The Blue State Model: How the Democrats Created a "Liberalism of the Rich" - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176121/ <comment><USER2> A major problem I see in the US, compared to basically anywhere else in the world I've lived, is sprawl. Seemingly every other developed country has done a much better job of having the vast majority of people live in at least medium-density areas, which has all sorts of benefits, especially a lower cost of infrastructure/public transportation, and encouraging mixed-use development with small owner-operated businesses and markets within walking distance serving day-to-day needs.

All of this helps encourage a more communal, broad-based and functioning working/middle class economy. Whereas the US tends to have a huge divide between high-density "downtown" area and then low density suburbs to exurbs, mixed with island apartment complexes and served almost solely by massive chain stores.

I remember moving back to the US from France and landed in one of those terrible cookie-cutter apartment complexes, and one day walking to the central mail box I thought to myself: "I am walking farther to get my mail in the US than I did in France to get to a grocery store, bakery, meat shop or tram line."

The nearest place I could buy any food was a gas station with processed crap and soda, 3/4 of a mile away. In France I could walk a block to a mini-market with tons of fresh vegetables, cheese and fresh-baked still-warm bread.

<comment><USER3> Zoning rules in the US are one thing I will never understand. Especially since it is very anti market and the US seems to believe on a free market more than most countries. I wonder if it has to do with suburbs of American cities being much more planned than most other city areas. Planned residential areas in Europe suffer from the same problems. Maybe the US just had more planned instead of grown areas?

<comment><USER4> > Maybe the US just had more planned instead of grown areas?

You don't know the half of it.

Suburban sprawl was national policy during the Cold War. The idea was to spread out the population to reduce the damage a nuclear weapon could do.

They did it on purpose.

<comment><USER5> source? i was under the impression it had more to do with a convergence of car culture and white flight

<comment><USER4> [http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/Cold.War.Urban.Vulnerab...](http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/Cold.War.Urban.Vulnerability.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Part of me wants to be a loyal Bostonian and defend my hometown- most of the evils described in the article could be found in any other state, Republican- or Democrat-run alike. But the point about innovation rhetoric does strike true.

The "innovation district" is full of big pharma and etc companies that would have had an easy time finding offices anywhere; most of the time when the i-word is trotted out, its because someone is either offering tax breaks to some giant corporation to entice them to grace us with their presence, or launching some gaudy public cheerleading event that no one really cares about.

But substantial issues relating to the "creative class"? Such as, for instance, _effective public transit_? Suddenly the state and city can't spare a dime; its not a "priority"; students and post-car intellectuals (and, incidentally, the working class) are stuck paying through the nose to get on a subway that's broken again. Or, taking an Uber because its past midnight. (Late night service was great for the six months it lasted!)

There are other issues of a similar bent; there's a fight going on in Somerville (the neighborhood of MIT, Harvard, and Tufts students, now that Cambridge property deeds come platinum-plated) to allow more than four unrelated individuals to share a house. And they're facing _fierce resistance._

Most of us who can head to the west coast at the first opportunity; Boston would _be_ SF if it wasn't for its outright hostility to the bright minds pouring out of its universities. The scale of the wasted opportunity is _staggering._

<comment><USER7>
        > [T]here's a fight going on
        > in Somerville...to allow more
        > than four unrelated individuals
        > to share a house. And they're
        > facing fierce resistance.

As they should. The solution is not to cram 17 students into a house. The solution is to build more housing. Boston is full of slumlords who gouge students, landlords who resist new development because it would force them to provide decent living conditions at a reasonable profit.

<comment><USER8> The law is Boston reads "4 unrelated undergraduates". The fight is to change the language in Somerville to match (it reads "4 unrelated persons" now). It's about allowing found-families and co-ops, not students.

<comment><USER7> Some landlords want to remove any limit on number of tenants occupying a single unit, related or not. [1]

[1] [http://somerville.wickedlocal.com/article/20160127/NEWS/1601...](http://somerville.wickedlocal.com/article/20160127/NEWS/160126306)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a complex topic but the article is dead-on. Scott Alexander wrote years ago that the US has created a divide that he calls Blue Tribe vs. Red Tribe that is far deeper than Dem vs. Repub - it's cultural.

Today it is extremely common for someone in the "blue tribe" to know no one who is in the "red tribe" \- people who (to use a few stereotypes) are Christian, enjoy NASCAR, and unabashedly eat at chain restaurants. People in either tribe don't encounter each other daily and as a result both tribes have little understanding of each other's worlds or the number of people who are not in their tribe.

Inequality is deeply problematic and there are no easy solutions. Liberalism recognizes this. The problem is that the tribal line now runs along an economic fault line. Red tribe hasn't been doing well - red states are full of disadvantaged people. Worse, because of identity politics they have been made "the other" and rendered relatively voiceless.

Liberalism can champion the disadvantaged but it has to approach them with solutions. As technological displacement of workers continues it is hard to see what they will be.

I am blue tribe but I flinch when I see my colleagues in the tech industry complain about things like the injustice of having to go to a whiteboard in an interview to get a job in a Crèche-like work environment with play-balls while people outside the industry are lucky to get jobs driving cars, cleaning tables, or lifting boxes without health insurance. We don't see our own sense of entitlement. It is transparent to others despite our liberal signaling. This isn't going to be a pretty ride.

<comment><USER10> >Inequality is deeply problematic and there are no easy solutions. Liberalism recognizes this.

No, it doesn't. The article points this out very eloquently. Bernie Sanders recognizes it, but he doesn't speak for most liberals, who are all excited to vote for Hillary and Goldman Sachs.

(And before anyone downvotes me for directly bashing a political candidate, go read the article; I'm just repeating what the article says. Don't like it, downvote the whole article.)

>We don't see our own sense of entitlement. It is transparent to others despite our liberal signaling. This isn't going to be a pretty ride.

This is absolutely right. As the article says, this is exactly why Trump is so popular right now: he's playing directly to the working class that's lucky to get a job lifting boxes without health insurance. The mainline Democrats are not: they're telling everyone how wonderful the economy is, how unemployment is at record-low levels, how wonderful Obamacare is, etc. All those platitudes aren't helping actual working-class people at all, and they're not seeing any of these benefits.

<comment><USER11> I'm an outsider to this, but Obamacare seems like a tentative half-step towards a sane healthcare system like the rest of the developed world has. And as far as I can tell the only reason it's a half-step is because the red-tribe has been convinced for decades that it would help African Americans and so voted for people who worked against it.

Trump could be seen as these red-tribe members realising they'd been duped, but it could also be seen as the Republicans losing control of the racism they cultivated to win those votes in the past.

<comment><USER12> To me it felt like a complete betrayal of what most people, who were for it, wanted. Most people I know regard it as a failure or at best a mess. I know I certainly had a very different system in mind. I will say that it seems to have benefited some however.

<comment><USER10> It seems to have helped some lower-income people in some states get coverage they couldn't afford otherwise, with the downside that everyone else's insurance rates have skyrocketed and the insurance companies have had record profits.

The whole thing was a stupid idea by a right-wing thinktank. It tries to help by establishing a cap on profits and spreading the costs around by requiring everyone to be insured, but it depended on states increasing their Medicaid eligibility, which red states did not. It did nothing to actually decrease the cost of care.

I consider it a mess, not a complete failure. The problem is that we only have one candidate who's serious about fixing the situation, and it's unlikely he's going to get his party's nomination. His competitor thinks this system is wonderful and defends it. On the other side, one guy wants to repeal it altogether and just screw over anyone who can't afford insurance, and with the other guy no one really knows what he's going to do because he keeps changing his position, though he did say something in favor of universal healthcare a while back, but his current website has switched to some standard lame Republican ideas about letting insurance companies compete over state lines, so they'll all just move to the least-regulated state like Wyoming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > What Massachusetts liberals pine for, by and large, is a more perfect > meritocracy -- a system where the essential thing is to ensure that the > truly talented get into the right schools and then get to rise through the > ranks of society.

This rings true, and explains a couple of the key failings of modern American society. Liberals' wholesale embrace of meritocracy combined with their traditional alignment with public unions has manifested in this bizarre fixation with education. Education has become the sole means for achieving traditional liberal goals within the framework of meritocracy. That trend has directly resulted in the college bubble: a society where everybody spends inordinate amounts of money getting an education that for most of them is a waste if time.

More fundamentally, the leadership of the liberal establishment doesn't seem to really believe in the idea of a flat, egalitarian society. Among the liberal elite in San Francisco, D.C., Boston, etc, there is an intense disdain for the folks who form the backbone of the middle class in other industrialized countries: non-college educated blue and white collar workers. In places like Germany, you can get a white collar job and live a middle class life with just 16 years of formal education. In the U.S., even the liberals don't seem to think that is a desirable state of affairs.

<comment><USER14> It's worse because 1) even with the "best and brightest" in charge, we've had one disaster after another and 2) the "meritocracy" we have is horribly broken on its own terms. Making the meritocracy we imagine _should_ exist would require fairly radical reforms in terms of taxes, redistribution, college funding and regulation, youth economic and educational support, and a whole host of other interventions that supporters of the present establishment find anywhere from distasteful to anathema.

"In public life, our pillar institutions and the elites who run them play the mechanic's role. They are charged with the task of diagnosing and fixing problems in governance, the market, and society. And what we want from authorities, whether they are mechanics, money managers, or senators, is that they be competent—smart, informed, able—and that they not use their authority to pursue a hidden agenda or personal gain. We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities, and the consequences of this simple, devastating realization is the defining feature of American life at the end of this low, dishonest decade. Elite failure and the distrust it has spawned is the most powerful and least understood aspect of current politics and society."

"..what we've seen time and time again is that the two aren't so neatly separated. If you don't concern yourself at all with equality of outcomes, you will, over time, produce a system with horrendous inequality of opportunity. This is the paradox of meritocracy: It can only truly come to flower in a society that starts out with a relatively high degree of equality. So if you want meritocracy, work for equality. Because it is only in a society which values equality of actual outcomes, one that promotes the commonweal and social solidarity, that equal opportunity and earned mobility can flourish."

\- Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites

There's a good reason social mobility in places like Denmark is so high compared to the US; they do meritocracy better.

<comment><USER15> You should go ahead and read Thomas Frank's book that he pulled this article from. He spends an entire chapter on how regulators and economists from the well-graduated "meritocratic" elite simply aren't held to any kind of empirical standard whatsoever. When they're wrong, they consider it as a civilizational mistake. It's only other people who can be individually incorrect and responsible for intellectual mistakes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm genuinely curious: what is the alternative here? Keep taxis around? Encourage people to take more manufacturing jobs? These don't seem like sustainable or viable alternatives. Over the coming years, all jobs are going to require an element of creativity, innovation, and probably some degree of higher education (not necessarily university-based, but some form of specialized, knowledge-intensive learning).

This is something that is inevitable, and it's coming up fast. To the extent that we subsidize and protect dying industries to maintain the jobs of their workers, we hinder their retrainment in new professions and further entrench the inefficiencies of the past. In even the medium term, this is nothing but harmful.

Now, I think there are things that probably can and should be done to help these people get into new jobs. Subsidizing retraining and education, providing interim assistance to help them get through these periods, and maybe eventually even a universal basic income (fundamentally the economics of this probably don't make sense quite yet, but I think they will in the future). But what is fundamentally not ok, what is never ok, is shielding dying industries under the aegis of employment.

<comment><USER17> I think the alternative (and we can debate whether it's the right choice) is to regulate companies like Uber that are monopsonies for a segment (in this case Uber is the only buyer of Uber drivers, and works to reduce the elasticity of labor supply so drivers will stay with Uber). That could take the form of a minimum wage for drivers, or regulation that establishes a separate market for drivers that ridesharing platforms would need to all use.

The issue is not the job loss, but that the benefits of the disruption accrue not only accrue mainly with the employer, but are less valuable to the employer and the economy then the loss of taxable income and stable jobs. The Wikipedia page [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony) isn't a bad read.

<comment><USER18> Uber has a monopsony on Uber drivers in the same way that Apple has a monopoly on selling Apple devices, which is to say, not for any useful definition of the term. Plenty of Uber drivers also drive for e.g. Lyft.

<comment><USER17> Uber drivers aren't consumers, they are independent contractors. The better metaphor would be IOS developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's the other extreme - the liberalism of the working class, the Union Pacific Railroad. 150 years in business. 40,000 employees. 86% belong to a union. 20% are military veterans. UP claims 3 million hours a year of training time for their employees, and that's all paid time.

It's not an easy life. Here's a recruiting video.[1] They open by showing workers in a railroad yard in Chicago at 5:47 AM in a snowstorm. Management training starts with jobs like that. They show a management training session on how to deal with conflict. There's a lot of travel. One of the trainees says "UP operates in 23 states, and I went to 21 of them in my first year."

It's the total opposite of the "brogrammer" culture. Not only does UP hire many women, the women go out in the field, wearing all the heavy protective gear and doing hard work. UP is insistent about this.[2] It helps that they're a union shop, where employee discipline is formal. And this is in a culture much more macho than programming.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMViWazEYoc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMViWazEYoc)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVH8pASu- og](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVH8pASu-og)

</comment><comment><USER20> My wife refers to this problem as the Alan Shore Democrats (Alan Shore from Boston Legal TV Show). People who care about the plight of the working poor, but then you find out that they only do so to appease the poor so they don't rise up and revolt against the status quo.

It's the politics of fear. Democrats yell "Vote for me, I will keep those evil republicans from making abortion and being gay illegal." And the Republicans yell "Vote for me, I will keep those sodomites and baby killers in check." They paint the other side as evil, split the poor people in half, and stay in power. The truth is, they desperately need each other, because, if people stopped hating their neighbor for a second, and turned around, they might realize that they are being fucked by their elected officials on both sides.

<comment><USER21> They might even realise that you can't have only two parties represent a population of 300 million people in a multicultural society spread all the way across a continent, sea-to-sea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Url changed from [http://billmoyers.com/story/the-blue-state- model/](http://billmoyers.com/story/the-blue-state-model/), which points to this.

This is a political story that has a chance of clearing the 'unusually interesting' bar so let's give it a try. Frank's model of the 'professional class' (a.k.a. top 10%) as the key socioeconomic faultline is an interesting one that deserves a good discussion. If the thread turns into partisan or ideological bickering, we'll demote it. Let's stay substantive.

<comment><USER7> The central premise of the article is faulty: That Democratic policies (or "Innovation Liberalism") created the divide between the wealthy and the working class in Massachusetts, when in fact it has always been the opposite: The divide was already there, and the party in power serves to maintain it while playing lip service to some ideals.

<comment><USER22> You may be right, but an article with a faulty central premise can still be interesting and worth discussing. It would be better to post your observation as a top-level comment and better still to make it engage more with the specific claims of the OP.

(It's also possible that that's not really Frank's central premise, given that this is a excerpt from a book on a larger topic.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Like so many other American scenes, this one is the product of decades of > deindustrialization, engineered by Republicans and rationalized by > Democrats. [...] Even the city's one real hope for new employment > opportunities --- an Amazon warehouse that is now in the planning stages -- > will serve to lock in this relationship. If all goes according to plan, and > if Amazon sticks to the practices it has pioneered elsewhere, people from > Fall River will one day get to do exhausting work with few benefits while > being electronically monitored for efficiency, in order to save the affluent > customers of nearby Boston a few pennies when they buy books or electronics.

Let me get this straight. The elite are bad for taking away working class jobs in industrial sectors (jobs which could be so brutal to workers that they basically spurred the invention of the labor unions). But they are also bad when they create new working class jobs.

There is definitely a problem for working class people today. Maybe it feels better for people to believe that it's because today's politicians and business leaders are uniquely malfeasant. But it's not really accurate. Technology changes the picture and we have to figure out how to respond to that. Read about the Ludlow Massacre and try and tell me that industrial America was "the good old days."

</comment><comment><USER24> _At a 2014 celebration of Governor Patrick's innovation leadership, Google's Eric Schmidt announced that "if you want to solve the economic problems of the U.S., create more entrepreneurs."_

I'm a Bernie Sanders supporter, but I totally agree with Eric Schmidt here. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the growing incubator/accelerator industry, of which YC is at the vanguard, is one of the most hopeful, encouraging things happening in the world today. I think it's ridiculous that Paul Graham has to defend himself against charges of exacerbating inequality, when he's done as much as anyone to start the economy down a new path. (Disclosure: I have not applied to YC or any other accelerator, but I might in the future.)

So -- is this too much of a contradiction, to be what this author calls an "innovation liberal" while supporting a populist/socialist candidate?

Economic change, of the kind the US is now going through, is always wrenching and painful; there are always people on the back side of the curve who suffer. I think the challenge for government is to craft policies that support the changes, and those driving them, while not excessively punishing those left behind.

I think that broadly, the pendulum in the US has swung too far in the direction of minimizing the safety net in support of individual responsibility, and the surprising success the Sanders campaign is having -- Bernie himself did not think, a year ago, that he could get as far as he has -- shows that the public mood is starting to swing back the other way. I think that's healthy, to a point, and that's why I'm supporting him.

Let's not make this a discussion about Bernie, though. I recognize he is not perfect, and I'm not even 100% certain he would make a good President. I just think the issues he is raising deserve a larger hearing.

<comment><USER25> It always puzzles me to hear people say that they think the social safety net "pendulum" has been swinging too far in the direction of personal responsibility.

By any measure, social safety net spending is significantly higher than it has ever been. News comes out every day of some new government mandate like paid parental leave, paid personal days, etc.

The minimum wage is creeping higher every day.

Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare spending has never been higher.

We just passed a massive, expensive, entitlement known as Obamacare, which provides (or was supposed to) health insurance to everyone in America.

Obama, during his first term, passed a massive expansion of government- subsidized student loans.

We are in the process of a significant expansion of home loans for low income and people with dodgy credit.

Except for the very limited, bipartisan, welfare reform under President Clinton (which has since basically been reversed), I'm not aware of any shrinking of the welfare state that has happened in the last 20 years.

<comment><USER24> > The minimum wage is creeping higher every day.

Not in constant dollars [0]. It peaked in 1968. It's a bit lower than that now -- if you accept the official inflation estimates, which some argue are understated.

> Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare spending has never been higher.

True, though as a percentage of GDP, Social Security hasn't increased that much since 1975 -- it reached 4% then, and is around 5% now. [1] I'll let you look up the numbers on Medicare and Medicaid.

The situation with the ACA is complicated -- it is costing some money in the short run, but (a) it's less than originally projected, and (b) more importantly, it does seem to be curbing healthcare inflation (something is, anyway).

All that said, your point that the welfare state hasn't been shrinking, either, is a fair one. Perhaps it's fairer to say -- as I think the OP is arguing -- that economic conditions, particularly since the Great Recession, and especially the fact that the middle class has been shrinking in recent years, put us in a situation where the need for the safety net is arguably greater than it had been until recently.

[0] [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/23/5-facts- abou...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/23/5-facts-about-the- minimum-wage/)

[1] [http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/social_security_spending...](http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/social_security_spending_by_year)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> You can understand a lot of "progressive" policy as devoted to screwing the white working class as hard as possible (and in fact a lot of the white working class does see it through that lens, which is why, eg, Trump sees such support from that demographic). For instance:

\- Hollowing out icky manufacturing & extraction-sector jobs, while ensuring maximal support for FIRE & "knowledge sector" jobs via IP protections & lax regulations.

\- Importing vast amounts of cheap labor to compete for service-sector jobs.

\- Ensuring that "live in an expensive neighborhood" is the only mechanism to ensure your children go to vaunted "good schools" (or even safe schools).

\- Devoting recurring two-minutes-hates to attacking their cultural symbols.

</comment><comment><USER27> The main claim is that today's liberal establishment has no patience with the idea that everyone should share in society's wealth.

Instead, what today's liberal establishment really pines for, the author writes, is _a more perfect meritocracy_.

Unfortunately, there is no solidarity in a perfect meritocracy, for the ideology of meritocracy negates any esteem society's winners might feel for poorly educated, low-achieving losers.

Rings True.

</comment><comment><USER7> The article reverses the cause and effect of Massachusetts' divide between the wealthy and the worker in order to lay the cause at the feed of the Democratic Party. Take the examples: Universities, Banks, and Large Companies (Mills in the past, Pharma today) were dominant well before the Democratic Party become dominant [1], and were not somehow made powerful as the result of Democratic policies alone. We've really always has a "________ of the rich", where the blank is either "liberalism" or "conservatism" depending on the current party in power.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is Bill Clinton-esque "neoliberalism", right?

socially liberal, economically oligarchist, to contrast with the Repbulicans socially conservative economically oligarchist.

</comment><comment><USER29> "The Oxfam report An Economy for the 1%, shows that the wealth of the poorest half of the world's population has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010, a drop of 38 percent. This has occurred despite the global population increasing by around 400 million people during that period. Meanwhile, the wealth of the richest 62 has increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76tr. The report also shows how women are disproportionately affected by inequality – of the current '62', 53 are men and just nine are women."

OK so assume these top 62 people give all their money to the poor. 1.76 trillion is distributed among 3.5 billion people giving $502 each. the average net worth of these people goes from $500 to about $1000. 1 year later what will have happened? probably not much. These people will increase consumption somewhat, some might invest a bit, but mostly the money will just disappear.

Huge swathes of the population have minimal net worth, like many of my friends, and live happy, comfortable lives. If they had an extra $500 they would spend it quick. This isn't the rule obviously, and there is a lot of poverty, but these statements don't really quite give a true picture of the issue.

<comment><USER30> If 3.5 billion people were to spend $500 quick, that would give an enormous economic boost globally. Most of those people would probably spend it wisely, improve their lives considerably, start businesses etc.

I read it has been shown that simply giving money to the poorest people is a very effective way of stimulating the economy.

<comment><USER29> I know when I was broke, working crappy jobs and in debt, $500 would basically have put a small dent in my credit card, and not much else.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk has $16 billion dollars and hes making significant strides towards colonizing mars and slowing global warming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Politics is the mindkiller.

It opens with the assumption that everyone shares the author's policy prescriptions.

How can anyone write about politics and think that it's full of issues with only one obvious answer? Is it through screening all interactions to avoid anyone with different opinions?

And there's no reason to single Frank out on this. Why does almost everyone on both sides of the aisle write and talk about politics in exactly this way?

</comment><comment><USER32> It's always interesting to see rich liberal cities like San Francisco because there is really no middle class. You are either making lots of money in IT or some other business or you can't afford your rent and are barely scraping by.

You don't see this as much in cities that are not as liberally run.

<comment><USER33> Detroit is a city historically run by Democrats and is a very affordable. Chicago is relatively affordable and historically is run by Democrats.

There will continue to be going to be growing levels of income inequality as automation continues to increase. Either we focus on solving that (Minimal Viable Income sounds like a plan) or we face a true million man March on DC.

Something has to change.

<comment><USER34> Detroit is more or less a smoking crater at the moment, and Chicago is a smoking crater to come. For that you can thank the wise, forward-thinking stewardship of the Democrats.

<comment><USER35> That's a simplistic interpretation of the facts. Detroit is a burned out shell of a city for a wide variety of reasons; very few of those reasons have much to do with local politicians. Trade agreements at the national level probably tell as much of the story as any individual element. But, strategic failures of US car makers also plays a role. And, a rapidly evolving global economic environment also plays a role.

Certainly there has been mismanagement of the city of Detroit, sometimes on an absurd and possibly criminal scale. But, to chalk it all of to "Democrats did this" is...well, it leaves a whole lot of the story out.

Note that I'm not a Democrat and not defending politicians in any general case. But, I do think it's silly to make the claim that local Democrats caused Detroit's decline, when there are clearly so many other factors in the story.

<comment><USER24> Okay, but isn't it fair to say that making the unions too powerful was a key part of the story? That ultimately greatly damaged Detroit's ability to compete on the world stage.

Not to say that the automakers weren't also badly run -- they were. There's an NPR piece about NUMMI that puts some great color on the situation -- ah, here it is [0]. See especially "Act Two", where GM completely muffs bringing the NUMMI success to the rest of the company.

[0] [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/561/t...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/561/transcript)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What Thomas Frank does not realize, or is ignoring, is that it's still the 'elite' who create jobs, and antipathy towards them won't improve the situation for the millions who are without work. The reality is, without job creators, most people wold fail, as the success rate for entrepreneurship is very low.

<comment><USER37> Not sure that the whole ideal of job creators really holds up in the light of day. Or rather job creators as 'elites' with enormous amounts of capitalism and economies of scale dont drive jobs growth.

I guess its a matter of scale... A single WalMart certainly employs less people and provides lower salaries than the 20 small businesses it replaces...

If by elite we are including the typical small business owners then yeah they are job creators...

If by elite we are talking the investor class executive class then not in aggreememt

<comment><USER36> 'investor class'

you realize that businesses don't spring out the ground like plants, right. typically, someone has to invest

<comment><USER30> Or something, like a pension fund or a bank... It doesn't have to be someone rich.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11462513](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11462513)

<comment><USER39> A direct link: [http://www.salon.com/2016/04/02/whats_the_matter_with_dem_th...](http://www.salon.com/2016/04/02/whats_the_matter_with_dem_thomas_frank_talks_bill_clinton_barack_obama_and_everything_in_between_partner/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Well that was a bit unusual:

> Posted by Thomas Frank

...

> Reading Thomas Frank's new book, _Listen, Liberal, or What Ever Happened to > the Party of the People?_ [...]

...

> Let me just add that, as Frank makes clear in his brilliant new work [...]

...

> [...] Frank does a typically brainy thing.

You usually don't see people review their own books from a third person viewpoint, or point out how brilliant or brainy they are. The few times I have seen that have been in contexts where they were obviously trying to project an image of a giant ego for humorous purposes. I'm not familiar enough with this author to know if that's what he's going for in this review, or if he is seriously praising himself.

<comment><USER41> Nah, you are mistaken, and the article has led you astray.

The writer who wrote a few introductory paragraphs to the large book excerpt is not Thomas Frank himself. It's not 100% explicit, but the person writing these laudatory words is almost certainly Tom Englehart, the editor of TomDispatch.

I've seen Thomas Frank speak and followed him for many years, since he and others founded the _Baffler_ in Chicago in the late 80s. He's a Midwesterner through and through, grew up in suburban Kansas City, and has the characteristic modesty of the area.

<comment><USER40> That does appear to be the case, based on looking at some other reviews. It looks like it works like this, at least for authors who are TomsDispatch regulars:

1\. Author Foo writes a book.

2\. Tom Englehart writes a review, which consists of introductory material and then a long excerpt from the book.

3\. Englehart's review appears on the site, but it says "Posted by Foo" at the top. The only mention of Englehart is that it says "Tom" in italics immediately after the last sentence of the introductory material.

4\. At the bottom it says "Foo, a TomsDispatch regular, is the author of <name of book>".

5\. At the bottom it says "Copyright <year> Foo".

Basically everything on the page except for that lone italicized "Tom" after the introductory material makes it look like Foo wrote the review. In the case where firstname_of(Foo) == "Tom", everything on the page makes it look like Foo wrote the review.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Maybe if the Republicans weren't in the pockets of anti science right wing religious nuts and climate change deniers, the well educated would be more willing to consider them?

<comment><USER22> I'd like to think it's a mark of HN's improvement that unsubstantive, snarky putdowns turned out to be rare in this thread.</comment></comment>


GuardianUK: Only 6% of Public Want to Return to Pre-Pandemic Economy - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/28/just-6-of-uk-public-want-a-return-to-pre-pandemic-economy <comment><USER2> People have always wanted change. The issue is that the change some want is the opposite of the change the others want. We will see who gets what they want and who doesn't, but I'd beware: the new boss will be the same as the old boss.

</comment><comment><USER3> Before the pandemic, anyone who want change was told it could not be done. Now they have been force to make the changes people see a change can be done.

</comment><comment><USER4> > a YouGov poll shows that 31% of people want to see big changes in the way > the economy is run coming out of the crisis, with a further 28% wanting to > see moderate changes and only 6% of people wanting to see no changes.

What's the basis for assuming it has anything to do with the pandemic? Who's to say that 59% (31%+28%) of the population didn't want to see changes to the economy before the pandemic?

<comment><USER5> 52% voted for economic changes in 2016, they are finally going to get them at the end of this year. I'm pretty sure they will be disappointed with the results.</comment></comment>


Naval Ravikant: "The Anatomy of a Fundable Startup" (video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.founderinstitute.com/posts/335

<comment><USER2> Good talk, but lots of big generalities. You have to pick and choose what to really take to heart, IMO. Good counterpoint that you may have already seen: <http://www.humbledmba.com/dont-give-bullshit-advice>

</comment><comment><USER3> Naval should be (will be?) on Time magazine's top 100 this year.

<comment><AUTHOR> +1. Between AngelList and Venture Hacks he is arguably helping startups more than anyone else..</comment></comment>


After breach exposing millions of parents and kids, toymaker VTech fined $650K - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/08/after-breach-exposing-millions-of-parents-and-kids-toymaker-vtech-handed-a-650k-fine-by-ftc/ <comment><USER2> In a hypothetical world where child pornography stalkers and kick murder cyberbullying are _NOT_ the knee jerk concern du jour, regarding the privacy of minors, what are the other worries one might have with a situation where little kids are running around snapping pictures with an unsecured web cam tied to real world identities?

The only other thing I can think of is the long con of snooping on periphery data to guess at a second factor security questionaire interview...

      1. What's your first pet's name?
      2. What street did you grow up on?
      3. What was your grandmother's maiden name?

Are there any other weird invasive problems a product like this could evoke?

<comment><USER3> You could easily use such information to find out where someone lives, what their daily schedule is, who they associate with or what products they buy. Photographs could easily contain immediately sensitive information like SSN when it's kids snapping the pictures rather than privacy conscious adults – it's a load of problems.

Then again, I think it should be considered a problem in itself, and not just because of COPPA. Their security policy makes claims that the product does not live up to, leading end users to assume a level of privacy that does not exist. If there is anything you do in private that you wouldn't do in public, I'm sure that you'll understand.

<comment><USER2> Oh yeah, the " _burglars know when you 're not at home_" scenario... I feel like maybe there's something else, but this one's definitely a standard IoT security checklist item.

<comment><USER3> Over all, private information can be incriminating, not just in terms of bullying and pedophiles. Let's say mom calls in sick. Kid snaps a picture of her mowing the lawn. Dad has a swastika banner in his trailer. Kid snaps a picture. Dad is quite seriously ill. Kid snaps pictures of him in bed every day.

Privacy breach happens, and employers, potential employers, banks, insurance investigators etc. suddenly have access to that information by name. Mom gets fired. Dad will never teach again. Dad can't get a life insurance because of his current health status.

Some of these scenarios are unlikely, and some of them might seem like net benefits to society if we squint a little. But the breach of privacy was detrimental to people, and we all do things that we don't want everyone or anyone else to know about.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The long-term vision thing - <AUTHOR> http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1989/1

<comment><USER2> Why dont they talk more about SpaceX? I think they are the coolest</comment>


We The People petition: Star Wars - <AUTHOR> https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/sign-executive-order-requiring-immediate-release-original-star-wars-trilogy-dvd-and-blu-ray-disc/YCY7mM7v

<comment><USER2> Such an executive order would probably lie outside the power of the President. The US Constitution does not give the President power do declare whatever he likes and for it to be law. Executive orders only allow the president to exercise powers congress delegated to him, or allow him to boss around his employees (the federal govt including the military).

Admittedly some presidents have declared all kinds of random things in executive orders, many of which have been followed through - it's a bit of a grey area. However this one is pretty clearly outside his power. It's probably outside Congress' power too as I imagine forcing someone to publish violates the first amendment.

I am not a lawyer. Or an American.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's stupid crap like this that will result in a some-what useful tool like the petition system to eventually be completely ignored.

</comment><comment><USER4> Petition taken down.

</comment><comment><USER5> Omg</comment>


Protestors march on Ebola centre in Sierra Leone - <AUTHOR> http://www.trust.org/item/20140726160952-f3p5c/?source=jtTheWire

<comment><USER2> Argh, I say. As if Ebola isn't bad enough, pile on a fearful and uneducated public making the situation worse. My sympathies and admiration to the people trying to get a handle on the situation over there. Public education seems to be half the battle.</comment>


Life May Have Spread Through the Galaxy Like a Plague - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/life-may-have-spread-through-galaxy-plague-180956425/

<comment><USER2> It makes for nice, clickbait-y headlines, but if life spread through the galaxy like a plague, we would have found this plague in space, on the Moon, and on Mars by now.</comment>


Should I Remove My Laptop Battery to Increase its Life? - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/242799/should_i_remove_my_laptop_battery_to_increase_its_life.html

<comment><USER2> Batteries die whether you use them or not. Modern laptop batteries don't really need any special care or cycling. I say just use and enjoy your laptop and stop worrying about the battery. When it dies, it dies, and you can go buy a new one at that time.

<comment><USER3> The amount of time and effort spend "avoiding" battery degradation might be better spend budgeting and earning for its replacement.</comment></comment>


How to Handle Big Git Repositories - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.atlassian.com/2014/05/handle-big-repositories-git/ <comment><USER2> submodules is a curse IMO. I used submodules in the pass and I hate it. Some of our projects still use submodules and I am vocal about removing the reference. My reason disliking it is that 1) I always forget to do recursive, 2) I hate to muddle my root repository with another repository inside of it, 3) I forget to update the commit, and 4) most of the time I don't need submodules. I can live with more git clone commands. Oh add one more - a lot of people use git@ rather than [https://](https://) because I don't use SSH to clone (I enable two-auth however) on my laptop, so whenever I clone one of our org's project which has sudmodule, I have to fix sudmodule config....

Personally I really dislike the fact Ansible's plugins are now sudmodules, but not up to me to decide.

The only large repo I have worked with was Firefox (mozilla-central) but I use Mercurial. Either way the speed was never an issue for me for a fresh clone - I expect a while. In git I could clone specific branch or specify a depth if I know I just need specific branch to work with. I guess when you work with real big repo like Facebook's or Google, then maybe there is a concern.

</comment><comment><USER3> Git Annex is a great way to handle large files. You can version them with git but they don't make the repository larger. And they are synced at rsync speeds. GitLab.com and GitLab EE have build in support for it [https://about.gitlab.com/2015/02/17/gitlab-annex-solves- the-...](https://about.gitlab.com/2015/02/17/gitlab-annex-solves-the-problem- of-versioning-large-binaries-with-git/)

</comment><comment><USER4> BFG Repo Cleaner is also a good tool which I don't see mentioned in the article: [https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo- cleaner/](https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/)

<comment><USER5> This looks very interesting, but I'm a little nervous about it since it would appear it operates directly on the repo internal files.

Anything you can say to make me feel better about using it?

<comment><USER6> I'm the author of the BFG, I'll try to help with that.

The BFG uses the JGit library to act on Git repository internals - JGit's the library used by Google for hosting the Android codebase, handling thousands of commits a day, and it's basically a pretty serious library. As for the BFG itself, I've used it myself on several critical repositories at the Guardian, and it's been used on many major projects around the world - here's a hundred tweets by different people who've used the BFG:

[https://twitter.com/rtyley/timelines/464727264345993216](https://twitter.com/rtyley/timelines/464727264345993216)

...and here's a comment by the head maintainer of Git itself, Junio Hamano:

[https://plus.google.com/+JunioCHamano/posts/Lm7iBwSLvoo](https://plus.google.com/+JunioCHamano/posts/Lm7iBwSLvoo)

So, I guess, most people like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We made git fit to manage big assets as well: [https://github.com/dailymuse/git-fit](https://github.com/dailymuse/git-fit)

Didn't go with git annex because, frankly, I never felt like I grasped what was going on in the background when using it.

</comment><comment><USER8> Someone should show this article to Jonathan Blow.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know if mainline git has any plans to eventually add better support for binary files? There are a number of hacks and bolt-on solutions, but it would be a lot easier to propose git for projects if it would just work as-is.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wish Atlassian's Stash supported Git Annex natively</comment>


The secret power of "I don't know" - <AUTHOR> https://jfdimag.com/the-secret-power-of-i-dont-know-392190f80abc <comment><USER2> On a slight tangent, but I wish there were more acceptance of this in general. My memory isn't brilliant so if asked a question I often won't have the answer off the cuff, but I can generally find the resources I need and once I have these put together solutions with speed and creativity, making me good at resolving certain types of problems - and terrible at others - but knowing my flaws I think I am able to target myself where I am useful. Sadly, in the competitive work environment today it seems like people would often rather bullshit than admit ignorance. I wish it weren't like this.</comment>


Ask HN: What is generally considered to be the World's first tech startup? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> The start of Silcon Valley: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Crunk and Grog's Magical Wheel Emporium"</comment>


"The mighty music business is in free fall," so Sony tries focusing on quality. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/magazine/02rubin.t.html?ex=1346385600&en=13e393b83b59e1dd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss <comment><USER3> >"The Big Red focus groups were both depressing and informative, and they confirmed what I -- and Rick -- already knew," DiDia told me afterward. "The kids all said that a) no one listens to the radio anymore, b) they mostly steal music, but they don't consider it stealing, and c) they get most of their music from iTunes on their iPod. They told us that MySpace is over, it's just not cool anymore; Facebook is still cool, but that might not last much longer; and the biggest thing in their life is word of mouth. That's how they hear about music, bands, everything."

Ouch! So they're confirming what we've all suspected for a while: social nets are fads and people outgrow them just like they outgrow pop bands.

<comment><USER4> Just to be a bit pedantic here-- social networks aren't fads, though the sites taking advantage of them may be. (I know that's what you meant, but I think it's important to differentiate network effects vs. "social networking" sites)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Odd that his self-professed technical inability extends to mixing boards and the like...standard tools of producers. Maybe that's a good thing. Take someone with a decent ear, mix it with no real capacity for muddying things up (Phil Specter-like) and I could see him "producing" quality material.

Neil Diamond...? "Hey, Neil, why don't you record songs the same way you did back before sucked so hard?" ...I could have told him that.

The Black Crows told a story about how Rubin wanted them to call themselves "Krawford Kounty Krows"...KKK LOL. Good one, Rube. He isn't universally popular.

I seriously hope that record companies aren't feeling too down on themselves. Music blows anymore, and blows hard. I don't know if it's the long-predicted exhaustion of good melodies, or just the distraction of new media, or what. The fact that _so many_ people listen to "rap" suggests lead in the water as much as anything else, so what can you say?

Here follow a few albums from 1969. It's hard to imagine a time when so much great material is being produced. When I hear a decent song these days, I'm absolutely shocked.

Abbey Road - The Beatles

Blood Sweat & Tears - Blood, Sweat & Tears

Crosby, Stills & Nash - Crosby, Stills & Nash

Green River, Bayou Country, Willy and the Poor Boys - Creedence Clearwater Revival

Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin II - Led Zeppelin

Let It Bleed - The Rolling Stones

Tommy - The Who

<comment><USER6> What are your sources for dicsovering new music? I certainly know good music from after 69, but in recent years I have been slacking in my research. I don't think it would be fair to judge current music just by the stuff you get to hear on MTV or radio.

<comment><USER7> I usually discover new music by 'accident'. For example, on radioblogclub.com you can search for artists or songs you know and you end up with a playlist you can listen to online. After you've listened to what you were looking for, you can keep listening the playlist and discover similar stuff.

Web radios are great, too. A favorite of mine is www.scenemusic.net (old- school demoscene music).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The best creative leaders are always specifically opinionated and decisive. It tends to build a mystique around them, but it's what people want, even need, to hear. If you asked for a critique from a creative leader you respect, you want to hear specific, decisive feedback. Artists of all kinds are dying for that kind of interaction. Remember the "More Cowbell" skit?

When the system works, leaders improve the works they're responsible for through expert criticism. When it goes wrong, critics who are not responsible or responsible parties who have bad taste fill the creative leadership vacuum with disastrous results.

I think this article shows how desperately large creative enterprises need outsize creative leaders. Not managers, and not business guys who "let the artist do their thing." Artists can do their thing on their own, but if an artist is a part of a large company, that needs to work for them and help improve their work.

[http://zachbaker.com/articles/2007/09/03/exploring- creative-...](http://zachbaker.com/articles/2007/09/03/exploring-creative- leadership-with-rick-rubin)

</comment><comment><USER9> i've been thinking about this issue for a long time, because some people are going to get rich from this. whenever an old industry is in decline, a new one is about to spring up in its place. ibm's downfall was microsoft's windfall.

so, let's see who's made a dent so far. the original napster, which brought the contours of the new era into sharp focus. too bad their "business model" was based on cold-blooded straight-up theivery. mp3.com was an interesting player for awhile; a bunch of artists made a good living just from being popular on that site. itunes of course, but apple is having a tough time of it because the dinosaur label execs won't get the hell out of the way.

what's next? small boutique "record labels" that distribute their artists' records online for little or no money, and expect the bands to make money through touring and t-shirts? i wish i could see the future more clearly on this.

<comment><USER10> MySpace. MySpace got popular largely through small independent bands that used it to stay in close touch with their fans. It's still one of the best places to go if you're a struggling artist with a small but devoted fanbase.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good article. Seems like a good guy. But I think their problems are so deep and fundamental (as in their entire business model is broken) that his magic ears won't really help.

</comment><comment><USER12> I really liked that article, and it really got me thinking about the software industry as well.

If you liked this article, there are a couple of good articles you might want to read (just use google, easy to find them).

1\. "The way the music died" - this was a PBS show about the decline of the music industry. One theory advanced is that as lawyers and accountants (without much real interest in music) took over the studios, the product suffered. It took a while, but eventually, that caught up with the industry.

2\. A salon.com article titled: "the greatest week in rock in history" - <USER2> a week that a truly remarkable line-up of top-selling albums. It's amazing that this much talent was compressed into the same moment in history.

Anyway, the reason I dig reading about this is that it is a cautionary tale for the technology industry. It's very tempting to put suits in charge of software, but in the end, it tends to fail.

The main difference: the music industry had such a good catalog of existing product (a led zeppelin album is still good to listen to today) that they could limp along without innovating for quite some time. Whereas most software companies that stop innovating will be dead quickly. Yeah, monopoly positions can hold reality at bay for a while, but reality always wins in the end.

</comment><comment><USER13> Last FM (<http://www.last.fm/>) Has a great search tool where you can enter a band you like and it will suggest other new artists that you may enjoy listening to. Its pretty spot on and I've found a few new groups from the several times i've tried it. Its user driven so its virtual word of mouth.

<comment><USER14> I particularly like the "neighbors" feature, which shows you people who have similar tastes as you. You can then see what they're listening to that you aren't. Also PureVolume (<http://purevolume.com>) is excellent for listening to independent music.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What would be great would be to have a kind of meta store for MP3s, so that small startups could create online music shops without all the legal problems.

<comment><USER4> Sort of like this? <http://www.snocap.com/>

<comment><USER6> I am not sure, it sounds more like a solution to sell your own music? Unless you can become a retailer somehow? What I mean is something that allows you to create an alternative to iTunes and sell popular music.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen Their lawyers can't stop the business model from dying completely. I guess artists will have to make money off touring, which is much more profitable today than it was before. It used to be that artists toured at a loss to promote their album sales; now they won't make any money distributing their music in order to profit off concerts.

</comment><comment><USER15> How come Rhapsody isn't the solution to all their problems? The price is low enough that it isn't worth it for most people to go to the trouble of stealing the music. Portability is an issue, but maybe that's solvable or has been addressed already.

<comment><USER9> it seems like an option for casual music listeners, at best. once you stop paying, your music is gone. i don't want to have that kind of relationship with any company, because sooner or later, their interests and mine will not be aligned anymore.

personally i own over 700 cds and 300 vinyl lps. i'm not letting anybody else be in charge of my music collection. but then i'm an oddball, so i can't be called representative.

<comment><USER15> But, with Rhapsody, you don't have an equity interest in the music to begin with. The whole investment is the intellectual one in your playlist, which you can keep. At worst, if you discontinue Rhapsody, you could go and buy the music to replicate your playlist if you feel the need to own it.

I would be more concerned about the potential obsolescence of my investment in music in a physical medium or a particular file format.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Pretentious prima donna (Rubin) swoops in to save the day so rich assholes whose idea of business model improvement is fucking over artists further (50% of touring revenues?!) can keep on being blind morons. Yawn.

</comment><comment><USER17> Rick Rubin is a musical mastermind; that's clear. But no indications yet about whether this strategy's going to work out for the music industry.</comment>


Amaze project aims to take 3D printing 'into metal age' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24528306 <comment><USER2> There are tons of commercial solutions that allow 3D printing of full-metal parts, the 'metal age' for 3D printing happened a long time ago.

It's mostly a matter of price point, can you do it cheaply enough to compete with other processes (small scale casting is expensive too). Large volume metal parts are as a rule cast (which technically is an additive process too) and then the rough part is reworked a bit.

The niche for 3D printed metal parts is an interesting intersection between turn around time, strength of the resulting part, precision and capital investment to buy a printer (or to be able to rent one). In the end it's all economics.

</comment><comment><USER3> _" Additive manufacturing (or "3D printing") has already revolutionised the design of plastic products."_

Well additive metal manufacturing is not new [1] and already revolutionized the design of metal products. The Amaze project is just joining forces to think out new designed components.

[1] Example: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zApmGFDA6ow](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zApmGFDA6ow)

Edit: There are 3 methods (I know of) for 3D metal printing:

      Metal powder is fused with a laser, layer by layer.
      Metal powder is sprayed at the focal point of a laser and fused / added to the object.
      A ceramic mold is 3D printed and molten metal is cast into the mold.

<comment><USER4> You can also use "lost wax" casting (or variations on same) with 3D printing: build the positive model in wax or similar material, plaster/sand around model, melt/vaporize positive material in furnace, and then cast into mold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Because a plastic 3d printed gun wasn't dangerous enough...

This would be really cool but kind of goes with the point made by the author of

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6551278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6551278)

<comment><USER6> Guns are not hard to make.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDgHi_9_LX0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDgHi_9_LX0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is this announcement about, exactly? 3D printing with metal has been around for quite a while.

The porosity problems mentioned in the article have been solved. The machines from EOS are good enough to print small rocket chambers.

</comment><comment><USER8> _Using traditional casting techniques often wastes precious source material. Additive manufacturing - building parts up layer-on-layer from 3D digital data - produces almost "zero waste". "To produce one kilo of metal, you use one kilo of metal - not 20 kilos," says Esa's Franco Ongaro._

I don't understand. What traditional casting technique makes 95% of your metal unusable?</comment>


18% rebound for Apple - <AUTHOR> http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=aapl+april+18+2013+-+may+7+2013 <comment><USER2> I actually wrote an article on Apple stock movement history. Basically, Apple tends to have this significant rallies, followed by notable retracements between 50% - 61.8%. <http://thetechblock.com/apple-stock-movement-history>

<comment><USER3> Very iOS unfriendly - can't pinch zoom</comment></comment>


Important Things to Remember When Coding - jj-abram https://medium.com/@cecilycarver/things-i-wish-someone-had-told-me-when-i-was-learning-how-to-code-565fc9dcb329

<comment><AUTHOR> Good article - it's funny how easy it is to forget these points.

"Worrying about "geek cred" will slowly kill you"

This one rang particularly true as I easily overlook any successes I've had because they're rarely made public. The ones that make it to the light of day are never what I consider my best work. I'll see more popular programmers, lament my relative obscurity and then the whole Impostor Syndrome will flare up and nearly stop me in my tracks.

It's such a fantastic feeling to have leaned to say "meh, fuck it" and focus on what I love about my vocation.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is my favourite statement, really hits home.

> I've found that a big difference between new coders and experienced coders > is faith: faith that things are going wrong for a logical and discoverable > reason, faith that problems are fixable, faith that there is a way to > accomplish the goal. The path from "not working" to "working" might not be > obvious, but with patience you can usually find it.

<comment><USER3> "It's always something." (as opposed to being mystically causeless) is a catch-phrase of mine when assisting new coders. I usually pull it out again _after_ we find the mystery bug to reinforce the memory that mystery bugs are solvable.

In my many years of coding, I can't count the number of times that completely baffling bugs have eventually been traced down to errors that were concrete, understandable and usually embodied in just a tiny amount of erroneous code. My many, many experiences with this outcome gives me the confidence to keep digging even when I have no clue where to look. Without those experiences, what I do every day would seem like an unending stream of hopeless situations. That's why it's important to share that confidence with new coders --to help prevent them from failing due to despair just long enough for them to succeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If I wrote an article with the same title I would only include one thing to remember when coding and that is to write code with the expectation that others will have to read your code. (This of course assumes you're not an ass who wants to make people's lives more difficult!)

<comment><USER5> I find that statement to generally sound good, but there are lots of nasty details that are often overlooked. Taken to it's extreme, it leads to overly commented code that tries to explain to non-programmers what a program is doing. I find my time better spent than doing that for all code I write. Then there's the question of who the expected reader is? Some future version of you? Some coworker or successor in the same field, expected to be at relatively the same level in the relevant areas? Some beginner in those some fields. A programmer without experience in the relevant areas, or not yet comfortable in the chosen language and able to understand it's idiomatic usage?

Don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of the concept, I just find that most people seem to put very little thought into what it means in practice.

<comment><USER6> "Others will have to read your code"

Comments are not "code". Your code should, when written impossibly well, explain itself through variables, function names and composition. Better code equals less comments needed.

<comment><USER5> I think this is exactly the sort of position that leads to problems later when people find their implicit assumptions don't match with those of others.

I can write perfectly idiomatic code in Perl, using map, grep, simple postconditionals, taking advantage of built in functions that topicalize, knowledge of when items are passed by reference or copy (or a sort of alias), and the code will be very succinct and readable to Perl programmers. Should I forego some of that to make the code more readable to general programmers? Doing so will necessarily make the code slightly less readable to those expecting idiomatic Perl.

I'm not espousing one way over the other, just that it should be thought about with regard to the purpose of the code, who owns it, and who will be looking at it in the future. The exact answer may differ in different situations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't know, I kind of stopped reading when the author said that understanding pointers and recursion makes someone gifted in programming. Those are really just fundamentals.

<comment><USER8> First of all, the author did not say she believed that, she argued that Joel Spolsky did. I'm going to respond to it anyway because I think a lot of people do think pointers and recursion separate the boys from the men[0].

In an era of coding bootcamps that claim to compress a 4-year CS degree into 4-10 weeks of adrenaline-fueled CSS/HTML/JS/Ruby memorization, and deem their graduates programmers, it seems like many people follow that sentiment.

I believe this kind of thinking is not so much harmful as laughable - in my experience studying programming has been an exercise in learning about the existence of more and more complex topics I don't understand yet. First it was OOP, then design patterns, then functional programming, and now I'm glancing over the horizon towards type theory, language theory, etc.

Getting pointers and recursion are very, very, early steps (though hard ones!) on a long journey.

[0] s/boys/girls s/men/women

<comment><USER7> Well I'm not from a web programming background, I started with game programming in C. Maybe since web is so design heavy it doesn't matter if you don't understand what I would consider fundamentals.

<comment><USER9> I worked with C, C++, and assembly -- and others -- before picking up web programming. They're just different, but people still insist on getting their egos involved anyway.

With OS and applications programming, you typically have to know a handful of concepts, but you have to know them really well. With web programming, you typically have to know _a lot_ \-- it can be an obnoxiously broad field of practice -- but you don't have to know it all perfectly well. CSS or JS or PHP or Python or Ruby or what-have-you generally immediately works or doesn't work, you generally don't encounter those annoying null ptr situations.

I doubt there are a lot of C programmers that could do web development (front and back end) very well. I doubt there are a lot of web developers that could do OS development very well.

But it's all just programming.

All of software development would be a hell of a lot better environment if people would quit waving their egos around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some really cool points on getting started. Coding is hard and "coders" (like me) take getting started for granted. Worse, for new coders, it can sometimes feel like you need to jump to the top of the mountain rather than taking it one step at a time.

In the past, I found the best methods of picking up coding or new languages is to work on a small multi day/week project, and preferably with a friend that's just as lost as you are. It's great cause you'll have a support system in place and having two brains thinking about the same problems, which helps tremendously when treading carefully - or spontaneously (up to you :)

</comment><comment><USER11> good post, the points are feel-good/inspiring. Suprised this didn't get posted earlier (noticed it's a year old!) oh wait, it did 4 months ago but no one noticed ..hmph

</comment><comment><USER12> Great post. Inspiring.</comment>


Unlawful conveyance of fuel - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/12/florida-pastor-terry-jones-qurans

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't agree with the actions of the Pastor but the creative use of " unlawful conveyance of fuel" had me bemused.</comment>