The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/files/wp2017-25.pdf <comment><USER2> Take a quick look at a graph of population growth from 1870-2015. It has an incredibly steep curve. Now think about how that graph will look from 2015-2100. Likely, it will be drastically flatter.

Wouldn't this have a huge effect on real estate -- indeed, isn't that population graph the primary driver of what happens in the real estate market?

I'm not sure the last century provides a meaningful guide here.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it will have a huge effect on real estate, but probably not the way you think it will. Real estate prices in desirable urban areas will continue to grow at the same, or higher pace. If you look at urban zip codes in desirable economic areas, they were barely affected by the 2008 downturn, and by 2010 the prices were recovered.

Today, those prices are much higher than they were in 2007.

Land supply is an almost straight line with a slight growth, probably something on the order of y = 1.2x, mostly due to innovations in transport speed, cars & metro. So unless we get maglev metro that travels at 200mph, RE prices will continue to reach new highs.

<comment><USER4> My bet is driverless cars, whenever they arrive, will actually increase the value of rural/small town land that's ~1 hour from a city center.

Hypothesis is many people live close to the cities because they hate commuting. But if commuting means work on a laptop or watch a movie, then the commute time is less significant. It's the near ring suburbs that will take the biggest hit. Small towns outside the suburbs will increase.

<comment><USER5> I suspect that commuting traffic will increase to eliminate this advantage. Already in major metros, long commutes suffer low speeds due to congestion during rush hour periods. Without a commensurately vast increase in infrastructure investment, I do not foresee a significant change in commute experiences from self-driving cars.

I predict that most people would not elect to live 2 hours away from offices despite being able to have access to entertainment and work while commuting.

The evidence is already here: various tech companies run shuttles to far-flung areas (Google has shuttle service from Stockton to Mountain View), yet employees aren't moving to these lower-cost areas in large numbers.

Workers with families will have upper bounds to how long a commute they'll endure. Their families are more important to them than being able to have entertainment, and meeting times limit the amount of time that can be used for work done while commuting. At that point, it's approaching remote work, which is a promising idea, but isn't a solution for long commutes by itself.

I see self-driving cars changing last-mile and replacing hub-and-spoke commutes as a replacement to taxi services and short-distance shuttles.

<comment><USER6> > I suspect that commuting traffic will increase to eliminate this advantage.

I think maybe in the short term, but in the long term I can imagine self driving traffic moving much faster than regular traffic. Cars all accelerating at the same time at lights, Uber pool in vans becoming super cheap. Roads could dynamically add and remove lanes in a direction without needing infrastructure, since all the cars will just "know" which lanes are available. Personal cars (hopefully rarer) can drive themselves home rather than take up parking space in cities.

<comment><USER7> The main advantage is the self-driving car could be an extension to your office. For instance if I have an 8 hour day with 4 hours of face-to-face meetings, then it doesn't particularly matter if the other 4 hours are spent commuting because I can work the whole time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Highlights:

> 1\. _In terms of total returns, residential real estate and equities have > shown very similar and high real total gains, on average about 7% per year._ > ... _The observation that housing returns are similar to equity returns, yet > considerably less volatile, is puzzling._

> 2\. _We find that the real safe asset return has been very volatile over the > long-run, more so than one might expect, and oftentimes even more volatile > than real risky returns._

> 3\. _...our data uncover substantial swings in the risk premium at lower > frequencies that sometimes endured for decades, and which far exceed the > amplitudes of business-cycle swings._

> 4\. _Comparing returns to growth, or "r minus g" in Piketty's notation, we > uncover a striking finding. Even calculated from more granular asset price > returns data, the same fact reported in Piketty (2014) holds true for more > countries and more years, and more dramatically: namely "r >> g." > ...globally, and across most countries, the weighted rate of return on > capital was twice as high as the growth rate in the past 150 years._

<comment><USER9> Some more highlights:

> In terms of total returns, residential real estate and equities have shown > very similar and high real total gains, on average about 7% per year.

> The data summary in Table 3 and Figure 2 show that residential real estate, > not equity, has been the best long-run investment over the course of modern > history.

> Although returns on housing and equities are similar, the volatility of > housing returns is substantially lower, as Table 3 shows. Returns on the two > asset classes are in the same ballpark— around 7%—but the standard deviation > of housing returns is substantially smaller than that of equities (10% for > housing versus 22% for equities).

> Predictably, with thinner tails, the compounded return (using the geometric > average) is vastly better for housing than for equities—6.6% for housing > versus 4.6% for equities. This finding appears to contradict one of the > basic assumptions of modern valuation models: higher risks should come with > higher rewards.

Seems the way the real estate market works has caused a big drain both on economic growth (as investments have gone into real estate rather than more productive products), and on economic equality.

So a Georgist land value tax does seem like a pretty good idea.

<comment><USER10> Real estate returns have been juiced by government policies for decades. The interest deduction, government backing of mortgages, and implicit guarantees of mortgage backed securities. Aka the cost of buying a house to the consumer is lower than it should be on a risk adjusted basis.

<comment><USER11> The cost to the consumer of buying a house is probably higher than it would be without these incentives, actually, because it ends up causing more money to spill into real estate.

It's the same with college costs: every additional dollar of federally subsidized loans made available to the public adds a dollar to the cost of college, almost necessarily so.

<comment><USER12> You've mixed up two things here I think.

Returns vs Cost of buying a house.

The point is that the government subsidies make the profits on buying real estate high, which leads to high prices.

So both are true: "high cost of buying a house" "high returns on real estate"

Obviously they can't be true forever, the upper limit I guess is the ability of the lower classes to rebel divided by their tolerance of being priced out of their own land.

<comment><USER13> The grandparent was describing the long-term vs short-term effect of broad subsidies.

The short-term effect of a subsidy is a reduced cost to the consumer.

If subsidies are generally and persistently available, this reduced perceived cost increases demand, causing increased prices. The ratio of price increase to amount of subsidy (and thus whether the consumer or producer benefits from the subsidy) will depend breadth of the subsidy and on elasticity curves of supply and demand.

Then there's the increased demand because the subsidy increases ROI. further increasing prices of the fixed input (land/existing housing) to the good (living space).

<comment><USER11> Thank you. That is roughly what I meant to convey.

Mind you, because these subsidies are never really temporary, I suspect the immediate effect on prices is always to raise them. And perhaps even temporary subsidies cause price rises just by increasing demand, though the price rises might only be temporary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> IPFS mirror:

[https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmZ1y9U9KRuGBVUisc1YbXrjp8tDXGe...](https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmZ1y9U9KRuGBVUisc1YbXrjp8tDXGe8Ca2URfXBKvZqrD)

</comment><comment><USER15> I suspect that the issues with safe vs risky assets are a result of how screwed up the definition of economic risk is:

* Risk is defined by relatively short term visible price fluctuations, with "unusual" events removed from the model as "uncertainty".

* The risk model seems to use a Gaussian distribution, which doesn't fit the data particularly well.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wasn't able to download the PDF but I read the summary article [http://voxeu.org/article/rate-return- everything](http://voxeu.org/article/rate-return-everything)

In the paper, do they attempt to take into account the costs of real estate investment over holding stocks when calculating total returns? Things like property taxes, maintenance, stamp duties, realtor fees, legal costs dealing with problem tenants, etc.? If not I wonder if those explain some of the mystery around real estate returns relative to stocks?

<comment><USER17> Not to mention that real estate needs constant investment to keep it in working order and up to code. This is not the case with equities.

<comment><USER18> They use net returns (after operating costs etc., p.31), and provide an argument why leverage doesn't make a large difference (p. 40).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The PDF appears to be 2.9 MB and is taking a long time to download, possibly due to the source being "hugged" to death?

This appears to be an abstract, based on title: [https://www.nber.org/papers/w24112](https://www.nber.org/papers/w24112)

 _This paper answers fundamental questions that have preoccupied modern economic thought since the 18th century. What is the aggregate real rate of return in the economy? Is it higher than the growth rate of the economy and, if so, by how much? Is there a tendency for returns to fall in the long-run? Which particular assets have the highest long-run returns? We answer these questions on the basis of a new and comprehensive dataset for all major asset classes, including—for the first time—total returns to the largest, but oft ignored, component of household wealth, housing. The annual data on total returns for equity, housing, bonds, and bills cover 16 advanced economies from 1870 to 2015, and our new evidence reveals many new insights and puzzles._

<comment><USER20> There's a recent column by the same authors that's basically the executive summary: [http://voxeu.org/article/rate-return- everything](http://voxeu.org/article/rate-return-everything)

<comment><USER21> Nice. The right side of graph 4, with the massive drop of r-g during WW1 and WW2, bolsters the argument made I believe by Branko Milanovic eg in _Global Inequality_ , namely that war, by destroying fortunes, works to reduce inequality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if there is a study of real estate investment returns in relation to demographics trends. For example, does poor demographical outlook (low births for instance) correlate with lower real estate ROIs later ?

</comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if the extreme r - g divergence is helped by another factor: tax havens and hidden assets. GDP only includes things that can be counted and taxed; there have long been attempts to allow for the grey or black economy in GDP, but fundamentally it's dark matter that the owners are trying to hide.

But on the other end the assets are visible; we can count that there are X trillion dollars in bonds and Y trillion dollars in housing. We just can't work out who owns them because the trail goes dead in blind trusts in tax havens somewhere.

(There's a good paper on this that I can't find right now)

<comment><USER24> > GDP only includes things that can be counted and taxed

Unlike gross output, GDP only includes final outputs. All B2B activity is excluded by GDP, but capital is still involved. I wonder how things look if you look at gross output instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I was just thinking about this because Sears is in the process of closing something like 100 more stores. They were a behemoth of their time and now are barely staying a lot.

So many years of managerial incompetence and greed and market forces have completely eroded their dominance. I say eroded because they're not completely gone yet, and it's taken so long for them to glide down to this point.

It's just fascinating that company so large because reduced to so little over such a long span of time.

</comment><comment><USER26> original link is dead (which could be the result of its sudden popularity on HN -- their entire server is quite slow for other content as well)...

archive.org has a mirror copy of this document,

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180105120132/https://www.frbsf...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180105120132/https://www.frbsf.org/economic- research/files/wp2017-25.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER27> After taking a basic Mathematical Finance course, you'll find that nothing does better than the Prime Rate in the long term, unless you get lucky, or unlucky.

<comment><USER27> I guess nobody here has taken that course?

<comment><USER28> I think you need to elaborate more on what exactly you're talking about.

Nothing does better than the prime rate? You mean in terms of interest rate? Isn't the definition of the prime rate the best you can get?

In the long term? What does that even mean here? Can I get lucky and do better than the prime rate, whose definition is the best interest rate you can get?

Saying this knowledge is basic Mathematical Finance is also very condescending. I haven't taken "that course" but I feel from your tone that you took a 101 college course which now guides your entire mode of economic thinking.

Elaborate on your statements.

<comment><USER27> 4th year Introduction to Mathematical Finance, but basically 101 in a sense.

Using a binomial model (essentially a random walk) and using 'the formulas' for portfolio calculation, you will find that in the 'long term' (in math, infinite, but 'a long time' in the real world') you will find that no investment portfolio will beat the Prime Rate, as this is what all returns are based off of.

It was just the results I saw from the course. I know one can get 'lucky' and beat the Rate, but overall, as a zero sum game, someone else has to lose and overall the group rate of return is calculated as...the Prime Rate.

Sorry for being condescending sounding; I thought this was common knowledege given it's taught in introductory finance.

<comment><USER29> The linked paper is empirical counterevidence to that theoretical model though.

Admittedly, we can always just say "we're not in the long run," I'm not sure how useful that is.

I'm not certain what model exactly you're talking about, but I think it also probably misses technological change as a real source of growth independent of any monetary musings.

<comment><USER27> Theory is an 'efficient' market model. Practice is not. Reminds me of the old joke:

An Efficient Market Theorist sees a $100 lying on the ground, and passes it by saying "If that existed, someone else would have picked it up by now!".

<comment><USER21> > An Efficient Market Theorist

Milton Friedman, in the apocryphal story. And back in my days it was $20 :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


IDS experts brawl, create confusion on where intrusion detection is headed. - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/64048

<comment><USER2> An article about 2 companies arguing who's better. I must have missed the part where they actually debate, or brawl, about the future of IDS. Seems the biggest technical thought put forth was, "your performance sucks". Maybe that means IDS is headed to a future where performance will suck less. Yay.

</comment><comment><USER3> Competition is a good thing. Snort has been the only IDS in the market (I'm aware of Bro) and now there is competition in Suricata. The problem I see is that Suricata folks confusing "improvement" and "innovation." IDS, IMHO, still need innovations.

<comment><USER4> Say what? What about Cisco's IDS engine, which isn't Snort, and was originally WheelGroup? What about Intrusion's? What about Fortinet's? What about Enterasys' (Dragon)?

Two things happened to "intrusion detection":

* The concept failed, and

* The technology got rolled up into middleboxes as part of "IPS" (IDS plus filters) and "UTM" (all-in-one boxes).

There has been a vibrant "market" of IDS engines for over a decade.</comment></comment>


Kids losing touch with natural world -- can't identify common animals...  - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/attenborough-alarmed-as-children-are-left-flummoxed-by-test-on-the-natural-world-882624.html

<comment><USER2> I couldn't identify many of those, and I'm very knowledgeable about the natural world. There's more to it than long-range identification. I'd tell that it was an Oak by the leaves. Who sees a Daddy-Long-Legs from beneath a glass panel? A normal view from above would make it obvious. And the newt they show is not even mature, it's practically a hatchling!

</comment><comment><USER3> And a shocking 75 percent misidentified a debtor's prison with an almshouse!

</comment><comment><USER4> Kids "losing touch" implies a TREND, something which requires multiple surveys over time, which there obviously weren't.

The only thing alarming about 54% of British kids knowing what a blue tit is: the fact that _I_ don't know what a blue tit is.

<comment><USER5> I had the same question at the end. The only trend I could see is my own anecdotal evidence of journalists' tendency to draw conclusions where there is insufficient data to back up their central argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's impressively stupid. BBC personality (who does TV Nature shows) comments on stupid poll published by BBC Wildlife Magazine in order to shame parents into making their kids watch those same TV nature shows, since the vast majority of them probably don't have too much access to nature. It's basically a large and deceiving ad.

I wonder if "Sarah Cassidy, Education Correspondent" feels unclean.

</comment><comment><USER7> I guess we're losing touch with nature because 97% of us don't have to touch it any longer to feed ourselves. Good thing if you ask me. I'd rather kids (and adults for that matter) knew a little bit about taxes, law or how to calculate compound interest of their debt.

There are things about natural systems that affect us and things that are interesting, but identifying and classifying plants outside of any context is not one of them.

</comment><comment><USER8> How is a 9 year old supposed to know the difference between a newt and a lizard? A lot of adults probably don't know it too. After googleing it, i found that daddy long-legs is actually 3 different species. if you show me pictures of them i couldn't name them, two looked like spiders, and one was like a mosquito or something. Maybe i was just not in touch with nature when i was a kid.

</comment><comment><USER9> We need some context here - which kids where?

</comment><comment><USER10> Funny, they don't show a time trend. So how are they "losing touch" with the natural world?

</comment><comment><USER11> Already covered by Monty Python years ago.

...The LARCH... ...The LARCH...

</comment><comment><USER12> why would you memorize what you can google on your iphone from anywhere? memorizing rarely-used facts is out of date.

besides, kids can now identify more species of lolcat than ever before.

<comment><USER13> You can't really google a bird to figure out that it's a magpie (yet), but one does wonder what the point of being able to identify it is. I'd hope that they're learning more concepts in science than rote memorization which is a debunked educational method.

<comment><USER14> There is a website that you can post photos of something and ask what it is though.. Sadly I can't remember the address!</comment></comment></comment>


Why Use WebRTC? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nojitter.com/post/240171566/why-use-webrtc <comment><USER2> For a very niche platform world: video remote interpreting solutions (interpreter on one end, Doctor or boss (or other English speaking individual) and a non English speaker (or signer) together, on the other side. WebRTC has been a disruptive technology, particularly in cases where E2E encryption for hipaa (or ferpa, potentially) purposes is mandatory. WebRTC is a game changer, and I can't wait it to continue to improve.</comment>


Google to Let Users Leave Comments on Search Results - <AUTHOR> https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-search-comments/279227/ <comment> tonic-music Just what the world needs... another way for Google to correlate everything you do online with your personal ID so they can show you more ads.

<comment><USER2> I was thinking just one more way to make having a small business profile online will become untenable, if simply anyone can comment on search results.

With local reviews it is expected at least that you are a customer or have a direct relationship with the business and in most jurisdictions there could be legal recourse for posting fake reviews.

This sounds like a free for all.</comment></comment>


London student reported to police: "Enchanted by anarchism and individualism" - <AUTHOR> http://the-libertarian.co.uk/london-student-reported-to-police-enchanted-by-anarchism-and-individualism/ <comment><USER2> This sort of thing is alive and well in US schools, too. The official policy of the Seattle Public School system is to stamp out racism in all its forms, and notice how many forms there are. (Note in particular the Cultural Racism section that includes, _" emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology"_ as a form of racism that, by official policy, is to be stamped out by the government education system):

[http://web.archive.org/web/20060522101405/http://www.seattle...](http://web.archive.org/web/20060522101405/http://www.seattleschools.org/area/equityandrace/definitionofrace.xml)

<comment><USER3> In Canada this week, my girlfriend is required to visit the dean of a [top Canadian law school] for calling a girl a "bitch" on Twitter.

Backstory is interesting, because the girl had bullied her in person at school. GF never identified the girl on Twitter only saying "Some bitch blah blah at school today". But because she mentioned the school name, the dean found out and now wants to talk to her.

There's apparently a policy against certain language at the schools which is enforced by the very highest people.

Fortunately shes defending her right to freedom of expression (as any lawyer- in-training would) and refusing to delete the tweet. But the thought of students having to censor themselves because they are now a member of a school (which they paid $50k+ to join) is scary.

<comment><USER4> I don't think expecting basic good judgment of those in law school is 'scary'. Further it is worth mentioning that hateful speech is not protected in Canada, and while you could say that it was but a response, such a tweet is almost certainly in violation of several new anti-'cyber' bullying restrictions.

<comment><USER5> _hateful speech is not protected in Canada_

How do they prove that a speech is hateful instead of merely being ordinarily contemptuous?

<comment><USER4> Just talking abstractly (again, the only reason I mentioned that is that saying "free speech!" is a non-starter when you're calling someone a bitch -- even if unnamed, if any other party could identify who you mean, it isn't anonymous -- and bringing disrepute upon an institution), but Canadian rights are generally based upon the idea that your rights end where my nose begins, and your right to free speech ends when you intrude on the rights of others not to be harassed, disparaged, etc. Rights go both ways, and there is a balance to be found somewhere in the middle.

Westboro is a hate group, by Canadian law. Their hateful protests are actionable.

We have a new crop of anti-bullying laws -- particularly focused on the online world -- because the speaker can't fallback on the notion that their speech is protected, because it isn't.

<comment><USER5> So calling an idiot an idiot is not an option in Canada?

<comment><USER6> _In 19th and early 20th century medicine and psychology, an "idiot" was a person with a very severe mental retardation_

PC police will probably getcha for that, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _The headteacher, in addition to reporting Zaloom to the police, phoned Glasgow University, where the student had applied to study, in an attempt to dissuade them from accepting him._

Not the best way to counter charges of endemic corrpution in society, I must say. In the US, this kind of interference would pose a great deal of trouble for the ambitious functionary.

<comment><USER8> The UK has pretty strict libel laws. I wouldn't be surprised if approaching Glasgow U falls under that category.

<comment><USER9> Defaming a third party by telephone would more likely be slander than libel, but it's certainly not clear that what went on here would be defamation at all.

A defamatory statement must be a false factual allegation. As long as what the headmaster claimed was true, he should be safe from libel or slander lawsuits - saying "I don't like this guy's politics and you shouldn't take him on as a student." is a fair expression of opinion, however silly that opinion is, and despite the rather insidious attempt to harm someone's career over a personal/political disagreement.

Mind you, I'd guess that in these sorts of circumstances, Glasgow University would likely thank the headmaster for his concern and file the note of this communication in the waste paper basket, where it belongs. Universities are no stranger to having to fend off third parties - parents, police, stalkers and whathaveyou - attempting to meddle in the affairs of their students; if their admin staff are halfways competent, they already have 50 tactful ways of telling outside interferers to fuck off.

<comment><USER10> Truth is an absolute defense to the claim of libel or slander in the US, but not in all worldwide jurisdictions.

<comment><USER9> It's also the case in the UK. What makes you think I was thinking of US libel law? I'm not American

<comment><USER10> English libel law is substantially more friendly to the plaintiff than to the defendant.

I referenced US libel law as a counterpoint to the rest of the world because I thought you were _not_ thinking of the US. There have been several high profile cases of journalists and scientists saying true but defamatory things in the UK about quacks and charlatans and being hounded in the courts. In response to this, the UK has actually passed legislation attempting to remedy the situation, but this has not yet taken effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You almost feel sorry for the teacher in this case. Sure, he's about to get the just desserts of a repugnant action like this, but its kind of like a dog digging up a nest full of yellow jackets. He "deserves" the stings but he's not going to understand why he is suddenly being stung.

It boggles our tech-savvy minds that someone could be this out of touch and still have a position of any authority whatsoever, but there it is.

I also hope the best for the student, but I can't help feeling that this will be nothing but a minor setback for him as much as it seems to potentially suck now.

<comment><USER12> Being out of touch disqualifies you from any job pretty quickly.

Always be on the ball, not with your head up your arse like this elitist buffoon.

<comment><USER13> The Peter Principle and Dunning–Kruger effect would disagree.

<comment><USER12> Not really. Modern communication and media makes it easier to single out an individual from the flock and take them down.

<comment><USER13> No, that really has nothing to do with it. Organizations are still rampant with the following:

\- yes-men, sycophants

\- cronyism/nepotism/favoritism

\- cutthroat, bad culture

\- etc

<comment><USER12> And my point is it's easier to piss all over their party now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I somehow doubt that sabotaging the kid's education would reduce his anarchism and individualism.

<comment><USER15> Is kicking someone out of a building that bears more than a passing resemblance to a prison really sabotaging their education?

<comment><USER16> ... Yes. As a self-taught programmer, I believe university is important. It gives quite a lot of advantages (mostly social ones, which are the most important). And undergrad universities select primarily based on school performance, so kicking him out definitely would've sabotaged his higher education.

To piggyback on this comment in hopes of finding some assistance: I've been trying to figure out some long-term strategy of how to get into a top-tier university. I have the ACT scores for it, but I dropped out of highschool to go work in software. The decade of dev experience is certainly nice, and I've studied core CS theory on my own (xv6 and paxos for example), but I'd really like to attend a top uni in order to do graphics research. I wonder if it's even possible for a 25 year old highschool dropout to achieve this? I was thinking I could do well for a couple years at some local university, then apply to transfer to Penn, Stanford, etc. I've heard transfer students are more likely to be accepted. But I wonder what else I could do to increase my chances.

<comment><USER17> As someone who dropped out from Brown (and transferred credits from State universities I attended while in HS) and been engaging with newer educational things like project breaker[0], there are plenty of social advantages out there with "non-traditional" organizations that give more freedom and open just as many doors…

Though yes, if you are trying do research, uni might be good, but there's plenty of university politics/culture involved that might make you want to drop out again (esp with research and such), despite it all… Besides, who's to say you can't do research outside of uni?

[0] [http://www.projectbreaker.org/](http://www.projectbreaker.org/)

<comment><USER16> Well, I've been doing my best to research on my own, but at this point I need access to a high quality spectrophotometer in order to perform measurements of various materials' absorption spectrums under various lighting conditions. They can run ~$5k, so uni seems like my best bet. I figured I couldn't really just show up and ask to borrow their spectrophotometer... they'd probably want me to have a degree or some kind of credentials before trusting me at all.

Project Breaker looks quite interesting. Thanks for letting me know!

<comment><USER18> No, no. Show up knowing what you're about, vs. someone with theories "no one else understands" (from watching this once, I wouldn't be surprised if MIT professors get a bit of training in how to handle the crazies), you've got a hypothesis that's interesting and you need to do specific tests, and, oh, yeah, you'll be happy to let them share credit. You might be surprised at how far you can get.

Do some networking. If you don't have any contacts, start showing up for seminars at a target university. Listen, start contributing a bit to the community, then ease into "By the way, I have a [fill in the blank] I'd like to test...."

<comment><USER16> Yeah, worrying about being thought of as a crazy person is precisely what's prevented me from trying to contact any professors, because I'd imagine they have to deal with that sort of thing pretty often: outsiders bothering them with unscientific pet theories. That's why it's frustrating not having credentials.

Attending seminars is a good idea. Thank you. I wonder if I should call up universities and ask for info regarding any computer graphics related seminars / events. It seems like those would be very uncommon, but it's probably my only chance.

I have no contacts because I was mercilessly harassed throughout highschool and leaped at the opportunity to drop out and write software for a living. So I have no idea how to network. Showing up and saying, "Hey, would you be interested in chatting about computer graphics theory?" seems like it'd earn me strange looks.

I just moved to Chicago, so I was hoping University of Chicago has some sort of computer graphics program, and that I can figure out some way of becoming involved with it.

<comment><USER19> "I wonder if I should call up universities and ask for info regarding any computer graphics related seminars / events"

That shit's on the website, dogg.

<comment><USER16> Hmm... Is it?

Searching their events for "graphics" produced no results, and searching for "computer" (in hopes of anything CS related) wasn't very helpful. [http://event.uchicago.edu/maincampus/search.php](http://event.uchicago.edu/maincampus/search.php)

EDIT: The CS research interests page is interesting... [http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/research/interests](http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/research/interests) though nothing specifically graphics-related.

EDIT2: The closest thing to graphics research I can find is [http://www.mcs.anl.gov/research/fl/research/index.php?p=proj...](http://www.mcs.anl.gov/research/fl/research/index.php?p=proj_detail&id=28) ... though I don't really understand what its goals are based on its description: "Integration of Access Grid and ParaView to enable remote participants to interact with their visualizations in a coordinated manner across all sites, to improve information flow and expedite visualization development and scientific results. This will remove a significant bottleneck in achieving visualization results and understanding, by allowing participants to exchange data interactively while exploring their data visually. In this first development, specific areas of ParaView functionality will be targeted for inclusion in the shared interaction, based on feedback from the domain scientists as to the areas of highest relevance and impact." So I guess that's something graphics-theory-related, which I suppose is worth looking into...

<comment><USER19> Here you go: [http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/events](http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/events)

Looks sparse but I don't think the academic year's started yet, scroll back to last spring and it looks like the real departmental calendar.

Could just be you're SOL on the type of stuff you want at UC. That's academic life.

<comment><USER16> Oh, thank you so much!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Two things came to mind when I read this:

1) It doesn't often happen, but having the establishment individual confirm the blog's POV through word and deed is refreshing.

2) If you are from the University and read what this fool said to the newspapers / police, then you should be suspect of any individual whom he gave a recommendation.

</comment><comment><USER21> Here is the text of an email that I sent the school.

\-----

The primary duty that a school has is to turn out informed citizens who will try to maintain democracy. Despite your best efforts, you are apparently on the path to success with Kinnan Zaloom.

Unfortunately your headmaster has failed to learn the critical lesson that any organization populated by people will have failure modes, and a common failure mode is that those in authority will seek to use their authority inappropriately, and will also seek to assert more authority than they should have. This has been known for thousands of years, with famous examples including ancient Athens, the Roman Republic, and a plethora of dictatorships around the world today.

I am being generous in saying that your headmaster has failed to learn this lesson. In fact he seems to have learned it, but sees the path to petty dictatorship as something to emulate, not to fear. However one should never ascribe to malice and all that, so I will make the generous assumption that his actions came through incompetence.

But even making the generous assumption, it is clear that your headmaster is not the kind of person who should be put in a position where he can try to harm the future of children whose only crime is to think more clearly than he does. We need children to learn that authority is a necessary evil in a democratic society. Which lesson can best be learned in an environment where authority is exercised wisely enough that the "necessary" part of it becomes evident.

For the good of the children forced to suffer through your school, I sincerely hope that this fact is taken to heart and appropriate measures are taken to ensure that authority rests in more competent people going forward.

<comment><USER22> Nicely done. The headmaster's mentality is in direct conflict with the Enlightenment principles that the West was built on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is this satire? It reads like satire.

"I must do something. In the last year he has become more and more enchanted by antiestablishment ways of thinking and has even said that there is an inherent risk that every government is corrupt."

<comment><USER21> It seems sincere to me. And also blithely unaware that the student has a point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Doesn't sound like the kind of teacher I'd like in my university

 _Asked what had first inclined him to contact the police, Mr. Szemalikowski said "the fact that Kinnan has mentioned the ideologies of anarchism and individualism on this blog." Digging himself even deeper, the headteacher added, "I must do something. In the last year he has become more and more enchanted by antiestablishment ways of thinking and has even said that there is an inherent risk that every government is corrupt."_

<comment><USER25> Read the blog. Doesn't seem like the kind of kid I'd like in my university...

<comment><USER26> Having recently had a "Fuck all of you" reaction to public high school, what I read was a kid ranting about apathetic students and apathetic instructors. He's probably frustrated by the people he sees on a daily basis and it comes out on the blog as him being a jerk.

His writing could use some work too, kind of cheesy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> You can't just have individualists roaming freely around doing whatever the heck they like. Where would it end?

<comment><USER28> Hmmmm...no ruling elites?

<comment><USER29> If individualists are incapable of building functioning nonhierarchical organizations, they'll be at the mercy of those good at violence, and ruled.

This is why much of the anarchist tradition is about collective action, to support individual freedoms. They frequently reject the collective vs. individual dichotomy as absurd. (Hopefully this isn't pedantic or nitpicky, just this tends to be a common misconception.)

<comment><USER30> it's not pedantic in the context of the original article, where the headmaster was clearly too daft to know the difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm disgusted by the head teacher's nosy behavior. I also think the student is an insufferable person according to his blog posts [1]. He's one of those people who try to use loaded words like "anarchism" and "individualism" to justify annoying or selfish behavior. Kind of like Galt-wannabe libertarians who hide being the word "liberty" to give credence to social darwinism.

[1] [http://hampsteadtrash.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/sludge- obituary...](http://hampsteadtrash.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/sludge- obituary.html)

<comment><USER32> Yes, lots of high school students are insufferably pompous and selfish. They _are_ just growing from children into young adults.

A high school head teacher should be able to handle this.

Also, as an adult, you should also be able to handle this without becoming annoyed and judgemental.

<comment><USER33> " lots of high school students are insufferably pompous and selfish"

So are a lot of teachers and heads.

<comment><USER34> but most high school students grow out of that phase :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is the kind of behavior current political systems are encouraging to the members of our society. Instead of teachers reaching out to students to create bonds and personal connections, we have a system that promotes unjustified surveillance, profiling and reporting.

</comment><comment><USER35> What did the police say? Did the teacher believe that the UK has thought-crime laws about uncommon political beliefs? Do they?

<comment><USER36> Not so much _laws_ but there's certainly a lot more stigma to holding unpopular opinions (or even freely expressing 'distasteful' but popular opinions, cf. responses to many UKIP supporters) in the UK compared to the USA - nowhere on the scale as in Russia or Eastern Europe though.

<comment><USER37> Eastern Europe? Could you please elaborate or provide some example to illustrate what exactly you mean? I am from Eastern Europe (Czech Rep.) and I used to live in UK. Generally I would say that current Eastern Europe is way more open/tolerant/apathetic to 'unpopular opinions' than UK.

<comment><USER36> I don't have an interest in filling a post with links to articles about the freedom of speech issues or homophobia in Belarus, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Romania, or what not, but they are easily found. For starters, though, Belarus, the Ukraine, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Greece and Albania aren't even in the top 80 countries for press freedom: [http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom- index-2013,1054.html](http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2013,1054.html)

However, I had to hit Wikipedia as I'd never considered the Czech Republic to culturally be "Eastern Europe" but it turns out it often is. I consider the Czech Republic as progressive as any Western European nation and the statistics seem to support that (for example, Czechs are more in support of gay marriage than even the Brits). I've been to the Czech Republic before and was pleasantly surprised at how awesome it was.

So, to clarify, I did not have mean "Eastern Europe" formally but countries on the geographically eastern fringes of Europe.

<comment><USER38> Don't trust everything you see on Wikipedia.

I went to school in one of the countries you mentioned. There is a firm cultural policy there that the teachers' authority ends at the doors of the school. Barring some extreme cases (e.g. underage teenagers starring in porn movies), a teacher doing something like what's mentioned in the article would result in significant _public_ outcry, on all levels, exactly on the grounds of free speech.

The merits, policies, methods and value of schools, colleges and even individual professors are matters of public debate with no restriction. Attempts of imposing sanctions on pupils for expressing views of discontent with institutions do occur, but are isolated and rarely carried out, due to -- you've guessed it -- public outcry.

Perhaps most symbolic for this: after the fall of the Communist regime, school uniforms quickly fell out of favour and are quite rare after 4th grade or so even today. And where they are in place, the rules against _not_ wearing them are rarely enforced for precisely the same reasons. It's all nice on paper, but as soon as someone decides a kid should be expelled for not wearing _those particular clothes_ , things usually get ugly.

Press freedom, corruption and the like are not good _general_ indicatives for the population's values. There's a large gap between general indices and individual behaviour. [Edit:] Communities tend to find ways around things, especially youngsters. Press freedom is the simplest example there: precisely because everyone knows press is basically a propaganda agency, there's general distrust of it, and people are suspicious of what they read in the newspaper. Same goes for teachers: after a long (political-driven) culture of authoritarianism in schools, people are very suspicious of school staff extending their authority past the realm of schools.

It also works this way with the generation gap. Precisely because younger people (particularly in urban areas) perceive their parents as closed-minded, they obstinately try to exercise open-mindedness, or to at least adopt a more indifferent stance, with e.g most teenagers there either supporting gay marriage, or simply not "getting what the big deal is", if people want to marry, they marry. (This is itself a symptom of something else, but I digress).

tl;dr There's at least one place on the fringe of Eastern Europe where a school principal behaving like this would generally end up with a lot of angry parents on his doorstep the following morning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Yet another attack on an anti-authoritarian person.

The most compelling example that our society doesn't accept people with this personality treat is the psychiatrists who treat them as if they had a mental disorder.

[http://www.honeycolony.com/article/psychiatrys-oppression- of...](http://www.honeycolony.com/article/psychiatrys-oppression-of-young- anarchists-and-the-underground-resistance/)

</comment><comment><USER40> This reads like a parody.

 _" has even said that there is an inherent risk that every government is corrupt"_

Corruption in the government? Gasp! How dare you?!

</comment><comment><USER41> I think the story has completely wrong focus. The problem is not the teachers actions (no matter how despicable), but the effects of those actions. I mean if a teacher is able to "ruin" someones life by making couple of phonecalls, then therein lies the problem. In a ideal society the teacher would be free to voice his concerns, and if those concerns were baseless (as seems to be the case here) then the voicing should have no effect on the pupils life.

Of course there wasn't really any concrete effects mentioned in the story that had already happened, so hopefully this was just a sensationalist story and the uni and police will ignore the teacher. In fact the story heavily smells like an attempt to crucify the teacher while no damage/harm was actually done to the pupil.

</comment><comment><USER42> — (President) Youth, with its enthusiasms, which rebels against any accepted norm because it must, and we sympathize. It may wear flowers in its hair and bells on its toes, but when the common good is threatened, when the functioning of society is endangered, such revolts must cease! They are non- productive, and must be abolished!

[...]

— (President) Guilty! Read the charge!

— (Delegate) The prisoner has been charged with the most serious breach of social etiquette: Cultural defiance of the elementary laws which sustain our community. Questioning the decisions of those we voted to govern us. Unhealthy aspects of speech and dress, not in accordance with general practice. And the refusal to observe, wear, or respond to his number!

(Quotes from "The Prisoner", Episode 17, "Fall Out", 1967)

</comment><comment><USER26> Here is the post that seems to have triggered the response:

[http://hampsteadtrash.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/sludge- obituary...](http://hampsteadtrash.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/sludge- obituary.html)

<comment><USER43> Nothing untoward in this apart from the pointless, juvenile and lazy repetition of the f __k word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> > In the last year he has become more and more enchanted by antiestablishment > ways of thinking and has even said that there is an inherent risk that every > government is corrupt.

If not for that line I'd say that techer just wanted to say that the student is vocal, selfish jackass and failed to invoke proper euphemisms. But this line shows teachers ignorance. I thought that risk of governemnt being corrupt is something so obvious that it's taught on history lessons in primaryschool. Or maybe I am wrong and it's not established that all government can become corrupt? And if there are some uncorruptible goverment forms, then why we don't use them? Or there is some non-constructive proof known that shows that some goverments are not at all prone to corruption but we have no idea how they look like?

Goverment by definition decides about the stuff it does not own. And if you decide about stuff you don't own you can trade doing some harm to that stuff for improving your own status. And that's coruption.

</comment><comment><USER45> The Hampton Trash (blog) [http://hampsteadtrash.blogspot.co.uk/](http://hampsteadtrash.blogspot.co.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER46> Check the comments on the article as well, for a few insane ramblings by the templeos maker...

<comment><USER28> Wait, so it's conspiracy theory/religion applied to x86 assembler?

I'm going to print it out for future reference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Prime Minister by 30?

<comment><USER33> In the UK? Yeah, that would be the teacher who reported him then. I'm sure the current Home Sec would very much approve of a student being outed for saying something the establishment disagrees with. If the teach u-turns some how, then yes, PM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Will he be accepted in Glasgow U?

<comment><USER49> The offer made by Glasgow to the student is guaranteed, as long as the student meets the conditions of the offer: typically a grade-based offer.

According to the original article, the student didn't meet the conditions of the offer. The university may now award a discretionary place... this decision could have been influenced by the principal, but is moderately unlikely anyway. The article notes that Zaloom will study at Portsmouth U instead. Good luck to him :)

[http://www.camdennewjournal.com/news/2013/sep/headteacher- re...](http://www.camdennewjournal.com/news/2013/sep/headteacher-reports-teen- blogger-who-criticised-school-police)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> This "headteacher" should be arrested and prosecuted.

<comment><USER51> Kettle, meet pot.

<comment><USER50> Wrong. I consider that action by the teacher a direct threat to the student's civil rights at the very least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> pretty douchey to list the schools phone number at the bottom, just so idiot internet hate mobs can phone and abuse the school secretary.

<comment><USER50> "internet hate mobs" are the people that oppose this pretty douchey teacher?

<comment><USER25> Did you read the blog in question? Are you in possession of the full facts of the case? Do you know those involved? Or have you formed your opinions based on some gossippy trash reporting.

There is almost always far more to stories like this than the reporting has us to believe. That's because the reporting is pushing an agenda. Which internet hate mobs etc absolutely love.

<comment><USER50> So you dispute the story and the reporting is "pushing an agenda"? Why do I have the feeling that you don't think that the "teacher" was wrong in what he did?

<comment><USER25> Having read some of the blog, it certainly looks like he's a kid with issues. So I'm not surprised the teacher called the university to warn them.

Not sure he really should have called the police, but it's up to him isn't it. But as I said, there's very likely far more to the story than just a blog.

If for example the story was "teacher calls police after student damages property / makes threats / brings knife to school / etc etc, and also shows police his weird ranty blog", then it wouldn't fit with the 'internet hate mob' agenda.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21518574 <comment><USER2> This whole idea is wrongheaded because it has correlation and causation backwards.

The English-speaking world is full of places where it is incredibly expensive to live a decent lifestyle in retirement. Take the same pension that you earned in the Anglophonie and then move to France or Spain or Japan or Taiwan or Mexico and live a comfortable retirement in a supportive community where your friends and family respect your middle-income wisdom and experience.

Or you can stick to the English-speaking world and be faced with the choice of a isolation in a soulless suburb abandoned by work-focused family, emotional abandonment in a nursing home, or paying through the nose for a rare spot in the few community-oriented cities where people of all ages mix the way they do in all other world cultures.

Forget planning your 401(k) and get out those flash cards so you can start practicing.

<comment><USER3> You didn't read the article did you

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Geert Hofstede, an influential Dutch researcher in cultural economics identified a cultural dimension termed "long-term orientation", defined as "the extent to which a society shows a pragmatic future-oriented perspective rather than a conventional historical short-term point of view" [1]. On LTO the U.S. scores 29, Deutschland 31, and China 118. Respondents in "high-LTO countries" are pragmatic, believing "less in universal guidelines about what is good and evil and more in considering the circumstances" [2]. LTO was the only cultural dimension found to predict per capita economic growth.

The pragmatism probably arises, in part, from the interaction with another cultural dimension: uncertainty avoidance. UAI is "the extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations and have created beliefs and institutions that try to avoid these". Uncertainty- avoidance cultures tend to believe that "there is only one Truth and we have it. All others are wrong." On UAI the U.S. scores 46, Deutschland 65, and China 30. While China was shifting from communism to state capitalism Deng Xiaoping asked "what does the color of the cat matter as long as it catches mice?"

Marieke de Mooij found in a 2002 study [3] that LTO cultures "are cash or debit card cultures, not credit card cultures". They also prefer real estate over mutual funds. Interestingly, "a long-term orientation suggests less receptivity to e-commerce" because of a reduced "willingness to pay for convenience".

As an aside regarding cultural blinders, LTO was not detected in Geert Hofstede's original 1981 research. It took the Chinese Values Survey "questionnaire, designed by Eastern minds," which, in turn, "did not detect the uncertainty avoidance dimension" to discover LTO [2]. The original "IBM and Rokeach Value Survey questionnaires, both designed by Western minds, did not detect long-versus short-term orientation".

[1] <http://geert-hofstede.com/united-states.html>

[2] [http://www.amazon.com/Cultures-Organizations-Software- Mind-e...](http://www.amazon.com/Cultures-Organizations-Software-Mind- ebook/dp/B001C31FRG/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1361603377&sr=8-1)

[3] [http://home.arcor.de/mba2006/Convergence%20and%20divergence%...](http://home.arcor.de/mba2006/Convergence%20and%20divergence%20in%20consumer%20behaviour.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Oh boy, Chomsky vs Whorf round two hundred and thirty three. Time to grab popcorn.

Some controversies never die and the impact of language on thought and perception is one of them. Anyway time to go grab a beer while my colorless green dreams sleep furiously.

BTW the language/thought and language/perception interactions pose problems on both sides. There is some evidence that how a language refers to directions of relative objects impacts the perception of the speaker regarding direction (and that's a mark against Chomsky) but at the same time, if we accepted the Whorfian hypothesis uncritically than attempts to relabel "crippled" as "handicapped" would have been the end of it and we wouldn't have gone back to "disabled" and finally "persons with disabilities." Of those terms, "handicapped" is the least negative but changing terms did not change really how people related so it's not as simple as that.

I doubt that large-scale and long-term patterns are that dependent on language. It may be that immediate, small-scale patterns are more dependent but as you scale out the sorts of solutions to problems we all have to navigate become much more restrained so I don't think the thesis can be as simple as it is put forward here.

</comment><comment><USER6> Mandarin, primarily spoken in countries that don't have a pension or adequate health care versus English, spoken widely in countries that generally do have pensions and adequate health care. Also where's the cultural correlation studies? Chinese culture places a huge emphasis on fortune, wealth and luck.

<comment><USER7> I thought so too at first, but:

> But he says his research has controlled for all these factors, by > concentrating on nine multi-lingual countries: Belgium, Burkina Faso, > Ethiopia, Estonia, DR Congo, Nigeria, Malaysia, Singapore, and Switzerland.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for your reply, though I still think the research is flawed. I'm Australian but living & working Singapore, which is right next to Malaysia.

Here, it's a country that's well developed, has a high level of education and does have a pension (called CPF). The average local salary is SGD $2,000 per month and I can tell you the CPF does not provide enough for retirement. There's a back-to-work program that effectively lets those well into their retirement (70s, 80s) go back to work, and heartbreakingly they end up clearing tables, washing dishes or serving down at the local McDonalds.

Culture-wise, Singapore is predominantly Chinese. In fact they're probably more Chinese than China - many of the old traditions that aren't followed in China still happen here like the "Hungry ghost" and "Yu sheng". Come Chinese new year, "red packet" culture is alive and well, with the holiday seen as a chance for your relatives to be happy of all the wealth and prosperity you've accumulated over the year. Have an aunt who lives in near poverty? She'll be so happy that you drive around in a $120,000 car.

Malaysia is a slightly different story. It's split into Chinese Malaysia, and indigenous Malaysia. If you've ever been to Malaysia, you'll quickly understand that there is a need to look after your own family rather than trust anything to the government. It's notoriously corrupt. I stupidly drove a car with Singaporean plates to Kuala Lumpur, and was such an easy target for traffic police where unsurprisingly everything could be fixed by paying a 'fine.' If you get sick in places like this, your ability to get better depends on your ability to pay enough to get the better doctors and get prioritized up the waiting queue. If you're poor, good luck.

So no, I don't accept that the research has controlled for all these factors. I see it as an attempt from a failed linguistics professor to attach meaning where there is none.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > "You can find families that live right next door to each other, have exactly > the same education levels, exactly the same income and even exactly same > religion.

However, because they speak a different language they might have gone to different schools, have a different sense of humor, watch different TV channels, read different newspapers, and be interested in the events or culture of different countries.

Moreover, in a few of the countries listed the different language groups tend to live in different regions, which can have very different economies.

<comment><USER8> Here's a gaffe.

The author says that Belgium has large 'Flemish' and French speaking populations, but then when he talks about Brussels he says there are large Dutch and French speaking populations.

In at least one table he lists Dutch and Flemish separately.

Is he suggesting that Dutch speakers in Brussels and Dutch speakers in Flanders really speak a different language? :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This makes perfect sense; we think of programming languages changing the way solutions are designed all the time. That's why we learn so many different ones.

Unfortunately I doubt this will be proven at any time in the near future... it is nearly impossible to isolate this characteristic from other factors.

</comment><comment><USER10> _If I wanted to explain to an English-speaking colleague why I can't attend a meeting later today, I could not say 'I go to a seminar', English grammar would oblige me to say 'I will go, am going, or have to go to a seminar'._

That seems like a pretty poor (no pun intended) example, given that "I am going to a seminar" uses present tense (present progressive) to describe a future event.

(A different reading of the above quote suggests that the second form is supposed to be "I am going to go to a seminar.")

<comment><USER11> It's a poor Mandarin example also. You would likely say "there is a seminar", or "I intend to go to a seminar". Both are also perfectly valid English examples, I should add, and convey similar time information. There is also an auxiliary, the Mandarin 要, which is used very similar to our "will" in most future situations.

What we call "tense" is actually a pretty fuzzy category, and at a general level is just the "grammaticalization of time reference", meaning the transition of a word from the expression of concrete content to an abstract time-related function word. This in all languages is a constantly evolving process and can occur over a long period of time and to different degrees. English hasn't even fully grammaticalized the notion of the future, as our future and present tenses are morphologically identical.

Which brings up another point: both English and Mandarin lack elaborate morphological change, relying on auxiliaries to convey tense rather than explicit verbal modifications. Where do we draw the line here? At the end of the day, was the collapse of the Roman empire due to the richness of the morphological tense marking of Latin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> According to Chen's theory of time-compresion, a Mandarin speak who tries to say "I will spend money" [in the future], will say "I spend money", and spend money now.

<comment><USER13> It sounds more like time-overlap than "time-compression".

So, your future self is your current self. Anything you do right now is your future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > English grammar would oblige me to say 'I will go, am going, or have to go > to a seminar'.

Isn't "am going" a "present tense". That's how I perceive it a least, and indeed, it gives me the feeling of seeing the "future in the present tense", in the way of weak LTR. My native language is 'weak FTR', thought not in the list of researched ones. But I speak English "close to native" and tend to just "think in English" a lot, especially for topics for which all my learning material was in English. But I never felt "present tense continuous" when used as future anything different than just using the present tense for the future in my native language.

 _Does this mean that although I speak English close to native level, I actually have a different "understanding/feeling" of it than you true native English speakers?_

(of course, to even think along the lines of the study I need tons of "suspension of disbelief" and need to ignore that there are zillions of ignored variables and _no freaking way_ to determine _direction of causality_ at this level! ...but just pretending it makes some sense :) ...)

EDIT: my bad, I looked at the actual paper and saw that my language was evaluated and is "strong FTR", just like English. So our use "present for future" is just like the "present continuous for future" in English, just a "spoken language shortcut" and we also have real proper future sense, like all other latin Languages. Even matches our "almost american style" pattern of spending and saving. I should remember never to start talking after reading an article based on a paper: I'd better shut up before reading the paper as science-reporters always manage to distort or ambiguate stuff... sigh...

<comment><USER5> English tenses are so much fun. She speaks Japanese but right now she's speaking English. The factory makes toys, but right now it is closed for the night.

But when we get to Malay, things get really weird. Malay doesn't have tenses. You express timeframe with additional words. It does however have something like a tense, namely a sort of "bounding" quality but that's not like bounded vs unbounded aspects in English since bounding may occur either in time, in manner, or in social convention. Thus one can reduplicate for emphasis, to imply continuation, to imply reciprocity, or to imply a relaxation of social convention. Consequently we'd reduplicate the verb for "to beat" if we wanted to say "he frequently beats his son" or "give" if we wanted to say "they gave eachother gifts," or "walk" to mean "take a stroll," or "arrived" to indicate that in fact they arrived suddenly and unexpectedly. (Reduplication of nouns looks kind of like pluralization but it also involves an unbounding rather than a true pluralization.)

<comment><USER14> That's odd, as such a language would benefit most from a "word for letter" writing system like the Chinese one, yet Malay ended up being written in jawi arabic alphabet. I wonder if there are other languages with this type of "mismatch" between the writing system / alphabet and the language structure...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Correlation/causation?

<comment><USER16> No, merely Shapir/Wolf hypothesis.

It doesn't even need the correlation part, you can deduce similar conclusions merely from studying each language without real world input.

<comment><USER17> I think you mean Sapir-Whorf. My understanding was that's not been proven to a sufficient extent to use it as any kind of hard evidence that language influences complex decisions like long-term financial planning.

<comment><USER16> Well, they didn't use Sapir-Whorf to prove that "language influences complex decisions like long-term financial planning".

They did their own research, from scratch, to see if that happens, research that would also help to prove Sapir-Whorf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here's the TEDGlobal talk on the subject by Keith Chen himself, uploaded two days ago: [http://www.ted.com/talks/keith_chen_could_your_language_affe...](http://www.ted.com/talks/keith_chen_could_your_language_affect_your_ability_to_save_money.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> We don't need even need to look at the science formally. We can look at it at a different level. If we know a little about how the brain works then a phenomenon like this might become obvious.

Language affects how you think, there is no question about that. People who have a dirtier vocabulary will think dirtier, people who have a more formal vocabulary with think more formally, etc. If the language you speak makes it harder to talk dirty then you will probably talk less dirty. This will in-turn affect how you think.

There is a native tribe that does not have words for left, right, ahead or behind, but instead they relate every direction to the cardinal directions. So, instead of referring to your foot as your left foot, this native tribe will sometimes refer to it as your west foot, sometimes as your northeast foot, etc. This simple example shows how different your thought patterns can be based on what words you use. These natives will always have in their minds where north is, where any "normal" outsider will have to spend a second or two locating north first. Their brains are almost set up to think in a different way.

Language is complex as hell, but it makes sense that if a word, or expression is used more often in one culture than another, that its speakers will be more influenced by that word or expression. Can you imagine if in English there was no easy way to say "sex"? In English there are dozens of ways to refer to sex and other sexual acts, and many only take one or two syllables. What if the easiest way to refer to sex was to say a 5-syllable word? I bet that would have some influence on how much we think about sex. We might still be able to think of the act of sex easily (the images, memories in our heads), but thinking about/using the word will take too much energy and as a result will be used less. Can you imagine if the word "sex" was used less on TV, in music, etc. simply because the word was too long and no longer fit nicely within the script/lyrics?

Now, it's not too much of a leap to see that having a language where present- tense and future-tense are less distinct from each other will influence the speaker of that language into making less of a distinction between the present & future.

How much influence? Who knows? That, we need formal, nitty-gritty science for.

<comment><USER20> _Language affects how you think, there is no question about that._

Quite to the contrary, it is an old and tired notion which has been refuted and refuted and refuted (see, e.g., the third chapter of "The Stuff of Thought" by Steven Pinker) and yet it can't die because some people just find it too appealing to let go.

<comment><USER16> Only the refutation is not very convincing. Not everybody agrees to Anglo- Saxon postulates on language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> English speakers tend to think of time as going from behind to ahead, whereas Chinese speakers think of time as going from top (上) to bottom (下). It's hard to break the habit of saying "next week"(下个星期) in Chinese when I mean "last week", and many Chinese speakers have a similar problem. In fact, I'd say English-speakers' primary metaphor for time is _climbing a mountain_ , indicating working to move forward in time, making us _more_ likely to save.

<comment><USER22> Actually I am not getting these concepts at all.

Time doesn't move at all. Feb 23 2013 7:32:14AM is always at the same spot.

<comment><USER23> The value Feb 23 2013 7:32:14AM never changes, but the result of the function now() does change from time to time.

I don't know if the above makes any sense to you.

<http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Value-Values>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So Chinese people on average should have more savings? That doesn't seem like true, since most of the Chinese elders live with their children...

</comment><comment><USER24> That's why i am always broke. P.S. Oh and my native language is Russian.</comment>


The quest to help astronauts sleep better - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170509-the-quest-to-help-astronauts-sleep-better <comment><USER2> Jesus i hate this style of journalism. S/he goes on and on with useless descriptions of what the room looked like and tries to make a novel of the fucking thing. Horrible.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why no pillows on the ISS? Weight? Fear of being smothered if it floats around and covers your nose & mouth? Can't be washed there?

<comment><USER4> Pillows help to keep the head elevated when lying on the back or on the shoulder. Since the astronauts are in zero-G, there's probably no real need for that.</comment></comment>