800 from me every month, splitting it up, and sending parts of $1800 to the three different insurance companies.

Issue 1: One month in, we tried to schedule an appointment with the dentist (8). The dentist told us the dental insurance said we didn't have coverage. Neither insurance nor the COBRA plan would return my calls. I had to talk to HR at my old company and sic the insurance broker on them. She came back more than a month later and said that both companies agree that the money was sent and I now had coverage for the previous month. I pointed out that retroactively saying I had coverage was completely useless since I had been unable to USE the coverage in real time. She went back and negotiated a reimbursement for two months coverage. The dental insurance carrier would send a check to my old employer who would then send it to me. This wasted the time of at least a half dozen people, most of all mine.

Issue 2: In early December, my wife had appendicitis that lead to an ER visit(9), CT scan, emergency surgery, and a 5-day hospital stay. 2 weeks later she was back at the ER with significant pain, and got another CT scan. Thank god for COBRA, right? lol.

When we got home from the second visit, I found a letter in the mailbox from the COBRA company saying that the monthly premium for december medical insurance had gone up by $100, and I would have to pay more to retain my coverage. This letter was dated a week after the month started, so I couldn't have paid the correct amount without inventing time travel. I was given until the end of an un-specified "grace period" to pay. They then *retroactively* cancelled all 3 insurance plans a few weeks later, but kept the $1800.

I didn't know this happened - I had just started a new job whose medical benefits kicked in 3 hours too late for us, and thought I had another couple weeks to figure out what was happening. Meanwhile, I got separate bills from the surgeon (10), anesthesiologist (11), and radiologist (12) for trivial amounts. I then got an $8000 bill from the ER, which included no indication (other than the amount) that my insurance coverage had retroactively lapsed between them checking my coverage and submitting their claims. The medical insurance never notified me it was being cancelled, and the website implied I had never had coverage in December.

I contacted everyone and after hours on the phone finally got hold of the COBRA company, who will process a grace period extension over the next two weeks, at which point the ER and all other providers can have their office staff re-submit claims and then bill me - which I will have to pay on different online portals except for the ones where I can only mail or pay by phone.

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This is insanity. 12 different entities, many of which had multiple people actively involved. US healthcare costs are the highest in the world because every bullshit job creates an equal and opposite bullshit job, and they all also use up unpaid and undocumented patient time.

In other products I can only assume there has been a similar race to the bottom. Why should I pay up for some service if it's a roll of the dice that I will be treated any better? Unless I really trust a brand, and I can't know, I 'm going to end up differentiating on price alone.

But I'm seeing a lot of big corpo were paid $X for service S, and it was never rendered. Customer wants their money back, corporation doesn't want to give it.

In any other context, we'd call that "highway robbery", but for some reason for corporations, its fine. The article gives an example of it: ordered a coffee, it never came, no refund.

Regulatory agencies need to bring the ban hammer down on this, or forced arb. needs to be outlawed so that the people can class action it, or both.

Auto companies are relearning why it does not make sense to outsource anything that a customer sees or touches. That is your profound knowledge and any supplier that is incentivized to maximize cost per unit will not care one bit about providing anything more that the minimum needed to get the contract. The customer suffers until one automaker breaks the mold and start to differentiate themselves by building in house and having a tighter feedback loop to provide the best quality.

Here's how it went down at Tesla straight from the horse's mouth. I remember the skeptics thought he was crazy for bringing this in house but it seems to have worked out. [1]: https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=357

This reminds me of weird tip-related hijinx I experienced recently. First, also at an airport, the credit card machine asked me to leave a tip at one of those retail "news" stores. This seems like an overreach. Retail was traditionally a tip-free experience and the prices at those stores are outrageous already.

In another incident, my restaurant bill included an automatic 20% "service fee" (for a party of 2). We had to ask if this was the equivalent of a tip and going to the staff or what (turns out it was). I totally support paying restaurant staff a living wage and eliminating tips entirely, but this seems somewhat underhanded. Sure I was planning to tip already, but calling it a "service fee" sends a very muddled message. It would have been more transparent to just make the food cost 20% more.

Finally, as a general observation, the move paying (and tipping) electronically makes me question if the waitstaff are getting 100% of these digital tips or the employer is keeping some/all of it.

We just saw a multi year effort to enact right to repair get destroyed by the stroke of a pen in NY state. There seems to be little to no hope.