The Next Recession Will Be About Sovereign Debt - <AUTHOR> https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/the-next-recession-whenever-it-comes-will-be-about-sovereign-debt <comment><USER2> >What made the recession in 2008 the Great Recession was the failure of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to prevent Lehman Brothers from collapsing.

I'm not sure that's true - what made it big was the epic borrowing to buy property that pushed up prices to record levels before hand. The Lehman thing was just the pin that popped the bubble. It was going to burst big one day because of the size of the thing.

It makes you doubt the rest of the reasoning if the first sentence is incorrect.

<comment><AUTHOR> Respectfully, I think that Lehman brothers was a major part of why the great recession was the great recession. I'll quote economist Allen binder:

People argue that if it wasn't Lehman Brothers it would have been something else," …."I don't buy that. I don't mean everything would have been great if we had bailed out Lehman. We were in a financial crisis before Lehman. But it had a shock value that just caused everything to fall off a cliff. If you look at data on almost anything – consumer spending, investment spending, car sales, employment – it just drops off the table at Lehman Brothers and I don't think we needed to have that.

<comment><USER3> He seems to be saying that if we had known what was going to happen before it happened, we would have been able to prevent it from happening. Well, maybe. But isn't that like saying "if the French had defended the Ardennes, they would have stayed in the war much longer"? That seems like a reasonable guess (as does "rescuing Lehman could have taken the bite out of the Great Recession") but I would say that, actually, no one knows what would have happened in these imaginary scenarios.

The broader point here is that events like Lehman's collapse and its aftermath (or the invasion of France) are essentially defined by their unpredictability. If we could predict them, they wouldn't even be _events_.

And even if, somehow, these events were predictable, does anyone really think that economists have some theory that lets them make decisions like "who to bail out" or answer questions like "what will the consequences will be if they don't bail X out?" I believe that economists make better calls than a man on the street (me), but I have my doubts.

<comment><USER4> > The broader point here is that events like Lehman's collapse and its > aftermath (or the invasion of France) are essentially defined by their > unpredictability.

Unpredictability is a dangerous word because it has two meanings here.

On the one hand, you are using it to mean nobody could possibly know ahead of time that it would be Lehman and even if they were told that fact it would still have been impossible to pick the date (or the year for that matter). Nobody could argue.

On the other hand, billions to trillions of dollars of wealth that everyone thought existed turned out not to be there. It didn't disappear; it was discovered in the financial crisis that it never existed and the crisis was when that fact became uncontroversial in the mind of the general money manager.

That part was clearly predictable in an emperor-has-no-clothes fashion and probably years in advance as well. It seems highly likely that if the people with power didn't see it shaping up then they were choosing not to see. Much like government debt-to-GDP in today's article. The people profiting cheer- lead bad long term decisions and everyone else sits quiet hoping that they won't have to pay for it. Which would be fine if the responsible people were made to pay in the end, but 2008 showed that not to be the case; taxpayers stepped in. The financial bloodbath was not matched by an equal sack-everyone- involved-and-bankrupt-the-investment-banks bloodbath of sufficient magnitude. A failure like that should have reamed out the entire sector; if they weren't ready for it replace them with new blood and ideas.

I suppose the point I want to make is that there is a frame here that 'saving Lehman' would have been a win. It wouldn't be a win. They were complicit in mis-allocating resources; 'saving' them just gives them more time to redirect real effort into bad causes, and makes the final reckoning more painful when people need to call on real resources that turn out not to be there. The books were misleading; protecting them would just have let more people make bad decisions based on misleading figures. Markets work best when people don't do that, and I understate by an order of magnitude or two when I say that.

<comment><USER3> > On the other hand, billions to trillions of dollars of wealth that everyone > thought existed turned out not to be there. It didn't disappear; it was > discovered in the financial crisis that it never existed and the crisis was > when that fact became uncontroversial in the mind of the general money > manager.

> That part was clearly predictable in an emperor-has-no-clothes fashion and > probably years in advance as well. It seems highly likely that if the people > with power didn't see it shaping up then they were choosing not to see.

I don't think it was predictable in any useful sense. First, I don't think anyone knew that (or when) "the general money manager" would "become aware of the facts". Second, I don't think anyone knew that would happen _if_ they became aware of the facts.

So maybe it was predictable in a "there will definitely be a recession...sometime" sense, but that's not helpful.

Even if some people did identify "billions to trillions of missing wealth" and predict the crisis (and apparently some people did), there wasn't any way to know which of those predictions was correct. There is no one who predicts things who is always right and there is no agreed-upon theory to tell us when these things are going to happen before they happen with any precision.

To put it another way: there are smart people who predict financial crises that never happen all the time.

> I suppose the point I want to make is that there is a frame here that > 'saving Lehman' would have been a win. It wouldn't be a win. They were > complicit in mis-allocating resources; 'saving' them just gives them more > time to redirect real effort into bad causes, and makes the final reckoning > more painful when people need to call on real resources that turn out not to > be there. The books were misleading; protecting them would just have let > more people make bad decisions based on misleading figures. Markets work > best when people don't do that, and I understate by an order of magnitude or > two when I say that.

This is a different argument. I guess there are two things to worry about:

1\. Making the responsible parties pay for their malfeasance (justice)

2\. Making decisions that will benefit the economy (pragmatism)

It's entirely possible that bailouts ticked the second box but not the first. But, as you argue, in the long run, not bailing out the lenders might tick both boxes because it will teach them a lesson. However, that's a hard sell for Americans living between 2008 and 2012, who probably _did_ benefit from the bailouts, even if they were unjust and even those bailouts only deferred some larger, inevitable crisis.

I don't envy the people who have to make these decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps we all should have gone the route of Iceland in 2009 — let all the banks fail, endure ferocious poverty for 5 or so years, but in that time cultivate a rich humanity that results in:

\- peacefully firing the entire government

\- crowdsourcing a new constitution with the help of the Internet

\- putting the white collar criminals in corrections where they belong (instead of giving them $25M bonuses)

\- getting women on equal footing in government and business leadership

— transitioning to 100% green energy

Seems the global economy tried to vomit up all the banksters and corporate corruption but the governments all took a pill to suppress the purge and stay ill.

<comment><USER6> It's absurd that such a crucial function of society -- control of the money supply and management of debt -- falls on the hands of an unelected, unaccountable, largely hereditary elite. Yet nobody talks about this, when the solution is obvious and in plain view of all: democratise banking.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure people are knowledgeable enough to know if someone is competent to be a banker. How could such election not ending as a populist race.

<comment><USER8> Why will democratization lead to demagogues?

The most popular _ideas_ should win, not the most popular people. We have no real need to require representation anymore, we should have a fully auditable, direct democracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >>"[..] but it has allowed deeply indebted nations like Greece, Japan, and Italy to service their debts."

Anyone that put Japan, Italy and Greece in the same page and fail to point that Japan is using its own currency, and the other two are not, don't understand what he is talking about.

>>" [..] if the BOJ or the ECB was to simply buy bonds directly from the treasury without removing an equivalent amount from circulation by holding it as reserves it would be massively inflationary. [..]"

Why it would be "massively inflationary"? He fail to tell us.

>>" As tax revenues fall, debt to GDP ratios will rise. Rating agencies will downgrade nations debt and investors will demand higher interest rates to compensate for the risk. "

Why this has not happened to Japan already? They have been done this for years and years.

Edit - recommended lecture: "Building bank reserves is not inflationary" (1)

1 - [http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=6624](http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=6624)

<comment><AUTHOR> Japan, Italy, and Greece are in the same category of heavily indebted countries as a percentage of their GDP. But, you're absolutely correct that a key difference between these countries is that Japan controls its own currency (unlike Italy and Greece).

Having a central bank by bonds directly from the treasury is the very definition of monetization. It would add a substantial amount of currency to the economy and is very different from what is happening with QE.

As for how Japan has been able to build up debt to their levels without seeing bond yields rise and sparking a crisis - it's because the Bank Of Japan has used just about every outstanding government bond for QE. But they Japanese in particular are reaching the limit of QE. I go more into this argument here: [https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/quantitative-easing- ha...](https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/quantitative-easing-has- prevented-a-debt-crisis-but-we-re-reaching-the-physical-limits-of-qe)

<comment><USER9> If I understand you correctly, your argument is that QE is not inflationary because the banks don't have bonds in their balance that previously they had, instead they have reserves.

First, reserves are not inflationary (1). The quantity of reserves in the system is not important if that money is keep in the Central Bank and it's not spent. As the current QE exercise has show, adding reserves to the system don't make firms and households ask for more credit. If the real economy don't want to spend, you can add all the reserves that you want and nothing will happen (except lowering the interest rate that it's already at minumum).

Now, fiscal policy, it's the right tool if you want to stimulate the economy, but, for political reasons, it's not done.

Second, please, explain through what mechanism banks don't owning a quantity of bonds equivalent to the reserves in the system will create inflation. All the point of selling bonds (by the central bank to the banks) is to retire reserves from the system.

Monetization of the debt don't cause inflation. What causes inflation is spending in the economy. That it's precisely what the politics in, for instance, the Euro-area refuse to do.

(1) - [http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=6624](http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=6624)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think we agree that QE is not inflationary (and obviously despite years of QE inflation is low)

However, monetization if the debt (which is very different from QE) is definitely inflationary. Would you suggest that every country could simply print fresh currency and pay off the national debt without causing inflation?

<comment><USER9> Please, note that I'm not saying that QE it's not inflationary (it's not), I'm making a more general statement: adding reserves to the bank system it's not inflationary.

You probably agree with me that what create inflation is the spending in the economy.

One thing is the public deficit and another is the public debt. The deficit happens when the government spend in the economy. If the government (or the private sector) spend too much in the economy inflation will happen. The other way inflation can happen is by some kind of supply shock.

The public debt is just the accumulated of the money that has been already spent in the economy. So, the public debt can't be inflationary. That money is already in the economy!

Paying the public debt it's just not emitting new debt and waiting until all the debt mature.

Could that be done (if we forget for a moment the rules currently in place)?

Yes, the government just could spend what they need without emitting bonds. The real restrictions in the government spending would be the same: don't spend more than the economy can provide or you will get inflation.

The public debt number is basically irrelevant. This is true for countries with its own currency and the debt denominated in its own currency, otherwise the issue it's very different.

We are not going to see a crisis created by a public debt problem of countries that have their own currency, but the public debt, of the countries in the Euro, is a good candidate for the source of the next crisis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Already the BOJ has begun to run out of eligible bonds to buy - or swap > really - for reserves at the central bank. Ben Bernanke noted in late 2016 > that "…constraints on the availability of JGBs [Japanese Government Bonds] > were seen in many quarters as limiting the BOJ's ability to maintain its > easy policies beyond the next year or two." Japan is very close to > purchasing all of the outstanding JGBs - at which point it will not be able > to continue its QE program.

Japan has truly been the pioneer here. Its stock market went supernova first. It experienced deflation first. It implemented QE first. At each stage, Japan showed the rest of the world how this descent from free markets into something else works.

Japan was also the first industrialized country to realize the vast potential of direct stock purchases by the central bank. Today, the BOJ is a major shareholder of Japanese stocks:

> The BOJ held over 28 trillion yen ($250 billion) in exchange-traded funds as > of the end of March [2019] -- 4.7% of the total market capitalization of the > first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

> ...

> The BOJ has likely also become the top shareholder in 23 companies, > including Nidec, Fanuc and Omron, through its ETF holdings. It was among the > top 10 for 49.7% of all Tokyo-listed enterprises at the end of March.

[https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Bank-of-Japan-to- be...](https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Bank-of-Japan-to-be-top- shareholder-of-Japan-stocks)

There's always money in the banana stand.

<comment><USER11> Isn't that a slippery slope? If you extrapolate, the market gets used to easy money from the central banks and we end up with most companies being owned by the central banks. Price discovery and risk get totally screwed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The first one in the line is Argentina, which is about to default the biggest loan the IMF ever gave.

Argentina defaulting would not affect any other countries significantly: but it holds over 60% of IMF's financial assets and has the will to default on this debt.

The IMF losing more than half its holdings means that there wouldn't be a lender of last resort for sovereign debt issues.

</comment><comment><USER13> One aspect the article doesn't cover is that since Japans has been doing this for decades they have effective run out the clock on QE.

BOJ has been buying ETFs for so long they are the majority of shareholders in a large percentage of stocks in Japan. I don't think you can do that with swaps so I am pretty sure they had to "print" money to do that.

Additionally I have heard that ECB buys corp bonds. Apple can go over to Europe whenever it wants and sell a couple Billion in debt and it will be bought immediately.

The question is when does it pop?

</comment><comment><USER14> The last financial crisis had a large sovereign debt element - but only in those countries where a "bailin" of the local banking industry was inconcievable and there was a bailout transfer instead.

If you want to look at debt, look at yields; just the other day we were discussing negative yield bonds in some Western countries. You can't have a sovereign debt crisis and negative yields in the same country at the same time!

The most obvious trigger event for the next global recession is sovereign idiocy. The UK's own prediction documents for no-deal Brexit show 5-10% GDP loss within a year or so. The war in Syria rumbles on. The wave of tit-for-tat tanker seizures could continue. Or the trade war with China could escalate.

<comment><USER15> > If you want to look at debt, look at yields; just the other day we were > discussing negative yield bonds in some Western countries. You can't have a > sovereign debt crisis and negative yields in the same country at the same > time!

I mostly agree with you. But I seem to recall reading that US Treasury auctions had been recently failing, and only appeared not to fail because the dealers stepped in and bought the rest of the bonds. That's what they're supposed to do in that situation, but in a normal auction, they don't have to.

So I worry that all is not as it appears in the bond markets, and therefore that your logic might not work. In particular, it might not work for long, because the bond dealers can't keep buying half the issues for long - especially not at the rate the US is having to issue bonds to fund the deficit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There are a few candidates for a crisis, sovereign debt is one. At this point corporate debt is no less scary.

My guess is it won't be about one specific thing, because there are so many interlinked ways for things to jack up at this point.

</comment><comment><USER17> Negative yields are a pretty strong indicator the people with skin in the game aren't worried about sovereign debt.

What might kick off the recession will be the austerity measures countries impose as an over-reaction to debt worries.

</comment><comment><USER18> > What made the recession in 2008 the Great Recession was the failure of the > Federal Reserve and the Treasury to prevent Lehman Brothers from collapsing. > Allowing the collapse of an institution that was too big to fail is what > started…

One could argue that the problem started with the market believing there were such things as an institution too big to fail… Or maybe even earlier, when bankers decided they could lend money to any insolvent guy because the risk was going to be born by others through CDS…

</comment><comment><USER19> Blackrock is also running a series: "Dealing with the next downturn"

[https://www.blackrockblog.com/2019/08/20/how-central- banks-m...](https://www.blackrockblog.com/2019/08/20/how-central-banks-might- deal-with-the-next-downturn/)

Direct stimulus (through universal basic income) may emerge as the best, if not only, innovation for stabilizing aggregate consumer demand.

<comment><USER20> I always wondered why the folks doing QE didnt pump money into the people letting them stimulate the economy by spending / paying their bills.

Banks still end up with the money but people would not be screwed quite so during the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This site and the links per country makes for interesting follow up reading: [https://commodity.com/debt-clock/](https://commodity.com/debt-clock/)

</comment><comment><USER22> How can an individual investor profit from the coming sovereign debt crisis?

<comment><USER12> Credit Default Swaps.

<comment><USER15> If the counterparty survives...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The next recession will be caused by poor crop yields due to environmental destruction. It will also cause famines and wars globally.

</comment><comment><USER24> Every recession in history has been caused by two things: an overreaction by the feds, or a screw up by wall street. Market crash in the 80s was because the feds spiked the interest rate, dot com bust was because wall street didn't do their due diligence.

Not saying that the upcoming recession will be caused by one of these things, just that I doubt sovereign debt has the power (like overreactions or financial mishaps) to move global markets.

</comment><comment><USER25> If we reach the point where global stability depends on whether or not debt by almost every first world country can be paid or not, we will be in a situation where we have to evaluate whether or not keeping that debt around is worth the risk of total economic collapse.

Consider - each country can either: a) mutually agree to cancel all debt (or some large portion to mitigate the situation, say 50%) or, b) continue to demand the debt, thus perpetuating the downward spiral of the global economy, thus ushering in an era of civil unrest and large civilizational changes.

I'm not trying to sound all doom and gloom, but I think a large part of the economy is very much "pretend money" that works fine with high levels of productivity and economic output, but can very much just be done away with if the alternative is total collapse.

The GFC wasn't a total collapse. It was just the loss of large amounts of profit for some large bankers. This had severe consequences for some people (mortgage foreclosures, jobs etc), but wasn't on the scale this article describes, or anywhere close.

It's a bit like the worries people (rightfully) have around foreign ownership of land, especially farmland. Yeah it's not ideal now, but you think private property laws will be upheld in war time? If a country ever goes to war with say, China, (a large owner of foreign farmland), you can bet that country will simply seize it all and repurpose it for the war effort before you can say "world war 3". Private property is nice on paper, but when push comes to shove it's just that - paper. Easily rewriten.

<comment><USER26> > each country can either: a) mutually agree to cancel all debt

Sovereign debt doesn't mean that countries owe money to each other. Most of the debt is owed to private investors (banks, funds, etc).

<comment><USER27> And what gives private banks freedom to operate?

<comment><USER25> Bingo. You think the government will standby and watch the world economy collapse because some investment bank won't cancel their debt, or uphold our end of the deal to mutually cancel debt? Send in military, seize all assets, wipe the records. Yes, it's a dystopia, and there will be sociatal and economic consequences. But the alternative is far worse.

I think that the larger the world economies get, the closer we get to totalitarian policy being the only thing that works to mitigate disaster. Think economic collapse, climate change, viral epidemics. None can be solved by individual initiative, slow moving government policy, etc. They require large scale, immediate, dictorial action by large nation states.

<comment><USER14> > totalitarian policy being the only thing that works to mitigate disaster

Totalitarian policy _is_ a disaster all its own.

<comment><USER28> You are right, and it is also the case that totalitarian policy can be implemented in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. It can be a last resort measure to save a society (e.g., when the UK canceled elections to deal with the Nazi threat).

More importantly: it is perfectly possible to implement totalitarian policy _while_ maintaining the aesthetics of freedom. There is a famous book about this, 1984 something... Sorry for the cliché, but here we are.

Let's say, for example, that you convince the population of the most powerful economy on earth that they are the most free, most amazing society ever, while the rest of the developed world actually enjoys affordable health care and vacation time. Meanwhile, most of your citizens not only spend the vast amount of their time in an endless rat race that only benefits economically the top .001%, send their sons and daughters to stupid wars, while aggressively _demanding_ the continuation of this state of affairs.

Another important trick to maintaining this state of affairs is to create very violent political debate about a very narrow and irrelevant set of topics (e.g. bullshit topics such as "cultural marxism", "red pill", "cucks and soyboys", "cultural appropriation", the corrupt blue guy vs the corrupt red gal... you get the picture).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> You can feel the fatigue with central banks all around the world. It's obvious this small group of people shouldn't hold this power and it's clear they have no idea what they're doing and are just moving levers like our lives are their video games.

This will not manifest as a revision of the system but rather the changing of who is pulling those levers. The funny money will go to Workers not Bankers and Shareholders and Homeowners next decade (which starts in four months btw!)</comment>


Nektra and VMware are Collaborating to Simplify Application Virtualization - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nektra.com/main/2013/11/05/nektra-and-vmware-are-collaborating-to-simplify-application-virtualization-packaging/

<comment><AUTHOR> More on the hot market of application virtualization here:

\- The Virtualization of Everything: Virtualization Tech Takes $744M Across 88 Deals in the Last Year: [http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/trends/virtualization- venture...](http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/trends/virtualization-venture- capital-financing-trends)

\- In 5 Years Microsoft Will Be The Market's Most Valuable Company: [http://www.businessinsider.com/longboard-microsoft-slide- dec...](http://www.businessinsider.com/longboard-microsoft-slide- deck-2013-10?op=1#ixzz2kR3nxgCz)

</comment><comment><USER2> I have been packaging applications for 2 years with ThinApp and that video was amazing! Working within a VDI environment application delivery is the part that seems to be the afterthought. I have seen many instances where capturing an app given certain requirements (like interaction with other apps) is just not possible. This may have just made my whole morning.

</comment><comment><USER2> Yeah...might need to wait for the next couple of versions before it works as slick as in that video.</comment>


'One last chance' to get Brexit done, says May - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-48357017 <comment><USER2> If I were an MP, I wouldn't invite May to future cookouts.

 _" No, no, no...we need to have_ another _vote to decide if we 're using St. Louis ribs or spare ribs."_</comment>


Show HN: Photobrix, lego mosaics - <AUTHOR> http://photobrix.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> I spent a while on and off again putting this together with a friend. We were featured on BBC Click today which was completely unexpected; yesterday the server it was on totally died and I had to get it setup elsewhere - which we managed to do just in time.

Lots of stuff we still have to do or have in a semi-finished state in the background. We were thinking of charging for the instructions but it's really more something 'fun' than a business idea for us. There's a few affiliate links but they dont really bring in anything (at least so far they dont).

I toyed with the idea of having a login but in the end just made it completely open. We have some social auth added to let you save your outputs to your own account but that's not yet live.

We're using django with imagemagick doing the background bits. I've been thinking of trying out graphicmagick instead here.

One thing I'd love to do is integrate it into the lego site itself so you can just order the correct bricks but this doesn't seem to be possible as yet.</comment>


Confirmed: Live Video On YouTube This Year - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/29/confirmed-live-video-on-youtube-this-year/ <comment><USER2> I posted three weeks ago about another start-up doing this already ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=112421> ) and it got no response.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are already lots of startups that do livevideo, and here youtube is poised to take on all of them.</comment></comment>


Can AI make the gender gap at work disappear? - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90250182/this-ai-platform-aims-to-close-the-gender-gap-in-the-workforce <comment><USER2> Url changed from [https://amp-fastcompany- com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.fastc...](https://amp-fastcompany- com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.fastcompany.com/90250182/this-ai-platform-aims- to-close-the-gender-gap-in-the-workforce), which points to this.</comment>


How Technology Is Destroying Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/

<comment><USER2> The problem is not technology.

The problem is that technology is being centralized by a few owners. A computer in every pocket, 3d printers and CNC machines are very near to us.

Companies grow bigger and bigger, not because they are more efficient, on the contrary, but because they could black mail society to sustain it. Too big too fail became the motto of the new era, banks and industry companies so inefficient with huge losses that nobody could touch it without breaking society itself.

Those companies had done well, who needs to make cars when you can take $50 billion by the government to speculate in the stock market? A stock market that is fueled by printing dollars by a central bank(inflating and raising taxes of millions people).

Don't make me started with software patents in order for a few to own all ideas. Society is collapsing to sustain unproductive parasites.

It will have to get worse before it gets better.

<comment><USER3> Technology could be making EVERYONE's lives better and decrease all of our work hours, however the average American's work hours are not decreased because instead of using technology to make everyone's work easier, the rich guy uses tech to replace workers and pockets the profits from that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That technology destroys more jobs than it creates can only be news to economists. Any one of us has put far more than one other person out of work by automating their data entry or analysis jobs.

This essay on four possible futures along the axes of scarcity and equality is highly relevant.

[http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four- futures/](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/)

Does a post-scarcity economy, the sort implied by democratizing production via 3D printers and cheap energy, necessarily imply a more equal society or can the rentier class find a way to extract profits via patents and intellectual property?

Conversely, if we end up constrained by natural resources — energy, feedstocks, labor, etc. — is it even possible to move to a more equal society?

</comment><comment><USER5> While I didn't quite read this article (I skimmed), I talk (read argue) about this subject very often with some friends.

I think in the end, the inventor of a technology is somewhat responsible for figuring out what the people he/she will displace can do.

For example, if I'm about to put a whole industry out of work ('disrupt'ing it), I think it would be reasonably responsible for me to offer training or some kind of conversion for the workers of that industry (so they can use /license the tool I have made).

<comment> loup-vaillant You're assuming that displaced people should, or need to, work. Also, that they _can_ work.

I'd say, not necessarily.

Think about the impending disappearance of professional driving. Automation may not be total, but it will probably reach a point where a single human for 50+ trucks is enough (just have the truck communicate with its command centre). So basically, the professional driving profession will likely shrink by a factor of 10 to 100.

Now, what's a ex-driver to do? I doubt Google could, nor should, have an answer.

Anyway, the reduction of necessary labour, which technology permits, should be _good news_. If it's not, that's probably because our societies are ill- equipped to deal with such progress.

<comment><USER5> Right, but an engineer/creator of such a service that realizes the impact of that technological advancement should at least give forethought to what will come about as a result.

If you're going to make an atomic bomb, you should consider the devastation it might cost. While this ISN'T an atomic bomb, if you're going to so heavily disrupt a field such that many people will find themselves out of work, at least giving those people some thought seems to be the responsible choice.

On your last point, societies are always ill-equipped to deal with rapid progress. In fact most of it is dismissed until it can't be ignored. However, the problem of introducing change in a way that will not hurt/severely degrade the life quality of large parts of society is worth tackling -- I don't think people should just throw care to the wind and disrupt areas in which displaced employees are unlikely to be able to bounce back.

Not that you shouldn't release the technology, just that some thought should be given to the effects of your innovation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The only way to stay ahead of the curve is by constant self-improvement.

I feel in todays world many people are slow to realize that they need to get more technical. It's not like there isn't "jobs" or "work" that needs to be done, it's just smarter, more technical work, with no clear-cut answers due to the ever increasing amounts of data we can collect and process. Think about it like this: "Programming skills in 2010s are the Excel skills of the 1990s".

<comment><USER7> that's not an answer for the majority of population, when the pace of good job destruction is faster than good job creation.

no doubt, there's now plenty of opportunity for tech-workers, who will profit from the process (at least as long as their jobs don't get automated away, too). but the wages are already stagnant also in this sector - when the entry of new workers will undercut current engineers' negotiating position (and it will, as engineering becomes the only safe-heaven on the labour market), they will gradually face similar fate as the rest of the workers. the real winners of automation are the owners of capital.

<comment><USER6> Until AI that's comparable to a human brain is invented (which I don't see coming in the next 100 years), there will be an ever increasing number of problems to be solved by humans, and as a result, an ever increasing number of opportunities for humans in all sorts of industries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hackers can solve this problem

\- cloud labor, mechanical turk style. Hackers need to turn the tasks done in businesses into small bite size chunks that can be done by masses of unskilled workers. This is purely a software task that hackers relish.

\- training workers cheaply and effectively, khan academy/udacity/coursera style.The business model for this should not be charging students (an evil practice carried out by colleges) but instead charging businesses for access to those workers.

\- decentralizing production. Making what is produced by large factories produceable in the home. 3d printers, home robots, and so on. These are also mostly software problems of controlling mechanical parts.

That there is joblessness is mostly because hackers are not thinking creatively and working hard enough. Help will not come from other segments of society, they are incapable of doing so because they lack the key skill of which we hackers are famous for - inventiveness.

<comment><USER9> Services like Mechanical Turk/TaskRabbit/eLance etc emphasize workers as commodities leading to a race to the bottom in prices and the most profit for the platform vendor.

Looking at the average earnings on these sorts of platforms it would seem like a challenge to eek out even a meagre existence in a first world country.

<comment><USER8> The reason for that is because there's far too little work being placed in them. These types of places need to scale 1000x and you'll see wages rise to middle class level.

This is also a much bigger opportunity for startups than traditional eyeballs model. A startup that can pull it off could easily be worth a -trillion- dollars. Apple, Microsoft, Google grew large just by taking $100-200 a year from a billion users. Imagine a mechanical turk that grew to a billion users - it could be taking $500 a month from users while paying them $5000 a month. Truly immense potential.

<comment><USER9> Not sure, these sorts of marketplaces exist largely to commoditize labour. This is especially true if there is more supply than demand. Any buyer can expect to receive competing bids and is likely to choose the cheapest that will get the work done.

Higher skilled sellers who can demand higher prices will want to avoid these platform for that reason. They don't want to have the platform owner taking a cut when they are capable of finding customers on their own. This leads to a sort of lemon market where the buyers who are willing to pay the highest rates for the best workers will tend to avoid these places altogether.

<comment><USER8> You're totally correct when it comes to skilled work, they get snatched up when they've proven their worth. However, this cloud labor is for unskilled work.

So yes, they are commodities, but if they are a lot of them, and a lot of work to go around, wages rise. We saw this with the industrial revolution, especially assembly lines. Mid 20th century you could live pretty well as an unskilled assembly line worker, but then the work dried up.

Most modern work, knowledge work, hasn't been turned into assembly line yet. Many would argue that's because it can't be, but I disagree with that, much of enterprise software is about turning it into that (workflows,processes). It just requires more of the same. There are actually very few cloud labor startups (mturk, crowdflower, mobilworks) with at most a 100 programmers, one reason being that it doesn't have the network effects moat that VC's look for. Robotics is another casualty of that. How do you defend your cloud labor,robotics company from competition? That's why it will have to be built from the ground up by bootstrappers.

<comment><USER9> These platforms make it easier to find labour and thus drives more competition between labour providers but they don't necessarily increase the demand for it, at least at higher pay rates.

It also makes the competition for knowledge work go international which might increase pay in developing countries but lower it in first world countries.

<comment><USER8> Oh sure, it will equalize wages across the world, with some rich worlders losing in the short term, but I think that's a good thing, why should poor worlder's suffer.

Higher pay rates exist for two reasons, unfair monopoly positions (e.g. bill gates and the OS monopoly of the 90s, actors/athletes), and because there is complex work that hasn't been deskilled yet. Not much can be done about the former except regulations, the latter is where programmers can change the situation. Demand is everywhere - whether it's fulfilled by cloud labor, or by specialized labor - is the question.

Either way, I think we can agree that immense opportunities exist for startups to profit from this space.

<comment><USER9> There's certainly profit to be made in being a middle man in the labour market but that doesn't really solve the fundamental problem.

If you equalize wages you also need to equalize the cost of living which is something that doesn't seem to be happening because a lot of people have a lot of money locked up in land etc that they are not going to want to see devalued.

If deskilled work does not cover rent payments then it is not much good to anyone.

<comment><USER8> I have to disagree about being the middle man. Deskilling the workforce into an assembly line is a value creating activity, it's what engineers basically do. The typical middle man is simply there to skim some money because there are communication bottlenecks.

Yes, you're totally right - land will get devalued. The older generations in richer countries will lose the most relatively. This is not a bad thing fundamentally (it reverses the rich get richer trend), and is actually what's already happening, but people don't feel it. Every story that is heard about poverty reduction in China is also a story of westerners getting relatively poorer - though in absolute terms everyone is getting better quality of life.

<comment><USER9> Deskilling the workforce may be a valuable activity but those who make the best of it will be those doing the deskilling rather than those who are deskilled.

I'm not sure that the older/richer will lose out. They have a lot of political clout that they will bring to bear to keep value in their homes and retirement assets. A lot of this will be hoarded rather than redistributed so demand will continue to outstrip supply in many areas.

<comment><USER8> The 'rich' in this case are middle and upper middle classes (wealth in homes), not the uber rich (wealth in stocks), so they don't actually have that much clout (doctors, teachers etc) on the international level, and they already are losing out. Doctors are relatively poorer than in the 60s/70s.

Deskilling benefits everyone, is leads to more equitable wealth distribution. The people inventing the assembly lines (hackers) will be paid more than the assembly line worker (cloud laborers), but that's a fair reward for the effort. They won't be much richer (just like mechanical engineers who invent factory equipment) because fierce competition will prevent it (there aren't network/platform effects that lead to gates/zuckerburg).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Technology has destroyed jobs for hundreds of years. It means we as a species are continually releasing human labour resources to tackle newer, more exciting challenges.

The difficulty is transitioning these labour resources from tasks now mechanized, to new endeavours that society is interested in solving.

<comment><USER11> Long term, there's potentially a point where we can repurpose mechanization faster than we can repurpose people. I certainly don't make the claim that we're there yet, though.

Short to medium term, one angle is figuring out how to actually get people paid for the new stuff - there is a lot that creates value that is difficult to capture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The answer to a complex system like the economy is never so simple. Technology, the shift from a productive to a finance, insurance and real estate economy, artificial interest rates, stock bubble, housing bubble, credit crises....

There are a lot of factors that contribute to fewer jobs. When it comes to technology, yes, technology destroys jobs. But never on a net bases. 100 years ago 40% of our economy worked in agriculture. Today it's less than 2%. Yet people aren't longing for the days of farming. Technology alone is not the culprit.

</comment><comment><USER13> What's the problem exactly? Job growth has been stagnant for 5 years?

Productivity is the ratio of units of output per unit of input, where you can abstract input as being either capital or labor. Indeed, productivity continues to grow as a consequence of technological advances. When mankind started using oxes to plough fields, landworkers' productivity rose significantly. As we develop more tools to aid us in daily tasks, less labor - and sometimes even less capital - is required to perform those tasks.

During the relatively prosperous past decades, organizations have grown heavy, and were able to do so because of a continuously rising product demand. People started over-working and over-consuming. Then there was an external shock, media started talking about a financial crisis, people started being more considerate of their consumption in the face of job insecurity, and businesses that grew too heavy needed to get back into shape. This is a process that has significant feedback effects. The process of business getting back into shape means the cutting non-contributing jobs (think of excess layers of management), which by itself causes a growth in productivity. In this sense, employment growth and productivity growth can be negatively correlated, and it is not necessarily "technological advances" that drive productivity growth.

Telling us that technology is destroying our jobs is the same as telling us that China is stealing our jobs, though they may affect different industries (I don't see Chinese laborers replacing our butchers.) The thing is that the working population is very flexible, and despite offshoring certain jobs the average American still works over 50 hours a week. Population growth hasn't justified job growth in the US for the past 40 years, so perhaps a stagnant job growth is a good thing in that it draws things back to "normality".

<comment><USER14> One problem is that we have trained people to do (and are still training people to do) jobs which are being replaced by computers and technologists who can do the same job more productively. This is beginning to have a significant impact upon all industries.

The economy is doing great, productivity is doing great, but there are increasing numbers of people with obsolete skills who can't find work and are struggling to survive this improving economy, through no fault of their own. A small number of people are taking all the benefits of the new economy - entrenching inequality.

The problem is with people, not with the economy.

<comment><USER15> The replacement of muscle by automation was 20th century. In the current wave, we see a replacement of office workers with a mix of more productive office workers outsourced, online or in house.

<comment><USER14> I think we are seeing a restructure of skilled work generally as technology becomes able to do portions of skilled work. For example, look at education.

Interestingly, muscle jobs are more-or-less immune as they have already been automated as much as is reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Semirelated: [http://www.sjbaker.org/humor/pythagoras_costs_jobs.html](http://www.sjbaker.org/humor/pythagoras_costs_jobs.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> Cheap interest rates are destroying jobs.

Artificially low interest rates == artificially high amount to spend on machine replacing labor == labor earnings go down as percentage of the economy.

</comment><comment><USER18> While you cannot view technology as some kind of force of nature, immune to ethics, blaming the misery of joblessness on technology is beside the point.

When is the last time the minimum wage was raised? The last time the work week shortened? Those laws are in place because of technology eliminating human labor. Those legal changes were the solution to a problem technology created. But they have not been updated while technology is galloping away. We blithely crush low-skill, entry level jobs because they are easy to crush.

Technologists have a responsibility to mitigate the impact of technology. But the answer isn't to restrain technology. The answer is to deliver benefits to society as a whole, and that comes from restructuring our economy to benefit workers.

<comment><USER19> If you raise the US Minimum wage to $20 an hour you will immediately see people move their companies to Mexico,China,etc.. So that will only make the problem worse. Instead of making $10 an hour those employees will be making $0.

<comment><USER20> Honest question which companies? Which companies that currently pay workers minimum wage are able to move overseas? Mcdonalds, Walmart etc cannot move their service jobs overseas.

<comment><USER9> It might incentivise those companies to find ways of doing business with less human labour. For example computer checkout /ordering systems or more emphasis on doing business online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> «In our own time, the development of technology and the growth of cities has brought man's alienation from nature to a breaking point. Western man finds himself confined to a largely synthetic urban enviroment, far removed physically from the land, his relationship to the natural world mediated by machines. Not only does he lack familiarity with how most of his goods are produced, but his foods bear only the faintest resemblence to the animals and plants from which they were derived. Boxed into a sanitized urban milieu (almost institutional in form and appearance), modern man is denied even a spectatorial role in the agricultural and industrial systems that satisfy his material needs. He is a pure consumer, an insensate receptacle. It would be cruel to say that he is disrespectful toward his natural; the fact is that he scarcely knows what ecology means or what his enviroment requires to remain in balance.»

— "Towards a Liberatory Technology", Lewis Herber [Murray Bookchin]

<comment><USER21> Follow-up:

«Unfortunately, the singularity may not be what you're hoping for. By default the singularity (intelligence explosion) will go very badly for humans, because what humans want is a very, very specific set of things in the vast space of possible motivations, and it's very hard to translate what we want into sufficiently precise math, so by default superhuman AIs will end up optimizing the world around us for something other than what we want, and using up all our resources to do so.»

— [http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/y9lm0/i_am_luke_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/y9lm0/i_am_luke_muehlhauser_ceo_of_the_singularity/c5tm6fu)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Well, who is the nerd now?

</comment><comment><USER23> certain jobs.

<comment><USER24> That's what the article says as well:

> In other words, in the race against the machine, some are likely to win > while many others lose.

<comment><USER25> Majority will lose, minority will win.

<comment><USER26> Till the revolution then the minority will lose and then everyone has lost.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Power of the Niche - <AUTHOR> https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/power-of-the-niche/ <comment><USER2> A good niche will allow you to build a product that solves one problem well

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Choosing a tiny and, at the time, not too competitive niche was _key_ for me being able to make my current project viable in the 10hrs/week or so of time I had to spend on it. I had no audience at the beginning, either.

Now that I do have an audience and some experience, my next project will be in a somewhat larger niche that overlaps with my current one.

</comment><comment><USER3> >> Look out for non-competitor competitive alternatives: the things people use instead of using an actual product. This can be Post-It notes, an Excel Sheet that does not involve numbers, anything that is a general tool applied to a specific problem. That is where you can find your critical problems, and that is where you can serve your niche best.

This is an overlooked factor by many bootstrapped startups. Rather than copy the competitors features, look at the gaps in the market, that you can build and cater to.

<comment><USER4> The thing is I am not sure if these so called "niches" can be "looked" into. Most if not all came from one single sources, you are frustrated at the current way of doing it and start asking, there has got to be a better way.

And because you understand the problem so well, you can crave a niche out of it. Simply by looking into things people are doing rarely gives any deep insight that are enough to built something useful.

<comment><USER5> Author here. I think "looking" is indeed not the right term for this.

Most problem discovery in any market happens through careful qualitative analysis that happens during and after interviews with prospective customers.

Looking at their behavior is a first step to getting a glimpse of what the day-to-day work looks like, and where you as a SaaS could interface with that.

The second step is figuring out customer intent ("what do I want to get done"), problem awareness ("what could be done much better"), pain intensity ("what is unbearable about my work").

Some of those come directly from the prospect, mostly problems where they have high pain and high awareness. Others, you will have to find yourself, such as low-awareness problems. Then, there are problems to dismiss, such as low-pain and non-intent-aligned ones.

To me, a niche represents a group of people you select out of a more general population.

From what you wrote, I understand that we agree that niches don't "exist", they are "defined". That is both a result and a starting point, which makes this whole exercise so hard - it's an iterative approach: you define a niche, you explore their problems, you re-define the niche, explore again, until you have found a critical problem worth solving.

The point is that you can't find problems without communicating with those who have them. Looking won't do. You will need to listen.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you design a modern CPU with virtual memory support? - <AUTHOR> Virtual memory[1] is useful for a number of things[2], but can takes up a large amount of die space and development time during the development of a CPU to be both efficient and correct.  With the advent of 64+ bit architectures and cheap memory available today, an extended address space and paging aren't specifically needed for many tasks. Memory safe, high level languages[3] need less 'isolation' and 'protection' from a VM subsystem than traditional languages like C and C++.  Page tables help the OS organize non-contiguous physical memory for applications, but is that as much an issue today, especially for symbolic and object based languages?<p>If one was to design a new 'high level' language CPU today, would it be seen as advantageous to include a traditional multi-level page table based virtual memory system, or could the resources be put to better use in other areas of the chip design?<p>[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory<p>[2] The primary benefits of virtual memory include freeing applications from having to manage a shared memory space, increased security due to memory isolation, and being able to conceptually use more memory than might be physically available, using the technique of paging.<p>[3] http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=327133 <comment><USER2> The ABI for shared libraries gets a little different. IIUC, the global offset table (and all of the .data and .bss sections) for a given shared library is located at a fixed offset relative to the .text section. Position-independent code can always lookup its own data relative to the instruction pointer. For a memory protection-only model to work and still have shared read-only mappings to shared libraries, you would have to include the base address of the target library in the GOT for every redirection, and pass it to the target via a dedicated register.

<comment><USER3> Do we really need shared libraries anymore? The original reasons (disk space / ram) no longer apply outside of minimal boards like the RPi. With package managers it's no longer a hassle to have to update everything that uses a library when a vuln is discovered. I can only think of two reasons to use shared libraries anymore: vdso and plugins to applications.

Edit: thought of a 3rd reason, licensing... But that's really an artificial/political reason rather than a technical one.

<comment><USER2> Security. Instead of one CVE for libpng, you now have thousands for all of the programs that statically linked to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the idea of flat address spaces with memory protection only. There are a variety of ARM processors that are set up that way, like the ARM940T which has 16 regions that can be configured in size, position, priority, etc. Using a large background region with several smaller high-priority regions that overlap it, you can run several tasks with enforced private memory and shared memory spaces. That way you get some of the benefits of an MMU, but with fast context switches and deterministic timing.

<comment><AUTHOR> So the idea is that you take memory and chunk it into regions that can (possibly) overlay each other, each with it's own protection level? Interesting idea.

<comment><USER2> Look into the ARMv7-A/R PMSA (protected memory system architecture) for more details. ARMv7-M does the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> > Memory safe, high level languages[3] need less 'isolation' and 'protection' > from a VM subsystem than traditional languages like C and C++.

I'm not buying it. Java is a memory-safe high-level language that very much needs memory protection from the rest of the system. The JVM has regularly been an attack target.

<comment><USER5> Because the JVM is written in C++, rarely because of issues with Java itself.

<comment><USER6> But all language runtimes are running machine code under the hood. Machine code has no built in memory safety.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can build memory safety into machine code with the proper processor architecture. See the last reference in the original post.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Visualizing climate change mitigation - <AUTHOR> http://puzlet.com/m/b00dz

<comment><USER2> "For simplicity, we assume that past greenhouse gas emissions followed an exponential path, which is a reasonable approximation for historical emissions."

Wow. That is quite the assumption.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Reposting after significant improvements.</comment>


Smart Kids Should Skip High School - <AUTHOR> http://sonyaellenmann.com/2015/09/why-skip-high-school.html <comment><USER3> Could I instead have had the curriculum at my own pace?

Really it should just be a national, fully open, stack. No expensive text books (there's a nice racket) / etc.

Not just high school, but all of it. If we need to have 'learning centers' where parents can warehouse their kids while going to work, lets just fund that with those results in mind, and have additional tutors (maybe other students for extra credit, based off of the realistic improvement rate in the grades of those tutored) for those who aren't advancing quickly enough.

Of course, full boarding that the kids can opt in to (for predictable meals and escape from abusive situations) could also help.

</comment><comment><USER4> I dropped out of high school in my junior year. Predictably, most people remarked that it was a poor decision and that my prospects of employment would be forever decimated.

I skipped ~50% of days in grades 8-10, but somehow passed. I spent those days coding and learning on my own time.

As school got progressively less challenging, I dropped out in grade 11 and decided to stop wasting my time.

Finally, I could pursue my passion in software full-time. That additional time and freedom was instrumental in achieving my dreams. It was almost certainly much more valuable than more wasted years of high school. By the age of 19 I was already earning a very significant sum of money and had years of solid experience.

But who knows? Maybe I missed out on some important friendships or valuable connections. Perhaps my lack of a high school diploma will be an insurmountable barrier in the future.

Although I believe it was the right decision for me (who knows), I don't think it's the right decision for the vast majority of people. You must have discipline and passion. You must be your own boss and have a plan. You should enjoy learning on your own. Treat time as a precious resource.

I am fortunate that my chosen field, software development, generally does not require a diploma or degree. Exceptions exist, but I'm not interested in those jobs. Any other field and my decision could have been disastrous.

<comment><USER5> > You must have discipline and passion. You must be your own boss and have a > plan. You should enjoy learning on your own. Treat time as a precious > resource.

Sadly, most of that is not taught at junior/middle school. Getting out of the labor force factory that 'education' is in most countries, may not be the best idea even for the majority of 'smart kids', as you say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think kids should skip high school, but I think parents could let up on expectations placed on children to compensate for the uselessness and tedium of much of the subject matter.

On the other hand, engaging in passion driven projects that also involve self directed study is the way to go. Parents should encourage the latter while being less fussy about grades. Grades don't matter anyway 10 years later when the child will be hired or try to make a business, but a few passion driven projects could go a long way towards later success.

<comment><USER7> The problem is college admissions. Sonya says, "Skipping college is almost middle-class mainstream at this point," but she's dead wrong. It might be mainstream among the lower classes, but they aren't doing too well these days, are they? And it's mainstream among a certain fraction of the upper-classes who have enough of a safety net in family wealth and connections that it doesn't matter. But for the vast majority of the middle classes, the true middle classes, college is still very much a mainstream choice, and increasingly important as a backstop against falling into the lower class. If you don't have a high school transcript, your chances of getting into a college go down by quite a bit.

As for, "I could have spent three years writing and reading and working on interesting projects, instead of enduring the sociocultural hell of high school," I nearly giggled when I read that. Maybe Sonya was among the special 1% of kids who would actually have done that, but realistically, if I had skipped high school, I would have spent my days playing video games and getting into trouble, not "reading and working on interesting projects".

<comment><USER8> Given that I spent my high school years reading anyway, I feel pretty safe in saying that had I skipped high school I would still have spent the time reading. There's nothing about going to high school, or having any other occupation, that precludes you from reading.

I would have spent most of the time playing video games, as I in fact did during college, but I wouldn't have done any getting into trouble. This would have been largely unproductive, much like attending high school was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Im going to take a different position. I think school is valuable. But only because it informs you about a curriculum and subjects you might not know exist.

People are smart. But people need to figure out what they can be geniuses at. If we remove opportunity in this way, we absolutely must find an alternative to telling people what they dont know they dont know about.

</comment><comment><USER10> I half did this: after sophomore year, I left high school for what's now called Bard College at Simon's Rock, a college specifically for younger kids. tl;dr if you think you might be ready for college you should look at it. There are scholarships.

I have no regrets about that. It's as demanding as you want. About 2/3 of kids there get an associates' to transfer to another school after two years; those that stay all four do a B.A. thesis. Some folks who transferred reported being bored at their new schools, but I don't have much of a sample. :) I'd probably have had a slightly shinier-looking résumé if I'd gone on through high school, but there's more to life than that. For me the résumé thing is moot (the Rock actually helped; I got work through a teacher referring me to an alum), and plenty of classmates have done well in tech or law, become doctors, gone into research (including in hard sciences), etc. It produces a good number of high achievers for its small size and high acceptance rate, probably because kids interested in rushing into college are a sort of funny pool already. Occasionally bureaucracy requires some grad to take a GED exam because they left high school, but that's straightforward.

For high-school me, the focus on the liberal arts and the beliefs of folks there really contrasted with how I looked at the world at the time. Same would be true for a lot of folks here I figure. The tension from being exposed to something different was productive for me. Sounds icky I bet, but what you need to learn is not always the stuff you come in wanting to learn.

Anyhow, the site is [https://simons-rock.edu/](https://simons-rock.edu/). Hope this is useful to folks.

<comment><USER11> The problem is that's a small and selective school that only accepts a few hundred people. It's hardly a solution for the entire country, much less world. While it lists an 89% acceptance rate, that's out of only 199 applicants and with a total student body size of 329 (in 2015). It's an "elite" school for "elite" kids to basically start college early. Possibly a model for other schools, but it alone doesn't scale to the rest of the population.

Full disclosure: I applied when in high school, remember getting the full tour and sample class, etc, but was rejected, imo because I pretty clearly didn't hit it off with the interviewer. It seemed like a very nice place though, if you can get in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very smart kids should skip multiple grades at least.

[http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf](http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf)

"A 20-year longitudinal study has traced the academic, social, and emotional development of 60 young Australians with IQs of 160 and above... The considerable majority of young people who have been radically accelerated [skipped 3+ grades], or who accelerated by 2 years, report high degrees of life satisfaction, have taken research degrees at leading universities, have professional careers, and report facilitative social and love relationships. Young people of equal abilities who accelerated by only 1 year or who have not been permitted acceleration have tended to enter less academically rigorous college courses, report lower levels of life satisfaction, and in many cases, experience significant difficulties with socialization. Several did not graduate from college or high school."

<comment><USER13> I would guess Terry Tao was one of them?

<comment><USER12> Correct. In case studies of a subset of 15 of these kids, he was one of three with a 200+ IQ. What happened to the other two?

"Christopher Otway"'s story is described in the link. "While in Grade 1, Chris was accelerated to work with fifth-grade students for math and sixth-grade students for English. The following year he did math with seventh-grade students ... at the end of his second-grade year Chris made a full grade skip to fourth grade but took math with the eighth grade. By age 12, he was theoretically enrolled in 9th grade but took five subjects (physics, chemistry, English, math, and economics) with 11th-grade students 5 years older than he." Eventually, "He entered university at 16 years 2 months, graduating with Bachelor of Science (First-Class Honours) in computer science and mathematics at age 20. Chris won a scholarship to a major British university and graduated with a Ph.D. in pure math at age 24. Since then, based in London, he works for a worldwide consultancy assisting other companies with financial strategies."

As for "Ian Baker": starting with preschool, "only after his parents had gently informed the teacher that he had just finished reading Charlotte's Web was he permitted to forego reading readiness exercises". In grade 1 and 2, his teacher worked with him to give him stimulating material, ranging up to grade 8 math, and he was in a pull-out program with other gifted children; however, in grade 3, a new principal canceled the pull-out program, and Ian's teacher permitted him to work on a grade 7 math textbook "with no guidance or assistance, and no other children to work with", and Ian lost interest. Ian was bored and miserable in grades 3-4. He switched schools, and partway through grade 5, was given a high-school math teacher mentor, who took him through math up to grade 9. In grade 6, he took 10th grade math, and the following year skipped into grade 8, taking 11th grade math and CS and 10th grade science. In grade 10, he began taking university math. Ian enrolled in university at 17, did a bachelor's degree in "computing systems engineering", graduated at 20, and was in his fourth year of a Ph.D in digital hardware design at 24.

According to the author of the study, "Ian Baker's mathematical ability is certainly on a par with that of Christopher Otway and may well equal that of Adrian Seng [Terence Tao's pseudonym]. Unlike Adrian and Chris, however, his astonishing potential has largely been ignored by the education system ... It is unfortunate that he had to suffer through four years of appalling educational mismanagement." The author also says, "Adrian is the only child of the 15 who believes that he has been permitted to work, at school, at the level of which he is capable."

What was Adrian's educational program? At age 3.5, he tried entering preschool, but couldn't cope with a full school day at that age and left. At age 5 (by which time he had done all of elementary school math in home study), he entered school again. His parents worked with the principal to design a flexible program, in which he was able to progress through two grade levels per year. At age 6.5, he was attending grades 3, 4, 6, and 7 in different subjects. At age 7.5 he attended high school for part of the day, doing grade 11 math; the rest of the day was spent in grades 5 and 6 at the elementary school. At 8 he was doing math, physics, English, and social studies at high school (variously at grade levels 8, 11, and 12). At 8.5, "having informally sat and passed university entrance mathematics", he started taking university math, first in independent study and then guided by a professor; at age 8.75, he stopped attending any elementary school classes, and spent 3/4 of the day at high school, doing sciences in grades 10, 11, and 12, and humanities and "general studies" in grade 8, and 1/4 at university. By age 12 "his studies at university included fourth-year algebra, second-year physics, and second-year computer science". "By age 14, he had passed university entrance examinations in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and English, and completed university courses in areas such as mathematical physics, quantum mechanics, discrete mathematics, linear and abstract algebra, Lebesgue integration, electromagnetic theory, optics, and several areas of computing science."

(source: "Exceptionally Gifted Children", 2nd edition, by Miraca Gross)

It is, shall we say, interesting to imagine what might have been, if all the kids in the study had been afforded such a program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I agree. Despite going to one of the best public high schools in the country I don't remember learning much of anything. Looking back on it it was more like a very pleasant teenage internment camp. Parts of it were fun, the drugs and alcohol being a highlight. Going to school high or getting high at school was pretty fun. Sometimes competing with other students on the tests without studying or doing any of the homework was fun. But I imagine I could have had a lot more fun and learned a lot more elsewhere.

<comment><USER15> I went to one of the better public high schools in my district, so not one of the best schools in the country.

I learned quite a bit. Both the US history and European history teachers were very good, the calculus and differential equations courses were an excellent base for college physics and applied math, the computer class marked the start of my transition from an avid hobby programmer to a software developer, and drafting changed the way I understand a building.

As it happens, I'm still interested in history, math, science, programming, and building design, so perhaps I remember those best because I found them interesting. You were interested in getting high and competing with your friends, so perhaps that's why you remember that part best?

<comment><USER16> That last paragraph would sound unpleasant if it replied to me. :) That poster can take solace that they're in good intellectual company:

 _" In fact, I can remember a lot about elementary school, the work I did, what I studied and so on. I remember virtually nothing about high school. It's almost an absolute blank in my memory apart from the emotional tone, which was quite negative."_ — Noam Chomsky ([https://chomsky.info/reader01/](https://chomsky.info/reader01/))

<comment><USER15> I can see that interpretation. Let me try another way.

I remember nothing about my government or human health class, very little about my sociology class, I try to forget everything about my senior year English class, and I took Spanish only because there was a state scholarship where part of the requirement was to take three years of a foreign language, instead of the state-mandated two years.

I surely learned things in these classes. I've likely forgotten them because the contents didn't interest me enough. If I regard the brain as RAM, there was no refresh so the memories faded.

Just like I remember very little now about most of my college classes. I took numerical analysis, thermodynamics, theater, psychology, database organization, and more, but I've forgotten them. Even my analysis course, where I remember I adored doing epsilon-delta proofs, has faded into all but emotional tones. I've also forgotten how to do PDEs, but knowing that technique saved my butt a few years later when I took the qualifying exam for physics.

While I vividly remember my theory of automata course, my discrete math course, and a few others which are still so key to what I do every day.

It seems I remember best the things I like, and the things which I still use. I can totally understand that someone who liked high school because of friends and getting high might only remember that part. That doesn't have to mean there was no learning, nor even that the learning wasn't useful. Only that it's no longer recallable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In the context of the article, my wife and I are being even more extreme - <USER2> kids are skipping _all of it_. We're unschooling.

Our oldest is seven, and shows a ton of potential. Instead of trying to sit her down every day and "teach", we literally just gave her a pile of books and told her to have fun. Two or three days a week she tends to sit down while her younger sister is napping for the sole purpose of learning. That's usually math, but it could be anything. She's starting to take on small projects of her own design as well, which is exciting.

For example: we were out walking on a popular trail last week, and she emptied her water bottle. She decided it would be a good idea to sell water and snacks on the trail. Without input at all from us, when we got home she started listing out all the things shed need to set up a mobile food cart of sorts, with cold drinks and snacks. Then she shared it with me and we worked together to polish the idea a bit - I suggested she use a wagon instead of a stroller, and limit herself to bottles of water and prepackaged trail mix.

She will probably see that particular project through to completion, break about even on it, and move on to something else. She did that in the past with a lemonade stand at our apartment complex.

As for her progress, her math skills are significantly ahead of her peers. Her reading ability is something I think needs improvement, but we test her twice a year and they show that she's at parity with her public-schooled peers. She's picked up reading very quickly in the past 2-3 months though, and I'm very interested to see how she places this time around.

So, yeah, skipping high school doesn't sound all that crazy to me. What the author calls "smart kids" \- which are in reality intelligent kids with the advantages of a good familial support system - can make much better use of their time than sitting in a classroom waiting for the bell to ring.

</comment><comment><USER18> I hesitate to describe myself as a smart kid, but I wish I couldn've skipped most of my formal education.

I ended up making a living from the things I was doing outside of school, and wish I had been able to pursue those things more, and with less guilt and shame.

I'm still unlearning a lot of the bad habits and dealing with the anxiety I developed when trying to deal with school. Sigh. It's not a huge deal, there are worse problems in the world, but it upsets me to know that there must be others like me going through this year after year.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't get the trend of being all cool and dropping out of High School or College or whatever. High School gets out at 2 or 3 pm, leaving plenty of time to learn on your own or build projects. At that age are you really going to start a business? Besides, school provides motivation to learn, especially Colleges, because you are paying for it and don't want to fail classes.

<comment><USER20> high school does not provide motivation. That comes from the students that know what their next step is and want to get into college.

<comment><USER15> Umm, you realize a lot of people are motivated to graduate from high school because they have career plans which _don 't_ require college, right?

There are entire high school programs of vocational, technical, and career education for those whose idea of a "next step" is different from an academically oriented career that most colleges teach.

There are also people who graduate from high school because their goal is to enter the military, either as a career or for specialized training, and the military requires a high school degree.

Also, by the same logic, college does not provide motivation either.

<comment><USER20> I thought I had more emphasis on next step when I wrote the reply. I don't believe school is ever the motivation. Those that are motivated in school see it as a means to an end.

<comment><USER15> In my school district, school was only required until 16. Some did leave school then. _Everyone_ who remained had some sort of motivation, because it was voluntary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> School education often has a leveling effect. It helps people below the average to get better and blocks people above average or brings them down by boring them, leading to avoidance of any real effort. As far as i know most nobel price winners are below IQ 150, because apart from being smart, they learned to work hard and not go through school with minimum effort.

</comment><comment><USER22> I dropped out of high school to go to MIT early, then dropped out of MIT to do a startup, and never bothered submitting the class transcripts to my high school for the gym and English classes I needed to get a diploma, so technically: "highest level of education completed: middle school."

</comment><comment><USER23> In first grade was given a bunch of tests and determined I had a "grade 12 reading level" whatever that means. I was sent to one of those so-called child prodigy schools but had no interest in anything they were teaching me. Instead I would disassemble every electronic box in the school and hack around with it. They kicked me out of that school for doing nothing the entire time except taking apart electronics and returned me to the public system. First day, when we received our texts for the year I'd read through the entire text on the weekend and do all the exercises. Then I'd just slack off all year, usually only showing up to do the tests and weekly quizzes while spending the rest of my time hanging out with the other delinquents in my school who never went to class. This worked fine until about Grade 10, when I decided to not even bother reading the textbooks on the first weekend of school anymore and just didn't show up or do any work at all. I was solely interested in hanging out with the crazy STS chatboard goths and IRC hackers I befriended who all partied at this guy's warehouse downtown everyday, which I got away with for about 8 months until one day I forgot to intercept the mail and phone calls from my school and my parents discovered I wasn't even going anymore.

My routine was to get up and walk to school, attend homeroom to show I was actually there then just take off to go downtown to said hacker/drug dealer's warehouse. There was always a ton of people there it was a defacto hackspace and party house. I learned more hanging around those people for a few months than I did all of high school. When my parents gave me an ultimatum I decided to go squat with a bunch of street punks and just hang around the hackerspace all day.

I probably would've been satisfied going to some kind of engineering or compsci program after school if it had existed at the time. I liked hanging out with my friends in high school and was glad I still went to be social but it would've been great if school was only a few hours, and the rest of the day I could have pursued my interests in electrical engineering at a non institutionalized type environment. Hanging with my friends was fun in school between and after classes but everything else about it felt like prison. Somebody you don't elect hands you arbitrary rules to follow and you just end up feeling trapped. I'm sure plenty of other kids don't mind high school for a few hours a day but would much rather spend the bulk of their time learning something else they're actually interested in. I have no idea how this can be accomplished but a full day slogging through half a chapter in a textbook on a subject you have zero passion about isn't it.

</comment><comment><USER24> [US centric]

Some kids should skip some part of some high schools. Smart is orthogonal to the issue. "Skip" is a sliding scale. Early admission to college, home schooling, and starting in a trade are all on it. So is just getting the fuck out of a bad situation.

The people who should skip are those for whom the "these are the sizes we carry" [no high school is actually one-size fits all] doesn't carry a healthy size. The likelihood that a part that should be skipped is inversely proportional to it's length: senior year is more broadly appropriate than 9th grade.

</comment><comment> vhost- I dropped out because the school system wasn't designed for kids with dyslexia. All I ever felt was left behind.

</comment><comment><USER25> The writing in this article was disorganized, meandering, and it was not even clear what theses were being defended.

</comment><comment><USER26> High school in the US is a joke. What did I learn? I learned math is horrible. Wait! What? Yes, school actually killed my passion for math. When I wanted to do matrices, they wanted to do arithmetic. When I wanted to do trigonometry, they put me in 3 (THREE) years of pre-algebra. How much fucking pre-algebra can you have?

Everything I attained during and after high school was DESPITE school, not because of it. I taught myself how to program like many here, 3d graphics, sound, music, writing, etc. I wrote a book that got me a full tuition scholarship (despite having no official extracurricular activities) in my spare time. High school was so useless, I went a whole semester doing homework only one time and getting all A's and the occasional B+.

And this is at one of the best public schools in New Jersey. Seriously, what a joke. What a waste of time. What torture to be put in there with all the rest of the kids, most of them unlikable idiots. And worst of all, what lost potential during those days. How much more could I have done had I not been forced into this elaborate babysitting scheme we call high school? How many books would I have written? What software would I have developed? What animations would I have created? If only I hadn't been so tired from the daily bullshit of high school ...

</comment><comment><USER27> My son went to Grossmont Middle College which is a charter school for the last two years of high school located on a jr college campus. He was able to get enough college units to save him a year and a half at 4 year college. High school, depending upon your goals and classes can be not the best use of time if you can just jump in and do the college courses anyway... why do double work.

<comment><USER28> because taking your time through college can be an incredible experience.

<comment><USER7> On the other hand, parent-poster's son probably saved enough money to buy a car. College credits are incredibly expensive, and if you can do them for free in high school, there's no reason to skip them.

On a broader level, I would very much like to disagree with people who say that you should take your time through college. Take your time through college... _if you can afford it_. Don't forget that you're paying a good ten to twenty thousand a year for the privilege of taking your time.

<comment><USER27> We are ridiculously poor so money saved is a large benefit. But because he qualifies for the whole fasfa aid and since he saved a year of college he is doing a double major. So getting college units in is allowing him to do more and still be the right age getting out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I went to college before high school, starting at age 13. I was a full-time student until the age of 15, when I went back to high school due both financial and social reasons.

Going back to high school was great for my social life, but it was horrible for my education. Having already taken a good chunk of a math major, I had to take high school math and science courses because those were the rules. I took a ton of AP courses but still had a poor GPA. In the case of AP chemistry, I got more college credit for passing the exam but an F for the course due to the heavy weighting of homework. Over the next couple of years I lost all respect for formal schooling and became a pretty bad student. On the other hand, I played sports and made some great friends who I still know even now.

In all honesty I can't say if the social costs of staying and finishing a degree at such a young age would have been worse or not. My current thinking is maybe it's okay to skip high school, but don't go back if you do.

</comment><comment><USER30> I wish I had skipped high school. At best it was a waste of time and at worst it was a highly traumatic experience for me. I guess I'm doing better now but the first few years I spent in the real world were spent desperately trying to unlearn everything I'd learned from that experience.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is this like saying "Rich people should hoard their wealth"?

There is something to be said for Smart kids being at school both receive and PROVIDE benefit to/from the other students.

But I guess, who cares about dumb kids, who had less opportunity than the smart ones? They'll get a better draw next life!

<comment><USER32> Actually, smart kids usually end up a net loss for classes. They get bored. so they skip classes, or end up sitting in class bothering everyone else. They also end up frustrating other kids because "why does it come so easy for X but not for me?" Bad teachers even use smart kids as examples: "See, you all should be a lot more like smart kid".

A smart kid isn't going to magically become a free tutor for other kids at school. Let teachers focus on educating. Don't shift that responsibility to teenagers who could be advancing significantly in other environments.

<comment><USER31> Research shows the opposite. Mixing ability levels increases the median mark. The point of public funded education is not to produce a minority of geniuses but a majority of smart people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The best thing about school is it being a forced social experience -- preparing one for life itself, and even having them interact with others even if that's not their "thing" (it wasn't for me either).

Not the learning.

<comment><USER34> What makes that the best thing? All available evidence suggests it is not a relevant thing at all, since home schooled children are indistinguishable in social skills to regular schooled children. The forced social experience of a typical school is very artificial, and does not apply well to many other social settings. The only real similar setting is prison. Unless the goal of school is to prepare children for the social experience of prison, I don't see how that could be the best thing about it.

<comment><USER33> > _What makes that the best thing? All available evidence suggests it is not a > relevant thing at all, since home schooled children are indistinguishable in > social skills to regular schooled children._

I, for one, very much doubt that "available evidence".

<comment><USER34> Facts don't really care if you doubt them or not. Please, answer the question. What makes that the best thing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> School is only incidentally about education. For instance, never underestimate the power of networking at a elite private school.

A few random stories, all true:

A client of mine is global <role_deleted_to_protect_anonymity> director of a multi-billion dollar Scandinavian corporation largely because a school friend knew a few board members.

A friend obtained deep access to a person, considered to be among the five most powerful people in his country, due to his school network.

Another friend was contacted by a school friend and helped him to land a job in an elite investment bank despite the lack of any relevant experience.

</comment><comment><USER36> So maybe what we need are high schools where students start by learning how to devise a project and work on it. This stage will give students the skill set to do their own project while introducing them to a wide variety of concepts. In stage two, students write the question they want to answer and form a study group to work with. Stage three is completing the project and stage four is some form of publication.

</comment><comment><USER37> John Taylor Gatto [1] says that it's more important to skip as much of the early years of schooling as possible. If the child spends that time in the real world, nothing of importance will be missed. For me, kindergarten was incredibly boring... Nothing of importance to me was ever learned at school, that couldn't have been learned quicker on my own.

[1] [http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/](http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/)

</comment><comment><USER38> There have been times when I felt I would be more productive doing something else, at different phases of life.

Statements like this article's really depend on what someone's end goal is. If you are striving for some kind of above average monetary success ... earlier, there's nothing about this that guarantees it. If you aren't, then you need a different end goal to make this useful.

</comment><comment><USER39> Dad and mom did this to me and my sister, and dad wrote a blog on it. Here is his post-mortem:

[http://chapmankids.net/blog/why-not-skip-high-school-a- serie...](http://chapmankids.net/blog/why-not-skip-high-school-a-series-on- our-experience/)

Skipping high school may not be bad idea, even for the not-extremely-gifted.

</comment><comment><USER40> I skipped half of middle school and high school, I think it paid off. I have a great job and a jumping off point for whatever ambitions I might have.

</comment><comment><USER41> The main problems that constrain the development of education in a country is the government's policy.

</comment><comment><USER42> Well this is a load of drivel. And all yall are agreeing with it because every single person on this forum considers themselves smart so you like agreeing with people who claim to be smart and know smart people stuff.

"so I took California's GED test in June, 2012. It was dead easy."

If that's your basis for calling yourself smart then I'm not impressed. I took the GED high as a kite and got a perfect math score (know what's similar about both our statements? we both sound like jerks). The GED isn't a smartness metric, it's a soap bubble test so white people don't get stuck as fry chefs for their whole lives. It's _supposed_ to be easy as long as you understand the questions. Welcome to the upper class nimwit.

"People worry about Google and the instant availability of knowledge making people dumber, because we don't have to memorize much anymore — Socrates felt the same anxiety when writing and reading were invented."

Your events are off by a few _millenia_.

"contrary to what teachers and school board members might want you to think, getting into college is easy if you're intelligent and work hard to do interesting things"

False. Just false. I mean, I'm assuming you want to go to a top tier college, not community college. Top tier colleges are for expanding the upper tiers of the gentry class, while community colleges allow entry into the gentry class. To move to the upper tiers of the gentry, you need to have shown that you respect the institution of the gentry, ie. going to high school. Exceptions maybe exist for prodigies or minorities who built a clock once (because that's soooo amazing, who here _didn't_ build shit like that as a kid), but in general skipping high school to learn sewing and greenhaus building is an acceptable path to an Amish lifestyle, not differential equations and the Ivy League.

I thought it was generally acknowledged at this point that school isn't about education? School is about socialization, connections, and a prodding to at least have some depth of knowledge about a general corpus that it's accepted people should know about. No one actually expects you to be able to find x in real life, but everyone is familiar with the concept of finding x. I am an _astrophysicist_ and I use, at maximum, 5% of shit found in my physics texts through the year. _School is not about the shit in the books, that is not the point of school_, you're like an atheist telling a Catholic that Jesus was an asshole because evolution -- it's a valid point but it has nothing to do with the conjecture. School is an indoctrination procedure so we don't schism even further into our already highly segregated class based society, saying that it's a waste of time because class and homework are stupid is a correct statement, but misses the entire point.

Even anarchists believe in school.

<comment><USER43> Elite universities are not for expanding the gentry class. They are so that the elite can meet other elite as they are extremely distributed geographically, get married and continue on the class system. The lower class people that go there are aiming to join the elite, but the vast majority of them simply become highly paid servants to the owning class. We like to think that startups made by dropouts establish that anyone can make it big, but for the most part these startups are children of millionaires living off trust funds until they break through; like Trump, no one should consider these rags to riches stories, accomplished though they may be.

The main point is that for elites, their schools are so that their girls can bring a nice boy home and not some trash from main street while their boys can find a wife that actually stands a chance at domesticating them.

It's really just that most geeks are so focused on their projects that they forget that there are more important things, like their family. Hence why we constantly hear incredibly talented but socially awkward people call for the repeal of school. Because social things don't mean anything to them. They generally become tools of the elite class.

I generally agree with the idea of creating environments where people can meet their future family because finding a quality spouse is extremely difficult without expensive and fool-proof filters in place. Connecting it with education is inevitable because children and young adults are nearly useless in a modern economy. We can't make it excellent education because there is a lot of economic and social pressure for truly talented individuals to abandon academia in favor of the market. My main complaint is that the elites are no longer virtuous so they do not deserve to exist anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> i'm 21 and still in high school oh gods get me out of this.

<comment><USER44> to be more clear on this, i've skipped classes ever since high school started, this was due to being introduced to a computer at young age and having access to the internet - i was amazed by the world and got to see the "oh what the hell this is vile" stuff; it's difficult to fit in my classes. my parents didn't care what i did on there because they had to focus on their job. my mother was, and still is, kind about this. she probably knows the horrors i've seen.

so, uh, i guess, i agree with this article even though this applies on where you're from. there are no "smart kids", though, because, imo, everyone is smart.</comment></comment>