Net worth of Americans aged 18 to 35 has dropped 34 percent since 1996: study - <AUTHOR> https://thehill.com/policy/finance/446372-net-worth-of-americans-aged-18-to-35-has-dropped-34-percent-since-1996-study <comment><USER2> I suspect that a large part of that has to do with student loans, which have grown by a huge multiple since 1996. With compounding interest it takes longer to recover from school.

I know I graduated with $75k loans at 8% interest. Even with say, a $100k salary, just the interest eats ~7% of the income. With the total payments being somewhere around 12% of your income. Combine that with increased taxes over the same time and a 34% reduction in worth seems about right (if we account for the loss in compounding interest from buying a home, 401k investments, etc)

<comment><USER3> The 8% interest on the loans seems high to me. Around here (Poland), a standard credit card is at 10% interest, and student loans should be much safer for the bank.

<comment><USER4> It's true. I may have actually been higher for some loans until I got a couple of promotions and had enough of an income increase to be able to refinance to a 5 year 4.75% loan at SoFi. Which itself still feels high as you watch DAILY interest compounding happen.

I lean fairly liberal, but I think we can make significant strides with this issue in the US by simply changing what max interest rates are and how this interest compounds. The way things work right now truly feels like robbery when you're in the thick of it.

<comment><USER5> We could limit max interest rates. If that had been in place, your loan would have been denied. Would that have been better for you? Might you have then chosen to get an illegal loan at an even higher interest rate from organized crime, with a risk of violence for non-payment?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational- attai...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attainment- of-college-diploma-or-higher-by-gender/)

The percent of people who have completed a 4 year degree has been on a continual increase.

This will drag down the net worth of young folks who give up working years and take on a debt load.

<comment><USER7> Another, more optimistic way to describe it is that students are spending more of their wealth to invest in their own human capital, which isn't measured in statistics.

<comment><USER8> Reminder to those down voting this comment. Down votes are for people _not_ contributing to the discussion in a meaningful way. They are not for expressing disagreement. Use the reply button if you disagree with the parent comment.

<comment><USER9> Is downvote the opposite of upvote? It seems that people upvote comments that are helpful/insightful and that they agree with.

Because upvote and downvote seem like they would be opposites, it's not surprising that people might focus on the negative of "I agree with this comment" instead of the opposite of "this comment is helpful/insightful". The former is easier to measure than the latter.

<comment><USER7> pg has in the past explicitly endorsed the idea that votes should, to some extent, reflect agreement/disagreement, but he's making a mistake. He has also correctly said the votes should answer the question "do we want more of this on HN?" since that's functionally what they are used for. If anything, we should err on the side of upvoting thoughtful things we disagree with, rather than agree with, since we learn more from that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I sometimes wonder what it would take for "yellow vest" type protests to happen in the US.

It seems like there's a combination of shame in talking about money, in being made to feel personally responsible for being in precarious financial situations (e.g. too much avocado toast!), and relatively easy access to consumer credit to numb things over. Or it's just the "boiling frog" phenomenon where things get slightly worse every year due to everything getting a little more expensive but never sharply enough that it'd create a mass revolt.

<comment><USER11> It already happened, and was called "Occupy Wallstreet". Then identity politics came around and occupied the left.

<comment><USER12> All politics is identity politics. The difference is the left embraced it without trying to sugar coat it.

It's too bitter and now there's some backlash.

<comment><USER13> > _All politics is identity politics._

That's only true if you define the term broadly enough to be useless. What about, say, anti-war demonstrations during Vietnam?

<comment><USER12> It's less literal than that.

You can think of the whole cosmopolitan urban vs salt-of-the-earth rural aspect of American politics as one example. Or southern identity/culture. "As a veteran who served"/"As a parent", or the cross-denomination "moral majority"— it's all based around the idea that your lived experience as _something_ shapes your political perspective and is intrinsically valuable to the political conversation.

And even Occupy: was occupy simply making a statement about economic politics or was it the identity of "the 1%" or "Bankers" vs the rest of Americans? These categories were somewhat arbitrary and basically represented which group you identified with.

<comment><USER13> That's what I mean by defining the phrase so broadly it becomes useless. You can say, "I am, and I have an identity, therefore my politics is identity politics." However, identity politics is specifically when the tribal motivations exceed and dominate all other motivations. It's similar to how islands are not called bodies of water even though soil contains water.

<comment><USER12> > However, identity politics is specifically when the tribal motivations > exceed and dominate all other motivations.

Then the term "identity politics" shouldn't be applied. But even if we accept that extremely narrow view: there are numerous political segments that are notorious for doing what you describe across the political spectrum. Most notable the rural Scotch-Irish, often criticized for routinely voting against their self-interest and instead choosing to vote for pols who simply provide them cultural validation and do nothing to address their material concerns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here in suburbs of New York, if you have no college degree, most of jobs will pay you $12/hr, some decent employers will pay $15/hr but if you get lucky and have some useful experience you can find something for $18/hr which result in around $2400 paycheck every 4 weeks of work. Most 1br apartments are around $1500/mo. Car (Lease+Insurance+Gas) is $500/mo roughly. After groceries there is literally no money left to go out. How the fuck are we supposed to build up net worth?

<comment><USER15> Why would someone making $2400/monthly after taxes rent a $1500/mo apartment on their own? I'm not sure they'd even qualify because most landlords require at least 2-2.5x gross income. Renting a room with other housemates, or splitting rent on a 1-bedroom with a partner/SO is probably a better idea in that situation.

<comment><USER16> Because card board boxes are very cold in the winter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> First, "dropped" is sort of a misleading term since it's not saying anyone actually has _lost_ money. Rather, the cohort of Americans in that age group has less money than previous cohorts did at that age.

Second, 18 to 35 is sort of a crazy range, it seems to me, since the net worth of the group is likely going to be dominated by those in their 30s who are mid-career.

Lastly, it's unsurprising that those who began their career in the throws of the 2008 collapse were stunted, relative to basically any other group.

<comment><USER18> > Second, 18 to 35 is sort of a crazy range, it seems to me, since the net > worth of the group is likely going to be dominated by those in their 30s who > are mid-career.

And yet, it still

> has dropped 34%

If you break it down to two sub-demographics, I suspect there'd be an even larger disparity within e.g. 18-25 than there is with 26-35 for reasons such as student loans, but 18-35 would seem appropriate for what's perhaps an overgeneralized view of when most career trajectories and preferences plateau/harden.

Not sure if it's at all related to the key TV demographic of 18-34, but that wouldn't surprise me either for largely the same reason (hardening of preferences).

But I think that's kinda the point. People were previously building more wealth at a time in their lives when said wealth would have a more profound impact as they approached retirement age some number of decades later. The current generation occupying that demographic has been tragically stunted by stagnation in wage growth + inflation of education charges, and here in the United States, this may well impose a cascading detrimental impact on the health of the economy as a whole.

<comment><USER17> > _If you break it down to two sub-demographics, I suspect there 'd be an even > larger disparity within e.g. 18-25 than there is with 26-35 for reasons such > as student loans, but 18-35 would seem appropriate for what's perhaps an > overgeneralized view of when most career trajectories and preferences > plateau/harden._

My point is exactly that I _don 't_ think it's likely that 18-25 would show an even larger disparity, since my suspicion is that the disparity is driven entirely by those who began their career during the Great Recession. 18-25 year olds, who began their career as the economy was heating up, wouldn't show the same. But I'd love to see the data to know if that's the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Note that in the article it says the avg net worth is now around $8000, which means 34% more is only ~$11,000.

That's noticeable, but still not really as a big of a drop as 34% makes it sound.

<comment><USER20> I'd almost be more interested in the change in variance across time. If education costs are the main factor, and the top 10-20% (? estimate) have parent's who pay for college, you'd think this might be yet another factor exacerbating inequality.

<comment><USER19> I'd also be much more interested in a more detailed net worth distribution over time. Reminds me of the quote Nassim Taleb is fond of, "Never cross a river that is on average 4 feet deep".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's almost like giving 18 year olds unlimited access to debt for unmarketable degrees was a bad idea!

<comment><USER22> It's almost as if guaranteeing loans to for for profit institutions which receive the money that is printed out of thing air is going to exacerbate social inequality!

Don't get me wrong, 18 year olds are generally stupid (I was at that age), but blaming them seems like the kind of thing the profiteers from this mess would want. It's also not a very logical position. It's almost as if this type of idea would be something a propagandist would want to disseminate.

<comment><USER21> I think we're on the same page here. To really stretch an analogy, if I were to leave a taser with a small child they shouldn't taser themselves, but I'm clearly (and Unironically) the asshole for giving them the taser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am simultaneously feeling privileged and horrified. My net worth is substantially above $8k, i have a reasonable income, and i'm feeling stressed about money most days and will remain unable to buy property in the city that has the best and most jobs for my profession for the foreseeable future.

<comment><USER24> There is nothing preventing you from exploring. You can be a big fish in a small pond. And because they know your worth, they won't treat you as disposable.

<comment><USER23> True enough, but i've made a home and a life here, and my niche is small enough that network effects matter a great deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It blows my mind away that in America student loans have a higher interest rate than car loans and housing loans. That's a country intentionally ruining the next generation's chance of making the county better.

Coming from Australia, this really makes me cringe.

<comment><USER26> Just cause of collateral. You can impound a car, foreclose on a mortgage, sell it and get back much or most of your money, which is why rates can be a lot lower. You can't compound on a college dropouts partial knowledge. And given there are various ways to get the loan forgiven, and with college dropout rates being as high as they are, and given the (popularity and) volume of degrees with low financial returns...

Fact is, most studies show that the returns on education in the US are quite high, higher than much of the rest of the world.

Where I am from (EU), you're not dissuaded to pursue a degree with low financial returns. My college fees are 10k in total for the entire bachelor+master's programme, and you can borrow 50k during those 4 years currently at 0% interest. I love it, but our returns on education are quite a bit lower than in the US because we subsidise things that don't work, or prevent it from failing, and incentivise people to study things they don't need or have no economic value. And it doesn't necessarily make the country better off.

I'm not saying economic value is the only metric that counts, there are other reasons why I'm in favour of pretty strong educational subsidies. But there's also benefits to the US system too that we don't have. And it's too easy to say the US is intentionally ruining the next generation, that's just not true.

<comment><USER27> >Just cause of collateral. You can impound a car, foreclose on a mortgage, sell it and get back much or most of your money, which is why rates can be a lot lower.

If it follows that the interest should be higher on a more risky investment, then why are student loans (that are unforgivable) not essentially free? As they should be basically a zero risk investment since they follow the person around forever, through bankruptcies etc.

<comment><USER26> Unforgiveable doesn't mean it'll be paid back. If someone goes bankrupt and can't forgive a loan, it's more likely that they'll continue to miss interest payments while also never paying back the principal, which just keeps building up. Typically loans line that get written off internally as a loss, or sold at a loss to a debt collector, even if the loan isn't forgiven to the borrower, it'll be a loss and therefore a risk event for the lender.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> These numbers makes me wonder if the gap among young people also is growing. Meaning we have more poorer and richer young people than "middle-class" young people!

<comment><USER29> I would also like to see the distribution, since the metric in the article is average. My guess is that it's flatter or more spread, like you say. It's not that the average worth has dropped, but the worth gap has also grown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Along with older retirees, younger generations seem to be supportive of distributive policies that are going to tax them more during their highest earning years and shift more wealth to other groups.

I don't see this trend changing anytime soon without more fundamental change.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have much greater income security and compensation than my parents achieved and at a far younger age despite having less education. The biggest difference is a practiced skill. It takes lots of time, often without compensation, to build a desired skill.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why even bother including 18-22 year olds? Almost all of them have zero to negative net worth.

</comment><comment><USER33> The bank shown in the article's photo is (somewhat lazily) Australian.

To clarify a bit: The photo doesn't seem to appear in the article itself, but in RSS feeds and on the article index.

</comment><comment><USER34> I am interested to know how much of that is voluntary.

I willing left the tech scene in order to pursue my passions and my net worth has significantly decreased.

It was the best decision I have ever made.

<comment><USER35> I'd love to hear more, have you blogged about it? :)

<comment><USER34> Not really, but the short of it is that I gave up my career as a successful software dev in the bay area and sold everything I own to work in diving.

I used to hate getting up in the morning and was consumed with stress about trivial work bullshit. These days I work in the South Pacific and split my time between environmental projects and training new divers.

It's not going to make me rich, at all, but I honestly don't care. I would trade the decade I wasted in front of computer screens to have started doing this a few years earlier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> 34% is a lot of a avocado toast.

I suspect there are other economic forces at work to cause such a drop. I just can't think of what they might be.

</comment><comment><USER37> Most financial growth comes from home ownership/equity. The debt from student loans has also skyrocketed in line with tuition rate increases since around that time. Those to factors probably account for all of the difference. Starting off deeper in debt with debt that doesn't lead to equity gains for most people.

</comment><comment><USER38> Money that went to the corps that is constantly improving their targeted advertising and increasing converting them.

</comment><comment><USER39> On one side it's depressing, but on the other side it's not as harsh as media wants us to believe in recent years. -30% is not "one house and 2 cars less than the parents", as many articles claimed over at least 2018.

<comment><USER40> It just shows how extremely hardworking those young people are. Its effectively harder to earn good money now than 25 years ago.

And thats after two major economy collapses.

Despite all odds against them, they dont give up, yet still get shorter stick.

<comment><USER41> And the media rails on them nonstop for no particular good reason other than 'That darn younger generation!'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> TLDR; _Education expenses have climbed 65 percent in the past decade. Food costs have jumped 26 percent, health care is up 21 percent, housing jumped 16 percent and transportation rose 11 percent. And there are now expenses that most consumers didn't have to account for 20 years ago, including smartphones and data plans._

Better link: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/05/31/millennia...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/05/31/millennials- have-an-average-net-worth-thats-significantly-less-than-previous-generations/)

<comment><USER43> Smart phone rubbish again. Kids today don't need to pay for a landline. Or cable. Or cigarettes

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> There's a huge demographic shift in America. Do we expect things to remain the same?

</comment><comment><USER45> Not a surprise when you consider that more people are spending money to go to college, where they are mostly taught to be poor (spend money on school, rely on a job for income, spend your money on a house, do what you love, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER46> This is highly misleading, the demographics of the USA were quite different 23 years ago which means that 18-35 cohort of today isn't comparable to the 18-35 cohort of 1996 in any coherent way. These changes can only be understood in the larger context of a dynamic system, not just comparing static snapshots.

<comment><USER47> Can you elaborate more on how you see the demographics to be different?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Is there a solution to this "problem" that doesn't involve taking the hard- earned wealth away from people 55 and older who carefully planned and saved so they can enjoy themselves?

<comment><USER49> You say that, but the reality is that the 55 year olds are largely doing the opposite, taking from the young and healthy to support their Social Security benefits, their insurance, etc.

<comment><USER50> The 55 year olds aren't taking from the young via Social Security and Medicare, they already payed in and are still paying in. The 65+s also already payed in and they're just getting back what they paid for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> College debt is one of the reasons that decided to leave the U.S. After I saw the injustice of the federal gov't bailing out morally corrupt banks and Wall St. institutions circa 2008 while leaving me to hang by my college debt, I said enough. One of the best decisions I ever made. Gave me perspective, gave me freedom. The U.S. is giant penal colony.

<comment><USER52> Did you pay it off or was leaving the country a form of abandoning your debt responsibility?

Don't get me wrong. I think it's insane to have an education system this dysfunctional. I think some people get institutionalized and just kind of see college debt as how the universe works.

<comment><USER51> I have partially repaid my loans, but now I have been postponing the repayments while I struggle with the idea of defaulting. I feel guilty doing so, but I also think that when I took on the loans I was too young to understand the implications and, as you mention, was "brainwashed" into thinking this was the only way to go. My family was too poor to pay for my college, so this was my only "choice." So while large corporations and the rich can privatize gains and socialize their costs, we peons are on the hook 100%, with a large predatory capitalist system stacked against us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> UNREALISTICALLY HIGH REAL ESTATE PRICES.

Single biggest purchase and wealth building instrument is buying REAL ESTATE / HOUSE.

Most millennials are not leaving on the streets homeless. They are paying high rent prices = money wasted = money that could have been going towards building their wealth long term, towards their homes.

High education costs prevented them from buying homes early which in turn impacted their net worth long term.

Simple example: If you buy a house in an average area when you are 30 - by 35 you have at least $50,000 that you paid towards your net worth (assuming very budget 1000/month mortgage).

Whats happening instead today? High housing costs and debt load from education prevent younger generation from bulding their wealth early through real estate. Something previous generations enjoyed.

We need more affordable housing, we need to change building codes and zoning laws to allow construction of affordable homes easily (that younger folks/families/singles can afford to buy). We need to build out infrastructure!

<comment><USER45> A home is not necessarily an asset or wealth. For the vast majority of homeowners their home is their largest liability (it costs them money).

The idea that spending money to buy a home is "building wealth" is incredibly stupid. It's bad advice for everyone but a real estate agent.

<comment><USER53> "A home is not necessarily an asset or wealth."

a home IS an asset and wealth. it is only a liability on volcano's path on big island/Hawaii.

<comment><USER45> What kind of backwards finance is that? A house costs money, it doesn't earn money.

An asset it something that makes you money, like rental income from rental properties, profit from a business or investment, stocks, or bonds.

A liability is something that costs you money. A house to live in, apartment, a car, healthcare, food, etc.

<comment><USER54> You've taken "Rich dad, poor dad" too literally it seems. A house can be an asset or liability, depending on its use. If you live in it, it certainly earns you something, it replaces the need for renting a space to live in. If you own it and don't use or rent it, it can be a liability if it's not even a suitable investment vehicle (e.g. with stable or falling prices).

<comment><USER55> > A house can be an asset or liability, depending on its use.

A house, _per se_ , is an asset. It may or may not have liabilities attached to it. (Or produce maintenance expenses, which is a different thing altogether.)

> If you own it and don't use or rent it, it can be a liability if it's not > even a suitable investment vehicle (e.g. with stable or falling prices).

You seem to have confused a depreciating asset with a liability.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: World Countries in JSON, CSV and XML - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mledoze/countries

<comment><USER2> Cool, some of this an a lot of other info is available via web service at <http://www.geonames.org/export/ws-overview.html></comment>


What I'd really like to tell the bores in my life - <AUTHOR> http://www.theamericanscholar.org/enough-already/ <comment><USER2> Was this meant to be a kind of self-parody, a boring article about how annoying bores are?</comment>


Music Inspired by "Gödel, Escher, Bach" Created by an AI Trained on Bach - <AUTHOR> https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/12/ai-music-godel-escher-bach-robert-thomas.html <comment><USER2> It is beautiful! Had a giggle when ML output started playing, I do not know what I was expecting.</comment>


Smallpt: Global Illumination in 99 lines of C++ - <AUTHOR> http://www.kevinbeason.com/smallpt/ <comment><USER2> I like the walls made of spheres! The real Cornell box is about 2 feet cubed IIRC... that would make the units of this scene file something close to centimeters... which would mean the walls are spheres with a diameter of about 1.2 miles.

Last time I saw the box in person, I made sure to leave some fingerprints. :P

> Realistic Ray Tracing, by Peter Shirley > Almost 100% of smallpt is derived > from this book.

FWIW, Peter Shirley distilled all the fun parts of Realistic Ray Tracing into an easy quick e-book available for $3, or free with the trial. "Ray Tracing in One Weekend."

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01B5AODD8/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01B5AODD8/)

Blog post about it w/ more code & lots of resources: [http://in1weekend.blogspot.com/2016/01/ray-tracing-in-one- we...](http://in1weekend.blogspot.com/2016/01/ray-tracing-in-one-weekend.html)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for posting the blog. I know Shirley's books but I had not seen the blog.

<comment><USER2> Surely. :) That blog is actually for his e-books. Here's his real blog: [http://psgraphics.blogspot.com/](http://psgraphics.blogspot.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand the fascination with writing/presenting the code with as few lines as possible. I'd be just as impressed if they said the code was 120 lines and formatted so it was just a bit more pleasant to read.

<comment><USER5> Here are slides linked from that page with a reformatted version with 202 lines:

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8g97JkuSSBwUENiWTJXeGtTOHF...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8g97JkuSSBwUENiWTJXeGtTOHFmSm51UC01YWtCZw/view)

Here's the source from those slides (I don't know who put it there).

[http://codepad.org/ZWbF9yrY](http://codepad.org/ZWbF9yrY)

I had to remove these two lines to make it compile.

        double M_PI = 3.14159265358979;
        double M_1_PI = 1.0/M_PI;

<comment><USER6> I had to modify this line as well: double erand48(unsigned short xsubi[3]) throw() {

Link here: [http://codepad.org/fpp2inpr](http://codepad.org/fpp2inpr)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interestingly enough, this code is replicated in Scala Native as an example for use of the language superset[1].

[1] [https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native- example/blob/ma...](https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native- example/blob/master/src/main/scala/smallpt.scala)

</comment><comment><USER8>
        FILE *f = fopen("image.ppm", "w");         // Write image to PPM file.

Useless comment. Could've used that space for error checking.

</comment><comment><USER9> So concise. operator% is used as cross product... I love it

<comment><USER10> I've recently had to deal with some code that did this for work (and also used operator* for dot product) and it made the equations incredibly difficult to read. Please don't make the mistake of doing this in your own code.

<comment><USER11> Using operator* for the dot product is straight up wrong, since multiplication between two vectors is well defined and used all the time.

<comment><USER10> Exactly.

Same with %: since we're talking about a number-like object, there's a clear and expected meaning for it and that is NOT cross product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This a good example of the kind of computational tasks that have me staying on the top of the line of the latest generation of intel's desktop chips, and overclock them when I'm running compute intensive stuff.

If I want to try out something new like this and play around with it, I want it to be snappy.

I am vehemently opposed to the idea that PC's are "fast enough" \-- more speed, less waiting!

The only compromise I make is avoiding the extreme versions of their chips, as they can almost $1,000 more. But in the future I might change my mind on that.

Time is the one thing you can't buy more of.

</comment><comment><USER13> Very cool with small code pieces that does a lot. I was a big fan of the Amiga Boot sector intro's back in the 80-90s where the programmers had to make entertaining pieces of digital art where compiled code, music, and graphics all had to fit inside 1 KB boot sector of a 3.5" floppy disks. Here are some examples [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPTkTobvsaw&list=PLDAE2D6D92...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPTkTobvsaw&list=PLDAE2D6D92098FF88) . Thanks for sharing! :)

</comment><comment><USER14> I personally wish the code was just written cleanly and idiomatically. I wouldn't mind "300 lines of simple, idiomatic C++". What's the use of making code dense if you're going to reformat it anyway?

(I say this in contrast to something which was explicitly "code golfed", which this code seems not to be.)

<comment><USER15> I understand production and community code demands a most simple format but for me this program is just a few braces and vertical breaks short of perfection.

<comment><USER16> You must be a fucking genius then because:

Vec w=nl, u=((fabs(w.x)>.1?Vec(0,1):Vec(1))%w).norm(), v=w%u;

is completely unreadable and that's just one line.

<comment><USER17> That really just needs some whitespace.

        Vec w=nl,
            u=((fabs(w.x) > .1 ? Vec(0,1) : Vec(1)) % w).norm(),
            v=w%u;

Simple, right? I can see how it would look like garbage if you miss the three separate variables being initialized, but that should be familiar to most people with C/C++ experience.

<comment><USER15> % being overloaded as vector cross product is a bit mysterious here (until investigating Vec's definition)

It might be helpful if the instantiations were written fully too, ie. Vec(0,1,0) : Vec(1,0,0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A Python version-pySmallPT [https://github.com/hanton/pySmallPT](https://github.com/hanton/pySmallPT)

<comment><USER19> Lobster version: [https://github.com/aardappel/lobster/blob/master/lobster/sam...](https://github.com/aardappel/lobster/blob/master/lobster/samples/demos/smallpt.lobster)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks like it would make a nice glsl/WebGL fragment shader (might be even shorter as the vector operations are predefined). Can't see one listed on the page, but then it's mostly from a few years back.

<comment><USER20> Looking at it a bit more - the double recursion in the radiance function for refraction would make things a bit awkward in WebGL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great work and thanks for sharing the source! I love when I can see the output from someone's program, get the source code, compile it myself and then get the same results! :)

</comment><comment><USER22> For me it's more like 300 loc.

</comment><comment><USER23> Legend.

</comment><comment><USER24> cool!

</comment><comment><USER25> I've no words. Very cool.

</comment><comment><USER26> > 99 lines of 72-column (or less) open source C++ code

> #include <math.h>

> #include <stdlib.h>

> #include <stdio.h>

After g++ -E smallpt.cpp, how many lines is it? :0

<comment><USER27> 3325\. I'm not quite sure why you're asking. This isn't about the size of the library, it's about the lines of code the programmer needs to write to express an idea.

If you are concerned about the size of the final binary, then as the author states, it's under 4k with a few optimizations.

<comment><USER28> That's kind of ridiculous. Leveraging something someone else wrote does not mean you get to disclaim its role.

As an aside, this reminds me of XKCD's `import antigravity`.

<comment><USER29> It's the standard library. It's not a library for graphics. Might as well credit your OS as well for providing a kernel that runs the program, and your CPU manufacturer for making a CPU that executes the instructions.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_vVGPy4-rc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_vVGPy4-rc)

<comment><USER26> Sure, but where does the standard state that a #include of a standard header is a more proper atom than any other #include?

<comment><USER30> For instance, in the C++ draft standard doc n3690. 188.8.131.52 you get

'The facilities of the C standard Library are provided in 26 additional headers, as shown in Table 15.'

'<cassert> <cinttypes> <csignal> <cstdio> <cwchar> <ccomplex> <ciso646> <cstdalign> <cstdlib> <cwctype> <cctype> <climits> <cstdarg> <cstring> <cerrno> <clocale> <cstdbool> <ctgmath> <cfenv> <cmath> <cstddef> <ctime> <cfloat> <csetjmp> <cstdint> <cuchar>'

and

'Except as noted in Clauses 18 through 30 and Annex D, the contents of each header c name shall be the same as that of the corresponding header name .h, as specified in the C standard library (1.2) or the C Unicode TR, as appropriate, as if by inclusion'

Among other bits. It's made very clear that the standard libraries are valid 'C++'.

Even that aside, here are the used symbols from those libs:

atoi fopen FILE fprintf M_PI fabs sqrt cos sin erand48

Which are all resonable functionality to expect in any programming environment. The first 4 are only used for I/O which are not exposed in the language otherwise. And can also be safely removed and "GI" still functions. It's just nice to be able to see the result.

The rest of the math functions are generally replaceable with varying amounts of code or by calling platform native instructions.

The only real stand out is erand48 which isn't actually part of the standard, but is easily replaceable by many other standard pseudo random implementations something like 'double erand48(){return (double)rand()/(double)MAX_RAND;}' or some such, or by implementing one of many pseudo random number generators.

In all, it's very fair to consider this 99 lines of C++ all the algorithmic components of a path tracer are shown in the code. External code is well within expectations. And there is no reason to consider the usage of stdio.h as something to be counted, while discounting all the code that goes into actually compiling and executing the code. Where the line is now is the most obvious place to draw it and where all sane C++ programmers would.

<comment><USER31> > atoi fopen FILE fprintf M_PI fabs sqrt cos sin erand48

They finally standardized M_PI? Sweet, that was always awkward.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Anti-Fascist MIT license - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jamiebuilds/anti-fascist-mit-license <comment><USER2> Ah yes. Use an overloaded term like fascist which has a definition but is thrown around to usually mean "anyone who doesn't agree with me".

<comment><USER3> Confirmed. 46% of US voters are fascist.

      "Fascist" can be understood as any entity which supports radical authoritarian
      nationalism. Example: Donald Trump is a fascist, if you donated to his
      campaign then all rights provided by this license are not granted to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a US citizen. Am I "financially supporting fascists" by paying Federal taxes?

<comment><USER5> According to a pretty charitable read of this lisence, then yes. Absolutely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This license is non-free and shouldn't be used for the same reason that the JSON license is non-free and shouldn't be used.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's amazing how deeply and completely someone can miss the entire point of the MIT license.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is cool, even if edgy. What are some other interesting licenses? Is there a fascist only license? What about anti-communist licenses, or licenses only for communists?

Can I license my project ONLY to one ethnicity or religion? I know you can be discriminatory for clubs, like YMCA used to be, or the JCC, but can you be for IP?</comment>


Slack's New Logo Became a Lightning Rod For Bad Things on The Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/slack-new-logo-design-backlash <comment><USER2> Why did they redesign it at all? The old logo references the character that indicates channel names. Perfectly reasonable for a chat app. Now that they are going public maybe they should change the logo to "$" so people know the company has changed focus.

Also it's frustrating they call the new logo an "octothorpe" because that's a name of the "#" character they used for their previous logo.

Apparently this was designed by the same people who came up with the uninspired "H" logo for Hillary in 2016. My initial reaction to that was "a shift to the right". Which may actually align with Clinton's moderate political views but was probably the wrong message.

<comment><USER3> According to Slack, because it looked better on more backgrounds: [https://slackhq.com/say-hello-new-logo](https://slackhq.com/say-hello-new- logo)

<comment><USER4> It would look better if they left it on a white background, but it's constantly on a purple one and it looks so amateurish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This trend of having new logos twisted into something repulsive may not be only a social or social media trend.

Perhaps it is also the result of the current design fashion to create ever more abstract logos, seeking some ideal abstractions of the company/product's value proposition.

The thing is, the more abstract a graphic is, the more open it is to new, and often repulsive, viewings.

The original 1976 Apple logo [1] could not redily be mistaken or recast for much of anything other than Newton about to be hit on the head with an apple. The following logos are also pretty clearly the fruit, although the current one is getting pretty abstract.

By the time you get to Slack's new logo, well, it's sufficiently abstract as to be essentially a Rorschach Inkblot Test -- anybody can overlay anything they want, and on Twitter, they will.

Also, in these days of rapid change, adding yet another change, particularly to workplace items (as mentioned in the article), is just another piece of cognitive load that people don't need, and so will be a source of irritation, not pleasure.

Tread carefully...

[1] [http://www.graphicart-news.com/interview-with-rob-janoff- the...](http://www.graphicart-news.com/interview-with-rob-janoff-the-designer- of-the-original-apple-logo/)

</comment><comment><USER6> This largely seems like the fluff from a bored internet.

<comment><USER7> I will never understand "People are Mad on Twitter" stories

<comment><USER6> This seems to be most of what twitter is, like 1/3rd of it is anger, manufactured outrage, or or some sort of virtue signaling related outrage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't feel good about the surprisingly large number of "if you complain about the Slack logo you don't care about justice or the welfare of others" takes.

</comment><comment><USER9> I stand by the idea that the worst thing about the new logo is that it's not angled anymore. Even just tilting the new logo looks better.</comment>


Trees, Hash Tables and Tries - <AUTHOR> http://benlynn.blogspot.com/2007/04/trees-hash-tables-and-tries.html

<comment><USER2> In the real world, it's unlikely that a trie of any real size will be comparably performant to a hash table with a sane hash function: trie algorithms involve moving from node to node, each of which will require an unpredictable retrieval from non-sequential memory. Memory latency is pretty high these days (~200 cycles), so hash tables will almost always be quicker.

This is not to say that radix tries aren't extremely useful - they're compact and fast - but they're unlikely to match a hash table for raw performance.

<comment><USER3> I've done a bit of work with tries and hash functions and found that in-memory tries are almost universally faster than in-memory hashes, no matter how good the hash function is.

The difference though is on average around 20-30% faster if both implementations are well optimized. But they come with lots of downsides that need to managed well, tries explode into memory very quickly requiring all kinds of memory optimizations to the naive tries to keep the tree depth short (usually with a small hash on the leaves). I remember building an in-memory trie library once in Perl that outperformed a native C hash library by 70%. The development team's jaws dropped when my code was running, they were insisting it wasn't actually doing anything at all and I was faking the output. "There is no way Perl code can outperform our C." It was an interesting learning experience all around. Suffix trees likewise are insane for full text searching.

Hashes on the other hand have a few benefits, they are more compact in memory, on average have fast lookups (though if you try and constrain the hash table growth algorithm too much the can spend a lot of time on both collisions and on table growth operations) and have many many more high quality implementations in most standard libraries, including many very good and very fast on-disk hashes that only consume another few percentage points (single digits usually) off of speed.

The problem with tries is not that they are fast, there really isn't anything faster (in memory) that I'm aware of for lookup and retrieval problems. But tries are like sports cars, really fast, but lots of downsides. Hashes are like an upper end practical family car.

If you try and put the trie on disk, you end up with all sorts of problems that you don't really see in modern on-disk hash implementations. Coming off of disk, hashes tend to be the better option (in fact many of the on-disk trie interfaces I've seen actually just use hashes for the on-disk portion and optimize for tree depth in memory to keep things small).

So it depends, if the set of things you want to use for lookups is relatively small and you can cram it all into memory in a raw trie, it'll be a bit faster. If the set is big, and you want to use it off of disk, go with a hash.

 __Also, if the values you wish to store don't map well to a trie, like floating point numbers, you pretty much have to go with a hash. Fortunately, the hash function in that case is really easy ;) __

<comment><USER2> That's really interesting - but it's hard for me to understand. What makes them faster for lookup than a hash table with a really good, fast hash function (say, murmurhash)? Does it depend on factors like string length? Basically, what's the environment?

My assumption is that it's faster because you might end up performing fewer string comparisons with the trie - if you have strings with common prefixes/sizes, this could cost you time on a hash with collisions. Although it seems like unless you have a lot of strings with common prefixes/sizes, this still ought to be pretty fast. And if you do have a lot of similar strings, you could store the hash value as well to speed this up.

My work on cache-sensitive data structures is in the integer space, so perhaps my ignorance when it comes to working with strings is showing :-).

<comment><USER3> Bingo, string comparisons will eat you alive. Even if you have a very small percentage of collisions in your hash (even close to 0%), you _still_ have to check if you have a collision to determine if you need to iterate to the next slot in the hash no matter what. If you are hashing strings, you have to compare the entire string, each character comparison is guaranteed to be at least one integer sub operation for 1 byte wide character sets and 2 for unicode.

But basically, tries compute almost as fast as just reading the string, while hashes have to read the string a few times AND compute the function AND deal with collisions (AND resize the hash which is stupid expensive).

So to either insert or lookup in a hash you have to:

1) Compute the hash from the string, which naively involves reading the entire string into memory and computing the hash code. So for each character you have to move at least one or two bytes into memory, do something with it (likely some kind of integer op), store the result, then move the next byte or two in, do an operation with that and so on. Let's not forget that I also have to check for end of string, which uses at least one sub operation for each character as well for C style strings.

Otherwise you keep a strlen counter in a register somewhere and do sub operations against that, either way.

1b)If you are smart you simply restrict the length you compute off of to some smaller length that will still do a pretty good job of assuring a reasonable level of uniqueness in the hash, but you can't ever guarantee it (uniqueness is the principle problem of hashing functions).

2) But still, let's assume I'm dealing with a nice small 16 character string (n=16). I have to compute many more operations than just the string length, at least 1 mov, 1 sub (to check for EOS), and then a few operations for your hash and probably some copies back into memory, so let's be generous and say 8 ops for each character. So if n=16 at _least_ 128 ops to simply compute the hash.

3) Then we have to do some pointer arithmetic or some table lookups or whatever to get to the memory location and store the string. So in all we're talking about 500-1000 ops to insert a 16 character string without even checking for collisions.

4) Factor that in, assume no collision, we might be on the order of 1200 executed ops in the end. If we have a collision, a couple thousand or more.

So for n=16, ops=~1200 minimum.

5) Even if there isn't a collision, I have to do a linear string compare to the hash->string value in the hash to assure me that there wasn't a collision. So we have to start moving integers into registers and doing a bunch of subs again (and checking for EOS on both strings now). This could easily introduce another 50-100 ops to ensure no collision.

Lookups on the hash are also of a similar scale. Heaven help you if you have to expand the hash and move all that crap from one place to another.

For a trie, there is no such thing as collisions. In the naive version, you simply allocate an array in memory the length of the character set + 1 in memory, which takes a couple of ops since you know the character set + 1 length ahead of time, use the character (I'm assuming 1 byte character lengths, but the principle is the same for 2 byte) as an operand in some simple pointer arithmetic. And store a memory location pointer in each array index to the next array (of character set + 1) until you finish off the string. If you are inserting, point to one more array and set that extra + 1 byte to something meaningful. If you are doing a lookup, you check that location to see if the byte is set to something meaningful (or you can just set that on the last character instead of one more down the tree, whatever).

The point is, for a 16 character string you count say two ops for memory allocation, an op to find the slot in the array, and another op for allocation or value setting for each character.

So in all, an insert or lookup happens almost as fast as a direct string compare, maybe on the order of n=16, ops=<100\. Lookups can be even faster since you have _have_ to short circuit the lookup (read: stop reading the string) as soon as you can't find just one character).

I'm wagging a bit, I've never built either structure in asm, but if you analyze the number of operations each takes, the trie is insanely faster. Even with memory access lags.

You can do some obvious speedups, like loading several characters into a register at a time for integer arithmetic, or loading the hash locations value chains or something...

One of the confusing points on this is that the big-O estimates I've seen never bother to account for the string reads and comparisons. With a hash you basically have to do them a minimum of two times, with a trie, only once (and sometimes not even that much). Usually you see hashes as O(1) best and O(n) worst, but really they are O(k) and O(k*n) where k is the string length while tries are really O(k).

All that being said, as soon as you try to work with either structure on disk, hashes easily overtake tries in terms of speed since hard drive random access times are much worse and tries require lots and lots and lots of random access (for each character).

<http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Trie>

<comment><USER2> Fascinating - thanks for the detailed response, and that does make a lot of sense.

It seems that if string comparisons are the major cost, you could speed up collision handling on the hash table quite a bit by storing additional metadata. Storing the size of the string, for example, would allow you to skip a lot of comparisons - you can do a simple size comparison prior to actually comparing characters. This would also allow you to do slightly more funky string comparisons, such as comparing characters from the end first, or even starting at the middle, to skip common prefixes.

Alternatively, instead of storing the size you could store the computed hash value for each string, which would allow you to compare hash values rather than full strings. The likelihood of a collision on a 32 bit hash value (say) is pretty low, so you'd mostly be avoiding extraneous string comparisons. This would also speed up growing/shrinking the table quite a bit. Have you tried these sorts of changes, and what (if any) difference do they make?

I can see that these optimisations merely reduce the cost of collisions rather than the baseline non-collision cost, and it definitely makes sense that tries require fewer operations. What I wonder is whether, as you scale up the trie to very large datasets, the superiority of the trie tails off due to the memory latency? Or are tries basically always superior in memory, due to their depth never getting all that large?

(To be clear, I don't mean to doubt your work on this subject, since you're clearly rather more knowledgeable than I am - I'm just interested :-) )

<comment><USER3> No, not at all.

I think this is an incredible interesting, and often overlooked subject. I've even seen hashes that resolve collisions by sticking tries in the slots instead of linked lists for chaining. That way the "I'm checking for a collision" operation part of the hash becomes "give me the memory location 100% of the time I want". It essentially eliminates hash collisions in the classic sense, and the tries in the hash slots usually don't get very big/you can delay resizing the hash for quite a while (just use a different method like when the first trie hold more than n strings).

Some of the optimizations you mention make a lot of sense and I was generally responding with the more naive variations of the two concepts. One thing to keep in mind is that tries grow in memory amazingly fast. So fast that the rest of your system will have to start swapping out just to keep the trie in memory. A list of a quarter million tokens, average length of 6 will probably eat about 300-400MB before optimizations. If you restrict the tree depth to 4 or so, and stick hashes on the end, you can keep it around ~100MB. But a quarter million tokens is not really all that much, real life applications will usually involve millions of token. And a naive trie will rapidly outgrow the memory on 32-bit systems. It's the classic tradeoff, memory for speed. However, hashes are not really all that bad speed-wise. So the tradeoff isn't quite as good as one might hope. If you have to go to a trie from a hash to eek out an extra few percentage points in performance, you're likely having bigger problems.

In practice I've actually only used a trie a couple of times over a hash. Mostly because in the applications I'm using, I never have to grow the hash which is the most expensive hash operation. But also because there are already so many very good hash libraries in most languages particularly persistent hashes which can be _very_ memory efficient. The practical different in speed between the two is really not that noticeable for most applications unless you are doing billions of lookups a day (in which case you probably are looking for a different setup anyway involving some kind of database).

<comment><USER2> That is (again) really interesting/informative. Thanks - this is one of those conversations that really restores my faith in communicating over the web :-).

<comment><USER3> Actually, your idea of just sticking in the strlen on the hash nodes as a heuristic to prevent unnecessary collision checks is pretty good.

I too am glad to engage in this topic!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I will argue that a properly implemented tries are more compact but not necessarily faster than hash table. The fact is, there are some badly implemented tries which even worse than hash table in term of memory consumption. Also, I'd like to point out the actually trie implementation may not have a fix k child node. I most often use k = 256 or 512 for the first few layers and 4~8 for the last few one in order to get "hash table" like performance for the first few layers and "tree" like performance for a deeper lookup.

<comment><USER5> _I will argue that a properly implemented tries are more compact but not necessarily faster than hash table._

Where do you argue this?

 _The fact is, there are some badly implemented tries which even worse than hash table in term of memory consumption._

Any data structure can be badly implemented. What use is comparing a badly implemented data structure to a well-implemented one?

<comment><USER4> It seems in the article the author suggests that in certain case tries is faster than hash table.

Yes, you are right about every data structure can be badly implemented. But some data structures are more easily to get wrong. For example, everyone have no problem with selection sort, it is just hard to get it wrong. But for binary search, some decent programmer may write (a + b) / 2. Same case for tries, people more commonly (intuitively) write things like node_t* child[26];

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have also been getting into tries recently (last 6 months) and if you are interested in learning about them I recommend Sedgewick's Algorithms in C (parts 1-4) for a good introduction to the subject. Available on Safari if you have access to that.

</comment><comment><USER7> In the same way, any naively "constant space" algorithm that indexes into an array with a fixed number of pointers or indices is technically O(log n) in space, since you need log n bits to index n objects. So a space factor of log n can generally be treated as constant in practice.</comment>


Ask HN: Where can I find online Qt communities? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I read a lot of love from people here on HN about their experience developing for Qt, but I have trouble finding online communities about Qt. I'm aware of https://www.reddit.com/r/QtFramework but it seems not very active.
Where can I find active, online communities about Qt? <comment><USER2> [https://forum.qt.io/](https://forum.qt.io/)

[https://www.qtcentre.org/](https://www.qtcentre.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


Darkness Increases Dishonest Behavior - <AUTHOR> http://www.psychologicalscience.org/media/releases/2010/zhong.cfm

<comment><USER2> Something about this: " _...the experience of darkness, even one as subtle as wearing a pair of sunglasses, triggers the belief that we are warded from others' attention and inspections._ "

...reminded me of this, from The Catcher in the Rye: " _I hate fist fights. I don't mind getting hit so much - although I'm not crazy about it, naturally - but what scares me most in a fist fight is the guy's face. I can't stand looking at the other guy's face, is my trouble. It wouldn't be so bad if you could both be blindfolded or something._ "

</comment><comment><USER3> There was an interview on CBC Radio with one of the authors a few weeks ago. (It is memorable to hear anything whatsoever of value on CBC Radio.) In addition to this study, he talked about a related one that showed people were more likely to be altrustic in rooms with a lemon-fresh smell!

</comment><comment><USER4> Heh, I wonder if this is the reason why I can't stand the light from fluorescent ceiling lamps. Whenever I have the chance(few other people around to complain about the low light levels), I turn them off and switch on spotlights and table lamps instead.

</comment><comment><USER5> but, poorly lit nordic countries are a lot less corrupt then well-lit southern countries.

<comment><USER6> Different basis for what "dark" is then. I'm sure someone else could find a sound justification (not claiming validity).</comment></comment>


Show HN: Heynay. friendly, local neighbor-to-neighbor rentals - <AUTHOR> http://www.heynay.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Started this app a few months ago with some co-workers. It's my first shot at a client-server app. Been learning a ton! I'm originally from Chile, so I plan on expanding it there as well once we validate the concept.

Wait for the React web based app! Just came out of Fluent Conference VERY inspired with all the new technologies coming up.

Looking forward to your feedback!

<comment><USER2> Cool app. Is it aimed at transactions between neighbors who don't know each other, or neighbors who already have some sort of relationship? If it's the former, how do you handle trust problems like "How do I know I'm going to get my stuff back?" If it's the latter, what advantage do you have over sending them a text saying "Hey, can I borrow X?"

Also, I'm curious what your experiences have been with market validation? Are you building first and then finding customers, or finding customers and then building based on their feedback? What have been the most annoying parts of the process? I'm somewhat interested in building tools to make it easier to get to the MVP/validation stage, since in my experience so far, it takes a surprisingly large amount of effort just to get to the point where you can show a potential customer something to react to.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

To answer you first questions, it's aimed towards both known and unknown neighbors. We'll have soon the ability to show you which neighbors you have friends or friends of friends in common so you can opt for those only. How do you know you're getting the stuff back is by security deposit right now. Working on a long term more sustainable partnership with an insurance company and include it in the service fee.

Decided to go with the first. We're two developers mainly, it's been free to develop in our free time, why not build and let the market talk to us! It is exactly what we're doing, by trying to show it off a bit more to the community.

Lastly, all it takes is passion for what you're doing. Dedicating some nights of "oh crap it's 3 am I need some sleep" but you just can't stop coding. As long as you remain passionate and focused, you'll achieve it! We did this in barely 3 months 10-20 man hours a weekend. With all the free-for-startups infrastructure and tools we have today it's amazing how fast you can prove concepts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love the idea, is part of the fee Heynay takes covering insurance if theres something wrong with the deal?

Even if you weren't renting items but were just loaning them to friends it might be nice to have all your loaned/rented items in one spot. For this, making private listings might be a good feature.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! I;m using the concept of security deposits for now, so a hold is placed on the renter's credit card. It's all under the good-faith of neighbors.

Working on a more sustainable insurance plan that'll be included as part of our service. If not, why not just go and knock on your neighbor's door yourself right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks neat!

</comment><comment><USER5> looks great</comment>


The Supreme Court could soon deliver a blow to the Sixth Amendment - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/11/11/the-supreme-court-could-soon-deliver-a-crushing-blow-to-the-sixth-amendment/ <comment><USER3> >the court will decide whether the government can freeze all of a defendant's assets before trial, even those the government itself concedes aren't tainted by any connection to criminality, thus effectively preventing that defendant from paying for his own defense.

The shadow issue of our time is equal access to the legal system. It will be interesting to see how this changes the dynamic of the court system if the Supreme Court really decides that defendants cannot hire their own counsel though it is a bit like solving the equal access to education problem by banning all private colleges -- more than a little absurd.

<comment><USER4> > though it is a bit like solving the equal access to education problem by > banning all private colleges -- more than a little absurd.

While one can definitely argue against this view, it's far from absurd: the basic argument is that the availability of private college/lawyers/your- favourite-resource favours the rich and powerful, and that you can only get actual equal access for all to education/trial-defense/something-else if you force the rich and powerful to have an equal playing field with everyone else (at which point they will then use their power to ensure a decent/good level of the service for everyone, including themselves).

Two fairly different, and likely overly generalised and simplified, examples of this view: \- the British left-wing view of private (known as "public" in Britain, to confuse us all) schools (vs state schools): they allow the rich&powerful to get away with underfunding/neglecting the state school system, as it doesn't actually affect them, their family or their friends' family \- the Swiss view of public schools - paraphrasable as "Swiss private schools are for foreigners" \- which more or less implies that using (or a society needing) a private school is a moral failing ;) (ie the rich&powerful will help fix the public schools rather than send their children to the private one)

<comment><USER5> I'd argue that Swiss public schools being so "good" is a function of social homogeneity and income equality, than it is one of forcing rich kids to attend public schools.

The obvious counter example is the US, where public schooling is sectioned off by neighborhood and rich kids still attend school together because they can afford to live in their respective neighborhoods. Even worse, the US spends more money per child on public teaching, and still has some dreadfully bad public schools due to various inefficiencies.

In short, I think your assessment is backwards private college/lawyers/your- favourite-resource don't favor the rich, instead the rich build private college/lawyers/your-favourite-resource to favor themselves (or their children).

<comment><USER6> >>The obvious counter example is the US, where public schooling is sectioned off by neighborhood and rich kids still attend school together because they can afford to live in their respective neighborhoods.

This happens in the UK too. People who are unwilling to send their children to private school will instead move to a more expensive house because it is in the catchment area of a good school. This is morally equivalent to using extra money to sending your child to a private school.

<comment><USER7> Certainly does.

Near us (South London) the price difference between a 2-3 bedroom house in particularly good catchment area vs. an average one is at least 100,000 pounds, sometimes more...

Which makes it very clear that it's priced based on private school costs, given that the private schools near here costs ~10k/year (huge variations, but that's roughly it for 2-3 of the most popular ones)...

I've had the argument with my ex. over my sons school too. I had halfway given in and agreed to send him private, but we ended up sending him to the local school two doors down from me instead of 40-60 minutes travel to the nearest suitable private school, thankfully. But we'll be having that argument again over secondary school, I'm sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Playing up the "equal access to justice" angle here is shortsighted. Rich people have historically served as an important counterweight to government. When the government prosecutes them, it raises special interests, beyond the abstract interest in justice implicated whenever the government prosecutes someone. After all, it was the new-money commercial interests that lead the revolutions that gave us many of our modern democracies, including here in the U.S. And history is littered with examples of rich, powerful people being prosecuted precisely because of the threat they pose by virtue of their means.

An interesting example is Joseph Nacchio. While he was probably guilty of what he was accused of doing, at least he was declared guilty after putting up the best defense money could buy. Given the dynamics of the situation, it would've been troubling if he hadn't been able to do that.

<comment><USER9> Why don't poor people deserve to be a counterweight to government?

<comment><USER10> They do, but if they don't have that ability now then that's the problem we should be addressing. Removing the ability of the rich to do so won't magically give that ability to the poor.

If anyone here wants to argue that because the poor can't effectively fight government then nobody should be allowed to 'because otherwise it isn't fair', then please go ahead. But that's the logic of plucking out everyone's right eye because one person suffered an eye injury. If your idea of fairness is reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator, I want no part of it.

<comment><USER11> I was looking around for a quote along these lines, but I think you've just expressed it quite well: "Removing the ability of the rich to do so won't magically give that ability to the poor."

It is quite easy to retard the success (or fill in the blank with legal defense, assets, education, IQ) of a group or individual. However bringing that success (or whatever) to another group is an entirely different sort of challenge, a very difficult one. There are rarely shortcuts and the most commonly suggested solutions often involve infringing on the rights of others. People don't realize this and in the quest of solving social problems with government intervention they end up creating even larger ones. Like you said, it results in pandering to the lowest common denominator. You see this very visibly with policies like "No Child Left Behind", but this sentiment tends to run rampant in leftist schools of thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Scanning for 10 seconds, no sign of what the sixth amendment is, no way of judging significance, moving on.

For those as annoyed: [https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/sixth_amendment](https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/sixth_amendment)

<comment><USER13> > to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.

The author of the article believes this Supreme Court case weighs whether or not the government can willfully deprive an accused of the ability to pay for counsel by freezing untainted assets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _This particular policy is aimed at people accused of bank fraud, insider trading and other high-finance crimes._

There is indeed an entire group of self-proclaimed professionals that uses asset-shifting tactics to

(1) avoid detection by systems that seek to detect fraud (2) operate a number of legally "separate" but owned by the same group of people / businesses operating in the same sphere

Small transactions among these entities might not raise a flag on their own, but given the sum of them all, it can definitely help point an arrow to larger schemes for market manipulation.

Freezing the liquidity of these complex legal structures for a temporary period of time ... tracing the still-liquid "drip" (because the analogy is too good to not use) back to the source does seem to be a logical way to suss out the scum.

If you've ever invested in a growth company for "long", only to have your investment diluted and eventually delisted by one of these private enterprises, this reform should make you very happy.

[Edit] For example .... [http://sirf-online.org/2013/03/11/paper-world-of- brookfield-...](http://sirf-online.org/2013/03/11/paper-world-of-brookfield- asset-management/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Maybe the public defender system may benefit, because when even wealthy or middle-class defendants can't pay for their lawyers, more lawyers are forced to either become public defenders or work on similar arguments, making financial means of defendants less of a factor in choosing their clients.

<comment><USER16> Or fewer people will want to become lawyers.

Really thought this one through, I see :)

<comment><USER17> I don't understand why people continue to go into law in the numbers they do. Everything I've seen over the last few years indicates the number of law jobs being created/opening up due to retirement is far lower than the number of people passing the bar every year. Considering how much it costs to go through law school, it seems like an insane gamble unless you already have ins at a significant law firm.

<comment><USER7> See my other comment regarding the UK, where serving lawyers actually earn less than the national average. So yes, it's a bit puzzling. On the other hand, a law degree is a bit of a "I don't know what I'm going to do but this will at least give me a firm backing" type of degree.

You can take a law degree and go into any number of professions such as jobs in the police, human resources, journalism, areas of finance, all kinds of compliance roles and oversight or strategic positions in-house in companies etc. Basically you can treat being a qualified lawyer as having proven that you're able to work hard, learn fast and pay excellent attention to detail, which is often just as valuable or more as domain specific skills.

E.g. my ex recently went from one of the Magic Circle firms as a 2 year post qualification lawyer (UK system for solicitors - for barristers (litigators) it's slightly different - == 3 year law degree, 2 years training contract and passing the legal practice course; the latter can be done as part of/during training, especially if you get a contract with a top firm) to a director- level human resources position at a major bank on the basis of being a qualified solicitor with some lower level HR experience years ago, before her degree. Her legal training is by far the most relevant to the role vs. HR experience, given all the regulatory/compliance issues and general legal issues an investment banks HR department has to deal with.

But certainly, going into law to work in a law-firm is far from lucrative for most people.

(not that the overall cost is much lower in the UK,though: the law degree is a first degree, and costs the same as any typical first degree, and if you get a training contract the training is paid and many firms will then cover the cost of the legal practice course as well; even if you don't get a training contract before your LPC, it's possible to do the LPC for about GBP 5k I think)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can't you just pay your defense attorney after the trial, guilty or not, whenever your assets are unfrozen?

Assets frozen during trial that aren't linked to any criminal activity can't be permanently confiscated, so your defense attorney can just settle up your bill at the end of the trial, when the assets are unfrozen. Maybe that's not how it works now, but if this happens, then defense firms will have to do their billing this way.

Not ideal and I don't see the point, but how is this a big deal?

<comment><USER19> What lawyer will take on such a case, when it's unsure if you'll ever get paid, and if you do, it's years after the actual work is done? The first thing you do after you've hired a lawyer is pay his advance. No small firm can shoulder having to front cases that can drag on for years. It's not like you can tell your staff 'yeah we'll pay you in a few years'. And when the client is found guilty, the prosecutor will confiscate much of it. Good luck getting paid then.

<comment><USER18> It's not unsure (like I said, assets unrelated to the crime can't ultimately be kept), and what else are they going to do? You can't seriously suggest all criminal defense attorneys are just going to give up on their professions.

The _only_ thing extra you'd need as a criminal defense attorney is additional capital to start up your firm, and only for actual criminal case work. They have _plenty_ of money, enough to wait for some time for a payday.

It's actually _super_ common to wait years for payment in tons of industries, including law.

<comment><USER19> The vast majority of criminals have assets lower than their total penalties / damages payable. You're basically asking lawyers to hope that their clients will have enough money left after they have paid their damages? And you're saying defense lawyers will do that because... what... otherwise they'd have to find clients in other fields of law?

"It's actually super common to wait years for payment in tons of industries, including law."

8| No it's not, except in law for cases on contingency basis. Which only make sense in cases where there might be a huge settlement or punitive damages. There are very few companies that can even afford to wait for their money for years.

"They have plenty of money, enough to wait for some time for a payday."

I'm not sure if you're just trolling here? You seem to have a conception of the economics of running small law offices (which is what the vast majority of criminal defense lawyers are) that is massively detached from reality.

<comment><USER18> I'm not asking lawyers to do anything, I'm saying law firms who do criminal defense will not simply cease existing if this happens, which is what you're implying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The Supreme Court only answers the questions posed to them, not the merits of the underlying case, so the article's surprise that they're not addressing anything else is a strange to hear from a lawyer. It's also surprising to hear this as a "blow" to the Sixth Amendment, as the justices seem to believe they've rejected exactly this logic before in Monsanto. [1] One good thing is that the article hlepfully linked to a transcript of the hearing, a good journalistic practice too often ignored. [2] In the quotes below I've elided sections for clarity, as marked, primarily to remove where they repeated words or such while speaking.

The case involves Sixth Amendment [3] claims regarding asset forfeiture where Petitioner allegedly defrauded Medicare. The Deputy Solicitor General supports freezing this money so that it doesn't become unavailable to pay back the amount allegedly defrauded. Petitioner wants to use it to fund their legal defense. They retained the services of Howard Srebnick, Esq. for this oral argument. [4]

The argument in favor of the seizure is roughly this:

JUSTICE ALITO: [Two twin] brothers rob a bank. They get $10,000. They split it up, $5,000 each. And on that very same day, it happens to be their birthday, and their rich uncle comes and gives each of them $5,000 as a birthday present. So they go out to party, and one of them  and they both spend $5,000 partying. One of them spends the money from the bank robbery. The other one spends the money that was given to them by their rich uncle. And your position is that the one who spent the money from the socalled "tainted assets," the money from the bank robbery, is entitled to use the remaining $5,000 to hire an attorney, but the other one is out of luck? MR. SREBNICK: Yes [...] JUSTICE KENNEDY: So [...] you want this Court to say spend the bank robbery money first.

The argument against is roughly this:

MR. SREBNICK: Justice Ginsburg, from a constitutional perspective, I don't think that that's necessarily correct because the courts can give injunctive power to restrain assets, even assets currently belonging to the defendant. Our objection is when such an injunction interferes with the constitutionally protected right to retain counsel of choice. And so while the statute could constitutionally allow, provided that there is adequate hearings, et cetera, the restraint of even a defendant's owned assets, lawfully owned assets, that principle can't extend to assets  the subset of assets she needs to use counsel of choice.

[1] JUSTICE KAGAN: Mr. Srebnick, this goes back, I think, to the Chief Justice's first question. It seems that the distinction that you're making is one that the Court explicitly rejected in Monsanto.

[2] [http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcri...](http://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/14-419_h3ci.pdf)

[3] "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence."

[4] [http://www.royblack.com/attorneys/Howard/Srebnick/](http://www.royblack.com/attorneys/Howard/Srebnick/)

<comment><USER21> It strikes me that the problem with Justice Alito's analogy is that it presumes guilt. One could retell the story this way: two brothers each received $5000 from a rich uncle on the same day, and also made $5000 selling old vinyl records that turned out to be highly collectible. Then they go and spend $5000 partying. The government comes along and accuses them of attaining the second $5000 through illicit means and freezes their remaining money on the presumption of guilt. Defendants then cannot hire the counsel they desire, lose their case and go to jail. But it wasn't drugs they sold, it was vinyl.

I'm not sure that my story would end up changing legal minds, but failing to consider it as a possibility is unpardonable.

<comment><USER20> They're not saying he's presumed guilty, they're just trying out various scenarios to illustrate the effects of the laws.

And if you go that route, then it's not at all fair that some people can hire expensive lawyers and others cannot to improve their chances. If someone defrauds Medicare for millions, why should they get an expensive lawyer for that when other people cannot afford them?

If everyone was forced to use public defenders, the powerful would use their influence to make sure that it provided effective, independent defense. Even so, it's not like getting an expensive lawyer somehow gets you off and a public defender guarantees you'll be found guilty.

But it does not seem reasonable that we should adopt rules to increase the unfairness by doing everything possible to remove any incentive to improve the public defender's office and doing our utmost to ensure that the poor are forever trapped with ineffective counsel.

Just for the record, this guy has a very expensive lawyer, not a public defender.

<comment><USER22> "They're not saying he's presumed guilty, they're just trying out various scenarios to illustrate the effects of the laws."

Yes, but the important point is that the courts can only act with what they know at the time, not how some eventual case will come out.

If you expect the court to act under the "well sure, he's presumed innocent, but we have to cover the case where he's guilty too" theory, then we're expecting the courts to somehow figure out all of the possible combinations of actions in the future that might affect the money.

So let's take Alito's argument. We arrest a couple of brothers in suspicion of bank robbery. At the same time the bar owner opens a civil case for damages done to his bar during their party. Their criminal lawyer, getting a feeling he might not be paid (which sounds like a pretty good feeling to have) files a civil suit for his money.

Now we're having to ask the court to make a decision today about monies to maybe be spent or not sometime next year. This is ludicrous.

Yes, the money might be able to get away. But you've arrested the person, and that's all you get. Aside from the due process problems here, it's quite disturbing to see the government seemingly much more interested in the money than the crime. Something's wrong there.

<comment><USER20> That's not what they're doing or why.

They're not here to decide his fate or his case, though that may happen incidentally. They're here to settle a legal question that was posed to them in the petition for a writ of certiorari.

It's not their job to try his case, nor will they. Unless the entire case hinges on this question (it doesn't), they don't decide his case. So they might unfreeze his assets while he faces fraud charges, but we're not looking at them deciding his guilt or innocence here.

They're trying to decide what the best precedent to set is, which is why they have to consider every possible scenario. So yes, they really do have to consider scenarios with guilty people. It really wouldn't make sense to have them blind themselves to how the precedent will play out in the future. Surely you do not believe this will never be applied to people guilty of fraud? They do consider doubt in such stories, but only when it's important. So they might do that if they were pondering the scope of reasonable doubt, but it wouldn't make sense here.

This case may involve him but it's not about him. It's only about the Sixth Amendment question posed. They're not concerned about all that other stuff because they're not deciding his guilt or innocence.

> Yes, the money might be able to get away. But you've arrested the person, > and that's all you get.

The Supreme Court and prior cases disagree with you.

> Aside from the due process problems here, it's quite disturbing to see the > government seemingly much more interested in the money than the crime. > Something's wrong there.

Yes, but that something is your understanding of what they're doing and why.

Due process is your Fifth Amendment right. Nowhere does this case allege a violation of that right. This is not at all the same as a Sixth Amendment right to counsel being argued here. Moreover, he is in fact already defended by counsel of choice, specifically this one: [http://www.royblack.com/attorneys/Howard/Srebnick/](http://www.royblack.com/attorneys/Howard/Srebnick/)

This makes the hypothetical infringement of the Sixth Amendment rights rather oblique--was he really denied his right to counsel when the very expensive lawyer he chose is arguing before the highest court in this country?

<comment><USER22> " but we're not looking at them deciding his guilt or innocence here"

Yes, I got that. My point is that positing the various ways the case plays out with whether the person is guilty or innocent is outside the scope of the question. Alito's avenue of analysis was misguided. It doesn't matter whether they're guilty or innocent because we're asking what the government should do with the funds _before we know the result of the case_

And I understand the point of appeals courts. I'm making an argument based on a plain, layman's understanding of how the system should work. I have no doubt that for those inside the system, it all makes some kind of weird sense. "Hey, we took all of your money, but look! The paperwork has been done correctly!"

I also understand that the Supreme Court disagrees with me. Probably isn't the first time, nor will it be the last. Those guys are a hell of a lot smarter than I am. My best argument is that at some point it makes sense legally but yet you lose consent of the governed. Taking somebody's money so they can't afford a lawyer -- along with a half-dozen or so other bone-headed decisions over the last decade or two -- begin to cross that line. Somebody should speak up. That "speaking up" is not a legal argument; it is a political one.

Sometimes the law is an ass.

Thank you for the instruction on the split between the Fifth and Sixth Amendment issues. Lots of detail to consider here.

<comment><USER20> I'd like to point out that I'm not "in the system" as it were. I'm not a lawyer, I just happen to have studied a bit of legal procedure in college and the Supreme Court in particular. Thus, I know the process and why one normally petitions them for a writ of certiorari simply because the Supreme Court has original jurisdiction over only some obscure types of cases and thus does not hear most cases. See also: [https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/certiorari](https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/certiorari)

> we're asking what the government should do with the funds before we know the > result of the case

The converse is that we have two innocent people who have money frozen. One can pay for a lawyer, the other cannot.

If you find this is a Sixth Amendment violation, then isn't the Public Defenders office itself a violation? If that's the case, why are they not arguing that we cure that? The answer is that it wouldn't help them: they are able to afford a rather expensive lawyer. It's true that a full defense is expensive, but they're just causing themselves harm with an expensive Supreme Court appeal rather than saving the funds for the main defense. There are quite a few weird expenses involved there, not the least of which is the special booklets prepared for each justice and several other parties which have a large number of very exacting rules. Also, of note, is the fact that one can petition the Supreme Court 'in forma pauperis' and the Supremes will in fact pick up the tab for all that if you actually can't pay. They have accepted pro se applicants who were then provided representation for all the expensive formalities and such.

I think there is a good point that it's not at all fair that some people can get their own lawyer while others cannot. It would be better if that was fair for everyone, rather than rich people paying for better treatment.

Alas, that's not at all what petitioner is asking for. They're only interested in a rule that would help themselves here and that would encourage people who defrauded or robbed others to spend the stolen money first. So I steal all of your money and use it to pay for an expensive lawyer to get away with it, while poor but innocent people would have to rely on a state-appointed lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Their argument dealt only with the Sixth Amendment — that while the > government can seize untainted assets before trial, it must allow a > defendant access to enough of his untainted assets to pay for his own > defense.

However, in this case it seems to me the defendant is guilty of defrauding the govt. to the tune of $40M. The possible outcome of the trial would be forcing them to pay back + penalties perhaps. Had this been a trial about something else (murder for ex.) govt might not have fought much to freeze the assets.

EDIT: The problem is of course with the word assets. Are we talking about physical assets? Probalby not. Otherwise say they stole 5 apples from the govt and they also happen to have 10 bananas of their own. Govt comes and take away the apples and bananas. So one can say ok these apples are stolen, only get those back, but should not take the bananas. Now imagine the assets is money (as it probably is in this case). Can a thief steal a bag with $100 bills, change them all to $20 bills and then tell teh govt, don't take my $20 bills, these are not the assets I stole. I only stole $100 bills but those are gone now. It doesn't work that way of course.

<comment><USER24> That's not the question here—those $20 bills would still be "tainted". Moreover, the bar to demonstrate that they are tainted is reasonably low, significantly easier than getting a conviction. In this case, though, the _persecution agrees that the assets are unrelated_. As far as the courts are concerned, that's an established fact.

It's more like if you steal some apples, perhaps eat some of them and then the government freezes your bananas which you got through completely legitimate means unrelated to your (alleged) crime.

<comment><USER23> In the larger scope they are related if they can be converted back to cash. I imagine if assets are family photos or other maybe important items which have no value. But if they have monetary value I can see govt's position in freezing access to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Couldn't this be hacked by "law trouble" insurance. You get policy of up to X, in case you have your assets frozen and need legal council.

The current situation is strange. I can see why the Supreme Court would not want to open another can of worms. The problem comes from government being able to freeze all assets without guilt. Everything else is band aid on gangrene.

<comment><USER9> Govt could sieze your insurance payout.

<comment><USER25> By that logic govt could prevent you from utilizing your health insurance. Not sure if anyone could even think in that direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is this just an assertion that no money == no counsel, or is there some other attack on the 6th amendment here?

I think the notion that 'clean' assets can be frozen pre-trial is unfair, but as long as a public defender is actually available, that would seem to satisfy the amendment.

<comment><USER27> > actually available

Define "actually available"

Most public defenders offices are so oversubscribed and underfunded that they can't really provide good representation for the majority of their clients.

<comment><USER15> It doesn't say anywhere that a public defender has to be effective.

<comment><USER28> The text of the amendment doesn't say so explicitly, but Ineffective Assistance of Counsel is grounds for overturning convictions: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineffective_assistance_of_coun...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineffective_assistance_of_counsel)

(Note that the standard requires both that your counsel was ineffective, and that his/her ineffectiveness caused your conviction)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> As someone from a third world country with a 'poor' human rights track record, US prosecutor conduct baffles even me. At least in this part of the world you expect to get screwed over by incompetence or corruption, and not the "system".

<comment><USER18> That's most likely because you only hear about the extraordinary. The ordinary cases are just that, ordinary, and justice gets served with little fuss.

<comment><USER29> You're probably right. Plus I wasn't exactly fair in comparing a population of 300 million to one of 20 million. But where I come from 'going by the book' usually results in the guilty going free, not the innocent getting screwed. IANAL, but I wonder whether this is due to some difference between US law and Roman-Dutch/British law?

<comment><USER30> Yes, that's right. What you hear about are the extreme edge cases of society - the places where things fall through the cracks. As a whole the US Justice system is incredibly effective.

That being said, in a population of 300 million edge cases start to add up, and they are significant problems we should figure out how to fix.

<comment><USER31> The function of the Supreme Court is to decide edge cases. Anything they hear is either a question of overlapping laws and/or an area without significant precedents.

<comment><USER30> Very, very little makes it to the Supreme Court

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> <IANAL> The defense strategy doesn't make sense to me... Could this case be used to just this end? To shake Sixth Amendement and lay some ground work for terrorism case in future? Could it be that this is arranged between defendent and state attorney? </IANAL>

</comment><comment><USER33> If the government gets to carried away with this, then _jury nullification_ [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification) will come into play.

</comment><comment><USER34> They're about to kick out one of the legs of this Republic.

</comment><comment><USER35> Well, W was at least honest enough to admit that the Constitution is "just a goddamned piece of paper" ;)

</comment><comment><USER36> So: \- We've had religious erosions to the First \- Continued assault against the Second \- The Third appears to be safe \- Fourth is largely gone with Forfeiture \- Fifth mostly safe \- Sixth now under attack \- Seventh also attacked by Forfeiture \- This ruling also takes a passing swipe at the Eighth if it goes through \- The Ninth and Tenth were finally destroyed by the Health Care Act

<comment><USER37> Destroyed? Hyperbole. You had to have insurance to drive a car already - <USER2> that destroy it?

Yes the balance of rights of individuals in an every-more-entangled economic and social world is shifting. And we'll have to do more to adjust to social media, the speed of the internet, cheap pervasive surveillance by anybody (drones, minicams etc) of anybody, and so on.

<comment><USER38> I have no desire to pull the conversation off track but comparing auto insurance requirements to the affordable care act is apples and oranges.

You don't have to own a car. (and in fact fewer and fewer people do) You also don't have to have auto insurance to own or drive a vehicle, just to drive it on public thoroughfares. Which, believe it or not, is not everyone's use case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Couldn't asset freezing be more like "spending review" where the court approves certain spending for certain purposes?

I don't see any reason why ordinary spending on lawyers, rent, food, etc. should be prohibited before conviction.

For civil cases it might be different. If there are specific contested assets, it might make sense to freeze those.</comment>


Probabilistic Tic Tac Toe game – Randomness adds challenge and trumps deadlocks - <AUTHOR> http://shubhanshu.com/PT3/ <comment><USER2> I could very well be missing some aspect, but I'm not really seeing the added challenge here. Tic Tac Toe is easily solved, and playing this game by selecting the optimal 2 moves in regular Tic Tac Toe seems to be the best (and obvious?) strategy, which means that the entire game just comes down to who wins the critical coin toss.

I don't actually see where there's any strategic decision to be made but if I'm wrong about this I'd love for someone to point it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> The motivation for the game as listed on the page, was to make the original tic-tac-toe (a timepass game), slightly interesting.

The coin toss forces the suboptimal move, thereby giving the other player a chance to play the optimal move next time. The original game is quite easy, and becomes boring because most games tend to be tied. This configurations will allow individuals to keep playing, for a longer duration, knowing that the other player might not be able to play the most optimal move.</comment></comment>