Cancer Doctor Leading the Attack on Astronomical Drug Prices - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-01/this-cancer-doctor-is-leading-the-attack-on-astronomical-drug-prices <comment><USER2> Whenever something like this comes up, R&D is held up as the "cost center", whereas initial discovery (hit) or optimizing it into a "lead" molecule is a fraction of the cost of turning out a "drug", even manufacturing is a comparatively small expense. The majority of the cost lies in the clinical trials process. That is where a potential drug can fail and take everything down the drain. That is why the "fail-early, fail-fast" mantra has been ingrained into big pharmacy like gospel truth. However, there is no reliable predictor of "late stage" clinical trial failures for a candidate drug molecule. And trials can fail from a drug having statistically insignificant improvements in a group of target patients, all the way to, having a high (how high?) propensity for adverse effects in the patient group.

So, the solution? More fundamental research to explore indicators of late stage failure, coupled with "cheaper" clinical trials to justify a lower development cost that is enforced by legislation to bypass greedy execs/shareholders. Now, those "cheaper" trials, that is whole 'nother can-o- worms for a different thread, because it involves our willingness, as a society, to accept such risks as are part of the discovery process.

<comment><USER3> Also don't forget to take into account the price insensitivity of some buyers.

If I had a pill that could save 1 million people I wouldn't price it at $100, since I'd only make $100m. If I price it at $1m per pill, only 100 people could afford it, so that also only makes me $100m. But if I price it at say, $100k, I can get about 300k people to pay for it, which nets me $30b.

This is all aside from how much the drug cost me to make.

<comment><USER4> This is a real scenario... it's called sovaldi, and it basically cures hepatitis c. Except it costs $80k for the full course. There are around 100 million people (globally) who have the disease.

<comment><USER5> Few things:

\- Usually drug prices are dropped / negotiated with foreign governments for developing countries \- Drug price often starts high but drops as government / FDA criticizes and once they milk health insurance companies to pay for it

It's not an ideal system at all, but just wanted to correct the notion that the prices start high and stay that way / poor people don't get access to it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem is not the high cost of drugs, the problem is the lack of R&D into processes and drugs that are not patentable. Like Stem Cells or Vitamin C. I'm not saying that these have any medical value, it's just no one is willing to invest because there is no ROI. What might be interesting is force everyone to buy life insurance and then have the life insurance industry underwrite the R&D.

<comment><USER7> Not just lack of R&D. After expenses for FDA clinical trials is $150 million+. Nobody can afford that if they don't have a patent letting them recoup expenses.

My go to example for this is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy). That is the treatment of autoimmune diseases by infecting people with parasites which suppress your immune system in a targeted way for their own protection. I personally know someone who successfully treated his Crohn's disease with hookworm for 5 years and counting now, and the main problem he has is that if he ever needs antibiotics he needs to get reinfected because antibiotics will kill the hookworm.

But it is illegal to receive this treatment in the US because the FDA has never approved it.

<comment><USER8> a company did conduct clinical trials of a helminthic therapy for crohn's, it didn't do well: [http://www.drugs.com/clinical_trials/coronado-biosciences- ha...](http://www.drugs.com/clinical_trials/coronado-biosciences-halts-phase- ii-crohn-s-trial-16305.html)

<comment><USER7> Thank you for that information.

I note it wasn't hookworm, which is what helped my friend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> New Zealand's Pharmac has generally been quite successful in keeping costs down, which is of course why it's under constant attack by the US State Department and is likely to be required to be effectively destroyed when New Zealand signs up to the TPPA.

<comment><USER10> Pharmac works fairly well in NZ - although it's not nirvana, there still are issues around what drugs they fund (Pharmac provides the drugs they select at cheap prices, but if they choose not to fund a drug because they don't consider it cost effective enough, you have to pay full price yourself).

However, I'm not so sure it's a good model for the world or for the US market, because it's actually quite selfish. NZ is able to get drugs cheap because the US consumers are paying extremely high prices which cover the development costs. If everyone was buying drugs at the price we pay in NZ, there would be far less incentive to develop new drugs.

With NZ being such a small market we can get away with it without having any impact on the development of drugs, but we're lucky that the Americans are picking up the development tab for us and we would have a problem if they stopped doing that.

<comment><USER11> > NZ is able to get drugs cheap because the US consumers are paying extremely > high prices which cover the development costs.

Any source for this? I heard quite often that the marketing budget is more or less the same as the development cost. Further, a lot of the costs is burdened by others.

Seems like you assume that there's a reason that the costs are so high or must be so high. Could be a easy "can get away with it".

There's been numerous explanations that e.g. companies force more expensive medicine than needed. E.g. cheaper is available, but to get a unique medicine from the company, you also are forced to get all the expensive stuff that they have.

<comment><USER12> The marketing budget is really high but the two biggest contributors to that are teaching doctors how to use drugs and handing out free samples of otherwise very expensive drugs. The first is necessary and the second isn't what most people outside of accounting would think of as a cost. Advertising is only a fraction of drug marketing costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Headline doesn't match article: Saltz's beef is with the US spending too much on the very sick, which is getting in the way of truly universal health care coverage for the generally healthy.

He wants the US government to use its market power to discourage the progress of ever more expensive treatments until we solve the problem of getting everyone access to affordable health care.

<comment><USER14> We all have "access", as in I can potentially drive a car down to the upper end cancer facility in Indianapolis or the Mayo clinic in Chicago.

"Is it affordable?" is a whole different question. And simply put; No.

<comment><USER15> Access usually means obtain. For example, if i hand a person a calculus book, have i given them access to knowledge of calculus? If they can read, yes. If i hand another copy to a blind person, have i given them access to the knowledge of calculus? Not really, no. If my intention is access to knowledge of calculus, i need to take extra steps. Maybe a brail version, maybe just read to them.

I think you might be fuzzy because of login prompts. Technically you're using computer resources. clearly i have access to the machine in some way. Similarly, i have access to the Mayo clinic. I can walk in and talk to people. But, with the computer i can't get to the good parts, i can't open files. Also, with the hospital, i can't get to the good parts, i can't get healthcare without extra stuff.

This isn't a slight against the clinic, I know they do charitable work. I think they charge so much, in part, to offset the costs to those who can't pay.

<comment><USER14> However, access can be compared to areas that which do not have it.

For example, if I was in northern India and get injured, I do not have access to emergency room care. Nor do I have access to a hospital. I may have access to a local doctor, but (s)he may have very limited tools and even less amount of drugs to work with.

If I am injured in this country, I do have a reasonable access to emergent care. But the costs are exorbitant to the point that many people default on those bills.

And then I would also go to the argument that there is no informed consent on the bills for treatments. We, as a public, are supposed to go in for a problem and choose the appropriate solution with no regard for cost. Our solution is that we then get the "bill we deserve". There is no breakdown for "issue X is average cost Y".

In choosing what treatments can potentially cause harm, we have the idea of informed consent. We cannot make a choice, medically speaking, unless we know both the pros and cons of said argument. This somehow, does not transfer over to harms of money and reduction on standard of life.

That's criminal.

(And yes, I chose the Mayo clinic because they are a top of the line medical center. And they charge for it as well, when the client can bear it or has good insurance. I also know they do a great deal of charity work.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Starts with a culture shift : society should care about its citizens health. It's just not the case in many countries, especially in the US. I guess the maths are simple : keeping more people alive and healthy is less profitable for the people involved..

<comment><USER17> Keeping it's citizens alive, healthy and able to work is very profitable for a country since more able bodied citizens means a better economy.

Most companies only care about how much insurance they have to pay and their bottom line they have no reason to keep an eye on the big picture.

If an employee gets sick for too long or dies they will just fire him/her and get someone else to replace them.

The citizens health is a big picture thing that only a government has the incentive of maintaining.

<comment><USER18> "Incentive"? Really? You mean a president looking to be reelected for another 4-year term has an _incentive_ (as opposed to a moral imperative) to prevent future illness in people who're 20 today where the symptoms will become visible 30-50 years down the road?

What is that incentive, and how is it stronger than the incentive to create jobs or lower prices _right now_ for people who vote today by allowing some environment-destroying industry to expand, said expansion being the cause of future illness (a hypothetical or maybe not entirely hypothetical example)?

<comment><USER19> > What is that incentive

Those people are and will be paying the pensions of the current voting population.

QED.

<comment><USER20> Or even simpler: these are not people from the Government perspective. We are talking about tax payers here. You'd rather have more taxpayers than less, right?

If a Government needs to spend $100k in tax payer money to save somebody's life and this somebody pays back $200k in taxes, this is good business, isn't it?

<comment><USER18> But the people who're governing young taxpayers now will no longer be governing those taxpayers when they get older and will suffer from diseases caused by today's policies - policies which will raise the standard of living of the same taxpayers today. And a future government will simply blame past governments for the problem (rightfully, though not very usefully.)

"The government" (why the capital G?..) as an organization might have an incentive to protect taxpayers' health but individual people making up said government do not have the same incentive. I think they call it the agency problem.

(Some people go as far as advocating benevolent dictators with a hereditary right to rule; of course in reality few dictators are benevolent, and a hereditary right to rule prompts people to kill off ruling families. I conclude that setting up incentives such that everything works out smoothly is rather damned hard.)

<comment><USER20> > But the people who're governing young taxpayers now will no longer be > governing those taxpayers when they get older and will suffer from diseases > caused by today's policies

That's definitely a problem. Problem with democracy though and not capitalism. The policies are designed to have 4 year lifespan because elections are held every 4 years. Actually, it is quite a big flow when you think about it. Politicians are not only incentivized to look short-term at their policies but also to design them in the way where long term negative effects are desirable if one can be sure that the opposition party will take over after next elections.

That's why Western democracies are watching places like China carefully where you can design long-term policy and still benefit from capitalism. I believe that the main reason behind the US to introduce more and more authoritarian policies (i.e. militarization of police force) is because they see that it works well for China. I mean marrying soft authoritarian form of government (like in China) with capitalism might be superior (economically and socially more effective) compared to having liberal democracy combined with capitalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The problem is not just with cancer drugs, it's with drugs of _all_ types.

There's a scorpion antivenom that routinely costs $12,000 or more per vial in the United States. That _same_ antivenom, with the same level of purity, is available over the counter in Mexico for $100/vial. [1] Yet, if you were to go there, fill your trunk with scorpion antivenom, then bring it back to the U.S. and try to sell it at a 100% markup (which would be a pretty sweet profit for you, but would also drive the cost _way_ down), the Feds would confiscate it and likely throw you in _prison._

The drug Sovaldi, a treatment for hepatitis C, costs $85,000 for a course of treatment in the U.S., and only $1,500 in India. This has one executive coming up with insane plans like docking a cruise ship carrying the drug in international waters off Miami, and ferrying U.S. patients to the boat to be treated. [2]

Of course, there are laws on the books that allow pharmaceutical companies to get away with these prices...because, if there weren't, these would be _felony_ violations of the Sherman and Clayton Acts.

 _Real_ health care reform would involve wiping those special protection laws off the books and taking legal action against the companies engaging in these practices, with prison sentences for the people involved. Unfortunately, what we've wound up with is a "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" that neither protects patients nor makes care affordable.

[1] [http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/arizona-woman- feeli...](http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/arizona-woman-feeling- pain-83-046-bill-anti-venom-drug-seeking-medical-treatment-scorpion-sting- article-1.1152754)

[2] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-01/hepatitis-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-01/hepatitis- cruise-india-trips-among-plans-to-save-on-1-000-pill)

</comment><comment><USER22> Prices are high because of long and expensive development times, massive amounts of regulation, very high risk and relatively short patents to recoup these costs. Not to mention the costs of the other 5 drugs that failed final trials. Demand is also understandably very high. I do think there should be harder discussion of cost/benefit though to bring some sanity into the system. What else could be done with that money, rather than a marginal outcome for one person? It's a hard conversation. This is especially relevant in something like the NHS where direct tradeoffs must be made.

<comment><USER23> That's simply not true. Yes, development costs are high, but not that high.

The real reason the drugs are priced so high is that people/insurers pay it. I wouldn't even call it a free market, since the patent protection is involved. Essentially it is extortion. Eventually we might get a situation where drug companies raise costs for patented drugs, not only cancer ones, slowly to the breaking point where even less people can afford insurance anymore. Why wouldn't they? The insurers are very disinclined to refuse life saving treatments to their patients.

With biologicals the cost of actually producing the drugs can be high. The only way to bring that down is to drive forward the necessary technology.

<comment><USER24> > since the patent protection is involved

While I'm no fan of software patents, why would I spend billions developing a new drug when I can wait for somebody else to do it, then just copy it?

<comment><USER25> Because these drugs are mostly monoclonal antibodies, you have to actually develop your own. You can work out what the target is, but because the antibody has extremely high specificity for a specific target, and is high molecular weight, you can't just synthesise it, you need to grow it (An absolutely fascinating process in and of itself)

There have been examples of other drug companies targeting the same target as an existing high value monoclonal antibody drug, however I am aware of at least one example where the 'knockoff' monoclonal antibody actually had harmful effects compared with the original.

The only way you can actually copy the drug is to steal a cell from their lineage and produce your own

<comment><USER26> I am interested to learn about the case with the knockoff having harmful effects. Could you guide me in the right direction?

<comment><USER25> Off the top of my head it was a VEGF antagonist, so avastin knockoff. I'll try dig up the paper when I'm off mobile

<comment><USER25> So I have just spent about half an hour looking.

I honestly can't remember where this knowledge comes from. My feeling is i learned it on my oncology term 12 months ago. It may have even been a ipilimumab biosimilar. Unfortunately google is mostly saturated with success stories and papers relating to monoclonal antibodies and wherever I heard about the writeup of the failure has vanished into the nether-regions of google.

Apologies. If anything comes up, put a contact email in your details and i'll reach out to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It's an interesting plan from a game theoretic perspective to set an explicit upper price for drugs(in dollars per year of lfe or whatever). It certainly changes the price negotiation for drugs in the pipeline, and ultimately informs the incentives of drug development going forward.

</comment><comment><USER28> I might be wrong as I don't know how to in detail read financial statements, but at the end of the day if they were making too much money (and by to much I mean unproportional) it would be obvious there would it not?

I work in the medical industry and can say I don't know any poor doctors. Even socialists. And maybe they are rich compared to their individual r&d in study, I am not saying I support $200k a year for drugs, but shouldn't this be part of a bigger question.

<comment><USER29> The researchers in R&D are making significantly less than your typical clinician. It's not a career path you take if you're prime motivation is money (or job security).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "Cancer Doctor" \- really?

<comment><USER26> Oncologist. But 'cancer doctor' is a term more people would know instead of 'oncologist'

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Personally I don't think we can truly call ourselves civilised whilst we persist in valuing our fellow humans' health and their very lives in terms of financial currency.

<comment><USER32> This routinely happens everywhere on the planet. We could protect our citizens from being in car accidents, getting murdered, etc. But those all cost money, and we have made a decision to not spend more money(to hire lots of police, to build lots of public transport) to prevent those deaths.</comment></comment>


Slow motion lightning video is mindblowing [video] - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5034458/slow-motion-lightning-video-is-mindblowing-will-sell-a-thousand-slo+mo-cameras

<comment><USER2> Nature's implementation of parallel search

<comment><USER3> What kind of search would that be? Locally, each branch follows some simple heuristic, but where does a lightning bolt split?</comment></comment>


Easy FlipBook: Getting Started. Your Content in 3D Flip Book - <AUTHOR> http://fb.inogst.com/getting_started <comment><AUTHOR> What do you think about it?! How we can to use it?</comment>


OpenOffice 3.0–How to Get it Early, Including for the Mac - <AUTHOR> http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/10/10/openoffice-30-how-to-get-it-early-including-for-the-mac/

<comment><USER2> Congrats to the OOo guys on providing a native Mac port! This is a step in the right direction.

However, this is a feeble effort compared to the far superior NeoOffice port. Slow, ugly; it looks like it was thrown together very quickly. I 'm crossing my fingers that at some point OpenOffice treats the Mac platform as a first- class citizen. Until then, I'll stick with NeoOffice.

<comment><USER3> I'm quite happy with NeoOffice, personally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, at least including x86 macs...

This is the first time that the killer apps that would make me want to buy a new computer are all open source. The new open office, the new gimp, etc.

<comment><USER5> I'm a bit naïve about Macs... Can someone explain to me why many open source programs need to be "ported" to a Mac? Isn't it just a make -> make install?

<comment><USER6> Usually that does work but there are a few issues.

First of all, since there is no package management to speak of, you often run into dependency hell (A requires B requires C requires D ...). Thankfully, we have macports (think of it like a limited version of apt) to get around most of those problems.

The real issue, for graphical apps at least, is that X11 apps don't look and feel like native Mac apps which run on Quartz (correct me if I'm mistaken).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Or just download the perfectly capable RC3 from openoffice.org and wait a few days...

<comment><USER8> They're actually on RC4 now:

<http://download.openoffice.org/680/>

<comment><USER7> Point and Match, sir!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> docs.google.com!!!

But in all seriousness, Open Office is such an awesome product, I just hope 3.0 works well on the Mac.

<comment><USER10> OpenOffice.org is a great product, but it's never going to be taken seriously mainstream with a name like "openoffice.org"

<comment><USER11> In much the same way Microsoft Office 2007 is just called Office 2007, OpenOffice.org is just called OpenOffice by regular folks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Umm... LaTeX >>> WYSIWYG document editors.</comment>


Hate Speech vs Freedom of Speech - <AUTHOR> https://write.privacytools.io/freddy/hate-speech-vs-freedom-of-speech <comment><USER2> I read this hoping for a good discourse on the topic... instead the author barely dove into the topic. There is nothing novel or of value here.

Free speech is good, hate speech is bad. Great. But what is hate speech? What is the line that you draw? The author vaguely alludes lack of evidence, but 99% of discussions are opinion based. Are all lies hate speech?

Honestly I wish I hadn't wasted 5 minutes of my life on this.

<comment><USER3> Even worse is that the author doesn't even get the definition of "freedom of speech" right; at best he can be said to have defined the US First Amendment. A few moments with Wikipedia provides a variety of historical definitions of what freedom of speech was intended to be.

This article is simply devoid of any understanding of the topic or even the most basic attempt to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's fascinating to me how this battle against "hate speech" became global so quickly.

I disagree entirely with this article.

He doesn't define hate speech. "There is no place in this world for blatantly false allegations or denying historical evidence", what does it have to do with hate speech?

Also saying that freedom of speech "is about being able to speak out against your governments without fear of oppression." is a very limited and US centric viewpoint.

It's funny how people don't see the danger of supporting these soft-censorship feel-good policy while more and more authoritarian politicians get elected, surely these laws won't backfired?

And that quote of Voltaire is apocryphal (but he said something close).

<comment><USER5> > denying historical evidence ... what does it have to do with hate speech?

He's talking about holocaust denial, the [broadly] antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jewish peoples seized on WW2 as an opportunity to advance themselves, exaggerating the facts and inventing others.

You haven't defined hate speech either, but this meets _my_ criteria.

<comment><USER4> "theory that Jewish peoples seized on WW2 as an opportunity to advance themselves"

How would you definitely prove or refute that?

I prefer a society where anyone can ask "did the gas chambers exist?". In a healthy one you should have all the information and replies to make you conclude yes.

In my opinion making it illegal just fuel conspiracies.

Also this thread is a glorious reminder of Godwin's law.

<comment><USER5> > How would you definitely prove or refute that?

I wouldn't dare do either. I don't need to. There are simply enough people _who were there_ still alive [on all sides] to testify what happened. If first-hand reports from every angle aren't enough, nothing will be.

Asking questions is okay. But we're talking about people with their own answers, not questions. Not just questions, they're sharing pointedly racist motives.

And leave Godwin alone. We're literally talking about Nazis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Hate speech, on the other hand, is not. There is no place in this world for blatantly false allegations or denying historical evidence."

The issue is you can't pick the arbitrator of what is true. Once you do you create the tyrant. For once you have someone who will determine that which is true they can determine criticism of their decisions are also hate speech.

<comment><USER7> You don't need to decide up front for every possible statement whether it's true or not. You don't need to decide up front for every possible statement whether it's hate speech or not. When you come across a proposition, it's your responsibility to decide whether it's true or not. You have to be open to the possibility that you can make mistakes, even really bad ones. That's part of the responsibility.

Likewise it is an abdication of responsibility to just pretend like speech can't be destructive. It's your responsibility and the responsibility of your community to deliberate on what sort of speech is destructive to the purposes of that community. And you have to admit that you can make a mistake and deal with it. That's part of the responsibility.

Free speech absolutism is obviously on its face a dogshit principle because it is unlimited and thought-ending. Yes, the suppression of speech can cause harm, but this harm is not infinite and permanent. Any principle that does not allow thought, deliberation, and thus necessarily the ability to make a mistake and the ability to make up for mistakes is a stupid principle.

The harm of suppressing speech without good justification must be measured and balanced against the harm of allowing harmful speech. The existence of harmful speech is hardly debatable: If speech wasn't powerful then we wouldn't consider free speech important. If speech is powerful, then its power can cause damage and harm. Deal with it.

<comment><USER8> > Likewise it is an abdication of responsibility to just pretend like speech > can't be destructive.

How is speech destructive to anything other than ideas? Just one, very precise example would do.

<comment><USER9> Lies, deception, memetic contagions, going into what is already illegal slander and fraud.

The argument on the side of free speech is that the negative sides of such restriction outweigh the potential safety they grant; not that they do not exist.

<comment><USER8> They're not _destructive_. Which object do they destroy?

We're discussing speech, precision is a precursor for that, no?

<comment><USER7> Your ignorance of the distinction between cause-in-fact and proximate cause is not a matter of precision.

<comment><USER8> So says you but I disagree. Would you ban me saying so? At least I'm able to give an explanation where you make a bare assertion. Maybe not bare, you added some snark.

Maybe that's why I wouldn't have your speech denied, I'm quite sure I'm able to defend my position. Maybe that's also why you wish for others to have their speech denied, because you aren't able to defend yours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > However, hate speech doesn't have reliable sources.

It is my opinion that all your sources are unreliable, therefore you should not be allowed to speak.

> Hate speech isn't freedom of speech. Hate speech is hate.

Hate speech is hate. Hate _speech_ is also part of freedom of speech. It's very easy for me otherwise to label your opinions as hate.

And as it always bears repeating: Freedom of speech isn't freedom of consequence, and platforms where freedom of speech is respected we can respond to hate and if the platform is any good, we can also simply block it and promote block lists aimed at specific speech criteria.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can label anything as hate. It doesn't take much for me to say your comment is full of hate (which it clearly isn't). If you understand what hate is then you can distinguish the two.

Hate speech, to me, is expressing hatred towards others, be it online or in person, with no reason or justification.

If you are willingly being spiteful or intending harm with no reasoning then this is hate.

There is a fine line that I should have talked about more, so I'm sorry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is hate speech? It's actually very difficult to define. One culture and ideology might come up with a very clear distinction of what hate speech is, but a different culture and ideology might disagree entirely.

</comment><comment><USER12> Problem is the author never defines hate speech.

<comment><USER13> Hate speech is like porn. It's a case of "I can recognize it when I see it." It's certainly not something objective and it depends on the cultural background of people to define it. The author can't define it because the very definition of hate speech will vary from place to place and person to person.

The author makes other mistakes too such as thinking history that was already written is an absolute truth when it's actually something subjective written by the "winners." I lived through that once, the history that I was taught as truth in my school many years ago was proven to be false a few years ago and the lies were based on what today you'd consider hate speech.

I think the moment we can solve detecting hate speech using a machine will be the same a machine can pass the Turing test because it's impossible to define hate speech in objective terms. Meanwhile we have two equally incomplete solutions: allow all speech or let some people subjectively censor things. Neither of those things will satisfy the author of this post (well maybe the latter will).

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree with your first point. You've put it much better than me.

History is written by the winners, however, even if the Nazis had won the war, I think people would still understand that discrimination against any particular group is wrong. Who knows?

Censorship isn't something I stand for. However, in the UK I can be vocal about my opinions as long as I'm not harassing certain groups for no reason. Sure, thats censorship, but I can speak out against my government without showing hatred if they were to take the policy too far. Its a fine line.

<comment><USER13> >History is written by the winners, however, even if the Nazis had won the war, I think people would still understand that discrimination against any particular group is wrong. Who knows?

I think that had that been the case the people who remained alive would be people with ideologies aligned with Nazism and would consider discrimination against a particular group the right thing to do. Of course there will always be people who stand against the winners, real life proves this: Nazis still exist.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Nazis still exist

Sadly, they always will. There will always be people with ill intent in this world, because the world isn't perfect. However these neo-Nazis use free- speech to get a voice that they otherwise wouldn't have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> 'The problem is that while the actual product is great, the people behind it aren't.'

I have a genuine problem with this approach to anything. I have zero need to vet whether someone likes midget porn, believes a radical political theory or even espouses unpopular opinions. If their product is great, do I really want to support crappy product with 'right opinion' people?

<comment><AUTHOR> Considering the alternatives, such as mastodon, I don't see any need to support them. If I can use products that don't condone this sort of action then I probably will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The author is conflating 'hate' with 'facts'.

Denying the holocaust is one thing.

Saying 'I hate group X' is altogether another.

And saying 'I hate group X and we should go and harm them' is yet another.

But this is all academic because few people support any of that kind of stuff really.

The concerns around hate speech are on the margins:

Making jokes about sensitive things (i.e. comedian in Quebec fined $30 000 for making joke about a man in a wheelchair)

Policies which have possibly a racial angle, and yet which may or may not be racist (i.e. banning travel from China, complaints that top Canadian Health bureaucrat who is Chinese native and deep ties to the WHO is 'compromised' being perceived as specifically racist)

Policies which affect some groups more than others like those intended to ostensibly help groups (i.e. UCal system banning teachers from language that could be perceived as 'microaggression' like telling someone of African American descent who is being too aggressive/lound in class ... that they are being too loud/aggressive in class, or things like affirmative action, Quebec banning certain religious garb which affects specific groups)

Requiring 'affirmative' language for controversial things (i.e Jordan Peterson complaint that he must legally refer to someone given whatever of any number of genders they someone chooses to describe themselves as).

Racially oriented identity politics policies such as 'Black Lives Matter' trying to address real problems of racism, while requiring white people to 'march at the back of the line' given that they are ostensibly secondary to the nature of their status concerning the issue and their presence could overwhelm the authenticity of the message ... could be perceived as a form of hate speech.

Casual aggressive language which is really tantamount to 'very crude speech' but sometimes 'actual hate speech' sometimes not really hatefully oriented, but which could be categorized as hate speech. (You hear this in online game rooms a lot, occasionally some _very crass_ language that I don't think is meant to be hateful so much as crass, but maybe it is by some definition)

These are where the streams cross and things get harder.

<comment><USER9> > Making jokes about sensitive things (i.e. comedian in Quebec fined $30 000 > for making joke about a man in a wheelchair)

I feel like many people do not know about some more of the context. Essentially the fine was in terms of damages, as in those jokes fueled bullying from many of his classmates.

Personally I feel that this is more properly part of a conversation about the boundaries of defamation rather than the boundaries of free speech.

<comment><USER15> That's a good thought, but 'defamation' is right in the centre of free speech conversations.

It's a good example you bring up because it's as old as time and there doesn't seem to be a universal way to think about it just yet.

<comment><USER9> I would say that defamation is different as it is about damages between individuals. There the concept is directly related to proving that damages have occurred, and a fine is in part meant to "correct the records." It is less about an abstract of what is the limit of free speech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is the sort of article which would usually garner a few hundred comments on HN in which the same arguments are exchanged back and forth, usually around a very small number of central themes (stated as follows in the most neutral way I can think):

\- Who decides what's true and what isn't?

\- Who decides what's hate speech and what isn't?

\- Freedom of speech isn't only a legal principle, you're thinking of the first amendment.

\- Should YouTube or other platforms be forced to carry certain content? There's simply no other way to get your message heard. Why does YouTube/Facebook/Google get to decide what's the truth?

\- Hacker News has a pretty strict moderation policy. Is that censorship too?!

\- Ah yes, but Hacker News is niche. Nowhere near the scale of YouTube or Twitter.

\- So you're saying scale matters? Who decides what the scale is?

In the end, a lot of these questions seem to focus around a common denominator: "who decides?". In my judgement, we already have a pretty good idea of "who decides" in most matters that affect the whole of society, but not in some others. It's the government, which is supposed to be accountable and elected by the populace, or at least take into account their wishes. This kind of democracy largely does not extend to the economic sphere, which several economists through history have described as the "anarchy of the market".

 _If_ the answer to the central "who decides" question is a country's government, whether or not the government is competent enough to make those decisions. This is at least in part a subjective question, as people evaluate all policies depending on their ideological views. But bear in mind that saying "the government decides" is not necessarily an argument for regulation.

There is usually a lack of sources being cited, perhaps because they're philosophical or legal arguments and this is a very tech-oriented forum. I'll provide a few I know of, ones likely to be the most surprising, and if anyone has better pointers I'd be happy to find out about them.

\- Susan Brison (2018), "Free speech skepticism" in which the author discusses and attempts to rebut several arguments in favor of a special constitutional amendment to free speech[0]

\- Susan Brison (1998), "Speech, Harm and the Mind-Body Problem in 1A Jurisprudence" in which the author provides several compelling arguments that the harms that can be caused by speech can be no less involuntary and in fact can be more severe than physical hurts in a variety of situations. To that end, it's worth asking why "harm" in the interpretation of laws on speech is defined in such a way that it only includes physical assaults. The author argues that to separate "mental" harms from "physical" harms rests on a theory of mind-body dualism, which is generally rejected by philosophers of mind today.[5]

\- Brian Leiter (2016), "The Case Against Free Speech" in which the author argues that certain places speech is restricted in the search for truth (such as in the courtroom) offer insights into how speech can be regulated in society as a whole[1]

\- Rae Langton, "Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts" in which the author argues that the free speech of pornographers interferes with the free speech of women (if speech is to be interpreted more than 'scrawls and sounds', which all protections of the right to freedom of speech are based on) in a way that classical liberals should care about[2]

\- The Stanford Enyclopedia of Philosophy article for _Freedom of Speech_ , including a discussion on Mill's popular "harm principle" and the lesser known offense principle[3]

\- Steven D. Smith (2004), "The Hollowness of the Harm Principle" in which the author argues that the harm principle as it is frequently invoked on the principle that governments should only regulate acts which cause "harm" is a vacuous principle which the holder can fill with their own "baggage" simply by equivocating on "harm"[4]

[0] [https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp- content/uploads/2018/11/Bris...](https://www.law.berkeley.edu/wp- content/uploads/2018/11/Brison-Free-Speech-Skepticism-Nov.-11-2018-copy.pdf) (With apologies to the author for citing this draft paper. As far as I know it has not yet been properly published, but it is available publicly at berkely.edu.)

[1] [https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...](https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=12563&context=journal_articles)

[2] [http://web.mit.edu/langton/www/pubs/SpeechActs.pdf](http://web.mit.edu/langton/www/pubs/SpeechActs.pdf)

[3] [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom- speech/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-speech/)

[4] [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=591327](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=591327)

[5] [http://susanbrison.com/files/B.16.-speech_harm_and_the_mindb...](http://susanbrison.com/files/B.16.-speech_harm_and_the_mindbody_problem_in_first_amendment_jurisprudence.pdf)

(Quick edit: Looks like I took too much time in writing this comment back when the post had 0 comments, and the discussions I anticipated have already started :))

</comment><comment><USER17> If I can XKCD for a moment, you are one of today's 10,000 people to learn about The Tolerance Paradox!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)

Note: "a society" is not necessarily the public at large, it can also be a subculture, a set of subscribers, and so on.

<comment><USER3> The paradox of tolerance is utterly vacuous. "Group X is justified in not tolerating group Y because of Y's intolerance of X." Fine, except it doesn't even matter what X and Y is; it works just as well for your opponents as it does for you.

It's amazing that people still quote that XKCD despite the glaring logical fallacy.

<comment><USER17> What is the fallacy in saying you have to draw the line _some_ where?

<comment><USER18> People are all too eager to grant powers (to their favorite vendors as well as politicians) that can later be misused against them. They seem to forget that the other team also bats.

<comment><USER17> Ah, "people." What are we going to do about them, right?

I'm not sure you and Mr. Throwaway & Hide are talking about the same thing, but what I'm talking about is _not_ to grant powers, to leave the game.

I'm not sure how freezing someone out is supposed to give them more power, or increase their audience, or make their ideas any more viable, but using your enemies actions to determine your own is a form of ressentiment, what has been called a ruling principle of the lowest sort. It's related to reactionary behavior, tit-for-tat debate. There's nothing that says you have to participate in any of that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: 1400 books/people mentioned by prominent people - <AUTHOR> https://wikimentions.com/?hn=1 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi Hacker News!

WikiMentions lets you discover books/people mentioned by prominent people in books/videos. We already have around 2200 books and 1250 videos of 980 people. Its a wiki, so anyone can add content. We would love to hear some feedback.

Thanks!</comment>


Command-line tool for checking who has unfollowed you on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://ryancole.github.com/twitdiff/

<comment><AUTHOR> Had been meaning to write something like this for awhile. Finally found some time to knock it out. I didn't really want to use any of the numerous shady web apps for this.</comment>


If Congress wants jobs, it can't want SOPA - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/01/22/if-congress-wants-jobs-it-cant-want-sopa/ <comment><USER2> The author makes the argument that "movie studios, often cited as the driving force behind the two controversial bills, are losing money to online pirates, but that doesn't tell the whole story" but I disagree. From my own experience, people tend to pirate things they didn't have the money to buy because they had already spent it on all the movies they could afford or because things aren't available in the States (some manga series and anime being examples).

Would there be more money flowing to the studios if piracy didn't exist? Maybe. But maybe not. I've had friends who ended up buying special editions of movies they pirated because they liked it so much. Or friends who buy merchandise related to the anime or shows or whatever.

There's just too much going on, too many factors, too many different people, to conclusively say that piracy is linearly related to losses for studios. There have been studies that tried to determine if piracy is bad for studios and the non-studio funded ones have said it's hard to determine. But writing an article that says "yes, movie studios, piracy is making you lose money" when it's not even proven gives the MPAA and RIAA more ammunition that we shouldn't be giving them.

</comment><comment><USER3> A numbers proof for an argument I have observed repeatedly: The American Congress, on the balance, seems to be more about staying in Congress (or affiliates i.e. Lobbying) than about jobs for Americans.

When will we develop a digital representation system that allows us to dismantle the American Congress? We have the tools...

Edit: Another HN post that could be part of the solution: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3495623>

<comment><USER4> There's an excellent interview with John Perry Barlow on This Week in Tech from a few years ago where he discusses this:

> They're working in this way that just vastly consumes resources but doesn't > actually get much done. I guess I could've seen that coming, if you say the > existing institutions of the industrial period are going to collapse, well > it's not like they collapse one afternoon and the next day you've got the > new Jerusalem in place. It takes a while for them to collapse. Right now > you've got this ugly situation in which they're all still occupying the > receptor sites of power but not in a position to exercise it in any useful > or judicious fashion. And we on the other hand, who saw this coming, have > not been able to take the self-organizing systems that we can probably start > developing and turn it in to much of anything.

<http://twit.tv/specials43>

Start at around 17:00.

For those who don't know, John Perry Barlow is one of the founders of the EFF. The interview is a few years old but still incredibly relevant and worth watching.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congress doesn't really care about "jobs", it's just a platitude they use as an excuse to push through the bills they want...you wouldn't vote against jobs, would you?</comment>


How is computer programming different today than 20 years ago? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@ssg/how-is-computer-programming-different-today-than-20-years-ago-9d0154d1b6ce <comment><USER2> There was a lot more independence and respect 20 years ago. Now, much like the highlight in the article, there's a great deal of emphasis put on "team" and often cargo-cult style practices (IE: if we do these things, we'll be a high- performing team). Even as software has spread into more corners of our life and the number of developers has expanded, I don't see the professional respect that developers had 20 years ago. The infrastructure tools / documentation / pre-built parts have made our lives easier, but the number of tools and technologies we need to understand on a typical project has also exploded. We used to need to develop deep expertise - say on database management - that today gets abstracted away to AWS (this is not to say that those skills aren't still valuable and useful, just different...).

There's a lot more technology-choice-by-fad today. We didn't have as many choices or the instant access and bombardment of opinions back in the day, so decisions were slower, IE: we didn't just switch out tools on a whim because it "sounded like a good idea"

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd add another...

20 years ago: your boss says I want X. You wouldn't ever tell them it was impossible or hard work. You'd hack it together and bend the hardware to your will.

Today: your boss says I want X. You spend a lot of time arguing if it's a necessary business function, spend a few months designing it, and then implement it in such a way that makes Fizz-Buzz Enterprise Edition look simple.

To put it shortly, incredible creative hacks are looked down on, while "elegant" solutions are a must. At least that is what it looks like from my experiences.

<comment><USER4> What's better?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Compilers are better. Once I spent two days finding a semi colon error (in Deplhi)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, mostly that. That and safety and parallelism features in order to comply to today's software and user needs;

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Haha. Would love to hear also about:

1\. We're releases and code changes as common as it is now or once you finished writing it's more less that except for bug fixes?

2\. Nowadays a lot of non-technical people are also involved in the development process like product owners, project managers, scrum masters, engineering managers, etc. Was this so then?

3\. Size of the teams? Was it generally smaller or larger compared to today?

<comment><USER8> From my personal experience:

1\. Releases were less often, usually in the range of a couple releases (4-6) a year. We had dedicated bug fixing time for two weeks before a release with extensive QA.

2\. Mostly the same, except scrum master (or equivalent) was usually the project manager.

3\. Generally about the same size teams, but teams had total ownership over what they built. Code bases and services were never split among multiple teams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hilarious post.

"Since we have much faster CPUs now, numerical calculations are done in Python which is much slower than Fortran. So numerical calculations basically take the same amount of time as they did 20 years ago."

I get the humor but it's also not true... if using numpy, you're essentially running C code where speed matters.

<comment><USER10> > if using numpy, you're essentially running C code where speed matters.

Two notes:

1- If using numpy _properly_

2- Various numpy modules use FORTRAN 77, so it's not always C code.

<comment><USER9> You're right. Still fast code though ?

<comment><USER10> Probably faster than C ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've had a habit throughout my career of printing out small chunks of code (several pages) that were algorithmically difficult or contained significant bugs. I'd take them to the park or coffee shop and just study them, pencil check them, or just think deeply about them. For me, this is a super-power, compared to flipping around on our massive monitors.

The more recent grads I work with mock me for this. Things have indeed changed.

<comment><USER2> > just think deeply about them.

This is one of the reasons I am making a career transition this year. I don't have the time to think about good solutions, just cheap, quickly thrown together ones. It's exhausting and doesn't feel like good work. Deep thinking is an under appreciated opportunity in our culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The biggest difference is probably package managers. It was common for a codebase to be 100% written in-house. Often fundamental algorithms were written per-project. I never minded the detail work, but the way we have it now is much more productive. Standard libraries give you so much to start with and package managers and github libraries make up even more. The most important ability now is critical decision making at a higher level.

The other thing I really appreciate is garbage collection and static typing with type inference. We get this with good edit-compile-run ergonomics. We even have good interoperability of languages in run- or compile-time VMs. What we have today I didn't even dream of back in the day.

</comment><comment><USER13> stackoverflow.com makes a big difference.

<comment><USER14> Yes. Make the difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > 3 billion devices run Java. That number hasn't changed in the last 10 years > though.

He hasn't heard of Android apparently.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think when you install Java in windows it says that java runs on 3 billion devices and has been saying so for the past 10 years or so</comment></comment>


Ted Kaczynski (UNABOMB) was a genius - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6478930533844873216 <comment><USER2> For more on Kaczynski's evolution, see [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard- and-the-making-of-the-unabomber/378239/)

I've been curious how participation in Murray's experiment influenced other Harvard grads -- Americans with influence -- in the 1960's and '70's.</comment>


Some are more equal than others - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/11/daily-chart-2?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/somearemoreequalthanothers <comment><USER2> To argue that this is purely meritocratic requires you to argue that some individuals are thousands to tens to even hundreds of thousands of times more productive, intelligent, or hard-working than everyone else.

While differences do exist, framing the question that way makes it obvious that the _very highest_ levels of the income ladder are largely a result of network effects and leverage rather than productive activity.

Another way of framing the question: was Mark Zuckerberg's contribution to computer networking more than a million times more valuable than that of Tim Berners-Lee?

I'm starting to see the rise of "market fundamentalism" over the past 35-ish years as part of the general trend toward the naturalistic fallacy over the same time period. If it's "natural," it's by definition good. So if the "natural" free market concentrates >50% of all wealth in <0.1% of hands, well dag nabbit that's what nature obviously intended and who are you to argue with nature? Wealth redistribution or other mitigating strategies are sort of like vaccination and GMO foods-- tampering with nature and "playing God."

<comment><USER3> _Another way of framing the question: was Mark Zuckerberg 's contribution to computer networking more than a million times more valuable than that of Tim Berners-Lee?_

A spurious argument - Zuckerberg's money isn't from computer networking. Berner-Lee is essentially the inventor of the wheel while Zuckerberg created a Ferrari. So a better question would be "Has Zuckerberg made a significant contribution to ad sales and market intelligence data gathering?", in which case the answer would be an obvious yes.

Obviously that leads on to a question about whether the inventor of an enabling technology such as the web should be significantly remunerated for their work, which society would apparently answer with a resounding no.

<comment><USER2> This creates a problem though:

If you are a highly intelligent and motivated person, you have many choices about what to do. This suggests that doing the kind of basic R&D work that might lead to the invention of the WWW is a sucker's game. You shouldn't invent wheels. Instead you should invent Ferrari's using other peoples' wheels.

This over time will lead to brain drain from the realms of basic research and invention. I'd posit this as a possible explanation for the decline of fundamental innovation since roughly 1970, which coincidentally is the era when the groundwork for this shift in wealth distribution really got laid with the emergence of the "new left" and the "new right." (What I call the reactionary left and the reactionary right -- note that in both cases the naturalistic fallacy is a cornerstone of these belief systems.)

I'd count myself among the drained. I decided not to do a Ph.D partly because I didn't want to take a vow of poverty to do work to make other people rich.

Free markets reward things exponentially as they near the point of consumption. The person who puts the icing on the cake is rewarded exponentially more than the person who baked it, who in turn is rewarded exponentially more than the person who made the flour, and so on. The folks rewarded exponentially most of all are the financiers who simply move money around to fund these activities.

This seems unfair in virtually every case, but it's incredibly unfair in the realm of ideas, invention, science, and technology. In ordinary manual labor the difficulty of each step tends to be similar, while in intellectual realms the fundamental steps of invention and discovery are often exponentially _harder_ than the ones closer to the end of the line. So for intellectual work, the relationship between difficulty and importance and compensation is _really_ pathologically skewed.

<comment><USER4> > Free markets reward things exponentially as they near the point of > consumption.

Right. That explains why there's so much more money in gas stations than oil wells. And why HP is so much bigger than Intel.

<comment><USER5> Gas stations are consumers of the products of oil refineries and oil wells. HP is a consumer of Intel's chips.

Free markets reward business to business sales very well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The full article is here: [http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/21631129...](http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/21631129-it-001-who-are-really-getting-ahead-america-forget-1)

The 16,000 families comprising the richest 0.01%, or "1% of the 1%," now control 11.2% of total wealth—that's over half the wealth of the rest of the 1%.

<comment><USER7> I never know what to make of numbers like those, because the articles that present them never offer anything to tell me what a good wealth distribution would be. With nothing to compare to, I have no idea if those numbers are showing something is wrong, or showing that things are fine.

In any group (the whole population, or any subgroup such as the top 1%) where the are wealth differences within the group, then it is mathematically inevitable that the top X% of the group will have more than X% of the group's wealth.

If there is an individual who has more wealth than any other individual, then it is also mathematically necessary that wealth_of_top(X)/X increases as X decreases.

<comment><USER8> This. Also, it is not the top that matters, rather the quality of life of the bottom percentiles. We need to raise those up, and as long as we can do that, the top doesn't really matter.

<comment><USER9> True, but I think if we look around, we can find some fairly compelling evidence that we're not doing very well at raising the quality of life of the bottom percentiles...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The biggest lie told today is that we have less wealth in the world and we can't afford things like social security and welfare. There is more wealth now than there has ever been. Modern productivity is insanely high.

<comment><USER4> > There is more wealth now than there has ever been.

And the role is government is bigger than ever. Back in the day if there was an earthquake, people didn't storm Congress asking what they would do about the earthquake problem.

More significantly, people attributed bad health to nature, not bad insurance policies.

Also, demographic have changed a lot. Now we have:

* fewer productive adults per household due to demographic trends (single parenthood, divorce, etc.)

* fewer children per household that grow up and contribute payroll taxes

* fewer people dying at their prime (and contributing to pensions, etc. without drawing anything)

* higher standards of living (bigger houses, multiple TVs, grandma lives across instead of upstairs, obesity outweighs starvation as a problem, etc.)

<comment><USER11> Funny how you didn't address the increase in productivity bullet point. Guess it didn't fit your worldview/agenda.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I recommend this NPR podcast, you'd be surprised by the results.

"INCOME INEQUALITY IMPAIRS THE AMERICAN DREAM OF UPWARD MOBILITY"

[http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past- debates/item/1...](http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past- debates/item/1159-income-inequality-impairs-the-american-dream)

</comment><comment><USER13> The worst implication I see find (reading between the lines and via the graphs) is that our middle class consists of only 9.9% of the population. By subtraction, the middle class holds around 56% of the country's assets.

So our middle class is indeed shrinking but also moving towards being upper class.

<comment><USER2> What's _left_ of the middle class is sort of becoming a "lower rich" class. While this is somewhat anecdotal, what I see emerging is a kind of banded stratification: a tiny "superclass" holding a majority (>50%) of all wealth, a "lower rich" class, a very small working middle, a vast working poor, and a vast class of unemployable welfare recipients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd be very interested to see the impact of baby boomers on the distribution of wealth.

Remember: (1) wealth tends to be correlated with age and (2) baby boomers make up a much larger percentage of the population (i.e. age distribution is not equal).

If you have a large bolus of folks moving through their careers, the graph follows the typical wealth trajectory. Right now, baby boomers are at or near the peak of their wealth.

<comment><USER15> If you're interested in this subject, ZeroHedge has been compiling some very useful data regarding employment. Here's a link to two graphs that show the "age skew" at play in hiring for the past several years:

[http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/im...](http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2014/09/Workers%20aged%2055%20and%20over.jpg)

[http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/im...](http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2014/09/55%20older%20younger_0.jpg)

Full article:

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-03/hiring- grandparents...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-10-03/hiring-grandparents- only-230k-september-were-added-55-69-age-group-10k-lost-prime-25)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The webpage for the paper (!) has more information: [http://gabriel- zucman.eu/uswealth/](http://gabriel-zucman.eu/uswealth/)

There's also a slide deck for a talk on the paper: [http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/SaezZucman14slides.pdf](http://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/SaezZucman14slides.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER17> I find it hard to take this sort of analysis seriously, when the authors admit that they don't even understand the order of magnitude of the error bars on the data.

Not to mention that the regulatory landscape has changed over time, and since that directly influences several classes of errors (from waiters under- reporting tips to "the 1%" hiding money in now-illegal tax shelters) estimating historical trends is an exercise in futility.

And we effectively have no way to benchmark how well these different studies are doing at measuring the underlying phenomena that they're trying to measure, this is really just making up numbers and calling it "wealth distribution".

<comment><USER18> Welcome to problems with social science!

>this is really just making up numbers and calling it "wealth distribution".

We can go deeper. Almost everything you hear about the "economy" is based on a mathematical model that makes a variety of assumptions. What is income? What is wealth? Who are the people participating? How does information get transmitted? What is a "good" outcome and what is a "bad" outcome?

Further, "waiters undereporting tips" is a tiny problem next to "wealth is somewhat unmeasurable since we don't survey it or tax it".

The best we can do is measure what we can and try to make reasonable inferences. But it's _not_ an exercise in making up numbers. It's an exercise in interpreting what the numbers we have are saying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It is interesting that OP uses a line meant to denigrate socialism to critique capitalism. I think that the graph is misleading - the average poor person today has 3 wide screen TVs, an Xbox, a smart phone and air conditioning. Poor people in 1916 would sometimes starve during the winters. To compare 1916 to 2014 as if they are equal highs in inequality is meaningless: Overall, everybody is much, much better off.

<comment><USER20> You've clearly never spent any time in a real poor neighborhood.

Or, more likely - you consider the lower middle class "poor" by your inflated Silicon Valley standards.

Reminder: avg. US HOUSEHOLD income is 52K/year.

<comment><USER21> 68% of US Households with income under $50,000 have at least 1 HDTV.

[http://www.leichtmanresearch.com/press/030714release.html](http://www.leichtmanresearch.com/press/030714release.html)

<comment><USER22> All TVs are "HDTVs." That 68% will be near 100% (of TV users) once more TVs die in the next few years.

If I go onto Amazon right now, filter sellers by Amazon.com, sort by low to high, and look at the cheapest two TVs: Samsung UN24H4000 720p: $147.75 and LG 22LB4510 1080p: $159. Both "HD."

So, using HDTVs as a metric of poverty is dumb. They're the only game in town.

<comment><USER21> Right. So things which were once luxuries are now common and cheap.

Which was the point.

<comment><USER22> Sounds like a nice way to dismiss all Western poverty ever. Have running water and electricity? Clearly not poor...

Just pick anything that 90%+ of the population have: internet, electricity, gas, water, a car, heating, a telephone line, etc and then declare it your "line" for poverty.

<comment><USER21> That's not the point under discussion.

<comment><USER22> What exactly is the "point under discussion" then? Because it sounds pretty close to that if that isn't it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Deploy on Fridays, or Don't - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/deploy-on-fridays-or-dont-qg2y32jk <comment><AUTHOR> Enlightened take on why having a cultural norm against friday afternoon deploys doesn't make you a bad person.</comment>


Make your data accessible or you're fired - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@alchen1/make-your-data-accessible-or-youre-fired-c12c64c877f9 <comment><USER2> Web scraping is such an underappreciated art. Unfortunately, it's harder and harder to do little hobby projects since many sites will quickly ban you.

I was working on a music project, trying to use Rate Your Music as the data source. Got banned before even hitting 50 requests (less than one a minute). I should have checked their TOS first ...

<comment><USER3> Some secrets:

\- use a VPS (throw away IP) \- rate limit yourself \- cache all the things</comment></comment>


Black holes ruled out as universe's missing dark matter - <AUTHOR> http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/10/02/black-holes-ruled-out-as-universes-missing-dark-matter/ <comment><USER2> This spawned a question for me that seems like it must be nonsensical but I don't know the answer.

Why did the Big Bang not just produce a Big Hole? IOW, if all the current mass of the universe was in a small volume wouldn't it have promptly created a black hole?

I'm assuming the answer has something to do with mass not actually existing in its current form until the universe expanded enough. However I don't have any mental framework to understand why that would be true. If someone reading this knows the answer and can point me at it, I'd be grateful. TIA!

<comment><USER3> I'm absolutely not an expert, but I believe there wasn't any mass at first; it was all energy. It had to slow down to become mass, at which point it was spread out enough. Or something along those lines.

Another possibility is that black holes are places where lots of mass accumulates in the same place in space, while the big bang was a rapid expansion of space itself. Even if there was enough mass in one spot to be what we'd consider a black hole, the space it occupied expanded, dragged the mass along with it, and ripped the black hole apart.

<comment><USER4> "Mass" is just another name for "rest-energy".

A single photon cannot have mass because it has zero energy in the reference frame where it is at rest (zero net momentum). But a pair of non-parallel photons can have rest-mass, and indeed the mass of the photons inside a star is considerable, for example.

<comment><USER5> _> "Mass" is just another name for "rest-energy"._

Not if you're talking about what the source of gravity (spacetime curvature) is. Massless particles still have energy and still cause spacetime curvature.

<comment><USER4> The "source" of gravity is the stress-energy tensor. "Mass" (rest-energy) is a simplification that is useful for approximations and conceptualizations.

<comment><USER5> _> "Mass" (rest-energy) is a simplification that is useful for approximations and conceptualizations._

Yes, but not in a context where radiation is present, since radiation can have energy but has no rest mass (rest energy).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One question I have: is it not possible that the big bang occurred an infinite time ago? If the expansion of the universe is accelerating with time, does it not indicate that, if we reverse the time, the deceleration is asymptotic?

In that case the big bang is compatible with a universe that has always existed and did not have a beginning

<comment><USER7> Even a car constantly accelerating for a long time was still at t0.

<comment><USER8> A big bang event could explain the reason why the universe expanded in the first place, but it does not explain the accelerating expansion of the universe currently, forgive me for my ignorance if any, but in physics I was taught that any object which moves or is in constant motion was acted upon by a force, and so if the big bang created an expansion it will be a constant expansion and not an accelerating expansion as is obtained presently, as there is a requirement for a kind of force to cause an accelerating expansion which is not explained by a singular big bang but by a continuous big bang, which could as well be infinite in nature.

<comment><USER7> Again IANAP (and I'm sure any actual physicist will be horrified by my explanation), but the big bang is not an explosion that a time 0 set some mass in motion. But you are, in a way, right: the big bang is not over, is literally still happening right now. General relativity still predict that the process started a finite amount of time ago; wether the process will continue indefinitely or not is still an open question.

The expansion is an expected behaviour of space time, and is predicted by general relativity given a certain parametrization of the density of matter an energy of the universe. To explain the acceleration, though, a large energy parameter is required, which has not been yet identified with any known process, although many theories exhist; as placeholder the parameter is known as dark energy. It is of course possible, but generally considered unlikely, that general relativity is incomplete and another theory could explain the acceleration without dark energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Isn't "dark matter" just a way to account for an unexplained behavior? It bothers me that its existence is treated as a given, when it could be a case of mistaken assumptions. If calculations say the universe is acting as if it contained much more mass than we observe, we should also consider the possibility that our method of calculation may be flawed.

I'm not claiming dark matter doesn't exist, only that I fear the human tendency to run with a hypothesis too eagerly and discard alternate options.

Similar to how everyone seems to speak as if Hawking radiation is a given fact, when it is thus far completely unproven and nothing more than a suggested idea.

<comment><USER10> Yes, Dark Matter is a statement about the premise that something appears to be operating gravitationally while have no (or perhaps so little that we don't recognize it) interaction with other matter; however, it is not without reason.

The primary focus on matter as the candidate is that if you don't believe that some form of matter is responsible, you begin having to explain how a lot of our Laws are incorrect. Dark Matter is really a problem that we have a notion how our Laws should work at the cosmic scale, yet they don't. And yet, we don't see any obvious reason why they shouldn't give how thoroughly we've tests these Laws.

For instance, if you say that our equations for gravity is off, why is it completely consistent for everything in our solar system? Why is consistent down to the most precise test for gravitational frame pulling? It seems to be only different when you talk about very large masses creating gravity on objects tugged at very long distances. Why does it just cut over to different behavior?

If you say that gravity is emergent, then how do you explain the standard model's place for the graviton? Granted, it's not testable (gravity is so weak it's beyond direct testing), but it seems to be fit right in to a spin-2 tensor where we would expect a gravity-like particle to be. Why would you expect that to not be true?

That said, Dark Matter matter candidates are getting weeded out pretty quickly, these days. No new types of particles are being discovered, and Dark Matter observatories are largely coming up empty. But, that's science: got an idea? Test it and let the results speak.

As an aside, I think one thing to remember is: just because science doesn't know the answer to something, it often knows what can't be the right answer. Look into the theory's and their criticisms.

<comment><USER11> Is it possible that it's something other than gravity? A force we don't know about because of how weak it is but has an effect on a large scale?

I'm completely ignorant of the subject so I don't know how crazy that might sound.

<comment><USER10> No, that is a perfectly valid question. The answer is: science has no idea what gravity _is_. What we do know is:

The Newton/Einstein definition is that it is an effect by mass on space/time. Mass always travels in a straight line (unless acted on), but mass causes space/time to curve. So, what we see as gravitation attraction is a fake force. No different than being "pushed" into the back of your seat when a car accelerates. You are staying still, the car is moving forwards. The Newton/Einstein definition does not specify any mechanism. The description, however, is highly specific, and so far every test for the most subtle effects have been validated. Well, except for cosmic structures.

Quantum mechanics says that particles emit/receive interactions via the graviton carrier, and that it can be quantized and transmitted via waves. In the last few years, we have detected gravitational waves. It fits perfectly and exactly as we would expect over cosmic distances. Unfortunately, the amount of energy necessary to detect an actual graviton is beyond anything we can expect to be able to produce for the forceable future and likely will never have the resources. So that is out. Also, it makes no claim on how it can affect space/time.

So, just like we original argued over whether or not it was particles or waves, I think this paradox strongly suggests that we're just not looking at gravity correctly. I suspect that the real problem is "What is time?" Why do things experience different rates of time? It seems obvious to me that gravity, time, and entanglement are related. Gravity is very likely to be Dark Matter: a stand-in name until we can grasp the fundamentals.

<comment><USER12> > Unfortunately, the amount of energy necessary to detect an actual graviton > is beyond anything we can expect to be able to produce for the forceable > future and likely will never have the resources.

Sorry for the late reply. Why is that? What determines the amount of energy needed to detect a given particle?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One thing I do not understand: If a black hole in line-of-sight increases intensity, the intensity for other view points must decrease (the total number of emitted photons needs to stay constant). If black holes make up a substantial part of the dark matter, there should be (statistically) few in the line-of-sight and many more slightly off. Therefore I'd expect that this cancels out. Does anyone know how it is accounted for this?

</comment><comment><USER14> Sorry if this question is naive or ignorant or just doesn't make sense; but could this dark matter be influence from higher "spatial" dimensions that we can't see? I mean - doesn't string theory demand something like 10 dimensions in total?

</comment><comment><USER15> Since, we can only see "the observable universe", how do we know how much mass is beyond our view? If we don't know what is there, why do we think there is missing mass?

<comment><USER16> When we measure the amount of mass in a galaxy, we see that the galaxy's rotation is way faster than the amount of mass would indicate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Assuming this pans out, is there anything left but WIMPs?

<comment><USER18> AXIONS

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does this mean that black holes possibly might not even exist? Aren't there examples of them being directly observed?

<comment><USER2> We have observed their x-ray jets directly and have observed their creation (recently). Pretty sure they exist. :)

<comment><USER20> Let's change this a little bit.

We have observed specific phenomena but not that which created such phenomena.

As far as "Black Holes" as per theoretical descriptions are concerned, they cannot exist in a finite time universe as far as we (the observers) are concerned. The theoretical models used all have as a basic assumption that increasing gravity (whatever that may be) will cause a slow down in time as observed at distances away from such increase. As such, all phenomena involved in the creation of such entities will slow to a complete stop as far as we are concerned.

Hence, if the universe is of any finite duration, we will not have seen the creation of even 1 black hole of any kind. On the other hand, if the universe has existed eternally, it is still likely that these entities are still in the process of formation and not yet in existence.

I don't doubt we are seeing some interesting phenomena, but not the entities called "Black Holes". The argument for the creation involves changing perspective to some observer who is falling into or through the event horizon (choose which one of these you want, as there are apparently a couple of choices here in the theoretical models). Since we are not such observers, that perspective is actually irrelevant to us. What is relevant is what we observe in the universe at large.

The basic problems (irrespective of mathematical assumptions) with the processes of "Black Hole" generation relate to non-uniformity of compression, time dilation and other basic assumptions for the "Black Hole" models.

I find the reasoning used for the existence of "Black Holes" in our universe to be lacking in logical rigour and appears to have a lot of hand-waviness to it.

I am currently reading the documentation for the Metamath system and there are some quite enlightening comments in that about mathematics and those who study it. Especially as it relates to us who are not mathematicians as our career. One of these relates to the amount of "faith" we have to exhibit when trusting that specific "proofs" are in point of fact true. Even mathematicians who are not in that specific speciality do not have the necessary background to verify any proof outside of their own mathematical area.

Mathematics is a profoundly useful tool but as we have seen in the past and we will see in the future, it has problems (like all areas).

<comment><USER4> We have observed matter falling into a black hole. We've watched "hot spots" in orbit of a black hole in the accretion disk shine their light at us as they orbited the black hole. We've watched as the orbit got tighter and tighter and the light was dimmed by gravitational red shifting, then we've watched the light blink out and disappear as the blob of gas fell below the event horizon.

The evidence for the existence of black holes is incredibly strong at the moment. In fact in some ways it's stronger than the evidence for the existence of atoms about a century ago. Nobody except cranks or extreme contrarians seriously disputes the theory these days.

<comment><USER20> No. Incorrect. Wildly inaccurate.

We have made certain observations that are assumed to be the result of matter falling into a "Black Hole". We do not have any observations that show us this as a fact. Read the observational material very carefully.

Go back over the last few decades and see how many times it is declared "we have seen x for the first time", where x is the is the same entity each time, in this particlualr case "Black Holes".

Men (women, children) want to believe that they have a certain handle on the truth and reality. What is very unpleasant to most is not having that certainty. This applies to all people across the board and even more so to those whose expertise is dependent on their being right. Many scientists are in this category.

It is often difficult to sit in the place of recognising that we just don't know. We have some ideas which, on the evidence, give a handle to investigate further, but we should understand that our understanding can be turned on its head.

The evidence for the existence of something is there, yes. But, is it a "Black Hole" of the theory presented, hmmm, that is unknown and for the time being, unknowable. As we cannot get out there and actually do the appropriate experiments to test this. We can only do remote observations and these can be easily misinterpreted.

>>Nobody except cranks or extreme contrarians seriously disputes the theory these days.

The problem here with this view is that it has been "cranks" and "extreme contrarians" who have brought about the biggest changes in science. There are Nobel Prize winners amongst them. All views about the nature of our universe should have those who dispute it. This should spur on our investigations into the nature of the universe. If we are unable to handle someone disputing our models and theories of the universe, then what are we doing? We are not serious about expanding our knowledge, we are serious about our reputations and being right.

The biggest problem for science today is that people don't trust it because it keeps getting things wrong, yet all the while saying that it is the only source of truth.

Science is one of a group of tools we can and should use to investigate the universe around. It has its limitations as does all the other tools we have and we need to recognise that though this tool is helpful in understanding, it is not the tool that gives us the truth.

<comment><USER21> You had like, a _slim_ case before GW150914. Now you just have to either accept that black holes (in the sense of the external metric predicted by GR) do exist, or go make friends with the climate change deniers.

The science discussion about the existence is _settled_ , as evidenced by your complete lack of any concrete objection to the interpretations. (Just saying "measuring is ambiguous, maybe we didn't understand it properly" like it is an objection is typical cranking)

<comment><USER20> You really need to read the information provided about GW150914. There is no direct observation of the event, irrespective of what LIGO might say about the matter, LIGO is an indirect methodology.

I have no doubt that something was observed, but what that was will take far more research and repeated events that can be backed up by other observational means before we have any real evidence before us.

The science is only settled for those who want certainty in their models and theories. For practical uses, one can believe that electrons exist and act in particular ways and we build "technology" based on those "beliefs". Yet, we still do not have any real handle on what these particular entities are.

I used to believe in "black holes" and other assorted entities. I had no problems with these things, until I started noticing the discrepancies. It made me take a longer look and I realised that we know far less than we think and we understand far less than we think we do.

I live country that experiences climate change, yet, what I find interesting is that if you have questions about whether or not it is anthropogenic, you are immediately classified as a denier. The same goes for many different areas in science. If you don't accept the dogma you have to be a "crank".

What science needs is a higher level of scepticism than what it currently has.

Too many of the "settled" things are not "settled" at all. We have barely scratched the surface of the universe around us and the major failing we have is this desire to be certain. There are huge amounts of experimental observations that are showing that we really have no clue and an enormous number of new models are being developed as the years go by.

<comment><USER21> Look, to do science you have to believe the world outside your head can be observed; and if you are ready to trust the rickety and convoluted stack that encodes pulses from a keyboard into photons from a screen to accurately convey information, then gravity waves have been observed and match predictions for black holes _exactly_.

If you want to stick to reading Gorgias of Leontini that is fine, but please don't bother the rest of us that do accept the world outside as real.

<comment><USER20> You miss the point of what I am saying. Observations are being made, but is the given explanation actually meaningful? The universe is real. This does not mean that our explanations or interpretations are "truth". The problem I have with the current mindset is that it trends to treating others with a different viewpoint, model or theory as being unworthy of consideration, to be treated as pariahs, imbeciles, crackpots, heretics, to be hunted down and assassinated.

We should be accepting that our models and theories are both incomplete and wrong, irrespective of how useful they are. Every model and theory has its points of failure. That should be expected and is not a problem. Starting from that basis, we keep investigating to get better models or theories that help us gain a better insight into the universe around us. If that means giving up one model for something completely else, then what's the problem. Our universe is beautiful, complex, a place of incredible wonder that we can have an exciting time exploring and discovery.

There is a vast difference between the reality of the universe and what our models and theories are. The first is the territory, the second is only a map and maps can be notoriously faulty.

In regards to your reference to Gorgias of Leontini, I had to look that up. I chuckled. Is it possible that some of the "superstars" of science today are modern students of him?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can't wait for the n-gate synopsis of this one.

Get back to social mining you minions, you.

</comment><comment><USER23> Dark matter is a supersolid that fills 'empty' space, strongly interacts with ordinary matter and is displaced by ordinary matter. What is referred to geometrically as curved spacetime physically exists in nature as the state of displacement of the supersolid dark matter. The state of displacement of the supersolid dark matter is gravity.

The supersolid dark matter displaced by a galaxy pushes back, causing the stars in the outer arms of the galaxy to orbit the galactic center at the rate in which they do.

Displaced supersolid dark matter is curved spacetime.

<comment><USER24> what are you talking about dude, could you point to something on the arxiv?

<comment><USER23> Another way to think of this is that spacetime has mass. Spacetime and dark matter are both referring to the same 'stuff'. The stuff is a supersolid that is displaced by ordinary matter.

The Earth displaces the 'stuff'. The displaced 'stuff' pushes back. The displaced 'stuff' pushing back is gravity.

Curved spacetime = Geometrical representation of gravity.

Displaced supersolid dark matter = Physical representation of gravity.</comment></comment></comment>


Reddit User Captured a Tornado on Our Sun from His Backyard - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comments/earmsv/i_captured_a_tornado_on_the_sun_from_my_backyard/ <comment><USER2> The first comment was unsubstantial and I looked for a [-] to hide it and children.... no such thing was available. Really makes me happy that hacker news has kept its simple and functional interface as a priority.

<comment><USER3> [https://imgur.com/a/jvEzT7l](https://imgur.com/a/jvEzT7l)

<comment><USER2> haha! Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


AOL's Master Plan - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/the-aol-way?slop=1

<comment><USER2> There was a fascinating article in the New Yorker from a few weeks back on AOL and their strategy over the past few years. As someone who hasn't actually visited aol.com in 10 years or so, it was pretty interesting. I didn't submit it because you have to subscribe to the New Yorker, but in case there are any New Yorker reading HNers who missed it:

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_auletta)</comment>


The Breakfast Manifesto: The New Science of the Loneliest Meal - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/restaurants/features/breakfast/47396/

<comment><USER2> Voted up not because of the interesting content, but because of the interesting subject. I find it very hard to settle on healthy food for breakfast. Cereals and grains should be it, but somehow my feeling has always been that they don't agree with me very well. By now I also try to avoid dairy products, which makes "cereals" even less appealing.

So I am curious what everybody is eating?

<comment><AUTHOR> Answering that question is _exactly_ where I found the article interesting, especially with regard to the glycemic index and cognitive functioning. It's one reason I've almost entirely cut juice and sugar from my morning intake because it nicely explains the mid-morning crash. Even lightly processed cereals are not very good for you. It seems to be much better (physically and mentally) to get complex carbs (look for more fiber and less sugar) with fresh fruit (for fiber and sweetness) and perhaps a bit of protein/fat (nuts are really, really good). But all that's much easier said when full than hungry!

My wife and I have been trying (and failing) to push our diets closer to Michael Pollan's latest mantra:

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

<http://www.michaelpollan.com/indefense.php>

Magazine treatment here: [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t....](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?pagewanted=all)

<comment><USER2> Well I thought the glycemic index was a trend two years ago, but maybe it is still going strong, I am not sure ;-)

I will take a second look at the "in defense for food" book. Have you read "The China Study", and do the books agree?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, can't say I've read "The China Study". Sounds interesting though. Thanks.

The glycemic index, to me, simply means how our bodies respond to foods based on the time in which the nutrients are metabolized. I'm very interested in how that process corresponds to mental functioning. and unfortunately there hasn't been enough work done in that area. The work I had heard of is the referenced the oatmeal/cap'n crunch study.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Breakfast is by far my favorite meal of the day. I always wake up extra hungry and can't wait to eat something. I usually eat toast with peanut butter and honey or jam, a bit of fruit, and whatever else looks tasty. I always have a hard time understanding how people don't eat breakfast because I wake up sooooo hungry. I'm totally worthless if I don't eat breakfast.

</comment><comment><USER4> I swear by the Starbucks Ham and Cheese breakfast sandwitch. They are really good, lots of protien, some fiber, little fat for 300some calories.

After a lot of trying out, that is the food that gives me energy keeps me less hungry until lunch.

</comment><comment><USER5> Was anyone else disturbed by the phrase "nutritional science"?

Also, an uninteresting story. Maybe if pg was mentioned having breakfast...

<comment><USER6> You can always start an Ask PG thread about what he had for breakfast :-P Better yet, a poll asking us to guess what he had!</comment></comment>