The Economy - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/the-economy <comment><USER2> I'm not clear on how any of this will lead to a recession. Why will high Debt- to-GDP or government spending send the economy into a recession?

Q1 GDP numbers were clearly affected by dismal weather (although still bad), but labor markets are improving markedly, and there are reasons for optimism. I don't see this as a very convincing bear case.

For the bull case, see this post, from a guy who's been right about everything since the mid-2000s.

[http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2014/06/the-future-is- stil...](http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2014/06/the-future-is-still- bright.html)

<comment><USER3> If government debt grows high enough then an increasingly large percentage of federal spending will be devoted to paying interest on that debt rather than on arguably more useful areas which create future prosperity, such as education and scientific research.

After a certain point this becomes unsustainable and bad things start to happen, ranging from total political & economic collapse (Germany in the 1920s) to hyperinflation (Zimbabwe) to, in the best of the worst case scenarios, a large default/restructuring and subsequent downgrading of a country's debt to junk status (Argentina in the 2000s).

As F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and numerous other economists have written, government spending tends to be more inefficient than the free market because the government isn't constrained by profits and losses, which are society's way of indicating whether a company is producing goods and services that are valuable and desired. Of course, there are some goods and services that only the government can provide well, and the current left-right political divide is largely a debate over the point at which government taxation and spending becomes undesirable and inefficient. However, it's undeniable that at a certain level (almost certainly a level below our current level of spending in my opinion) each marginal dollar the government sucks out of the economy is used less efficiently than it would have been used if it remained in private hands.

<comment><USER4> Something to consider is the difference between debt denominated in a countries' own currency verse that of another country.

In _2010_ Germany finally repaid debt it had raised to pay its World War I reparations. The reparations never were paid in full but you damn bet the US dollar denominated debt was.

If a country borrows money in a foreign currency they may have bills due for an incredibly long time unless the creditors says "ok, you can pay less than you owe us." The EU members are in this position because the bills they owe are not in their own currency.

Generally this seems to have the biggest impact on tiny countries. One of the most interesting opinions I've heard recently is from James Rickards who was a negotiator for the Long Term Capital Management bailout in 1998. His opinion is the risks in the banking system have increased, not decreased, and when the next failure happens the US government will not be capable of a bailout largely due to the Federal Reserve's balance sheet leverage (which puts Lehman's leverage to shame) and a lack of political will to write a multi- trillion dollar check. What will happen is debt issued and denominated by the IMF, the only bank in the world left with a good balance sheet.

<comment><USER5> Next time what should be done (but probably won't) is to take over the insolvent banks, prosecute the fraudsters, and allow mortgage debt to be reduced in bankruptcies, perhaps converted to equity. The US federal government assets are certainly an order of magnitude (possibly two) bigger than the Fed balance sheet, so to talk of leverage is laughable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Almost any argument that relies on GDP numbers to back up its claim is specious at best.

For example, you could have a tornado destroy a town and the disaster recovery spending would increase GDP. You could build a teleportation device that puts all delivery drivers out of work. GDP would decrease but there would be an overall increase in wealth and quality of life.

Thinking about economics through the lens of GDP is just the wrong way to think about the economy.

Here's a great Planet Money podcast on the invention of "The Economy" and on GDP: [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/02/28/283477546/the- inve...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/02/28/283477546/the-invention-of- the-economy)

<comment><USER7> Yep. Heart attacks, perpetual 'diabetes treatment', borrowing a million (or a trillion) dollars you can't pay back and spending it, promising unrealistic pension benefits, and depleting natural resources (wood, water, energy, overfishing, selling your seed corn), fighting losing wars (is there ever a winner?), paying other people to raise your kids, all grow "gee-dee-pee'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> He just suggested a basic income for everybody.

I just wanted to point this out in case people missed it when skimming.

<comment><USER9> A basic income is a great idea...it would also be a good idea to completely remove the profit motive from health care. A social safety net that includes a living wage, guaranteed higher education, and retirement is completely possible if you don't spend so much on defense and intelligence.

<comment><USER10> > it would also be a good idea to completely remove the profit motive from > health care.

If I had a fatal disease with no known cure, I want a system that makes whoever finds the cure filthy rich. That's my best chance at survival. If anything, I want a system with even more profit motive.

<comment><USER11> Why would anyone care about curing your fatal disease if they are profit driven? They should be able to make more money working on widespread non-fatal problems, like erectile disfunction or baldness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Corporate savings are high across a broad basket of companies like the S&P500 because the earnings of multinationals are parked in Luxembourg, avoiding US taxes. We've all read about the Double Dutch and other IP licensing schemes that avoid taxes for Google, Apple and others. I personally feel these funds are waiting for a US corporate income tax holiday, perhaps under the guise of creating new jobs and investment domestically. The stock price of companies like Apple has their cash balance as "money good", meaning the market doesn't believe they'll pay tax on the $150 billion parked overseas.

Sam's zero interest rate point is the most salient to the startup world. It forces accredited investors to chase asset classes like technology startups for yield. You also see it in the midwest in oil, gas and other natural resource drilling/mining. These are long term 10 year investments for these investors to park their cash.

<comment><USER13> So, the 0% interest is a catalyst for startup investment? Do institutional investors or big banks directly fund incubators and the like?

I read somewhere recently that global bank income was up 29 billion from last year, does any of that profit come from startup success?

<comment><USER12> Institutionals and investment banks are higher up the chain. Accredited investors serve as front-line angels that fund would-be entrepreneurs, and then the aforementioned parties provide them with liquidity (distribution and marketing of the company's other shares to more sophisticated investors).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We need to find the next big growth engine. Like "the internet" big, or its baby brother "mobile" big. (Imagine what the US economy would be like without those growth engines. Even with them, their effect on the US GDP growth chart in the article is unnoticeable.)

I have a hard time thinking of things that could be so dramatic in terms of growth. AI, radical life extension, space elevators, renewables... I'm not sure.

The sad thing is we only have one Google. Very few other well-monied companies are taking big moon-shot risks. We need a dozen Googles and a hundred Elon Musks to find the next growth engine.

But instead we have billionaires buying NFL teams, the government taking money from STEM to fund entitlements, and corporations too risk-averse to make any big bets.

<comment><USER15> I nominate cleantech, energy efficiency, and renewable energy.

Over the next 30ish years, the entire globe will have to transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energy. The amount of growth that needs to happen is probably bigger than what we experienced in the internet boom. Already in California, green jobs outnumber Hollywood jobs, and solar is now profitable without subsidy.

These are the areas that are going to have the largest growth and innovation over the next few decades. The next Google is going to be an energy company.

<comment><USER16> I don't know how you can qualify this as growth. The transition to renewable energy should be applauded, but at the end of the day it is a displacement of the fossil fuel industry, which is massive. It seems less like a wealth creation engine and more like a "we will destroy the earth otherwise" necessity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There's a specific mental trap -- I'll call this "scientism" \-- that a lot of comments here are rapidly falling into. It's in treating macroeconomics as a "solved" problem, or putting too much faith in specific studies or sentences.

That's not at all the proper way to look at macroeconomics. Our economy is unimaginably complex -- it's full of hundreds and millions of moving parts, with each single part (the human brain) driven by an even more complex system with hundreds of billions of parts (neurons). All of these parts are re- orienting themselves with new data in real time.

What Sam is trying to say here, is that we don't know if these trends are "good" or "bad", or if they'll lead to bad outcomes or not, or in what time frame this will occur. All we know now -- and this I agree with -- is that _something_ in our economy has changed permanently. And this should be a good cause to worry, or at least, should be taken as a call to arms to economists everywhere to try and figure out why our models aren't working as well as they used to.

        "Too large a proportion of recent "mathematical" economics are mere concoctions,
        as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author
        to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a
        maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols." - John Maynard Keynes

</comment><comment><USER18> I wish everyone (or at least Sam Altman) would read "The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds": [http://goo.gl/6a22pX](http://goo.gl/6a22pX) less than 2 hour read. read it with an open mind and your worldview may change.

watch Stephanie Kelton and Warren Mosler talk about gov debt and deficits: (2 hours!) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba8XdDqZ- Jg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba8XdDqZ-Jg)

Randall Wray on Job Guarantee vs Basic Income: [http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2014/01/27/lets- compare-t...](http://www.economonitor.com/lrwray/2014/01/27/lets-compare-the- job-guarantee-to-the-alternatives-not-against-some-distant-utopian-vision/)

Mosler's current prescription: 1) A full FICA suspension, which raises take home pay by 7.6%, and, for businesses that are competitive, lowers prices as well, restoring sales/output/employment in short order 2) A $10/hr federally funded transition job for anyone willing and able to work to promote the transition from unemployment to private sector employment ...

</comment><comment><USER19> The first sentence prophesies 'collapse', but then reading on you see a recipe for a continuing mild recession.

Where does the collapse come in? (if it's nebulously caused spike in treasury rates, I'm not going to be convinced)

</comment><comment><USER20> You would think with all the social spending we do that things would be better by now for people in this category but its not really. There needs to be a concerted effort to reduce the number of assistance programs to a single digit number so that funds are not lost to paying the workers to administer the programs. There are thousands of assistance programs just at the Federal level, sure that is not an ideal way of getting help to those in need.

</comment><comment><USER21> _US GDP growth in real dollars is low (and trending down). It was 2.9% for Q1 2014 after the second official revision [1]. If it's down again for Q2, we'll be in a recession._

Just a nit, but to be clear...

1Q 2014 GDP #s (revised) growth rate was _negative_ 2.9% (-2.9%).

The second sentence in the quote also implies as much, so I think the quoted text has an oversight/typo.

[http://www.cnbc.com/id/101787838](http://www.cnbc.com/id/101787838)

</comment><comment><USER22> Some of the figures Altman gives are important. There are some more:

[http://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion- and-...](http://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and- stagnation)

If you read that article and consult the (mostly government) sources, you'll see:

* It's not just government debt that is high - household, business, and especially financial debt is high

* The financial sector has been growing much faster than the "real" economy

* Less and less of the GDP goes to consumers in wages and salaries

* Industrial capacity utilization goes down and down and down (so why invest in new capital?)

* Since the 1980s, profits have been an increasing share of GDP, while investment has been going down

Macroeconomic collapse on the scale (or greater then) it happened in the 1930s will, I believe, inevitably happen.

</comment><comment><USER23> I believe tax breaks don't show up as government spending. If for example Boeing is given a billion dollar tax break, then the government has a billion dollars loss and Boeing has a billion dollars more. But that won't show up as a billion dollars going to the government, and then spent on Boeing, even though that is exactly what is happening.

I suspect that if tax breaks were accounted for, then government spending would be higher. It looks like US corporate welfare is around $200bn/year, although there are many larger estimates out there (eg count the banking bailouts). I haven't seen numbers for personal tax breaks, but adding them will make the number larger.

</comment><comment><USER24> Q1 2014 GDP growth was -2.9%. There's no minus sign in front of 2.9% in item #1 in the article (I'm using Chrome).

</comment><comment><USER25> Another interesting chart: [https://twitter.com/hblodget/status/483577150805901312](https://twitter.com/hblodget/status/483577150805901312)

</comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone think we are heading towards an economic collapse?

<comment><USER27> Seeing as how "natural economic growth" is not infinitely sustainable (I'm operating under the assumptions that there are finite quantities of natural resources and human ingenuity is not infinite and infallible). It's probabilistically inevitable.

<comment><USER28> Natural resources are finite, but so long as we can improve our efficiency faster than some rate N, we will never run out of a given resource. Thank you Zeno's Paradox.

(Recycling also plays a part, though I don't know if it should be considered increasing the supply, or increasing our efficiency)

The only one that is a real problem is energy. Thanks to the laws of physics, we may not be able to forever increase our energy efficiency, and energy cannot be recycled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have gradually become convinced by mountains of evidence from many quarters that the Keynesians are right-- we are in a demand constrained economy.

One of the problems I think is that economists and politicos tend to always be fighting the last war. In the late 1970s to early 1980s -- the last time the economy seemed this systemically bleak -- the problem was insufficient capital available for investment combined with high inflation. This resulted in "stagflation," something classical Keynesians thought impossible, and thus resulted in a widespread discrediting of classical Keynesian and economic liberal thought.

Thing is... in the late 70s the supply siders may well have been right and the Keynesians wrong. We were in a supply limited economy, and stimulus and other liberal policies just made everything inflate.

But now I think the situation has reversed. Today looks a lot more like the 1930s, albeit not quite as viscerally nasty. There's a _huge_ amount of capital available but few good investments. Wages are stagnant, savings are down, pay and wealth inequality are utterly massive, etc.

So today I think the Keynesians may well be right again. Hopefully it'll come in the form of something less destructive than a war. I'd personally suggest a massive program to electrify all transport, huge investments in both renewable energy and next-generation nuclear power, a medical "war on aging," and a campaign to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. All that taken together would probably end up costing about what WWII did, and so might be enough. The war on aging would have the added follow-on benefit of helping with our demographic problems. (As would a more liberal immigration policy.)

Meta question: perhaps there's a new insight here... do modern industrial economies actually tend to oscillate between demand constrained and supply constrained failure modes? Perhaps the Keynesians overcorrected for the great depression, resulting in the 1970s, and now the supply siders have overcorrected for the 1970s resulting in today. In that case maybe we oscillate between periods when Keynesian demand-side policies work and periods when Friedman-esque supply-side policies work.

Edit: the reason I don't think we're hurting as bad at the street level today as we were at the depths of the Great Depression is simply because we've grown so far beyond subsistence level. Today the amount of economic pain required to cause visceral physical pain among large numbers of people in the developed world -- starvation, etc. -- would be quite a bit larger than what it took in the 30s. To lead to that kind of thing we'd need the 2008 financial crash times ten at least, combined with a major political collapse and some kind of technological train wreck. A mega-sized solar flare or a sudden "oh crap" worst case peak oil cliff coming to pass might do it.

But compared to a non-slump timeline -- compared to what _should_ be happening given the technological growth we've experienced -- we are in a depression. We should be colonizing Mars, conquering aging, pretty much doing all the things I suggested as stimulus. Instead we are building apps like Yo while people go bankrupt in underwater houses with underwater student loans. (Not blaming the authors of Yo either... during the depression a lot of people took up whittling sticks and other little time-passing pursuits for lack of good work to do.)

<comment><USER19> A large component of 70's stagflation was just supply shocks for oil. Why this never gets brought up, or is just brushed aside casually is beyond me.

> do modern industrial economies actually tend to oscillate between demand > constrained and supply constrained failure modes

This is probably a pretty good way to look at it. The solution is something like [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_finance](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_finance)

The meat:

1\. The government shall maintain a reasonable level of demand at all times. If there is too little spending and, thus, excessive unemployment, the government shall reduce taxes or increase its own spending. If there is too much spending, the government shall prevent inflation by reducing its own expenditures or by increasing taxes.

2\. By borrowing money when it wishes to raise the rate of interest and by lending money or repaying debt when it wishes to lower the rate of interest, the government shall maintain that rate of interest that induces the optimum amount of investment.

3\. If either of the first two rules conflicts with principles of 'sound finance' or of balancing the budget, or of limiting the national debt, so much the worse for these principles. The government press shall print any money that may be needed to carry out rules 1 and 2

<comment><USER30> >A large component of 70's stagflation was just supply shocks for oil. Why this never gets brought up, or is just brushed aside casually is beyond me.

It's politically expedient to forget it - just as it's politically expedient to forget that the people causing the oil shocks and the people who benefited from them politically seemed (and continue to seem) to have some interesting relationships.

Keynes is in danger of being written out of history, in the same way that dissidents like Henry George were.

I'm not sure how many people realise the extent to which anti-Keynesian narratives were deliberately promoted and funded after WWII, especially in Chicago.

The fact that Keynes is no longer considered an orthodox policy source is not an accident.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So what is the reasonable response to the future we have at hand. Most answers are the sky's the limit(stock will just keep going up) or zombie apocalypse.

I would prefer more of a negative income tax.

</comment><comment><USER32> "On the positive side, but as you'd expect with near-zero rates, US equities are at record levels." I'm no so sure this should be on the positive side. Those equities are artificially inflated by central bank (indirect) manipulation. Those prices might not reflect the real value of the underlying assets and could collapse, which would once again put the whole financial system at risk.

</comment><comment><USER33> The private debt levels are just as critical as the public debt levels and much higher (although down from their 2008 peak still I think). What is particularly is the total rate of change for public and private debt which heavily dictates the growth levels. When the economy suddenly switches from growing debt at accelerating rates to reducing debts is when the major crash happens.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's intriguing that US economy is slowing down since WWII. What are the reasons?

1\. No significant improvements like agriculture.

2\. Increasing regulations

3\. Big middle class that have no strong motivation to advance further or have "enough money" for good living (modulo individuals)

4\. Growth in domain which GDP doesn't capture e.g. Open Source

5\. No obvious investments opportunities e.g. Highway

<comment><USER35> I'd say it's probably just the world slowly but surely becoming less dependent on the U.S. economy after the entire world economy was destroyed in a War.

And, yes, birthrates and longer retirement are probably relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A simplified example of what happens when trade deficits occur over a long enough period of time:

Squanderville versus Thriftville (Warren Buffet) - [http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1053684/posts](http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1053684/posts)

</comment><comment><USER37> But it's not a bad economy VC/PE. It's basically loads of 0% money and no tax via carried interest. If you disagree, come see the number of entire floor apartment renovations happening on 5th ave.

<3 NYC

</comment><comment><USER38> I agree technology will save us from the mad max scenario that we repeatedly have read about over the last 5 years. However, it will be interesting to see how the "Technocracy" plays out.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm confused - Sam who held a fundraiser for Obama is now saying the economy is screwed?

<comment><USER39> To expand further - is there not a certain _tension_ in a) saying the US economy is screwed, and b) holding a fundraiser for the man that has presided over it for the last 6+ years?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This comment section turned out about the way one would predict: politics.

<comment><USER41> This comment section turned out about the way one would predict when so few of the participants have ever studied economics.

<comment><USER40> Unfortunately there seem to be two distinct groups that each think the other has never studied economics.

It's possible to have good discussions about this, but it requires a _lot_ more moderation than HN wants to do (rightly, in my estimation). And probably a different format: the threaded discussion format leads to all sorts of weird tarpits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's a dismal situation. Low interest rates mean cheap money in theory, but the "people" best equipped to take advantage of it are corporations. It's not like average people are able to start businesses just because the interest rate is low. However, low interest rates mean the penalty (to companies) for hoarding and for general risk aversion is also low. This means that lousy executives don't get a lot of investor pushback (companies don't have to do much to beat the risk-free rate) and can stick around indefinitely. The only thing that changes is that their exorbitant salaries go up (as do housing prices, college tuitions, and healthcare costs).

Meanwhile, for the 99%, this debt/poverty cancer just keeps growing inside the country, making it weaker every day: it's not just government debt-- although that is a real problem-- but student debt and credit cards as the replacement for Fordist wage increases.

The macro picture is bad, but the micro picture is even more dismal. Corporate management is becoming more self-serving and corrupt, internal policies of corporations are becoming more mean-spirited (many companies now require employees to use vacation when sick, and open-plan <50 SF allotments of office space are becoming the norm). When you see the reality of work life for most Americans, you realize that the corrosion is organic, inevitable, and really quite deserved. Our country has become a patchwork system of slapped-together corporate garbage, whether you're talking about its healthcare coverage or the way most of us have to work. What used to be a country is now a phalanx of uninspiring, mean-spirited organizations not worth caring about.

 _I think that startups and venture capital will continue to do well._

Ouch. Sorry to disagree, but... what's pushing people into startups is not that this VC-funded game is so great (it ain't) but that corporate employment has become such a raw deal. Now that big companies have ceased doing the right thing when it comes to investing in their employees, avoiding layoffs unless absolutely necessary, etc., we've reached a point that shoestring long-shots called "startups" look like a good idea in comparison. The startups haven't improved. (In fact, they've become worse.) The alternatives, however, have gone to shit.

VC-funded startups are notoriously cheap, and stinginess leads to mediocrity. For example, they don't pay relocation, don't pay for education, and usually involve 80+ percent "employee contributions" on health insurance. Some even make people _take fucking vacation days_ to attend conferences. If you look at it honestly, "we're a startup" is usually just used to justify being a terrible company.

Now, the proper strategy is either to bet big on someone, or not hire that person, and (in general) to be very selective. (If you're not willing to pay full relocation, you shouldn't be hiring that person at all.) The problem is that these VC-funded startups are so weak in terms of technical talent that "hire a few strong people and bet big on them" isn't a viable strategy, because they can't get the first part down. So they have to hire large (as in, a large number of people... like 30 before they even launch) and so they offer crappy salaries, dogshit equity, and nonexistent perks in the hope that one of the clueless 22-year-olds who takes their offer will be an undiscovered talent. Occasionally, it works out that way. Most of the time it doesn't. Hence, the high failure rate of VC-funded startups.

VC has been, and will continue to be, an underperforming asset class and there's a clear reason why. The main players aren't optimizing for the performance of their portfolios but their careers (and, to be fair, I can't blame them; I'd do the same in their shoes). Their career goals push them to over-collaborate (read: collude) and that creates that disgusting culture of co-funding. But as soon as you have important decisions made by committee, mediocrity is a result because you're now biased in favor of mediocre/never- offends-anyone people instead of high-variance people who actually do the fucking work.

 _Personally, I think that innovation and new technology is what will save us._

Eventually, yes. But I think we're going to see things get a lot worse before they start getting better. I don't think that the US or the world economy is in terminal decline, but I think we have another 10-15 years of ugliness before things start to improve.

<comment><USER43> Just to be clear, pretty much every point you made about startups directly conflicts with the sample of ~10 SF/SV companies I talked with during a recent job search

\- base salaries at funded startups are good. Equity could vary greatly depending on how much salary you asked for \- insurance is 100% paid for employees and 50%+ paid for family \- I didn't discuss relocation but I was relocated to SF 2 yrs ago by a startup \- Very, very smart and capable co- workers \- Vacation days were untracked or 15+, and there was a separate allotment of sick days \- Most teams were < 10 developers well after launch \- Much easier to find jobs as an experienced senior developer than a junior developer

The one point you nailed is all open-plan offices, everywhere, all the time.

I don't know what you're basing your statements on, and maybe it's different in other parts of the country, but in SV/SF right now, if you're a demonstrably good developer, you're in extremely high demand and many, many excellent companies are competing fiercely to hire you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> In this context, I hope at some point sama has a chance (if he hasn't already) to read the post "Sam Altman is not a blithering idiot" by Mencius Moldbug:

[http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/03/sam- alt...](http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/03/sam-altman-is- not-blithering-idiot.html)

 _The basic problem with our society is a disconnect between consensus reality and actual reality. We actually have no shortage of natural leaders. But they cannot actually lead us anywhere. They are operating in consensus reality rather than actual reality. Their joysticks are not plugged in. When the consensus is nonsense, sober good sense is nonsense. Nonsense is no use to anyone._

It's a long post, but if you're interested in examining the problems we face from a fresh and unusual perspective it's worth reading the whole thing.

<comment><USER45> It's also critically wrong in understanding technology:

"one run of a time machine, with a printout of Wikipedia, would be pretty much all the real 1950 needed. Send the technology back to 1945, and you'll have iPads by '55 at the latest. Those guys got things done."

That kind of thinking betrays a common misunderstanding. The limiting factor on what we can build at any given time is very rarely _ideas_. In 1950, people already knew enough physics to build an iPad. The idea of integrated circuits had already been proposed. The first one was demonstrated in 1958 -- only three years later than Moldbug's alternate history.

And yet no iPads in 1960. Because there's a vast global capital structure that needed to evolve first. Technology is not an external factor. It makes no sense to argue whether society is better after factoring out technology, because technology _cannot be factored out_. It's all part of the same web of interrelationships.

Edit to add:

I had to add this, because it's so wrong it's perverse: "At the base of the pyramid are air, water and food. How does 2013 do at supplying oxygen, hydration and nutrition? How did 1950 do? Just fine. Gentlemen, a draw."

Only if you limit yourself to the wealthiest 10% of human beings. Out here in reality, global food security for everybody else is dramatically better than it was in 1950. Much of the developing world is starting to worry more about obesity than starvation. Moldbug is simply ignoring the biggest economic story of the last 40 years, presumably because it didn't happen in The West.

<comment><USER46> Not only capital structure, but lots and lots and LOTS of various minor improvements in all areas.

They would not be making iPads, because simply having one around doesn't automatically create the production technology to create it. That would still take a whole lot of work. It may well be that it would be more efficient to send them a bunch of C64's if you simply wanted them to improve faster, since the gap between the technologies are lesser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Entitlement" is a dog whistle that is used in place of "welfare".

[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Entitlement_program](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Entitlement_program)

<comment><USER47> Arguing about terminology is a great way to avoid arguing about tough fiscal realities.

<comment><USER48> I think it's worth mentioning. Propagandistic terms such as "entitlements" frustrate discussion and make it even more difficult to communicate. It belittles and trivializes the opinion that poor people are entitled to things like healthcare or food, making people who hold that opinion unwilling to discuss it.

<comment><USER45> It's the government's own term, used by nonpartisan entities like the CBO.

If anything, "welfare" is now used as a more politically loaded term. It's almost never used anymore without attaching a negative connotation -- whether by the right in the old way, or by the left when decrying "corporate welfare".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The defense budget has gotten smaller as a total percentage of the economy since WWII, but the economy was smaller and the entire country was mobilized.

We currently spend over a trillion dollars a year on defense and intelligence. "Entitlements" are not the problem.I love how they are entitlements even though you pay for them...in fact, let's start calling it the social safety net instead.

The main problem is that the wealthy, corporations and individuals, don't pay enough. Cut defense by half and stop letting the wealthy walk all over us and all of a sudden you don't have a crisis.

<comment><USER49> I thought that they were called entitlements precisely because we pay for them.

<comment><USER9> They are called entitlements to make people think that some undeserving class is getting over...they think they are "entitled"...is the way that is put. It was done on purpose by conservatives. Its a dog whistle.

<comment><USER50> I don't think that comes from where you think it does. I think it comes from the fact that people are literally entitled to that money via the legal contract we've set up - it is spoken for.

<comment><USER51> Too many mixed metaphors.

Aside from employees, .gov gives people money two ways:

1) Contracts. 200 F-22 for $100B or so. $1M for the service contract for that server for a year. Usually involves a psuedo competitive bidding process, a lack of one is unusual enough that you get the phrase "no bid contract" because its an oddity.

2) Entitlements. If you meet these requirements, you get this money, or income tax credit, or whatever. You're entitled as a member of a class where that class is poor dudes or historic property investors or hybrid car owner or whatever. Usually doesn't involve competitive bidding or auctions at all.

You're just going to confuse people by mixing contracts and entitlements in the same line.

<comment><USER50> Sorry, didn't mean to confuse. "Contract" is used metaphorically in relation to the government all the time, though. "Social contract", for example.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Cold War mystery: Why did Jimmy Carter save the space shuttle? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/a-cold-war-mystery-why-did-jimmy-carter-save-the-space-shuttle/ <comment><USER2> perhaps it was to have the capability of launching AND servicing military satellites</comment>


An arsonist who set Washington on fire in 1985 (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://www.alternet.org/story/53378/why_thomas_sweatt_set_washington_on_fire <comment><USER2> This out-of-the-box thinking by the investigators caught my attention:

"Investigators knew from the bags left behind at the fire scenes that the arsonist shopped at convenience stores. From the wreckage of a Northeast car fire investigators pulled the remnants of a black plastic bag. The company supplied their black bags to just two shops in the D.C. area. Investigators put cameras in both stores.

With the cooperation of the owner of the two Circle 7 stores, agents affixed thumbnail-size stainless steel chips to the bottom of every bag in both stores. Each chip was marked according to alphanumeric code, going in order through the stack. If one of the bags were to be involved in a fire, the chip would survive. And because agents went to the stores daily to track which bags had been used, they would be able to go to the video to see which customer had purchased the bag from the fire."

The above was not how the arsonist was caught. (He was caught due to his car being captured on video leaving the scene of a fire. Having found a suspect, the investigators matched his DNA to DNA extracted from clothing he'd used as wicks in setting some of the fires.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, this is so messed up, he admits to masterbating after setting fire to random people's houses. It's like this onion story: [http://www.theonion.com/video/crime-reporter-finds-way-of- li...](http://www.theonion.com/video/crime-reporter-finds-way-of-linking- warehouse-fire-14371)

</comment><comment><USER4> WTActualF?</comment>


Tech C.E.O.s Held a Secret Meeting with Top Republicans to Stop Trump - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/03/tech-ceos-held-a-secret-meeting-with-top-republicans-to-stop-trump <comment><USER2> Politics aside, does this seem terribly elitist to anyone else? Is this what plutocracy looks like?

<comment><AUTHOR> You bet - makes you wonder why ~everybody~ is against Trump.</comment></comment>


A practical guide to varnish - <AUTHOR> http://devblog.factual.com/practical-guide-to-varnish

<comment><USER2> I've first heard of Varnish today, so it's quite a coincidence that this poped-up today here ...

But I'm a little bit confused. If I used this for CSS, is it really more efficient to serve them trough Varnish than to serve them from my server (nginx) which is configured to send the appropriate cache headers? I always set my css to expire far far in the future (expires max;), and I invalidate the cache by changing a GET parameter for the CSS file that has changed (somefile.css?v=X).

I'll have to read more about this, especially the stuff about dynamic content.

<comment><USER3> If I remember correctly, Varnish by default will use the standard HTTP headers to cache the content. This is my preferred way "configuring" Varnish. I like letting the app decide how to cache it's content rather than putting a bunch of special rules in VCL.

Some people strip out the cache headers once it hits Varnish, but I prefer to let the user agents cache the resources locally and use Varnish as a stop-gap for the misbehaving user agents.

As with everything, YMMV</comment></comment>


'We've bred them to their limit': death rates surge for female pigs in US(2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/01/death-rates-surge-female-pigs-us <comment><USER2> And people can openheartedly justify eating meat after seeing some bullshit like this?

<comment><AUTHOR> this is because they want to squeeze every little penny from it. Big AG firms compete on price and we see this, plus tasteless meat. Cheap but tasteless and unethical.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I join a Startup or keep working on my own (for now)? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a senior Computer Science student from Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. Right now I'm facing a situation, surrounded with too many thoughts and unable to walk properly.
The situation is, some awesome people at my institute are starting up a logistic based platform, which is going to be great (no doubts here). I was asked to join them, I loved the product they have currently.
But the other part of the game is, along my journey at the institute here, I have created a passion for Open Source and some exciting fields of the computer science.
I (kind of) believe that I come up with too many ideas, ranging from anything to everything, I try to note them down and work on them to reflect them on my GitHub[1] and my blog[2].
I have a strong attraction towards 'Data Science', 'Systems & Infrastructure' and 'Distributed Systems'.
Last year, I found out about Datadog[3] while working on the 'GitHub's 3rd Data Challenge'. I immediately loved the organization because it deals with all the things I like(Data & Infrastructure), so I applied for an engineering internship, went through the interview process and got the job. But later things went wrong and I wasn't able to go through the visa process.
On applying again, being pessimistic I think about not getting the visa (H1-B) this time too.
Initially I wasn't interested in studying higher but now I'm getting a feeling for it, not because I'm out of other options, just because I have some things in my list(to-do) relating to academia and I would love to see them happening. Although I can't go for it anytime soon, because I don't have that much money.
So the situation is, what to do? The Startup is going to be awesome, their product is great but I'm lacking a strong ignition towards it, that I see while working on my own little projects. Not sure if it's because of my addiction towards it.
[1] https://github.com/pravj/ [2] http://pravj.github.io/blog/ [3] https://www.datadoghq.com/ <comment><USER2> Why not do both? You say that you don't have much money, so why not take the sure thing job and at least earn some money while also working on open source projects that may or may not pan out?

</comment><comment><USER3> "but I'm lacking a strong ignition towards it" Then definitely continue on your own. Enthusiasm is what takes you over the break it or make it point.</comment>


'OK Google, give everybody in America a free speaker' - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/ok-google-give-everybody-in-america-a-free-speaker-2018-06-28 <comment><USER2> Yes! Let's put microphones in every single household in the US. That way, then it just becomes sooooo easy to pass a law for the company (in this case Google), to collaborate via a National Security Letter to make any feed available.

I can imagine the NSA and FBI salivating over the mere idea of this.

<comment><USER3> We're already carrying microphones around in our pockets. Do the speaker microphones really make the situation worse? When it is almost guaranteed that there is already multiple microphones present.

<comment><USER4> I would say they do. For instance, if I got a Google Home it would be the only non-Apple device with a microphone in my apartment, making gov access significantly easier.

<comment><USER5> Do you really think isolating yourself to the Apple ecosystem makes you more secure? If so: how do you qualify that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Selling hardware below manufacturing cost in order to undercut competition. Isn't that called "dumping"? Wouldn't that be an anti-trust issue?

</comment><comment><USER7> Cable had a voice remote that was cool, but I'm a cord cutter, I canceled cable. My phone has voice apps, but I disable them. I dont need to speak to my google/amazon apps.

My Win10 gaming PC has M$ Cortana, but I disabled that. My hdtv is old but I watch most my content on my PC. Seems most new TV's now are voice enabled.

My Car is the only place I use voice, voice dialing.

Wonder how many people really need or want voice-enabled speakers in their homes.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not a huge fan of voice either, but I find this stat fascinating. Why wouldn't Google just put one in every home for free. Who would go Amazon at that point (not to say one is better than the other).

<comment><USER8> >Who would go Amazon at that point

People who want to buy things other than nexus phones? Google isn't a retailer of anything except their own hardware as far as I know. Is something very different in the USA on this front?

<comment><AUTHOR> I should have clarified better - who would go to Amazon for their voice products, e.g., Alexa

<comment><USER8> For that I have no idea. I don't understand why anyone would have voice products in their house. If google gave me a free home mini I would drop it in the bin without a second thought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would be delighted to get a free nice-looking speaker that I could disassemble and hack and use for my own purposes!

<comment><USER10> This! Free hardware is great. Anyone remember the Cuecat?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat)</comment></comment>


Technique to manipulate electrons with light could make computers much faster - <AUTHOR> http://www.opli.net/opli_magazine/eo/2018/light-could-make-semiconductor-computers-a-million-times-faster-or-even-go-quantum-may-news/ <comment><USER2> This reads like a parody of science journalism... It ticks all the boxes. Simplifying quantum computing to "it runs every possibility in parallel"? Yup. Making vague and impossible speed up claims? Yup. Etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Electron will still use too much RAM though... /s

This is cool. It makes me wonder how big a computer can be. If bounded by the speed of light, could a planet-sized computer ever make any sense?

<comment><USER4> No, because even at the speed of light, a trip around the earth is 133ms. That's also a straight line, and in a vacuum. Much slower when it involves an atmosphere, optical fiber, and different routes.

<comment><USER3> That's not so long though, in the scheme of things. Especially if the computer was very fast.

I read this book Artemis by Andy Weir recently (the guy who wrote the Martian) and it mentioned a moon Internet, and it was like 8 seconds away from the earth Internet or something like that. However, and the book didn't mention it, but what if a computer could be constructed that could perform extremely large calculations, and it was cheaper to produce there? In the book, they used a lot of glass for decor, because the ingredients to manufacture it were byproducts of other manufacturing already present, but something like that could be possible in space.

I like to imagine a satellite orbiting earth, with a little factory onboard, and it would send out probes and repurpose all the space junk in orbit and convert it to energy or use it to build stuff.

A planet computer could be expanding itself in that same way, and even though the calculations' results might be delayed, that might be more effective.

If humans make it another couple hundred years, they're gonna get to start thinking and building that stuff. That'll be cool

<comment><USER5> Actually the moon is only 1.3 light seconds away, so a ping of ~2.7s to the moon is possible!

Mars would be annoying to communicate with though: 25-44.8 minutes for a roundtrip signal.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Subscription Revenue Model (spreadsheet) - <AUTHOR> https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkxZrw3662U_dEhQa0Y4T3c5RU5mcGd6N0twYXhLZWc&hl=en&authkey=CN_dm8wH# <comment><USER2> I use a different method for calculating the "Avg customer lifetime (months)", which is implied by some logic from a great book called The Loyalty Effect: [http://books.google.com/books?id=ctAj_SfSrKIC&printsec=f...](http://books.google.com/books?id=ctAj_SfSrKIC&printsec=frontcover)

Using this formula, I get different results for "Avg customer lifetime (months)" than the OP.

I calculate the average length of the customer tenure based on the formula: 0.5 = (1-churn%)^t, where "churn%" is the monthly churn rate, and t is time passed in months. Basically, this formula says: when will 50% of the customers be left?

You can solve for t:

0.5 = (1-churn%)^t

ln (0.5) =ln(1 - churn%)^t

ln (0.5) =t x ln(1 - churn%)

t = ln (0.5) / ln (1 - churn%)

You can test this math by calculating how long t is for a churn of 50% (it's 1 month).

Using this math, the average tenure for a monthly churn of 1% would be 60 months. The average tenure is useful because you can then do a discounted cash flow analysis on 100% of the cash flows until time t, to calculate the lifetime value of the average customer. So in this case, you would be discounting 100% of 60 months of cash flows.

The average tenure goes down rapidly as you increase the churn rate. At 2% churn, the average tenure is 34 months. At 3%, it's 23 months. At 5%, it's 14 months. And at 10%, it's 7 months.

If you have enough data, you can use a non-constant churn rate as well, as churn rate definitely goes down over time.

</comment><comment><USER3> The spreadsheet links to <http://bit.ly/93pK2v> (pdf) as a source of further information. Seems to be a discussion of SaaS in general.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's fun to share this, as figuring out these numbers has always been tricky. Feels good to finally open up the discussion and get these formulas figured out. Also been really fun to develop the spreadsheet as a community effort.

<comment><USER5> Hey Ryan, is there a background post/etc to this?

What are the figures based on (real numbers, log(/similar) real numbers, fake numbers) - would love to know more behind this other than the generic pdf from BVP!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been looking for something similar but for non SaaS websites. My site will rely on targeted advertising and the sale of classified ads. Is there something similar that suits my use, taking into account viral coefficients etc.

And along the same lines, is it more reasonable to make estimates on page views or uniques per month??

<comment><USER7> Targeted advertising? Classified ads? Sounds like music to my ears.

See trafficspaces.com

<comment><USER6> My site is going to have specific tags, somewhat like Stack Overflow. I see Trafficspaces has the ability to support contextual ads but there's not a lot of info. Ideally I'd like advertisers to be able to bid on a set of tags--is this possible?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know how to copy this spreadsheet to a personal Google account so it is editable and private? I am not seeing that option. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> "File -> Make a copy..." from the toolbar should do the trick

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What did you base the customer life cycle on?

<comment><USER4> It's automatically calculated based on churn. IE 10% churn would be 10 months (100/10 = 10)

<comment><USER2> Hi Ryan, I think that the rule of thumb used in the spreadsheet overstates the average customer tenure (as calculated by the alternate formula I outlined in another comment): [https://docs.google.com/drawings/edit?id=1-9z5wczSfbM3KLZavF...](https://docs.google.com/drawings/edit?id=1-9z5wczSfbM3KLZavFdM1WoQhK7q5wEyoiWWchInhwc&pli=1)

In case you find this worthwhile, I uploaded a spreadsheet showing my calculations which you can see here: [https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ag- jmDLo09WNdHBNY1d...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Ag- jmDLo09WNdHBNY1d0ejY3OWlHcGMtTWJSemI4WlE&hl=en#gid=0)</comment></comment></comment>


Personal data of 2.9M people leaked from Desjardins - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/desjardins-data-breach-1.5183297 <comment><USER2> > The information includes names, addresses, birth dates, social insurance > numbers, email addresses and information about transaction habits.

Oooof.

> However, Desjardins said, passwords, security questions and personal > identification numbers have not been compromised.

Well that's a relief! Glad the things that are easy to change are safe.

<comment><USER3> It's very bad from a privacy standpoint but at least nobody will be able to log-in to my account and send all my money offshore.

<comment><USER2> Instead they can steal your identity and open accounts in your name. Banks can automate the changing of passwords and PINs by requiring the former information to change the latter. But once it's out there, it's gone forever.

<comment><USER4> I know identity theft is not a joke, but (I'm too lazy to check how does it work in Canada, this is for the US):

• Under most state laws, you're not responsible for any debt incurred on fraudulent new accounts opened in your name without your permission.

[https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/pdf-0009_identitytheft...](https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/pdf-0009_identitytheft_a_recovery_plan.pdf)

<comment><USER2> That still requires work on the behalf of the person whose identity was stolen. Affidavits signed, letters mailed, etc. Also vigilant monitoring of your credit details afterwards.

Even if you are not monetarily charged, it's still a giant pain to recover from.

<comment><USER4> How easy would it be to recover funds from an account that has been compromised and emptied? Honest question, I have no idea.

Anyway, I don't know how many fraudulent accounts are opened in Quebec each year using stolen identities but if the fraudster has three millions of identities to choose from (one third of the population) you may have bigger risks to worry about.

<comment><USER2> Unsure about how it would work on a very large sum, or in Canada, but I had a wallet stolen several years ago and had to sign an affidavit describing what happened. Someone had gone to Best Buy and spent like $400, and the bank returned it after a few weeks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The federation's CEO and president, Guy Cormier, said the security breach is > not the result of a cyberattack, but the work of an employee who improperly > accessed and shared the information.

> That employee has been fired.

> Cormier said he felt "betrayed" by the former employee's actions.

Fired? How about arrested?

<comment><USER6> Letsee, 5 minutes of wasted time per impacted client (and that's just to interpret and ignore the notice) * 2.9 million people = 28 years of life lost by one action.

Basically a murder in terms of aggregate impact.

<comment><USER7> Lol with that logic most developers who implement an annoying pop up banner subscription/greeting chain combo on a high traffic site are committing an action equal to murder

<comment><USER6> The maintainers of uBlock Origin have a lot of "Get out of Jail" credits to exchange if they ever need to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If it was possible for an employee to "access and share" 2.9m datasets, it's the company's fault. No matter who the employee is, if you don't have safeguards in place as a credit union, you aren't doing your job. Like, at all.

<comment><USER4> How should you do your job so _no_ employee has access to that information? I'm sure they could have been more careful, but the risk cannot be completely eliminated without going to impractical extremes...

<comment><USER8> shakna already gave some good points, but a major one is the _shared_ part.

Even if it's an admin that moves around a backup file from server a to server b, you don't allow anyone to bring in and connect USB drives. You don't allow personal laptops to access files (on that level - accessing a frontend is fine, see access limits) that leave the premises. That's not impractical, it's not extreme, it's just what you do when you handle very important data of millions of users.

Making sure nobody can access data wholesale is step one. You will fail at some point for some reason. Making sure no one can exfil large amounts of data is step two. If he wants to go James Bond on you and use a small camera to photograph his screen, good. Data leaks suck, but this way, it will affect a hundred people, not 2.9m.

<comment><USER4> Sure, but you need processes to get all the names and adresses every time you send statements by mail, for example. Someone somewhere needs to be able to access the data. Not "everyone", but not "nobody" either. How do disable access from database admins? Do you keep all the listings in microfilms in a safe in a guarded room in the basement?

<comment><USER9> No, you do what he explained. Those DBs might have access to the customer DB, but no USB on those system.That access would also be logged at another location, listing date/time/user. It might also require a sign off from a manager/team that reviews record access of more than say 10,000 clients, etc. DBs would be informed of all these security factors, to desuade individuals from making bad choices.

Individually, none of the above would stop this kind of breach. Altogether, and it might be enough. You amply defense in depth

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> fuuuck

> Anyone whose data was affected will receive a 12-month credit monitoring > plan, paid for by Desjardins. That service includes access to daily credit > reports, alerts of any changes and identity theft insurance.

> "I want to be really clear," said Cormier. "Our members will be reimbursed > [for any losses they incur.] There will be no cost to our members."

Not bad.

<comment><USER11> No clear mention of whether those impacted will be notified though.

<comment><USER12> Not in the article, but Desjardins has set up a webpage with information on the leak.[0]

They will send a letter to every clients whose informations were leaked, which will include the code for a free 12-month Equifax (credit report) monitoring.

[0] [https://www.desjardins.com/renseignements- personnels/index.j...](https://www.desjardins.com/renseignements- personnels/index.jsp)

<comment><USER13> lol equifax

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a retired IT Exec (I worked in Cdn banking for over a decade) this kinda thing used to keep me up at night!

To mitigate the risk I wanted to implement a blanket USB plug-n-play restriction but the client-side Execs overruled me. Fortunately a leak never happened, but really it was just good fortune.

<comment><USER15> As a current IT exec in banking, a thing that keeps me up at night is the "go to" strategy of compromising employees' ability to use productivity tools for "security".

If you follow the lock-it-down strategy to the max, you eventually unplug the computer and keep it in a vault. Since you wouldn't do that, that means you recognize that security can't be at the expense of all utility.

So what is the right amount of utility to sacrifice in order to achieve security?

I'd argue — try for none. Make infosec the _happy path_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> In this world of NSA, data leaks and FAARG, the only way forward is undocumented births and backwoods medicine to avoid personal information being at the mercy of the state, corporations and criminal organizations.

</comment><comment><USER17> So the bank itself didn't found out the issue but was told by the police, I'm really curious about monitoring process at banks...

<comment><USER18> I've been looking into this recently Because Reasons. The story's pretty poor in most places.

Brian "Krebs on Security" Krebs wrote a bit in March 2018 on the state of bank online security. Virtually all of it is outsourced to a handful of major service providers: Fiserv, Jack Henry, FIS, CSI, and Finastra.

[https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/03/what-is-your-banks- secur...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/03/what-is-your-banks-security- banking-on/)

I don't find any indication of what Desjardins' security is based on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> More informations from Desjardins: [https://www.desjardins.com/ca/personal- information/index.jsp](https://www.desjardins.com/ca/personal- information/index.jsp)

</comment><comment><USER19> > The information includes names, addresses, birth dates, social insurance > numbers, email addresses and information about transaction habits.

It's starting to look downright irresponsible to regard such information as private these days.

As such, it should be considered irresponsible to base any portion of a verification protocol on that information.

</comment><comment><USER20> This isn't surprising, As is with everything with Québec, Desjardins is a Québec based business. They will still retain their customer base. Their site's UX was so bad that I didn't use them as my bank. Their English customer service sucks too. Glad I made that choice. A data breach is still a data breach even if it was by a rogue employee.

By the looks of it, Quebec's Communauto is next in the line.</comment>


The Patent Scam Trailer [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i48Pb6sTgmY <comment><AUTHOR> More info about the movie: [https://www.thepatentscam.com/](https://www.thepatentscam.com/). This was created by the author of X-Plane because he was sued by a patent troll (for selling his app on the Google Play Store).</comment>


US considering up to 35% tariff on imported solar panels - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/itc-suggests-trump-impose-up-to-a-35-tariff-on-imported-solar-modules/ <comment><USER2> Good-- enough of this free market belief while other countries gut punch us industrially. Quid pro quo.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand. Isn't jerking off about the 'free market' America's thing?</comment></comment>


How Facebook Is Making Friending Obsolete - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126084637203791583.html

<comment><USER2> "We'll need to treat this increasingly public version of Facebook with the same hard-headedness that we treat Twitter: as a place to broadcast, but not a place for vulnerability. A place to carefully calibrate, sanitize and bowdlerize our words for every possible audience, now and forever. Not a place for intimacy with friends."

Shame, that privacy and intimacy (plus the voyeurism that ensued) is what made FB so popular in the first place.

And from my [limited, anecdotal] experience, the people who use Facebook the most are talking with their grandmas and cousins, and have little to gain from mass public exposure. (I'd really like to have numbers about this to back up my observation.)

<comment><USER3> The good thing about Facebook is that as quick as they are to fuck up, they're even quicker at recognizing when users are pissed off and fixing themselves. They're even smart enough to differentiate between "Users don't like change" and "We really did an oopsie"; they've uncannily predicted which of their controversial changes would become more popular with time.

I don't know if this one'll make them change, though. Most people don't really want privacy anymore. My kneejerk, unthoughtout bet would be on their making it easy upon registration to decide on a blanket privacy policy. Make it easy for people to clamp up again but maintain the public status quo. Everybody's happy.

<comment><USER4> _Most people don't really want privacy anymore_

I agree on that one. Even though large groups of users scream about and sign petitions regarding Facebook's changing privacy policies, I'm convinced most users don't really care about how public their wall-to-wall conversations, photos, etc. get. I'd argue that if 100, 200, or 300 'friends' can see what you're posting on Facebook, it might as well be completely public. Facebook isn't making friending obsolete, users are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you take a step back and look at what Facebook is trying to do, it makes sense. They have never been about the advertisers or the users or the developers exclusively: their mission is to attain and represent the social graph which exists in the real world, on their servers. This is why they have both Facebook applications as well as Facebook Connect. Whereas apps brings people in to the site and earns ad revenue, Connect allows users to interact with websites in a socially relevant way without Facebook participating in ad revenue. If framed from an advertising perspective, it would seem that they are hurting themselves by competing with themselves. From a developer point of view, their API can give useful information but does not go far enough. From a user point of view, they want people to feel safe interacting with friends but they also want them to expose more of themselves.

To me, none of these facts make sense until you frame it as measures to make the social graph more pervasive. And it's that pervasiveness, IMO, that will guarantee Facebook's success, because it's too attractive to advertisers, developers, and users for any to truly abandon it.

P.S. Facebook's definitely not in a bad position financially. I'm pretty sure the terms of my NDA (I was an intern there this summer) preclude me from discussing it further, but its finances have been stable for quite some time now.

P.P.S. Article is bullshit, just restrict posts you want to be intimate, that's the idea of Per-Object Privacy. It can improve, to be sure, but that's not the point.

</comment><comment><USER6> The major problem with facebook is that they really don't care much about their users. I know enough friends that work there to know that they believe users will just "deal" and eventually get used to the new way of doing things.

<comment><USER7> Every minor redesign causes about a week of angry outrage that eventually goes away. I think Facebook has good empirical evidence that users _will_ just deal and eventually get used to the new way of doing things.

<comment><USER8> As someone that uses Facebook on a daily basis I can definitely agree with you on that one. In reality users haven't lost a lot of privacy and most users are moaning over nothing. To me this is a good move as a lot of people seem to be moving over to Twitter because it allows them to be more vocal and social. Everyone I know (that'd be two people) that isn't happy with these new changes has just changed their profile back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Of course we should take this with a grain of salt, because the Wall Street Journal is owned by the same company that owns Facebook's major competitor myspace. But of course the author is a responsible news corp. journalist, so she honestly disclosed the possible conflict of interest... Hahaha, just kidding.

Well, it is a given that whenever facebook stumbles and falls, the entire News Corp. media empire will be there to kick it in the crotch, but Zuckenberg has to take some of the blame for stumbling in the first place. Those privacy setting updates were a really really bad idea, and he should have reversed them as soon as he saw the negative blow back.

</comment><comment><USER10> A new social network for private networking will popup to fill the void facebook is leaving, just as facebook originally filled the need when myspace was at its peak.

I don't understand why facebook can't just keep doing what made it popular. The fact that it was a closed network for only _real_ people you knew, not random internet "friends". Why follow in the footsteps of twitter when you already have something useful. I stopped using facebook once my friends list grew into the hundreds, trying to open it up even more is probably going to result in less usage.

<comment><USER11> > I stopped using facebook once my friends list grew into the hundreds

Why didn't you just _remove_ friends and then _keep_ using it? That's like saying you gave up on using email because of all the unanswered messages you had sitting in your inbox.

<comment><USER3> In three years of using Facebook, I've _never_ had a friend delete an account. Not once. And it's the only site beyond Hacker News on which I keep a consistent account. (I wouldn't keep a consistent account here if deleting myself was permitted.)

But I'm edgy and avante-garde and so I _did_ disable my Facebook account for two days. Restored it almost instantly. It's not that there's an addiction, it's that Facebook is so easy to bend to your needs that outright deletion is stupid.

I removed all but ten friends and suddenly Facebook is a way of talking to friends and being vulnerable and the whole shebang. I've got no complaints. Literally none.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "(Recall that despite being the fifth most popular Web site in the world, Facebook is barely profitable.)"

That's a crucial point about Facebook's business model. It can't generate enough revenue yet to provide satisfactory server response consistently (as I have again discovered today).

"(Mr. Schnitt suggests that users are free to lie about their hometown or take down their profile picture to protect their privacy"

Where is the link to that statement? Doesn't it degrade Facebook's value (as against MySpace) if Facebook becomes the place to be fake? Well, indeed, that becomes the conclusion of the author of the submitted article, that Facebook becomes no longer a place to behave like one is among friends now that Facebook is desperate to monetize.

<comment><USER13> Having lived through the dotcom bubble, I know very well the terrible danger of runaway popularity. For a while Facebook was positively awash in Kool-Aid -- remember when they were going to be the next Microsoft and every application in the world was going to run primarily on their platform?

That's dangerous. The problem with bubbles is that they distort your view of reality. You do crazy things, like build out a big company with big infrastructure that is out of proportion to your primary use case. Or chase other people's business models instead of your own because you become addicted to the glare of the relentlessly-moving spotlight.

If, indeed, Facebook can't provide privacy while staying in business, that's a very exciting piece of business news. It means that somebody else -- one site, two sites, hundreds of sites, perhaps something that doesn't look like a _site_ at all -- is going to inherit Facebook's use case, the one that built their business: socializing with a select group of friends without excessive privacy concerns. [1]

To work, fellow nerds!

\---

[1] Yeah, I know, little or nothing that you type can ever be guaranteed to be truly private. Digital data is too hard to hide and too easy to spread. I strive not to type anything that would _kill_ me if it were cited all over the place. But there's value in the difference between "something that a private detective or a spy can learn without too much work" and "something that the Googlebot will index seconds after you write it". And that value is going to be worth money to someone, even if Facebook is tempted or compelled to turn away from it.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps the protocol of e-mail will soon be getting its day again.

<comment><USER13> Its day has never really left. But there is certainly a reason why all my Facebook-using peers have flocked to Facebook as well.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


An evergreen list of advanced JavaScript questions and their explanations - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lydiahallie/javascript-questions <comment><USER2> I write a lot of "old" (backwards compatible) JavaScript, so the let/const and block scope did throw me off a bit here! Also the this inside arrow functions. Good stuff to know :)</comment>


How to build a Java buildserver - <AUTHOR> http://www.zenbi.nl/en/blog_how_to_build_a_java_buildserver.php

<comment><USER2> Why not simply use Hudson: <http://hudson-ci.org/>. It has a bunch of plugins <http://wiki.hudson-ci.org/display/HUDSON/Plugins></comment>


What should newspapers have done? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/09/what_should_newspapers_have_do.cfm

<comment><USER2> The Economist is a great example for print media to follow. Here is what they do well:

1) Have an opinion, state it clearly and incorporate it into every piece. Articles can be a lot shorter and more informative if you don't have to "show each perspective" (which I think is impossible to do well.)

2) Create content that is so good, people will pay for it. Part of this is hiring insightful writers, part is sending them all over the world where a story is always happening and part is journalistic integrity. An untrustworthy news source is not valuable.

3) Avoid the butter battle. They don't play the tit for tat game with other columnists. The paper would read nearly the same whether they had a million competitors or none. It stands on its own axioms.

4) Understand your market:

[http://fora.tv/2007/02/05/Uncommon_Knowledge_John_Micklethwa...](http://fora.tv/2007/02/05/Uncommon_Knowledge_John_Micklethwait)

In this interview the editor of the economist talks about how they compete not with other newspapers but with people's time. He says that his customers are busy people with lots of money and they are willing to pay for a concise view on the world.

5) Give people the tools to win debates. Reading the news is really pushups for your next dinner party debate. Hardly anyone acts directly on what's happening in the news other than through conversation.

When I read the Economist cover to cover for 3 years while living in DC, I could go toe to toe w/ anyone in the think tank / foreign policy / political circuit even though I was an engineer / outsider. Not sure it did me any good other than satisfy my curiosity and competitive streak, but it was really fun and worth the money.

<comment><USER3> _When I read the Economist cover to cover for 3 years while living in DC, I could go toe to toe w/ anyone in the think tank / foreign policy / political circuit even though I was an engineer / outsider._

Read Unqualified Reservations and you'll be able to knock them out cold. You might end up in padded room though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What the newspapers should have done is not take out so much debt. The one tiny inconvenient fact in the whole whinefest which is the newspaper industry today is that those runaway news paper costs everyone complains about are mostly due to debt service and not to "quality journalism." The debt was used to: (i) acquisitions and/or (ii) pay the owners nice dividends.

See there used to be a business model where newspapers would simply make acquisitions until there is a single paper in each city and then hike up ad prices and make a lot of money. This does not work anymore, because with the internet you can never entirely capture an advertising market. So now the papers are stuck with the enourmous debt of acquisitions and without the monopoly profits they were expecting.

Big f-ing deal. They made an incorrect business decision and now they are suffering the consequences. I don't know why I should be worried about that.

If somebody is worried about journalism, someone should start a news website with none/little debt and they should be able to make enough money for quality journalism and a tidy profit. Advertising online is valuable and one can get good money for ads on sites people really like to read. One may argue that this is already happening today.

<comment><USER5> So it seems as though the railroad metaphor in the _Economist_ blog was apt: once the railroads/newspapers could no longer use finance in order to establish monopolies and then extract monopoly rents from their customers, it was good old competition that did them in.

There was a good article on a _New Republic_ blog examining how _Politico_ has managed to grow and make a profit, even in print, while traditional newspapers have continued to wither: [http://www.tnr.com/article/the-scoop- factory?id=82d8d496-d40...](http://www.tnr.com/article/the-scoop- factory?id=82d8d496-d402-4863-b98d-8967de7cc6ab)

<comment><USER4> Not sure about that metaphor. I don't know much about the railroad's pricing but it seems to me what did them in was that the government decided to subsidize their competitor. The government poured trillions of dollars into highways and there just wasn't much the railroads could do. The railroad is actually more efficient than the road so it is a very bad metaphor for a paper newspaper. Of course that did not matter once the government started making roads and offering them for free to all car owners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's still a demand for newspapers, it's just shrinking. As a country we're myopically focused on growth, but isn't there a place for businesses which are shrinking too? What's wrong with saying "the newspapers should reduce their size in an orderly way, in sync with declining demand"? Shouldn't it be possible to manage a shrinking business in such a way that it continues to generate profits until demand vanishes entirely?

</comment><comment><USER7> I have trouble following the article, since it appears based on the premise that rail is dead, which it very much is not, especially for freight.

What am I missing?

<comment><USER8> Rail has lost its dominance, and has experienced a decline in profitability.

<comment><USER7> It obviously hasn't been dominant for passenger traffic for quite some time, but, for freight, it's still a major player.

How much of a decline in profitability? How does that compare to other transportation modes?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing they should have done: Built out their online sales staff and online ad programs 5 years ago, while educating/working with customers (mostly local businesses) about the benefits of online programs.

</comment><comment><USER10> This article begins with a false analogy in its comparison of the plights of railroads and newspapers. Newspapers are not in the "newsprint" business, as suggested here, but rather in the journalism business. The mechanism for distribution of the information is not especially relevant, nor does it impact the newspaper companies' core competencies as much as any of the sources of this article suggest.

I don't really think it's as much of a stretch to imagine newspaper companies expanding into other media as it is to imagine railroads expanding into airborne freight. The problem is that strictly online providers were able to provide comparable information in a more convenient medium years before anyone in newspapers saw the light.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's too late to embrace online as the medium of choice for journalism companies.

<comment><USER5> Relatedly, Clay Shirky had an interesting article distinguishing between newspapers and journalism saying, "Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism."

[http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and- thinking...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the- unthinkable/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A railroad company could have moved into the trucking or air freight business. But newspapers had no chance to move into the "world wide web" business. There was nothing they could do to match the information distribution capability of social networking, online communities or news aggregators.

Times have changed, and I'm not sure that there was anything that newspapers should have done differently. I don't like the idea of a CEO saying "Well, it looks like our market is shrinking so I'd better start organizing an orderly failure"...but I don't know what I would do in a similar situation. At this point you would have to be truly visionary/insane to move very far away from your core business.

</comment><comment><USER12> Not relied too much on income from advertising?

<comment><USER5> That, and invented a time machine in order to go back in time and kill Craig Newmark's parents before he was conceived.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> they should have evolved before, or with, the curve. They're about 5 years late to the online game.

They've lost too much ground and don't have enough $$ to evolve now.</comment>