Capitalism Has Gone Off the Rails - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/capitalism-in-crisis-amid-slow-growth-and-growing-inequality-a-998598.html <comment><USER2> This is an important article, but I doubt there will be a useful discussion of it here.

The developed world has incredible productive capacity. With 1% of the workforce in agriculture and 8% in manufacturing, the US produces as much stuff as China. There are no significant shortages of any manufactured good anywhere in the developed world. Quality is pretty good across the board, too. This is unique in history.

That's great. But there's less productive work to go around. We're out of buying power. Labor is worth less because there's a labor glut. Our economic system can't cope with that. On top of this, more of what most people can do is being automated, and for less money. Automation used to be expensive. Now, if a computer can do it, it will be far cheaper than a human.

The financial system has become primarily self-serving, running on self- generated zero-sum tasks. It's part of the problem, not part of the solution. If we had a capital shortage, that might be a problem. Instead, we have a capital glut, and no place to put it that produces good returns on investment. This is "secular stagnation", as the article puts it.

Japan hit this around 1989, when their real estate bubble collapsed. Japan never came back from that. There was hope that the Japanese would figure out something. 25 years later, they haven't. They've built up their safety net and put money into infrastructure projects, so that fewer people are suffering. That's the best they could come up with.

We have no successful model for dealing with this. What capitalism gives us by default is a small number of rich people and a large number of poor people competing for a shrinking pool of low-paying jobs. Nobody really knows what to do about this, including the people who say they do.

<comment><USER3> This is not an important article, it is a rant against people with "tacky mansions", a turn of phrase that is more indicative of the author's point of view than the other conventional points about not understanding creative destruction. I think it is this overly nationalist view of economics that needs to die, not "capitalism".

There is not less productive work to go around, it's just not being done in the US. We are in a difficult situation because we have free trade with lower cost labor markets. Until labor market costs in free trade enclaves reach equilibrium, capitalism will continue to raise more people out of poverty, and prevent wages from rising in places where they are above the demand level in the global market.

The extraordinary amount of government debt being created is an interesting phenomenon, as it is failing to cause inflation in most large currencies as they are increasing the money quantities in a correlated fashion. The financial entities are spending a lot of energy pricing these various instruments, and can make low risk money on the spreads.

Japan did have a real estate bubble. The thing about bubbles is not "coming back", it's that the wealth wasn't real in the first place. We weren't as rich as we thought we were. Their problem is demographics, an aging population, low birth rate, and a society that is not practiced at encouraging positive immigration.

"What capitalism gives us by default is a small number of rich people and a large number of poor people competing for a shrinking pool of low-paying jobs." This is just wrong in every way...the number of rich people in the world is growing, the number of jobs in the world is growing. Just because every country is not moving linearly up and to the right does not mean things are falling apart.

<comment><USER4> A third of the population in the richest nation on earth lives in poverty. According to you, that's not a problem because even poorer people in Bangladesh are slightly less poor than they would be if American companies had never employed them. What kind of callous person could look around at all the suffering and think this system's working great? Or do you not look around at all, holed up in a tacky mansion of your own?

<comment><USER5> 95% of the biggest nation in the world (or maybe second biggest, no one really knows the exact pop of India and China) lives in far deeper poverty than poor americans. Many of them experience actual suffering - not enough food, no flush toilet, no power.

What, precisely, do you believe poor Americans are suffering from? The only concrete answer I usually hear is envy (I.e. "oh noes the inequality").

[http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves- and-t...](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-haves-and-the-have- nots/)

<comment><USER6> There is tremendous long run psychological and physical harm associated with living paycheck to paycheck in perpetual debt having to eat subpar foodstuffs because fruits and vegetables cost way more than dollar menu cheeseburgers per calorie. And if you don't have a working kitchen you can't cook farmers market produce.

And that is at best. A lot of us are unemployed, and families are collapsing in on themselves as you have fewer and fewer breadwinners.

<comment><USER5> _There is tremendous long run psychological and physical harm associated with living paycheck to paycheck_

This is entirely in the control of most poor Americans. India's GDP/capita is $5500 after adjusting for cost of living, yet India has a 20% savings rate. Poor Americans could reduce consumption and save if they wished.

 _in perpetual debt having to eat subpar foodstuffs because fruits and vegetables cost way more than dollar menu cheeseburgers per calorie._

Poor Americans tend to be fat. That means they can reduce calories and increase the quality of food while spending the same amount of money.

 _And if you don 't have a working kitchen you can't cook farmers market produce._

3% of poor Americans lack a complete kitchen (see table 2-4).

[http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf](http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf)

tl;dr; Poor Americans have some self inflicted problems. That's not much of an argument for protectionism against poor Bangladeshi's suffering from externally inflicted problems.

<comment><USER7> I've been traveling in SE Asia for the past 4 months, including China (not yet India). I've been in urban slums and poor rural villages. I also went to university in West Philadelphia, so I've spent a bit of time in an American "inner city".

I'd take the rural village or even the urban slum over the American inner city any day.

It might look from the outside that life "is entirely in the control of most poor Americans". But nothing could be further from the truth. The amount of forces conspiring against you as a student or young would-be worker in the ghetto is simply unfathomable to anyone with a middle-class or wealthier background (like myself). I'd argue you have a much better chance at moving up in the world as a poor person in Vietnam than America. There, you start a small business (eg; selling goods on the street) and work hard to grow it. Here, you can't just do that: people don't buy anything off the street. And don't tell me "they can just learn to code": I tried to teach them. They don't have computers. Not in the schools. Not at home.

Also, consider that unhealthy foods are often genuinely addicting and addictions are really, really hard to break. Especially when you're stretched then.

I don't want this to turn into a rant, so I'll just say that before you start blaming the American poor for their problems, spend some time living there, talking to them, and understanding their problems.

<comment><USER5> _I 'd argue you have a much better chance at moving up in the world as a poor person in Vietnam than America._

Your argument would be wrong, at least as of the last time we ran this experiment. Back in the 80's we took a bunch of Vietnamese and turned them into poor Americans. Now they are not poor. In contrast, the Vietnamese who stayed behind are still very poor. That includes the ones who started small businesses like selling goods on the street.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_American#Socioeconom...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_American#Socioeconomics)

<comment><USER8> There are plenty of Vietnamese/Hmong/chinese viet poverty in the states. And why San Jose gangs are mostly asian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If I were a rich software engineer feeling angry at people who criticised the capitalist system we had, perhaps whilst failing to acknowledge that people in America die because they can't pay health insurance, or are homeless because they can't afford housing, or end up eating what they find in someone's trash because they can't afford to buy food, I think that I'd do one thing:

I'd consider whether perhaps I might be wrong. Maybe my worldview is a bit skewed by the situation I find myself in. Maybe my country isn't very fair at all, and it's not right that I have the privileges I do whilst my fellow citizens suffer. And maybe it's not the Government's fault, either. Perhaps those Europeans with their welfare states aren't all socialist nutcases, but maybe they have something right that America has got wrong.

Often I hear Americans say "this isn't real capitalism! we need more capitalism! less government!". And I look at the state of homelessness in their country, or those without health insurance, and I think "really? Do you really need more of that? Maybe instead you need to spend a little less on your military and a little more on looking after the least fortunate in your society, the sick, the vulnerable. Maybe that would make a difference."

The "more capitalism" mantra always makes me think of communists who argue "well, this wasn't real communism! That's why it failed!" And it's so ironic, because those most vocally against communism are the same people who are cheerleading extreme capitalism, failing to notice that they are simply on the other side of the mirror.

<comment><USER10> _or are homeless because they can 't afford housing, or end up eating what they find in someone's trash because they can't afford to buy food_

There's a bit of a straw man or, at least, mischaracterization hidden in here. It's true that the U.S. does a pretty poor job of dealing with the mentally ill and those at the very bottom who simply cannot take care of themselves. And I think if you push people, even those on the far right, they'll acknowledge that we probably need to do something to help those people.

But, outside of this group, nobody is digging through trash for food. We live in a society where clothes and food are as cheap as they've ever been. And there _are_ government programs to fill the gaps. Arguments like yours only further distance you from the people you're trying to convince, because it's obvious to just about anyone, including (especially?) those who have actually been poor, that they're just not true. I've been poor. And it sucks. It sucks for lots of reasons, all related to access to resources, lack of successful friends and coworkers, its drain on your motivation, and so on and so on. But I never feared missing a meal. That's not the experience of most poor folks in the U.S.

<comment><USER9> > But I never feared missing a meal. That's not the experience of most poor > folks in the U.S.

I'm not an expert on the U.S. However, I have seen people digging through trash for food in Atlanta. I have also seen the extreme state of homelessness in Philadelphia, and the problems in San Francisco.

It is certainly true that _many_ people in the UK struggle to afford food [1], and given that the US has a much greater disparity of wealth, I assume that the US has this problem on a great scale.

So, no, I don't agree that it is an exaggeration.

[1] [http://www.trusselltrust.org/foodbank- projects](http://www.trusselltrust.org/foodbank-projects)

<comment><USER10> Yes, I've seen them, too. And there's a risk here that it will sound like I'm moving the goal posts around so that I'm right by definition. But that's not what I'm trying to do. There _are_ of course those at the bottom who are chronically homeless. Those are the folks I was referring to in my first paragraph. Yes, you will see them digging in dumpsters.

But this is not the typical experience. Most poor people never end up homeless. And those who do are typically homeless for a short period of time (and _do_ get help).

<comment><USER9> ok, I see.

It might be surprising to hear, then, that those people using food banks in the UK by no means consist entirely of the chronically or mentally ill. I'd say that would be a small minority. Most of them simply use food banks because they can't afford to buy food - the number one reason being their welfare payments being ended or delayed. See, in the UK in the process of dismantling our welfare state and I look across the Atlantic to see our fate. :-s

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well, yes. As more of the money is used to make more money, instead of things, experiences, or people... It losses it's correlation with the things that we actually want out of an economy. Plus, those in power (rightfully) use the power to get more power of the sort they already have. According the history books I read as a kid, this is what caused capitalism in the first place (english barons with more money than power using that money to make more money) and the (serial) French revolutions (aristocrats with more power than money using that power to gain more power).

I note these bits in particular:

"After a financial and banking crisis, the first order of business is to clean up the banks, and to do it quickly and radically. Institutions that are not viable need to be shut down while the others should be provided with capital."

"Their central thesis was that the key to [Western] success was not climate or religion, but the development of social institutions that included as many citizens as possible..."

I'm also reminded of a good article on what Iceland did after the collapse - I'm having trouble finding the article, but part of it was that, instead of taking on the debt from their collapsed banks, they issued arrest warrants so Interpol could chase down the executives. (The initial government was going to acquiesce and take on the debt, and that's when the "revolution" happened.)

Finally, someone gave me a really good quote a couple months ago: "Death is the way for an older organism to gift it's energy to a younger one." I then note that part of the financial problem is that failing institutions are not actually allowed to die - thus keeping that energy stagnating in the aptly- named "zombie" corporations.

<comment><USER12> Note that what Iceland did and the idea of clearing out bad capital and malinvestment are actually capitalist ideas, versus, say bailouts and central bank manipulation, which are not.

<comment><USER11> Yeah. I'm, to a decent degree, a fan of calling what we have today "corporatism" rather than "capitalism".

<comment><USER13> Yes. Many of the problems today have nothing to with capitalism but with government policies that are largely aimed at making those with the gold happy.

Capitalism is mainly about having markets that have competition. NO organization is suppose to have market power. This isn't really possible, but that is the concept. And we are so hugely away from it we can't call what is going on now capitalism. We have allowed people to convert what is called capitalism into an extreme political view that believes government is bad and huge corporations are good. That isn't capitalism, it isn't even an economic belief, it is a political belief.

A capitalist country has to be focused on maintaining a fair marketplace where companies can compete for business and consumers (including companies buying from each other) have the freedom to buy in a competitive market (not a market dominated by trusts, monopolies and oligopolies that break the function of markets to advantage themselves).

[http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/2008/06/10/monopolies- an...](http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/2008/06/10/monopolies-and- oligopolies-do-not-a-free-market-make/)

<comment><USER14> I agree with your point that capitalism is about markets, technically markets for capital, but markets for goods and services are also very important for a high functioning economy. We have those. To demonstrate this, let's looks at some alternative models such as those in Russia and the Chinese domestic markets, and contrats those with the west.

The Chinese and Russian ssytems are very corporatist. In both cases huge corporations completely dominate the domestic economy. In Russia's case these are technically privately held, but the oligrachs are so closely tied to the political ruling elite that this realy is just a technicality. In China the major corporations are owned by the government and explicity run by government place-men. In both cases these corporations enjoy economic, financial and political patronage and privillege that makes it functionally impossible fror 'independent' corporations, companies or individuals to effectively compete with them.

You might argue we have a similar ssytem in the west, but we realy don't. es there are instances of political patronage. Yes there are cases of undue political influence by corporations through lobbying. However the scale of such cases is absolutely riny and marginal compared to the standard order of business in Russia and China. There just isn't any reasonable comparrison. The rule of law, vita to the funcitoning of viable markets, it'sn just weak in China and Russia, it's functionally nonexistent.

No matter what weaknesses and flaws you can pick at in the rule of law in the US or Europe, the difference compared to China and Russia is several orders of magnitude.

Could our system(s) be better? Yes, of course. Is the situation gettign worse? In some ways yes. Are we in the same boat as Russia and China? No, not by any reasonable measure.

<comment><USER13> I would say it is true in most places in human history, those with power consolidate their power and use that power to take advantage of those without power (or very little power). That is the current system in the USA. I would agree in the USA it is less than in many other countries today.

So I agree the USA is less bad. But it is bad. And it is getting worse the last 20 years. And it is getting less and less capitalistic with relatively free markets (not the political extreme, might-make-right-markets, but actual economic markets that are free of monopolistic pricing power).

The USA has many advantages and does some things well (like having a marketplace where businesses can indeed grow quickly and prosper - even if it is far from perfect). This has given us great economic advantages. The huge amount of wealth we had and built up after world war two is a huge part of why the USA is where it is today. The USA mainly did well enough not to squander too much of that wealth advantage - it certainly could have done much worse. It could also have done much better.

The USA's health system is by far the worst in the rich world (double the cost and no better results - and this is the most expensive area of economics so being twice as bad as everyone else - and much more than twice as bad as the good health care system - is very bad). This problem is very much tied to the non-capitalist pro cronyist policies that are in general bad for the USA. Health care is just far worse here than anywhere (maybe some tiny, nearly insignificant markets are as badly broken relatively in the USA - say sugar quotas or something but economically it is just giving billions to a few people and costing everyone very small amounts of money). Health care is hugely broken and massively costly to the economy.

In most other areas the USA is mediocre or comparatively good but there are numerous where there are problems (and many are getting worse in the last 15 years).

Other than health care I don't so much see that the USA needs to turn to other examples of countries doing a better job of using capitalism to improve results to society (though there are examples such as new Zealand for farm policy…).

But the USA is creating great loss to our people by not taking advantage of capitalism (letting markets work - which is not what political talking heads mean, letting big business distort markets with monopolistic power). I want the USA to stop throwing away the benefits capitalism would allow us to gain.

There are many individual facets of society we could benefit from improving (and have lots of examples of countries doing much better - education, policing, foreign policy…).

But I would agree with your point that most other countries are even worse at taking advantage of the gains possible with a capitalist economic system.

In fact the USA is often responsible for making those other countries worse. The huge damage done by the copyright cartel (and associated patent messes) is the worst in the USA and the USA uses its political and military might to demand that its vassal states in Europe, Japan, Australia, etc. (I know they don't think of themselves as basal state but they really just bow down to whatever the USA actually demands only given token resistance where the USA allows it) allow such pitiful policies to flourish. The constitution of the USA had an appropriate understanding of the government GRANTING rights to private citizens/companies that DON"T exist WITHOUT government granting them (copyrights and patents). The economic theory is to balance the benefit to society from encouraging innovation through government granted monopolies with the cost of the GOVERNMENT taking from society to give to the private entity. The current USA policy is purely about supporting big business and allowing markets to be broken with extremely bad policy and no evidence they even have the vaguest understanding of capitalist or any economic theory on how the government should be acting in taking from society and giving to individuals.

Ah well, I doubt anyone will actually read this far. Obviously I am emotional on this topic. Which I know is odd. I just have seen how many people across the globe suffer because we don't get nearly the benefits from capitalism we could if we didn't allow the idiotic ides that capitalism means those with the power make the rules to break markets and direct the benefits to their own pockets.

<comment><USER14> I read it, and +1 because even though I don't agree with everything you say, at least it makes sense and presents arguments I can engage with. That's valuable.

I think a problem we have in the west (I'm a Brit) is that our generation has inherited a capitalist free market system under the rule of law, but we're treating it like a rich kid that doesn't value or truly understand our inheritance and doesn't manage it responsibly.

I don't think the situation is as bad as you say. But then my wife is Chinese and I have a good udnerstanding of how bad things can be. When people talk about the erosion of the rule of law and corporatist policies in the west I have a counter-example I can use for comparison and I see a much more nuanced picture in the west. Yes we do need to recalibrate our social contract, particularly in the US, but we do have the institutions and mechanisms available to do that. At least we are capable of having the debate here without getting censored or thrown in jail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When central banks like Japan's or US print money it is called "Capitalism" or it is called "central planning"?

When in places like Spain they create a bubble in real state but then try to support the prices by any means, including the creation of "bad banks" so prices don't sink it is called Capitalism or central planning?

When States do not control what they spend and the increase the debt by 10x it is called Capitalism or central planning?

This is not capitalism, but capital-comunism: Capitalism when prices go up on the riches, private profit, communism or public sharing of the losses.

When I lived in Japan and prices went down, it was very good for the people living there, but in the international news it was a catastrophe, because the markets could not make money in the stocks.

People(family and friends) always told me: Are you ok? like I had gone to the war or something, because of what they heard on the news.

<comment><USER16> This is the most appropriate reply currently.

We bemoan capitalism, but what we are really seeing is corrupt administrations with ex-banker moles everywhere supporting the financial industry's black sheep at all costs, against all rules of capitalism and the free market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Classic case of 'not looking at the bigger picture'. If you look at standard of living in the west, since the industrial revolution, it's increased exponentially, massively. More than anywhere else in the world, and it almost directly correlates to the more economically free parts of the world.

Yet every time there's a minor blip in that massive, massive rise in wealth and standards of living, people band together t blame Capitalism, forgetting the massive improvements to quality of life it's given us.

Actually what we have now, despite all that is somewhat broken and it's not even Capitalism in its truest sense. We're constantly battling against the feverish symptoms of Corporatism. Big business bail-outs, state monopolies, printing fiat currencies and the inflation it causes.

So whilst there are problems, don't blame 'Capitalism', blame those who try to 'improve' or 'skew' the heart of Capitalism. Which is free-trade, entrepuanlerialism and innovation. Not price fixing, inflation or quantitive easing.

</comment><comment><USER18> I thought this article was a waste of time. It is a grab bag of obvious truths, buzzwords, opinions and contradictions. The author seems to be confused and his prescriptions for more regulation, higher interest rates and more incoherent political revolt are unlikely to improve things and will probably make things worse.

Clearly there are many problems in the financial sector and even more in our governments (there many good things too). Unfortunately nobody can - in my opinion - convincingly articulate how to fix them or even exactly what they are and what causes them. And this author is worse than most!

</comment><comment><USER19> Capitalism works just fine. The problem is throughout Europe and the US we have this weird kind of corporate socialism where governments are more and more involved in their respective economies and then blame "capitalism" when things don't work out. You can't call it capitalism if companies aren't allowed to fail.

And banks are so heavily regulated they're _de facto_ agents of the state. The banking crisis isn't an indictment of capitalism at all - quite the opposite.

<comment><USER20> The banking crisis was a result of de-regulation, caused by neo-liberal government agendas. After the great depression, the banking sector was stable and only became problematic again when the laws that were introduced after the great depression started to be dismantled.

Are you saying thats not what happened?

<comment><USER21> The US financial crisis happened in large part due to the monopoly of the "big three"[1] credit ratings agencies mislabeling bad debt as good. These agencies had a corner on the credit ratings market thanks to the US federal gov't (SEC) bestowing them with the coveted "Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization" (NRSRO)[2] status, a status which only those three companies held between the mid-1990s until early 2003, firmly cementing them in the financial industry as the chosen ones for credit ratings. The US gov't also gave some extra protection to NRSRO-rated debt, e.g. by recognizing it as legal investments.[3]

So in this case, over-regulation and the monopoly it bred had quite a large hand in the financial crisis.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(credit_rating_agenci...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_\(credit_rating_agencies\)#2007-2010_financial_crisis)

[2]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationally_recognized_statistic...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationally_recognized_statistical_rating_organization)

[3]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationally_recognized_statistic...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationally_recognized_statistical_rating_organization#Subprime_mortgages.2C_CDOs.2C_and_the_financial_crisis)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How can you write an article about Japan Syndrome and stagnating economies without mentioning Bernanke, Krugman, or Keynes?

Capitalism isn't itself the problem. It's the way out of our current doldrums. But there's this idea that government institutions have no way to intervene to kick-start capitalism's more virtuous cycles.

As Keynes first recognized, and as Bernanke and Krugman both clarified in respect to 1990s Japan: when you hit an economic slump driven by lack of demand and your control over interest rates has hit its natural limit (you can't set an interest rate lower than zero... you wouldn't want to risk deflation in any case), the only way out (besides waiting) is to increase demand.

So how do you do that? Well, we have tons of options. Governments can take the opportunity to borrow at essentially zero interest and use the money to build stuff we need and fix stuff that's broken. Build out gigabit Internet to every house in the country; commit to curing diabetes in 20 years; build 200mph+ high speed rail networks between clusters of large cities, and improve airport capacity for longer-distance travel; replace aging water and sewer systems; invest in offshore wind and tidal power sources; build out a national power grid to maximize efficiency; provide research grants to increase battery efficiency x100 by 2025.

All of this will create millions of jobs, in addition to providing the cash to soak up all the industrial overcapacity that's out there. But there are more direct routes as well. Raising the minimum wage would stimulate a huge amount of new consumer spending and debt reduction, while _increasing_ payroll and income tax revenues for the federal government and putting upward pressure on wages across the board, which would lead to additional spending, tax revenues, and growth.

Or if you want to go full Bernanke, just have the central banks print money and drop it out of helicopters. That, or just mail everyone a check. That money'll get spent, and add jobs, and then we can let capitalism take back over from there.

<comment><USER23> So do you think it worked for Bernanke after he went full Bernanke and the article misses this point? Or do you think it didn't work - if so, why didn't it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> There seems to be an almost religious belief that capitalism has to work in all circumstances. But you can't just keep pumping credit into an economy with the hope that it will continue to expand. People only have so many needs. After a while there is no real point in building either new factories or houses.

Why isn't that fact that interest rates are zero not interpreted to mean that we are simply at capacity? Capitalism isn't broken, it's just full...

<comment><USER25> Because a simple walk down an average street nearly anywhere in the country strongly indicates otherwise. In science, we like to imagine that we'll begrudgingly discard our theories in the face of a single contradictory fact. Economists don't even seem to pretend that's a thing they'd ever do.

There are some 50-60 million people living in poverty in the US. Schools don't have books or desks. People are quite literally fighting insurance companies for their lives on a daily basis. That's quite a lot of demand out there for pretty basic things. There are staggering numbers of unemployed and underemployed people out there as well, so we're not hurting for supply-side capacity either.

There's simply more profit to be made by "investing" capital in playing financial games than there is in meeting actual demand. We can quibble about whether this is a failure of capitalist theory or a failure caused by too much regulation, or probably a dozen other claims. But whatever the case, it's a pretty cut and dried case of the bleeding obvious that we're not at capacity in our economic system.

<comment><USER24> I think you misunderstood my point. I am claiming that credit driven capitalism is incapable of providing any particular benefit under current conditions. In other words; capitalism is entirely ineffective...

From my perspective "playing financial games" is caused by the simple desperation of people who have large amounts of money and are having trouble coming to terms with the current reality. They face the horror of actually having to spend their capital...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The current climate is interesting. I think it's no coincidence that we are about one generation since soviet communism failed as a political movement and it became obvious that other leftist economies would either reform or be overthrown.

In any case, the current debate will perhaps be fruitful. Wealth disparity. Acceleration of Automation. Jobs evolving so fast that the paradigm of eduction-qualification-work is getting very clumsy. A resurgence of the old leftist idea that wealth distribution is inevitably political, mores than nationalism, religion or anything else.

It's all interesting.

Personally, I think the major force at play in our time is technology. Fraking for all its controversial implications has already lowered energy prices. Perhaps all the research and motivation to develop other energy sources will give us the awaited revolutionary 10X increase in energy availability. Computing continues to generate wealth and promises of more wealth.

The communication mediums open between most people on earth are developing at a blistering pace. The effects of cultural globalization may dwarf those of economic globalization.

It's not surprising that we have an appetite fro radical thought.

</comment><comment><USER27> There's a lot of conflation in this article between distribution and economic growth, which I think arises from the Spiegel's European perspective.

Going back to the start of the DAX tracking (mid-2011), we see okay performance in German DAX index, stagnation for the French CAC and British FTSE, and strong performance in the US S&P 500 and Japanese Nikkei. [1] Eurozone unemployment has soared into double digits of late, while in the US and Japan it is converging with the natural rate, <6%.

The economic situation in Europe is truly awful, in contrast to the US and Japan where growth has been respectable. But you would never have guessed this from the tone of the article.

The article raises a second narrative about inequality. Fair enough! But this is an orthogonal issue to Europe's economic malaise. The US is infamous at not distributing the benefits of growth. In the US, we have one thing that's working (growth) and one thing that's not (inequality). This is due to many institutional problems and governance decisions and it will be a lot of work to improve the situation.

The thing I found alarming about this was the way they denigrated stimulus. This is an area of major divergence between Japan/US and Europe. Nominal GDP growth, the measure of the 'easiness' of money (it's the sum of all money trading hands), has stagnated under the European Central Bank (ECB) while the US Fed (FOMC) has used stimulus to keep it growing in the United States [2]. If anyone believes the central banks have "run out of ammunition" as the article suggests, look what happened just last Friday in Japan: The BoJ announced unexpectedly high stimulus and the Nikkei instantly soared 4%, despite the fact that interest rates were already 0. [3]

The ECB needs to be _more_ like the FOMC and BoJ. The Spiegel seems to think the opposite. It seems like the ECB's policy reflects this hawkish European perspective. And that's scary for Europe.

PS It's true that Japan has been stagnating for decades. That is likely related to the ultratight monetary policy they've pursued since the early 90's (as well as structural issues of course); NGDP actually shrunk there over 2 decades [4]. But they've been moving in a different direction lately, and the shift seems to be paying dividends.

[1] Drag the slider here back to mid-2011 to get a long-ish view: [https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chfdeh=0&chdet=141499...](https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chfdeh=0&chdet=1414991874560&chddm=890&cmpto=INDEXNIKKEI:NI225;INDEXSP:.INX;INDEXDB:DAX;INDEXEURO:PX1;INDEXFTSE:UKX&cmptdms=0;1;1;1;1&q=INDEXNIKKEI:NI225,INDEXSP:.INX,INDEXDB:DAX,INDEXEURO:PX1,INDEXFTSE:UKX&ntsp=0&ei=7Q9XVOjLE8_diQLFlYHwBQ)

[2] [http://static.cdn- seekingalpha.com/uploads/2014/9/11/sauploa...](http://static.cdn- seekingalpha.com/uploads/2014/9/11/saupload_ngdp-ez-us.jpg)

[3] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/31/nikkei-japan- stimul...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/31/nikkei-japan- stimulus_n_6080146.html)

[4] [http://uneasymoney.com/2012/02/13/japans-2-decade- experiment...](http://uneasymoney.com/2012/02/13/japans-2-decade-experiment- with-fiscal-austerity-and-0-7-ngdp-growth/)

<comment><USER28> A German here, I probably read Spiegel for >10 years (from ~2000 to beginning of 2014):

They are kind of "left" which reflects in their articles "raises a second narrative about inequality". They'd support basic income any time.

The Spiegel has turned into yellow press lately, I am surprised to see a (english) article on HN.

Thank you HN for unveiling that there are some spots in Europe that are doing fine and that there are structural problems (I can see them, the borders are open and ppl come to Germany from other European countries).

<comment><USER29> One of the problems with the open borders is that the younger people are moving, leaving countries with an already stagnant economy with an even greater aging population issue.

<comment><USER30> The same problem exists within Germany.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'd say that it's well on its rails. It's us, the 99%, that we are in it's way.

</comment><comment><USER32> Capitalism has not gone off the rail. It is just the concept that has worked better than almost every other thing known to humanity.

This inequality business is a new modern day scam just like communism of last century. Some anointed people want power for themselves and want to still money from people like us who are working hard in the name of poor people nothing else.

When government creates incentives where it steals money from hardworking people like us and gives it to irresponsible people like teenage mothers in the name of "compassion", we are creating incentives for many people to remain poor. This is a perpetual poverty into which we have let the government condemn them. That is the problem.

Capitalism is a hope.

<comment><USER33> The need to see an _untermenschen_ to rail against always puzzles me; these tirades about "stealing from us" are just a good way to give one's eye-rolling some exercise. It's like you think, with your labor, you're not poor, too-- while some folks (hi) recognize that a couple years of illness are enough to destroy a laborer's career. Even a tech worker.

If you don't own capital to sustain your lifestyle, you're almost certainly part of the poor you want to spit on. Nobody has serious designs on your slightly bigger slice of the scraps that the middle and lower classes have, and I have this sneaking feeling that you know that. But Steinbeck predicted you most of a hundred years ago.

<comment><USER32> Yes. Something might destroy all I have earned but that is fine. I am individually responsible for that and I dont think someone else owes me anything.

<comment><USER33> The idea that one is individually responsible for getting cancer at the age of twenty-five is at best hilarious and at worst monstrous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A damning indictment from Stockman's _The Great Deformation_ (referenced in the article):

      The paper trail uncovered by congressional investigators shows that the
      $400 billion (notational value) of busted CDS insurance issued by the AIG
      holding company was held by a very small number of the world's largest fi-
      nancial institutions, and virtually none of it was held by the banks of Main
      Street America which were allegedly being shielded from AIG's imminent
      collapse. Moreover, the worst-case loss faced by the dozen or so giant in-
      stitutions actually exposed to an AIG bankruptcy would have amounted to
      no more than a few months' bonus accrual.

</comment><comment><USER35> More at [http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/10/16/149247/bill-gates- pi...](http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/10/16/149247/bill-gates-pikettys- attack-on-income-inequality-is-right)

</comment><comment><USER36> I don't think the healthiness of any specific industries (like banking and finance) has anything to do with capitalism. Just like, say, manufacturing CPUs has nothing to do with capitalism. If you have a bug in your manufacturing process then your company might go broke. Likewise, if there is a bug in your financial rules, financial institutions might break down. That has no bearing on the validity or invalidity of capitalism as a whole.

<comment><USER37> This is a good insight, with the remark that CPU manufacturers are rarely bailed out by the taxpayers, after designing a faulty processor and getting close to bankruptcy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The main purpose of money is to provide a transaction medium. So that we can negotiate contracts and trade things without barter. This function requires money to act as an artificial store of value. However money doesn't have intrinsic value in itself so if people start to put too much faith into this paper, it can replace more tangible market based stores of value such as stocks, bonds commodities etc., those that are backed by real economic activity. When real economic activity is replaced by a government "paper" store of value, you get unemployment and sub potential production.

Right now in many places, Europe in particular, interest rates are artificially high, yes they are near zero but zero is high when the alternative private investments would be in the negative in risk adjusted, inflation adjusted term. That is why corporation and banks tend to hoard cash. Cash is kept artificially more valuable than market investments.

It is critical in these situations to have slightly higher than normal inflation to allow central bank real rates to be more negative and closer to market rates for stores of value. When central banks don't cause enough inflation, they are subsidizing holders of money and money like instruments to the detriment of those who invest in things that are tied to economic activity. They are subsidizing economic idleness, they are keeping an artificial store of value worth more than free market investments and this creates gridlock in the economy.

</comment><comment><USER39> What is interesting about the article is that it clearly points out how destructive the Central Banks are in trying to manipulate the economy, but ends with blaming the private bankers. It is abundantly clear from economic history that Keynesian policies of money printing and interest rate manipulation don't work and in fact have never worked - they are the problem.

</comment><comment><USER40> What's really interesting about the labor glut is that the conventional wisdom about demographics hasn't been adjusted.

The CW is that the US has a great future because US population is going to climb to about 400M by about 2050. If economic growth is decoupled from labor, is that an advantage?

</comment><comment><USER41> Capitalism requires growth, finite resources/demand can't always live up to it. I have always believed that the virtual economy / digital goods is really where most of the growth needs to be.

We are seeing lots of this but maybe not enough. The only limited resource in virtual worlds is imagination, storage, network and power (energy), but it takes fractions of what physical goods take. If we can pull something off like in Ready Player One OASIS or even just more participating in buying digital goods I think this is part of the solution.

Another area I think can help is loans/investments but of digital currencies. The world of funding could be revolutionized by bitcoin like systems where they are primarily for hoarding, but they are also perfect for supplying capital. Capital could be made available to the 99% out there in new interesting ways, shaking up baked in wealth of the 1% that is immovable at times of need. If there ever is a basic income, I believe it will be some sort of digital currency, a new currency might even start out that way.

</comment><comment><USER35> Unlike Capitalism, Globalization is Zero-Sum.

</comment><comment> kuni-toko-tachi Another absurd anti-capitalism diatribe from left oriented journalists.

Capitalism is not the problem. We have too little capitalism, not too much. Central banking and the banking industry in general are the problem, since it exerts monopoly control over interest rates and currencies. Free markets are resilent distributed networks and therefore self-regulate and self-repair. Concentration of wealth is a valid concern, but only because many normal mechanisms of exchange have been co-opted by central entities. Because of this, people have to go through intermediaries to facilitate exchange. These intermediaries often do not have the interests of those parties at heart.

</comment><comment><USER42> So will it scale now?

</comment><comment><USER43> Very very very simple.

The natural end state of unregulated markets is cartel/monopoly.

Which is what practically every sector is right now.

Break them up with existing antitrust laws.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's not capitalism that's gone off the rails ... it's socialism. All of the countries with slow growth and growing inequality have heavy-handed socialist policies in place.

<comment><USER45> So you're saying the US isn't experiencing slow growth and growing inequality?

<comment><USER44> I'm saying the US has some of those very same policies in place.

<comment><USER11> So who doesn't?

<comment><USER46> Hong Kong and Singapore are the two freest economies. They have very minimal welfare states, with relatively light regulation and taxation. Their wealth creation and economic growth have been astounding over the last ten years.

Meanwhile, most of Europe has seen zero GDP growth in real terms since 2004/05\. France has seen an average of sub 1% nominal GDP growth for a decade; negative in real terms. Japan, which is a massive welfare state, has seen zero GDP growth for 20 years; their State spending dug such a deep hole, a quarter of their revenues go to just paying interest on debt, and they've taken to debasing their currency as the last step available to them to hold off further collapse. Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, et al. are welfare state disasters, rapidly imploding. The US has seen zero standard of living improvement for 40 years, and that's before accounting for the massive increase in debt that has yet to exact its full toll.

You can count the number of welfare states in the world that are doing well on one hand, with one of them being a temporary oil empire named Norway.

<comment><USER47> _Hong Kong and Singapore are the two freest economies. They have very minimal welfare states, with relatively light regulation and taxation. Their wealth creation and economic growth have been astounding over the last ten years._

Hong Kong and Singapore had an _astounding_ growth of 2.9% and 3.9%, while socialist China had a miserable 7.7%? I don't get the impression you looked at the numbers at all, or did you?

<comment><USER44> In what way is China socialist? It's a kleptocracy and an aggressively capitalist one at that.

<comment><USER47> Whether or not China is socialist or capitalist doesn't really matter: GP said "freer" economies have higher growth. Is China freer than Hong Kong or Singapore?

(BTW: China sure has a market economy, but OTOH it lacks multiple specifics of contemporary Western capitalist economies, e.g. it's not primarily driven by the financial markets, a significant portion of the workforce still works at state owned enterprises, much deeper planned macro economical development than in the West, ...)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Micromort - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort <comment><USER2> The Micromort concept is explored thoroughly and very enjoyable in the book 'The Normal Chronicles' by David Blastland and Michael Spiegelhalter. It's well worth checking out.

Blastland was one of the creators of the excellent 'More or Less' on the BBC that looks at how numbers are used and mostly abused by the media, politicians and everyone else.

Spiegelhalter is a prof of stats.

The book addresses a number of the criticisms that have been leveled at the concept in comments here. They also talk about the 'microlife' which is what you get by exercising or whatever. They also acknowledge the problems with these ideas as well.

<comment><USER3> Er, it's _David_ Spiegelhalter. He's a friend/colleague of mine.

While on the subject, "More or Less" is quite a good program, and fun to participate in.

<comment><USER2> Ha, Sorry, thanks for that.

Say hello to David/Michael, he does a great job!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Wikipedia article claims air pollution from living in New York or Boston is 30 times worse than the risk from living with a smoker, though that was in 1979. Presumably air pollution has become much less severe since then. Does anyone know the figure today?

<comment><USER5> These days people vastly overestimate the risk of second-hand smoke. Based on the numbers in this article living with a smoker is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes every _two years_. i.e. not much.

Second-hand smoke does have some health consequences -- for instance poor air quality is strongly linked to childhood asthma. It's also certainly considered a nuisance by most people.

Anyway, I'm not surprised at all that living in a polluted city would expose you to far more danger than a smoker at home. 30x sounds fairly reasonable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It should be noted that used in Thinking Fast and Slow context this micromort induce can be used to show how much we human have very hard time grasping low probability events.

All the lottery and insurance business is just a scam against us taking advantage of this miss computation of micro risks.

<comment><USER7> Insurance isn't a scam. You pay a little extra to ensure that you can get the money before you would have saved it (assuming you put your entire ensurance premium into savings) in the event that you (or your family, in the case of life insurance) need it. Sure, in infinite (or sufficiently high) number of lives/events, you'll always end up behind, but that doesn't mean it's a scam.

<comment><USER6> Do you agree that we are very bad at evaluating very low probabilities (below .1%)?

Then how much would you bet on the hope that insurance companies are not taking advantage of this psychological weakness for their benefit?

<comment><USER7> I agree with both your points there, but disagree with the premise that insurance is a scam - the insurance companies provide a valuable service, and they charge what people will pay - the way any reasonable business is going to behave.

From there, it's up to you to determine whether it's worth it. I personally don't have health insurance (though I live in a country with universal healthcare), but I have 3rd-party car insurance in case I accidentally drive into someone's Lamborghini, and it was fortunate that my girlfriend's dad had life insurance so that her mum had some money after he passed away prematurely last year. Just because money is being made doesn't mean it's a scam.

<comment><USER8> But why are you worried about driving into a Lamborghini and not the fact it would mean you've had a car accident and you could be dead?

This to me is where our perceived realities differ with real life.

Spending the money on defensive driving and/or car safety makes much more sense, but we can only see the future where the accident happens (And we survive) not all the accidents we can stop.

I have no idea about your girlfriends father and what happened but I'd prefer to spent money on not dieing than paying for what happens if I do.

<comment><USER9> non-lethal car accidents happen more often than those with casualties. And they often are fairly expensive, especially if you manage to involve more than your own car. That's not to say that you shouldn't drive carefully (and I guess your insurance company certainly raises the price once you start driving into other cars twice a month).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A lot of this seems weird. If I imbibe 0.5 liters of wine exactly once in my life I doubt there's any effect. Same for 2 cigarettes. For a lot of things there are thresholds that must be crossed before any effect is created.

<comment><USER11> It seems pretty clear that, to come up with these numbers, they took mortality figures from people with lots of exposure, divided their exposure down into small chunks, and assumed that everything scaled linearly.

I mean really, 1 hour in a coal mine and you get black lung? Absurd. Would 1 minute in a coal mine be 1/60th of a micromort? Would 1 second in a coal mine be 1/3600th of a micromort? Of course not, and of course not. Black Lung is caused by long term exposure.

You are not rolling a million-sided die every hour you are in a coal mine.

<comment><USER12> The statement >>1 hour in a coal mine and you get black lung<< is completely wrong.

By staying in a coal mine for 1 hour you increase the chance of death by 1 micromort, that by definition means if you did that for about a million times you would very probably die. If the average life expectancy is about 613000 hours, and if you spend every living hour in a coal mine you would still live every other lifespan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The idea of scaling probabilities (by 10^6) misses the point. Log scales are better at revealing orders of magnitude! How about dbMorts instead?

<comment><USER14> I have always struggled with log/db, can you explain your proposed system?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The discussion here is interesting. One of the reasons I hardly ever submit Wikipedia articles to Hacker News is that very few Wikipedia articles have gone through enough thorough editing to be worth discussing among the professionally edited sources submitted here. I'll note for the record, as a Wikipedian, that the article talk page

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Micromort](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Micromort)

for the article kindly submitted here suggests that the article still needs A LOT of work (as most Wikipedia articles doe) and that some of the statements now in the article may be flat wrong, misrepresenting the micromort concept as it was pioneered by Ronald A. Howard. See his presentation on microrisk analysis

[http://ise.tamu.edu/isen627/Slides/25%20Life%20and%20Death.p...](http://ise.tamu.edu/isen627/Slides/25%20Life%20and%20Death.pdf)

for a possibly more sophisticated, exact, and accurate view of the issue.

The online mathematics lesson "Understanding uncertainty: Small but lethal"

[http://plus.maths.org/content/os/issue55/features/risk/index](http://plus.maths.org/content/os/issue55/features/risk/index)

is also good for practicing understanding of micromorts.

</comment><comment><USER16> So per mile jets are only ~4 times safer than cars? That's a little unsettling.

<comment><USER17> That stat shocked me too, and from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Statistics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Statistics), it appears to be false. However, that table isn't sourced very well either.

Looking at the source, he seems to be lumping shorter plane rides in with the long-distance (safer) ones. The danger is largely in takeoff and landing, as far as I understand. I also can't tell if the source takes into account private jets, which are less regulated and likely more risky than passenger jets. I'd also imagine the statistic varies a lot of you limit yourself to flights involving the US and our colonies[1].

Or the source could just be wrong - he could have mistakenly used the chance of being involved in a crash, rather than the chance of dying. That would put it in the right order or magnitude, I think.

[1] With all the "evil empire" rhetoric flying around lately...

<comment><USER18> There are no reliable statistics for the safety of commercial air travel in the US these days.

It's not for lack of trying. It's simply that commercial air travel in the US is so safe that there isn't enough data to compile anything like a reasonable risk figure. Prior to the Asiana crash, the last fatal airliner crash in the US was in 2009, and there were no fatalities in 2008 or 2007.

So, yes, they're much safer than that number would imply, but it's hard to say exactly how much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Traveling 10 or 20 miles by bicycle"

They only assume the accidental nature of riding a bike and ignore the health benefits. A good article highlighting this [http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the- safe...](http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-safest-form- of-transportation/)

<comment><USER6> Furthermore each listed risky activity should be balanced with the micromort risk of not doing it.

For example suppose I take a plane, then ride a bike to go hiking for a week with friends. Maybe this trip will save me many micromort from health and mental perspectives. Having a deeper friendship is certainly also a net positive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If a day spent skiing raises your chance of dying by less than drinking half a liter of wine, you're probably not very much fun to ski with!

</comment><comment><USER21> Holy crap. I live in NYC, where I walk everywhere, drink, and fly several times per year. Apparently I'm screwed.

<comment><USER22> As long as you aren't taking canoes!

<comment><USER23> Yeah WTF! I didn't realize canoes were so dangerous! That almost can't be right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Here is great video by Cambridge Ideas about the risk of dying from various activities (measured in micromorts):

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1PtQ67urG4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1PtQ67urG4)

The professor's conclusion is that one of the biggest risks is being too cautious.

</comment><comment><USER25> So is 1 mort a guaranteed death or a [edit:] 1 - 1/e chance of death?

<comment><USER26> I think you mean 1-1/e (~= 1 - (1-10^-6)^(10^6)). But yes, the idea that you can just divide a statistic sampled over thousands of events linearly to get a meaningful statistic for one occurrence of the event is ridiculous.

<comment><USER25> Yes, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Another death-related unit meant to provide perspective: [http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html](http://www.raikoth.net/deadchild.html).

</comment><comment><USER28> Interesting that skydiving would only change the micromorts on the day of the jump from 39 to 46.

</comment><comment><USER29> What you get when the villain of the Harry Potter books makes one million horcruxes? (Or is it 20?)

EDIT: I wonder how much the micromort exchange rate is with "The Death of Rats?"

</comment><comment><USER30> La petite mort?

<comment><USER31> Hehe. Subtle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_component_analysis)

We're done here.</comment>


How  to Upgrade Your Office Using Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/floown/5-ways-to-upgrade-your-office-using-science <comment><USER2> I would expect my upgraded-with-science office to not need PowerPoint slides. Srlsy, should I take advice from someone who thinks PP on the web is a good idea?

<comment><AUTHOR> Never underestimate the power of good Powerpoint. Or in this case a Keynote...</comment></comment>


Most College Students Unable to Properly Use Search Engines - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/college-students-stumped-search-engines-research-finds-193221656.html

<comment><USER2> I really love the phrase "not that good at the Internet." I use terms like that in jest. Sometimes I wonder if we're creating a Warhammer 40,000 like world where high priests use incantations passed down for generations on machines so fantastically complex the knowledge of their construction has been lost for a thousand years.

Then i realize editors are lazy, and move on.

<comment><USER3> Warhammer 40,000? Surely you meant to reference Isaac Asimov's Foundation? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "most college students".... as defined by the outcome of a 30 student sample at one university.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm uncomfortable with the notion that there is a "proper" way to use a search engine. It seems like we should design search engines based upon our audience's behavior.

<comment><USER6> There may not be a "proper" way to use a search engine, but there are certainly effective and ineffective ways of using a search engine, with "effective" being defined as finding a relevant, factual answer to the question you were trying to answer.

And search engines are already designed based on these people's behavior: since many people tend to click on the first link, search engines put sponsored links at the top. Note, however, that this design is meant to optimize the revenue of the search engine company, not to help the users (who are not paying customers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The website of the project generating these results: <http://www.erialproject.org/>

The main takeaway should be "students have a hard time finding good sources because researchers hide their articles behind layers of unintuitive interfaces that finally bring you to a broken link."

<comment><USER7> Ah, here it is: [http://www.erialproject.org/wp- content/uploads/2011/04/ACRL-...](http://www.erialproject.org/wp- content/uploads/2011/04/ACRL-erial-results-presentation.pdf)

Ish. PP presentation with no data.</comment></comment>


Is there any framework like bottle for Node.js - <AUTHOR>

i am a python-er before, now, i found node can give me more motivation. but express is too complex for router than bottle. what's best choice of router framework for node ? <comment><USER2> I would take a look at koajs. It's a simpler, smaller framework with a killer feature: JavaScript Generators. Which means you don't have to use callbacks.

[http://koajs.com/](http://koajs.com/)</comment>


Payouts may have contribued to a talent exodus at Google's car project - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-13/one-reason-staffers-quit-google-s-car-project-the-company-paid-them-so-much <comment><USER2> I don't think getting paid a large sum of money is the contributing factor for the departures. If this was true, than logic would dictate that no company should be able to retain executives based on their compensation payouts each year.

If anything, the exodus at google shows clear lack of vision and direction from the management and executive teams. Engineers care about achieving something they can feel proud of and if the project lacks that, they move on.

This article is written in a way that suggests engineers should be paid less so that they remain loyal...you know, like slaves.

<comment><USER3> I've left a company (Microsoft) in part due to big bonuses. In my case, it was because the bonus gave me psychological stress. I felt a lot of (self-imposed) pressure to keep performing at a very high level. The bonus was given to me because I did a _lot_ of work to get a product out the door successfully. That process was frustrating and painful. The big bonus made me think "we expect more of the same!"

In retrospect, that's not at all what management was telling me. But I felt it. And I didn't want to go through another year like the one that led up to the bonus. And I didn't feel like climbing a career ladder (the way Microsoft at the time seemed to encourage). I just wanted to be a simple software engineer and build cool stuff.

I guess what I'm trying to say is anecdotally, actions (including big salaries / bonuses) can have unintended consequences.

Take IBM's recent initiative to kill remote work. Well, a predictable unintended consequence of that is a brain-drain. Those who aren't capable of finding other jobs will stay at IBM. Those who are capable will leave for greener (and remote-friendly) pastures.

<comment><USER4> I would have taken the opposite view-- that a bonus was for hard work already done, not an expectation of future work. A salary increase would represent that expectation.

<comment><USER5> Hah, when I was at a big company i took your opposite view in that a salary increase represented recognition for good work done consistently and the expectation of a new normal. It's funny how we interpret the (generally) same system

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just realized the genius of the name "Alphabet".

By investing in this company you are "betting" that they will be able to generate "alpha" ( in the financial sense )

[http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/alpha.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/alpha.asp)

<comment><USER7> You could also consider Google as Alphabet's primary, or "alpha" bet, but Google is also investing in a variety of "other bets". The name also provides for cool URLs, like [https://abc.xyz](https://abc.xyz).

<comment><USER8> Serious (and off-topic) question: did _Silicon Valley_ name Hooli XYZ as a nod to that domain name? A whois seems to indicate that the domain was created a year before the second season of the show, when Hooli XYZ made its first appearance.

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure it was just an obvious play on Google X. But googlers are not without a sense of humor.

[http://hooli.xyz/](http://hooli.xyz/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd interpret the content of the article as the opposite of the title: "One (the only?) reason staffers didn't quit Google's car project before now? The company paid them so much"

Multiple big players want to get into autonomous cars (and other vehicles -- this is the same space as military contracts for drones) and Google's executives were in total disarray. You'd think they'd lose out but instead they successfully hit some giant milestones by throwing enough cash at the problem.

I mean, if the staffers had been paid poorly, wouldn't they have quit without waiting for that 16x bonus that only comes after meeting the division goals and then waiting four years?

</comment><comment><USER11> I think the article is overemphasizing the money that the people earned with the project but instead people got disillusioned with the project and since they amassed enough money then that is why they departed the project. They even state this in the article.

</comment><comment><USER12> That's a bozo of an excuse if I ever heard one.

Lack of vision, lack of direction, failure to set expectations or execute a plan, better opportunities elsewhere, poor management... those are all reasons for brain drain.

Gave them too much money? That's absurd.

Honestly, it looks more like a propoganda message to pre-explain shrinking bonus money.

</comment><comment><USER13> And a million MBA heads just bobbled as they agreed, "Yes, yes, we pay engineers too much! Mwaaaahahaahahaa!"

</comment><comment><USER14> "F- you money" is the amount of money that allows you to do what you want, i.e. leave when things do not go your way. This must mean the staffers did not want to be there for some reason or another.

This is interesting because they were helping build the future. It's easy to see why people might not be excited or passionate about the next CRUD app but self driving cars seems like a passion project to me.

<comment><USER15> Many of these people are passionate about building the future. ...that's why they left Google.

Bear in mind, many of them are still working on self-driving cars, they just went to work for other companies. If as you say, it's a passion project, they are going to go to whoever they think is best equipped to accomplish the vision. Especially since money is no longer an issue for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> In an alternative universe:

1\. the regulatory environment in the US was relaxed

2\. the cars were a big hit, and

3\. there are articles about how far sighted Google was for letting the research project have these startup like returns.

<comment><USER17> _...the regulatory environment in the US was relaxed..._

Have onerous regulations been a problem for robocar development? If they were, I sort of think I would have heard of it, particularly here on HN where such vehicles are a common topic of conversation.

<comment><USER10> If there weren't these rules about not killing pedestrians or ramming buildings I could make a robot car myself! Another small business smothered in the crib by government overreach.

<comment><USER16> This is the point I was making, although this is a more amusing way of making it.

I didn't say they should not be relaxed, by the way.

I do think at some point there will be a big public fight about what we are willing to accept.

I have heard it said that even current self-driving tech is safer than humans. But I haven't looked at the stats myself.

<comment><USER17> Sorry! To my embarrassment, your irony overpowered me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> As usual it sounds like the story is more nuanced than the headline.

A more accurate phrasing might be "One reason staffers quit google's car project? The company structured their pay so that an intermediate project milestone was treated like an IPO event."

It's not that the employees got rich so they no longer cared about money, it's that they basically got their maximum bonus from Google, so they were better off taking their talents elsewhere to get the next big payout.

Given that their CFO discussed these payouts on the earnings call of a company with $6.6 billion in operating expenses, it sounds like these were entering the $100million range. Makes sense given that Google was trying to recruit and motivate people to work on startup projects, while overall Google market cap wasn't going to grow exponentially the way that a 2011 facebook or uber might. It probably wasn't a bad idea, they just executed in a way that only incentivized employees to get partway done.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. If they were told to hit a certain set of milestones, and they did, I don't see why its an issue after the fact. The people that received the bonuses did their job and deserve what they were promised.

After hitting all those milestones and not seeing a car on the road, I can imagine that as a reason to be disgruntled and wanting to move to another company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Did they pay F-You money to the engineers or the management? Because no matter how much you pay its not going to be enough to make one retire (in 5 years). Unless of course they really paid 10s of millions. That means if they are really paid, employees would rather not leave.

The main reason its a sieve is that they realized they could make more money by leaving. They saw examples with Otto and others.

<comment><USER21> I'd be comfortable retiring with a "mere" $2 mil bonus payout. But I'd also stay on at a job I enjoyed, especially something as important to society as self-driving vehicles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Maybe in a decade when this is all water under the bridge we'll get the real story about what sort of drama went down to cause all their top people to flee.

It may be been banal. Now that the visionary part of the program has been executed, and with development more or less on rails, it's possible there simply isn't anything exciting left for the top guys to work on. That and they're all extremely valuable to car companies who would rather not get left in the dust.

</comment><comment><USER23> Crazy thought... If this is even possible, create a standard for everything key employees should know. Pay people great, but not GREAT. Bank up "eff you" money for them. If they want to quit, they get the banked money as long as there are enough people on team to carry on without that person.

Might not be practical for a number of reasons. Just sounds interesting, without having put any thought into the idea beyond the time it took me to write this comment.

</comment><comment><USER24> I wonder if companies will ever take a page from the public sector and offer crucial employees pensions based on staying on for a long time.

<comment><USER21> I don't know that that can work in the tech sector — you'd have to scale down "long time" to accommodate higher pay (and thus earlier retirement) and even then I'd be wary of taking a job if I knew the pay was heavily backloaded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> But they also got the best people in the industry and the results they wanted. Engineers that may have ended up working at Lyft, Uber or other companies.

This just in, startup type incentives does work and also produces startup like effects including bouncing around more than they would like.

</comment><comment><USER26> I really enjoy the tone of this article. It's written like they are tracking down the steps that led a company to dump toxic chemicals outside a grade school. Considering I see Google self driving cars self driving all over the place and I don't recall seeing that before 2010, maybe the idea worked?

</comment><comment><USER27> Isn't there an on-premise labor economist on the payroll? I mean, a bachelor level econ student could have told them this. Interesting still, is that there is real-world proof of an upper limit to pay in this industry given the a typical labor-leisure curve

</comment><comment><USER28> Clearly you can't pay commoners too much. Only upper class people should get upper class money. One has to maintain the social order. God forbid those people who all "quit" use their newly earned capital to start their own enterprise.

<comment><USER29> Please don't post snarky rants to HN. Doing so pulls discussion quality below the level we're hoping for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Excellent journalism - anonymous sources speculate as to what might have caused people to leave a company.

Also pushes the new business-friendly narrative that it's good for companies to pay their engineers less.

Well done, I hope the author's boss is proud.

<comment><USER31> I am all for higher salaries but there is some truth to the dangers of overpaying. Give me 5 million dollars and you will never see me again. Give my CEO 5 million dollars and he'll keep going. On the other hand, give me 250000 dollars and you will have a very happy and loyal employee.

<comment><USER32> I doubt very much that you would quit after getting a 5mm bonus. I've seen some pretty ridiculous Wall St bonuses from the 90's up close.

I think a more typical response would be, "Hmmm. That wasn't so hard, let's see if they do it again next year." And when they don't -- that is typically when you walk.

<comment><USER33> Really, because $5M seems like an enormous fortune to me. It's an amount you could stick in a savings account yielding only 1% interest and pretty much live the rest of your life with a decent lifestyle somewhere with a low cost of living. OR, you could quit your high-stress job and augment that interest with a more fulfilling career.

I can pretty safely say a single $5M bonus would amount to an instant lifestyle change (namely less pressure to work) for me.

<comment><USER34> Or put it all in the market in highly diversified low-ish risk mutual funds, withdraw 4% per year and live a lavish lifestyle.

<comment><USER32> So assume you get a bonus which allows you to maintain your previous salary with just interest income. The problem is the cost of your leisure time (as measured by the cost of foregone wages) just went up dramatically, so the leisure has to be worth that much more to you for you to take it.

Two things to note: 1) this is different than winning a lottery, because with a lottery there is no expectation of a change in wages; 2) your first week of leisure is worth much, much more than your 50th, as is your 1st dollar worth more than your 5 millionth. There is some level at which you stop working. I think it's much higher than you realize.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Ruby and Lisp devs, please answer this (Not a flame war) - <AUTHOR> I'm a Ruby guy, I've fallen in love with the language thanks to Rails. I have a Master's in CS and in college we studied mainly Java, along with some Lisp and C, but I try to do all my current programming in Ruby.
In an effort to not be a Blub programmer I have taken another look at Lisp to see what I'm missing, but I'm afraid that I can't really see it.  I found this page http://innig.net/software/ruby/closures-in-ruby.rb which explains Closures in Ruby and after looking through that I don't really see what I could do with Lisp that I can't do with Ruby.
Again, I'm not looking for a "OMG Python is better than both" I would just like some honest answers about what the differences are. It's always worth it to learn new languages but would it be a better use of my time to start over and learn Lisp or just learn how to proficiently use Closures in Ruby?
Any comments, questions, etc. would be appreciated. <comment><USER2> Ruby descended from lisp, according to matz. So in order to "see what you're missing" by using ruby, take a look at what he removed or changed from lisp. In particular he removed macros and created syntax. As others have commented, macros are a _very_ powerful language feature.

[http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby- talk/...](http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/179642)

</comment><comment><USER3> 1\. CLOS and the MOP have some very devoted advocates, and it's obvious that CL's object model contains a strict superset of the behaviors available in other languages. If you don't absolutely hate OOP, they're worth checking out [1].

2\. Macros. Macros, macros, macros. Commonplaces like "code is data" and "program-writing programs" are useful characterizations, but they make it easy to underestimate how much of a productivity booster metaprogramming can be.

Despite regular practice and a lot of first-rate reading material, I stayed clueless about macrology until I got stuck with a big ugly infrastructure problem [2] that forced me to use a bottom-up style. At some point I macroexpanded my code out of curiosity and found myself staring at pages and pages of boilerplate. Some of it -- database code in particular -- even reminded me of stuff I previously would have done by hand.

Anyway, I guess I recommend the Kool Aid...

[1] OOP owes me my Freshman and Sophomore years.

[2] I was building a platform, but I can't talk about it.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's not that there's something you can do in Lisp that absolutely can't be done in Ruby. It's just that it's more convenient in Lisp, e.g. real closures instead of seven or eight closure-like constructs.

I took a look at that Closures in Ruby page you mentioned.

It says about Ruby: "This is quite a dizzing array of syntactic options, with subtle semantics differences that are not at all obvious, and riddled with minor special cases. It's like a big bear trap from programmers who expect the language to just work."

<comment><USER5> Ruby has real closures with semantics similar to Lisp: lambda expressions that reference variables from their enclosing lexical scope. It also has a number of constructs that create closures implicitly, and some others that may or may not be implemented that way, but you're not required to use them. You can use closures just like you would in Lisp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a good comparison:

[http://markwatson.com/blog/2008/01/cool-common-lisp- elephant...](http://markwatson.com/blog/2008/01/cool-common-lisp-elephant- object.html)

Performance is a big difference:

"Common Lisp compiled code runs much faster than Ruby: typical benchmark results are about 30 times faster - but Ruby's slowness is mitigated if a lot of processing is performed in native libraries like Ferret."

I don't think Ruby has all of the functionality of CLOS or the Meta Object Protocol. Here's Matz commenting on the lack of multi-methods in Ruby:

[http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby- talk/...](http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/49964)

"Most OO langauge includes Ruby see methods as "element of an object" This does not hold for CLOS. You loose the tight relationship but gain a new level of flexibility."

Beyond that, I would say pick a programming methodology and there is probably a CL implementation of it somewhere out there built with macros. That's due to the greater maturity of CL and "real macros" (which have been well covered by others already). And beyond macros, the "code as data" paradigm enabled by s-expressions has other uses (I think Steve Yegge mentioned "executable log files" as an example).

</comment><comment><USER7> In theory, it should be possible to get better performance out of a Lisp application, since most versions of Common Lisp include a compiler. Ruby is interpreted at present and can be slower in some contexts. Runtime pauses for garbage collection can be quite noticeable in Ruby.

</comment><comment><USER8> The main difference is that Lisp has macros, no other languages' macro systems come close.

For the cute version of why Lisp macros are so awesome check out chapter 8 of Practical Common Lisp (<http://gigamonkeys.com/book/>).

For the serious and intense version check out On Lisp (<http://paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html>).

</comment><comment><USER9> Your likely to get many comments about macros, so I suggest you take a closer look at what macros actually can do for you. That should be a sufficient enough reason to take a closer look at Lisp (be it Common Lisp or Scheme).

<comment><USER10> That's it, in a nutshell. The macro facility is what differentiates Lisp from other dynamic languages that have, seemingly, all of the same attributes-- dynamic/lexical scope, closures, etc.

They allow you to write a true DSL. Paul Graham pretty much wrote the book on the subject (On Lisp) which he graciously offers as a free download since it's out of print.

<comment><USER11> As a data point, in the source code of Arc and its libraries + the web server + News.YC + all of YC's internal applications, there are 738 calls to def (= CL defun) and 187 calls to mac (= CL defmacro). This isn't a complete list, because there are other defining operators, but it gives you an idea how large a role macros play in a typical Lisp application.

If you measured by uses of each type of operator, the role of macros would be even larger. You often write a function that you only call once, but you wouldn't do that with a macro.

Here's the last piece of code I wrote. I wrote it because I was curious to see what colors users had chosen for the top bar.

      (defopa topcolors req
        (minipage "Topcolors"
          (tab
            (each user (sort (compare > [karma _])
                             (keep [aand (uvar _ topcolor)
                                         (isnt it (hexrep orange))]
                                   (keys profs*)))
              (tr (td (link user (user-url user)))
                  (tdcolor (hex>color (uvar user topcolor)) (hspace 30)))))))

There are 10 macros used here: defopa, minipage, tab, each, karma, aand, uvar, tr, td, tdcolor.

Actually it's a hack that karma is a macro. I wanted it to be settable and was too lazy to define a setter, so I just defined it as a macro. It should be a function, and I should be able to say just (compare > karma).

<comment><USER12> I thought that Arc is written in Scheme, not in Common Lisp? Are Scheme Macros equally powerful?

Edit: OK, perhaps Arc is written in Scheme, but Arc itself features CL like macros, that would explain it ;-)

<comment><USER11> Arc is written in Scheme in the sense that it compiles into Scheme, and uses the Scheme read, numbers, etc. But Arc macros are not Scheme macros.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> All other Lisp-inspired languages, including Ruby, have added one important feature by introducing their biggest restriction: they went with more complex syntax abandoning Lisp's S-expressions. By doing so, they have created a substantial difference in how code and data are represented: whereas in Lisp everything, including your code, can be treated as data.

This is, in my humble opinion, the biggest difference between Lisp and others.

</comment><comment> kyle-burton Other features that have piqued my interest (besides the already mentioned, and vitally important, macros) are:

\- conditoins and restarts \- CLOS \- reader macros (which are distinctly different from normal macros).

If you're talking about other Lisps (besides CL), like Scheme, it's worth looking at define-syntax and syntax-rules and how they deal with some of the intricacies of creating macros with define-macro.

</comment><comment><USER14> Try RLisp, <http://chaosforge.org/taw/rlisp/>

"RLisp is a Lisp dialect naturally embedded in Ruby"

</comment><comment><USER15> From the Ruby side the difference is the quantity and quality of libraries that are available. You are likely to find stuff that is currently been worked on, with CL this can be a real problem. There are a lot of half done libraries, so you have to be willing to read a lot of code, either make improvements yourself or write some from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER16> Macros can be used to automate function definition. You can't use blocks and HOFs for that, because definition occurs at compile time. You can also automate definition of other macros.

<http://paste.lisp.org/display/54227>

</comment><comment><USER17> I know that Ruby's metaprogramming facilities don't equal Lisp's, but does that matter in practice? i.e. is there a convincing number of metaprogramming use cases that can be implemented using Lisp macros, but can't be implemented using the Ruby meta object protocol?

</comment><comment><USER18> There is another facility ruby and lisp lack- a good typing system- which you can find in languages like Haskell.

<comment><USER12> I stopped reading the Haskell tutorial when I came to the part where arrays have to be homogeneous (or something like that, basically all elements in the array have to have the same type, if I remember correctly). That is one of the things that is most annoying in Java, so why put up with it in another language?

In a similar vein, I wonder about the Erlang hype - some things are really impractical to do in Erlang, for lack of syntactic sugar and the immutable memory constraint. People were always bickering about the constraints in Java (no multiple inheritance and stuff like that), so why choose another language with impractical constraints instead?

<comment><USER19> This is a little tricky, Types can be pretty broad. First, you could define a tree type with all sorts of different leaves, you could have a list of tree parts, something like:

Tree = Branch Tree Tree | ILeaf Int | SLeaf String

then a list like [ILeaf 1, SLeaf "foo"]. Another way to go takes advantage of type erasure. Currently it's just a popular extension but it lets you have lists of stuff in the same type class.

A good example is "Show" you can have a list off stuff that knows how to turn itself into strings. always a handy thing.

Basically you get the big two, group things based on what they are, or group things based on what you can do to them.

Perhaps there is a big pile of random stuff you want to hang on to, but i'd bet 99.9% of the time you really want to collect the stuff into a coherent type.</comment></comment></comment>


Twinkies and Wonder Bread are history as Hostess shuts down after labor dispute - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/hostess-to-wind-down-ops-lay-off-its-18500-workers-sell-brands-following-labor-strike/2012/11/16/69476a6e-2fef-11e2-af17-67abba0676e2_story.html

<comment><USER2> After two bankruptcies and a major strike, perhaps pulling the plug was the only solution.

 _Side note: this is a terrible submission title. For one, that's not the headline of the linked article, and two, these brands aren't "history" -- they will be sold to other companies just like all their other assets._

</comment><comment><USER3> This is the side effect of who is in power in Washington. Labor unions have been steadily growing stronger under this administration.

We haven't seen companies shutting down because of labor unions at least in a while. Yes there are strikes at companies but it finally works out.

This is just the beginning and there will be many more to follow where a good company shuts down and thousands loose their jobs. In this, 18000 workers will loose their job. Thanks to Labor unions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Only 30% of their workforce is union.

And they had offers to sell the company to other bakeries.

There might have been some management/investment shenanigans going on

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My political bias is pre-disposed to want to blame the union for this, and I'm sure the truth is more nuanced (more competition with healthy snacks, etc), but man, the things I've read so far sure aren't helping... Sure, a ~10% pay cut sucks, cue discussion about stagnant wages and all that, but if your company is struggling that's gotta be better than a 100% cut.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Before you start hording them to ebay, etc. the idea that Twinkies last forever is a complete myth. They are "only" good for 25 days before they spoil.

Fun fact: twinkies were created to look like a banana alternative and first filled with banana filling - during WorldWar II when there was a banana shortage

<comment><USER5> And alas, they are not the Twinkies of my childhood. Tried one a couple years ago, and don't recall them being so "oily".

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One less source of more Carbs for this world?

</comment><comment><USER7> I will remind people here the following: Indiana is a right-to-work state. This was passed last year.

Right to work lowers employer burden why someone is laid off/fired. Along with that, makes it a felony to require union dues to work at a company. However, the union is still required to represent you upon its charter.

Hostess also lost a sizable chunk of money with the lawsuit concerning Sachs donuts. Because of things I do not understand, Hostess had to kill all lines of yeast donuts and all "packaged fresh" yeast donuts. And from talking to employees of Hostess in Columbus,IN, those machines were scrapped.

A good reason why the union was giving hell was Hostess wanted to cut wages by almost 20%: the union already agreed to a 10% cut and reduction of benefits. Hostess wanted 9% more, and threw a tantrum here locally.

Who was in the right? I have no idea. But it looks the the nuclear option was used: blow it to the ground.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently they also turned down selling to another bakery.

Not sure what was up with that, but there was definitely profit to be had if they didn't want to sell.

Strange that moving $2.5 Billion of product a year isn't profitable. Doesn't sound right.</comment></comment>


Horseshoes and Hand Grenades Quilt Pattern - <AUTHOR> https://prequilt.com/rbq/horseshoes <comment><USER2> The service itself (homepage, [https://prequilt.com/](https://prequilt.com/)) is quite interesting from a business and technical point of view.

Submitting individual patterns though is more like products of a shop and should target quilters, not HN audience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry is HN not the appropriate place to post? If not do you have any recommendations where I can post? Thanks and sorry again.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any suggestions on how to monetize? 1) We are taking a percentage of the pattern sales 2) For who want don't need help selling, we change a monthly fee 3) Subscription for users to create patterns

Questions 1) How much money can I make off of advertising?</comment>


Does Apple Have A Blind Spot About Flash? - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/02/does-apple-have-a-blind-spot-about-flash.html <comment><USER2> >> "But the mobile web will eventually just be the web. And a big part of getting it there is to get the tools that allow us to seamlessly consume rich media on the web onto mobile devices. To me that means Flash."

To me, and hopefully Apple, that means <video> <audio> etc - standards based media. Using Flash to do video and audio is a horrible hack. If browsers had <video> and <audio> 10 years ago, I think flash would have died off in usage just as Java applets have.

<comment><USER3> long term i am sure you are right. but right now if you want to watch a youtube video or listen to streaming audio in a flash player on your iphone browswer you can't. sure you can download an app, but that seems like a backwards approach. should every experience on the iphone require an app?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Flash versus Open

Perhaps one thing we can all agree on is that the future of the web, mobile or otherwise, will be more or less open. That would be HTML, MP3, H.264, HE-AAC, and so on. These are not proprietary Adobe products, they are open standards…unlike Flash.

In confusing codecs with UI, Wilson keeps asking, "why is it tha[t] most streaming audio and video on the web comes through flash players and not html5 based players?" The answer is rather pedestrian: HTML5 is just ramping up, but Flash IDE has been around for many years. Selling Flash IDE and back-end server tools has been a commercial focus for Adobe, while Apple, for example, hasn't paid much attention to QuickTime technologies and promotion in ages. It's thus reflected in adoption patterns.

Hopefully, this summary will clear Wilson's blind spot:

Apple is betting on open technologies (as it makes money on hardware) while Adobe (which only sells software) is betting on wrapping up content in a proprietary shackle called Flash.

From:

Does "A VC" have a blind spot for Apple? <http://counternotions.com/2009/02/16/open/></comment>