Why do we work so hard? - <AUTHOR> https://www.1843magazine.com/features/why-do-we-work-so-hard <comment><USER2> This will sound moralistic, and I don't mean it that way, but I think this relates to our general lack of clear values as a society. With religion absent in many people's lives, not much has stepped in to take up the slack and say "what really matters is being a good person" or "what really matters is wisdom" or "what really matters is family". So we're left with the messages we ARE getting, which are from a combination of advertising (what really matters is having a lot of money/nice things), Hollywood (what really matters is being good at shit) and the news cycle (which focuses on careers and especially major careers). "Mom gets home from work and has a fun late afternoon with her kids, spending no money and getting nothing much done" isn't a story we ever see upheld as a great, positive way to spend our time. So we pursue the things we do see people praising and talking about - promotions, money, milestones, important-ness.

<comment><USER3> Nah, it's that folks who get their values from other folks are the only ones who bother to tell other folks how well they're doing at achieving their externally-gifted values. If your goal is to make a lot of money but you decided that was just _your_ goal, why bother to tell anyone you've achieved it? (Indeed, it can be very counterproductive to tell other people.) If your goal is to be a good husband & father, then what does it matter what anyone besides your wife & kids think of you?

As a result, external discourse is filled with people crowing about how well they achieved this or that milestone, all of which is desirable only because other people think it's desirable. But then, the only people who _care_ are the ones looking to others for their values.

There are plenty of people whose values are plenty clear, arrived at through some deep reflection about what _they personally_ want. But then, since it's what they personally want, why would anyone else care?

<comment><USER4> Because there's a bit of a feedback loop with success. If others see you as being successful or impressive (on whatever axis they care about), this attracts them to you, and having a more admirers increases your social power and influence, which gives you more opportunities and better chances of success in your future efforts.

This also explains patio11's formula for career success, which is basically:

10 Make something awesome

20 Tell people about it

30 GOTO 10

<comment><USER5> Dude, this doesn't sound like fun at all. "Social power and influence" to what end? With whom are you getting this power and influence? Are these relationships even genuine?

> "this attracts them to you, and having a more admirers increases your social > power and influence, which gives you more opportunities and better chances > of success in your future efforts."

Reminds me of those "social climber" jokes about kids in high school. I guess if you've taken measure of yourself and found it matches up with the company you keep, there's nothing for anyone else to say.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps my explanation didn't adequately convey the subtlety of this phenomenon.

I am not saying that successful people are all social climbers. I am just saying that successful people naturally attract the support of people who want to learn from and take part in their success, and this greater popularity in turn increases their chances for future success. It's what you might call a virtuous cycle, or a snowball effect.

If you are successful at something, it is perfectly rational to want others to know it.

<comment><USER5> This isn't a secret, most people are aware of people whose "friends" are simply those who have skills or knowledge they want. In the context of what's important in life though, this drive for status and financial success might require examination. Especially when the people around you will disappear when there is nothing left to gain. If those are the majority of relationships in your life, it would be easy to lose sight of all the other awesome things in life aside from status and money. More importantly, you might realize the age- old problems with solely pursuing those things.

"You can't get everyone to genuinely like you, unless you're a snake, but then it's just an illusion. If you're lucky, (in this day and age) those you don't get along with will be polite.

Having all the money in the world is pointless if no one else has anything left to trade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I moved to SF in 2008 as a poor college grad. Since then, I've spent all of my time in startups. It's an unhealthy addiction and it's going to kill me.

I was the third engineer at Eventbrite, and I spent years working many extra hours. After 4 years, it felt like I worked 10 years.

I quit and moved to Europe to try to leave the startup scene, but a month later, I found myself the CTO of a startup in London. The addiction continued. Eventually I found myself back in SF. I'm on my 3rd CTO role now. We're about to raise a series B.

More than I'd like to admit, I want to stop this madness and just enjoy life. Hang out with my family. Perhaps move to Denver or Austin to maintain some semblance of tech life, but get out of the madness. I've been looking at houses in Denver for over a year. And it depresses me.

I know that it can't happen. I know that I'll be working like this until my health prohibits me.

<comment><USER7> There's a term for this called "revealed preferences." If you keep saying "I wish I could work sane hours" but actually keep making decisions to work insane hours, chances are you actually really just want to work insane hours.

I spent a lot of time being confused by this, listening to perfectly healthy young people with good paying jobs and no attachments telling me "I wish I could just drop everything and go traveling for months on end like you do" and then just sort of trailing off. "But You Can!!!" I always wanted to shout back. You just don't actually want to do that. Or you would. What that person really wanted was what they had: a stable comfortable job and a nice car and apartment, practicing for the day when they had a wife, kids, lease & mortgage to solidify that reality of "can't go traveling". Sounds pretty comfy, actually. If only they could come to grips with what they wanted and be happy with it.

It might be worth stepping back and looking at what you actually want. You just might find it's what you already have.

<comment><USER8> "Revealed preferences" used to be called "unconscious compulsions."

The phrasing is revealing, because "revealed preferences" suggests that your actions are somehow in alignment with your true core values, while "unconscious compulsions" suggests that your actions are destructive to your true core values, and you could consider doing some psychological work to realign them.

Psychology suggests the latter view is more realistic, especially if you're not getting any genuine fulfilment from a situation.

It also suggests that unconscious compulsions can be the result of external influences, particularly in childhood, and may not be true preferences at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?" "I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.

-Dickens

<comment><USER10> "I think that New York [City] is the new model for the New Concentration Camp where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves where the inmates ARE the guards and they have this pride in this thing they've built. They've built their own prison and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners and as a result, they no longer have – having been lobotomized – the capacity to leave the prison they've made or to even see it as a prison." \- My Dinner With Andre

<comment><USER11> If you remove literally every single property that makes a prison a prison, then New York is _just like_ a prison. Got it.

If you need to model large numbers of other people as suffering from severe mental health issues to make your world view fit, chances are it's your world view that's wrong. But that's no fun.

<comment><USER12> Reminds me of Wonko The Sane from a Douglas Adams book. He built his house as an inside out asylum to contain the entire outside world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I enjoy designing RF/Microwave hardware and I am paid well to do it. I plan on doing it till I keel over. I have a state of the art lab at work, and a nice lab at home. I'm passionate about electronics and really wouldn't know what else to do.

<comment><USER14> RF/Microwave hardware isn't work, it's sorcery. You just enjoy being a wizard.

<comment><USER13> All those professors in undergrad brushed it off as "black magic".

All really boils down to problem solving and intellectual stimulation. I suppose any job that has that is good.

<comment><USER15> And expensive equipment :-)

You said "state of the art," too, so I fully expect that the price is well into "call us" territory. Speaking of which, I need to go enter my name into today's Agilent drawing...

<comment><USER13> Spherical near field antenna scanner, mm wave equipment, Keysight 50 GHz PNA with pulsed X-parameters, Keysight UXA spectrum analyzer, load pull tuners, etc; all good stuff.

<comment><USER16> You have just described what is easily fifty thousand USD worth of equipment.

<comment><USER17> I think you mean 500K$ usd, used.

<comment><USER16> At that point, there isn't much difference in terms of affordability for your average person.

<comment><USER15> I think you underestimate how much those of us struck RF fever (a lifelong affliction with no cure) are willing to spend on the hobby. Some common price points I've seen in home labs: $15k oscilloscopes, $10k signal generators, $6k logic analyzers, etc. $50k would be a high-end home lab, but home-lab territory nonetheless. It's affordable on an engineer's salary -- many of us semi-regularly spend more on things like nice cars and "living in SF."

$500k, OTOH, isn't, unless you're particularly well off for an engineer. So you need to find an employer to purchase the toys for you. Looks like madengr has done well on that front :-)

<comment><USER16> Fair enough. Just sour grapes I suppose. Heh. I would love to have such a well equipped lab... as is I have to make do with simulation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Excellent article; at 3,860 words, it's a bit long, but recommended.

Here's a much shorter response, with more pathos:

"Oh. And if your reading this while sitting in some darkened studio or edit suite agonizing over whether housewife A should pick up the soap powder with her left hand or her right, do yourself a favour. Power down. Lock up and go home and kiss your wife and kids."

\-- Linds Redding, "A Short Lesson in Perspective"

Read the whole thing: [http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue- lesson-in-p...](http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-lesson-in- perspective/)

<comment><USER19> It's too long because he likes to write, lives to write, and writes to live.

<comment><USER20> All the more reason it should have been shorter.

<comment><USER21> Reminds me of the famous Blaise Pascal quote: "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." (also attributed to Mark Twain, T.S. Eliot and others)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Competition. It's not that we really have to work that hard to produce a product or service. It's that we have to work really hard to beat the other people trying to do the same thing.

Increased productivity doesn't help, because everybody is still running flat out to compete, at a higher level.

<comment><USER19> Don't you like rabbit holes? Chasing the weird or subtle or ill-defined phenomena that no one else cares about and will probably lead nowhere but _just smells so damn good_?

<comment><USER23> Many of us are like Jack Russells in that way ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The only reason I work hard is to surround myself with people I respect.

When I find myself pushed into situations where irritating people have crept into the mix, and no one seems to be willing or able to do anything about that, I look for an exit.

Boss' nephews. Obnoxious assholes who constantly talk about getting laid. Bitchy careerist ladies who constantly demand bullshit, and seem to foment panic with every breath they can muster. Narcissistic retards dumb as a bag of hammers, but smug to the core about everything they do, which usually turns out to be sitting on their asses all day, looking up trivia about sports. Weirdos who can't seem to bathe themselves, even though they're like 40 years old?

I work hard to separate myself from these people.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, I really can't understand this point of view. I find most people interesting, however different they may be. I'm lucky to be surrounded by talented people but I don't see it as a new stratum of goodness, people are shitty or great on every level.

On the contrary I dislike negative people who can't see anything good in what surround them and have a cynical view of the world. I don't think I would have liked working with you.

<comment><USER24> Things are always more bearable when not forced. The same is true for having to stand in the presence of awful people who are saddled with awful circumstances, and suffer both them and the circumstantial misery simultaneously.

Jail, and places similar to jail, where presence and schedule are compulsory, are neither fun nor interesting. Such places bring out the worst in people. I don't feel a shred of guilt or shame for being negative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wish I wanted to work a lot. I just kind of force myself to do it, even if it's something I'm excited about.

<comment><USER27> Same. Then again, I'm not where I want to be. Looking at all the workaholics in this thread I'm simultaneously intrigued and weirded out.

<comment><USER28> I'm also weirded out. Who wants to work? How can you _not_ have as a life goal to not work? It sucks for the most part!

As for Marx and Keynes and others, thinking about what people will do if they're freed of labour, have you SEEN youtube? People are not lacking ideas on things to do, quite the opposite!

<comment><USER29> My work is my life's dream. I did it for years as a hobby making no $ (losing money really) and worked terrible tech jobs I hated until I could switch the two.

Now I work 80 hours per week but it feels like 5. So it's not work to me.

<comment><USER30> So I guess your profile hasn't been updated in a while?

And what is it that you're are doing now? Must be really awesome if it's still enjoyable after 80 hours.

<comment><USER29> It sure as hell isn't Data Science. Well I guess I do some of that at my job. But now it's for fun.

I work in sports science now. It's great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > "Of all things, hard work has become a virtue instead of the curse it was > always advertised to be by our remote ancestors... The necessity to work is > a neurotic symptom. It is a crutch. It is an attempt to make oneself feel > valuable even though there is no particular need for one's working."

— C. B. Chisholm

</comment><comment><USER32> Work is a good excuse around which to build your life. The excuse approaches perfection in occupations such as programming which is getting paid for what would basically be your hobby. And―as any excuse―it is, as lovingly ever- favoured by your mind, easily used to avoid facing things in life, and edges in yourself. Staying busy is the opposite of having enough. It is doing versus being. When you do, you're trying to achieve something. When you be, you're liable to realise that you aren't missing anything, and that the keys to your life are found within yourself. People need both flavours but work rarely offers the latter.

</comment><comment><USER33> Because in a poor economy the most job desperate set ceilings for themselves they dare not touch. I know people who produce millions in profit a year, on 50-60k salary with any bonus over 3k for xmas is unheard of. Disparate power between employee and employer. I personally the problem is people dont understand the correct process of negotiating a contract.

In essence, making people desperate makes robots that are handy, but the lack of reward incentive creates demonstratably worse worke product.

</comment><comment><USER34> What about getting laid? It's no secret that women tend to find rich men attractive. Or men with a high social status. I wonder how many men work hard because of this?

<comment> a-l-c-o Voila. This and securing food. Both being delayed or sublimed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I worked hard -- or, long -- because I had a shit personal life and neighbors who made it miserable to be at home. And, I was taught early and thoroughly that there was nothing I could do about such things.

Let me tell you, it is a terrible way to live.

Working _hard_ and _smartly_ and _with fun_ , which I occasionally got to do, was something different and immensely satisfying.

But, if you are "working hard" because life sucks. Get your life in order. The sooner the better, not just for you, but ultimately, for your career.

Anyone who says you can't. Or that you have to "pay some sort of dues"? Fuck them.

As I overheard in the cafe, the other day -- my paraphrase may not be as snappy as the original: There's one choice where the outcome is 100% certain: Not choosing. Making no choice, taking no action, no chance.

The young-ish fellow was advising another young fellow on whether to ask a girl out.

As someone who's ended up spending his life alone -- and, is that "not by choice", or, per the above, precisely by choice. Let me tell you, there is no more important choice.

Family, friends, lovers, work and interests that matter (however, and, big or small). There is no more important choice. "Work hard" on those.

</comment><comment><USER36> It really depends. Most times you just need the money. Sometimes you have nothing better to do. Many times you just keep doing it because you are used to doing it. A few times is your dream job and you just can't stop doing it. Work is more than economics, is not a function of money. Work is action. My father is a 73 'retired' professional and scholar, now serving as a congressman, and already thinking what to do next. Action is life and you should never stop it: work til you drop.

Another question would be: why do we keep working so hard for money when technology could already solve many of our needs?

</comment><comment><USER37> Whenever I read topics like this I always think of Office Space.

Bob Porter: Looks like you've been missing a lot of work lately.

Peter Gibbons: I wouldn't say I've been _missing_ it, Bob.

<comment><USER38> Don't you wanna express yourself?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVyCK70BTUs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVyCK70BTUs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Some people thrive on "solving puzzles", which is sort of what engineering is.

For better or worse, there are an infinite number of puzzles to solve.

<comment><USER40> The troubling thing, at least for me, is that as I get older I realize that most puzzles one encounters as a software engineer are related to non- problems.

When I was fresh out of college I would jump at any such puzzle that was presented to me and would not sleep until I had solved it. I never stopped to think about the larger picture where that puzzle was embedded in, and if it actually required solving or if a more pragmatic solution was at hand and would lead to the same outcome.

Now that I have some years of experience in the industry, I realize that 80% of the "puzzles" I face at work are bullshit. They are usually complicated situations generated by organic and uncontrolled growth in codebase complexity that lead to horrible scenarios requiring a lot of brain power to solve. The thing is, if things had been more properly thought out, those situations would have not occurred in the first place, because the code would have a lot more sound architecture. But because it was allowed to grow without thought and refactoring, it now offers many "puzzles" that the younger people in the team don't even question at a more fundamental level.

Sorry for the cynicism but it's honestly the way I feel about most of the work I do these days. Too much in terms of stability, maintainability and soundness is sacrificed for performance and for pushing things out the door asap.

<comment><USER41> Every line of code added needs to be maintained and makes adding future code more difficult. As our job is to build software, we are too eager to increase technical debt without knowing it. Always ask "how can we avoid building it?"

When you realize it really does need to be built and it is the highest priority, think about how it can be built while keeping cruft down. You can still be fast while keeping the codebase clean but it requires constant refactoring and review and a common understanding between team members.

<comment><USER40> That's pretty much my personal approach to writing code (with special devotion to the "how can we avoid building it" part). I wish everyone I worked with had the same attitude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is what I've realized lately about job satisfaction:

Purpose, autonomy, work/life balance: pick 2

<comment><USER23> Classic engineering trade-off. I'm by nature a back room boy so I trade some autonomy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Earth is a small rocky ball among billions in the void. We don't know why we are here and what happens next. Stick your head into a mission (work, religion, family, whatever you like) and don't think about that.

</comment><comment><USER44> There's several issues intertwined here. The easy ones are those market forces I experienced at the relative bottom of the pay-scale and at the smaller end of the company scale: you're asked to work harder and more hours because it makes more money/profits for your employer to get you to work as long as possible for as little as possible.

However, I think there's two more aspects I think I can contribute.

Firstly: some kind of social identity. I've worked in a fair number of fields and a fair number of jobs, so being attached to a job or thinking of "myself as a particular profession" seems quite alien. But a fair number of my colleagues saw/see themselves as possessing a particular identity, and work/professions defined that for them. We have a very powerful social indoctrination that you are your job: we have titles, little boxes for "profession" on forms, and many people have internalized the messages that "you are what you are employed as", and that you need this external direction/identity to tell you what to do (I don't want to retire, what would I do with myself?!), and that their social identity is formed through their work/networks. Its a bit of a self-fullfilling prophecy, because as we move away from community oriented networks, people's social networks do become defined by where they work. Even if you manage to get out of the ratrace, you discover that your friends are still in it, so they don't have time to spend with you and you can't identify with some of their everyday struggles if you aren't going through it also. I should also note that people who gained this identity through work took retrenchment and change the hardest psychologically, and its easy upon reflection to understand why.

The second aspect though is this: generating the impression of work. I don't know whether its base human psychology (I think there are good arguments from anthropology that it isn't) or a culture-bound phenomenon, but I believe two things: that most humans still have a fundamentally reptilian-brain/cargo-cult psychology that is pretty close to the marxian concept of a labor theory of value, and that in modern large-scale professional life, metrics able to easily tie a worker or professional's inputs to outputs/profits accurately aren't commonly available.

So there is a social/cultural aspect here: how do most people judge how much you're bringing to the workplace? If you're not working in a widget factory, most people's have a heavily weighted proxy to just look at "how busy you look".

Would any CEO, politician, or professional in our culture, ever, justify themselves in taking their salaries by saying everything was running smoothly, and their job was to sit there, like a good taoist-esque ruler, just sitting and facing the horizon and not interrupt? The very idea is absurd, even though we must admit, I think rationally, that in some situations at the very least, that may be the most reasonable course of action. No, instead we justify such by "hours work put in" because it seems to be both a good cultural proxy, and I suspect because, even if its pretty bad, at least its a good cultural value to motivate the lower-downs into being good workers.

But it is of course, on an intellectual level, obscene and ridiculous. And it results in the promotion and workplace culture that I've experienced now at a lot of firms and professional workplaces.

Fresh out of university (economics), I was under the belief that government was generally wasteful. And I worked there, and I saw that it was, and it is, and all was good :)

But I didn't know true waste until I worked for the larger private corporations. We'd hire 15 men, 10 consultants, 4 managers, and support staff to do in 2 years what I could probably do with a skilled team of 4 in my area in government in 12 months. Am i being a little bit hyperbolic, maybe...

When I worked in government, the 2-3 staff would tell you something was bullshit, bitch, take a long lunch break, but get something done...maybe not everything, but something. They weren't salespeople.

In private sector professional firms, people will just lie and say everything they do is productive and a success. Its a hustle, its a sale. They'll come in to the office and rather than eat with their families at home, they'll eat breakfast at work while still not doing anything. They'll go to conferences and say "how great we are!". They'll come up with as many jobs and tasks as they can, and the efficiency of what they do is totally irrelevant. They still play solitaire on their computers. They get tonnes of people to proofread documents n times with n meetings (before eventually switching back to the original version). They'll restructure before restructuring back. They'll fire. They'll hire. It doesn't matter, just do STUFF.

The philosophy is just spend all the money you have and get your staff to do STUFF, expand your empire as much as possible, make everyone work, be seen to work, take credit for everything good, disown everything bad.

To them, long hours wasn't/isn't inefficient or a sign of intellectual failing, its a sign of how awesome you are, and you come in early and you stay back late not because you're doing anything (indeed, amongst the honest ones, there is a haunting realisation that your job, or at least the hours you're putting into it, maybe isn't actually producing anything, or might even be creating more work...), but because its a culturally-structurally reinforcing meme.

I'm not saying that all this culture is universal amongst us, or our workplaces, or our societies. But its there, and I think its all having a pretty powerful impact on our relationship with work, labor, and status...

<comment><USER45> I completely agree with you.

This notion that work is life sounds absolutely insane to me. I love programming, but I also love spending time with my wife, playing games, learning new things, traveling, writing and a whole lot of other things.

The worst part of the status quo is that it doesn't matter whether or not I'm an workaholic, I have to work to do a little bit of what I love.

We don't have time to do everything. But we have to limit ourselves to love our work only because there's almost no time to do anything else!

Some people think working 80/week is good, I don't mind them. But if I want to travel, to afford even simple things, 40+ hours of week of work is inevitable

And the bottom line is, most of us only work to make the top 1% even richer

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> It has been discussed many times why work makes us happy and the most compelling is flow: [https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow?la...](https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow?language=en)

It was also covered in the documentary "Happy".

I actually was thinking the article would discuss more in detail this or even just put a citation (he cited Keynes and Marx) but instead it went on a long personal anecdotal comparison after comparison.

I also was hoping the author would discuss the developing trend of people working from home and how that relates but.. nope.

IMO the article was too long for my liking. A fairly disappointing read.

</comment><comment><USER47> The answer can be found in this excellent analysis of modern economics by E.F Schumacher from 1973:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful)

</comment><comment><USER48> It's easy to spend a few hours on work (especially in the computing field) and feel a sense of accomplishment; not so much with life.

Programming often feels like a series of little victories to me, and it's much harder to achieve that outside of work.

</comment><comment><USER49> Alexis De Tocqueville had some thoughts relevant to this: [https://youtu.be/Rzr3AOtFA8o](https://youtu.be/Rzr3AOtFA8o)

<comment><USER50> Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment> ezequiel-garzon I'm curious: why did The Economist choose the name 1843 for its magazine? The About page doesn't say. Anybody know the significance of that year? Thanks.

<comment><USER51> I imagine it's related to the fact that their first issue was published on 1 August 1843.

<comment> ezequiel-garzon Thanks! That must be it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I don't want to be a serf.

Working is the only way I know of for me to accumulate capital in order to become financially independent.

The more I do, the faster I accumulate capital, the more years of my life I'll spend able to do what I want to do.

It doesn't feel like a choice to me. The alternative is to live a mediocre life and always have one eye on my "responsibility" towards my capitalist overlords.

</comment><comment><USER53> One thing that would help is if our governments, all governments, would stop spending money they don't have, and therefore stop devaluing currencies. When the Fed "buys" $4T in mortgages to relieve banks from holding any risk, where do they get all that money? They don't - they just "print" it, by clicking on a computer. And in the process, they devalue everyone's wealth.

Take a look at this chart: [http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/12/14/a-brief- history-of...](http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/12/14/a-brief-history-of-u- s-inflation-since-1775/)

Yes, things are not quite as volatile since 1930, but also note that there is _only_ inflation, whereas before, there was deflation to balance out the inflation. I know everyone says deflation is the devil. I'm not so sure about that.

<comment><USER54> Devil's advocate here, definitely not an economist either, but why is devaluing everyone's wealth a bad thing?

Sure, individually it sucks for one's pile of money to be worth less than it was yesterday but it incentivizes one to figure out solutions to inflation - real-estate, stocks, bonds, assets, work more, etc. Also leads people to produce more and not allow a resting-on-the-laurels situation. Overall, big picture wise, the species needs to grow to survive - to obtain the technology to expand outside of Earth. Stagnancy is a deadend death.

Note, I also did not agree with a bailout.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> There are a lot of hard work being done that is personally rewarding (money and fame) and either meaningless or destructive in a broader sense (ecological destruction, social destruction, unethical activites, fraud). Lehman brothers were very successful and was greatly rewarded before the financial crash.

</comment><comment><USER56> Good article. I've moved a bit from the five-year-old daughter's position to the "thinking about identity, community, purpose – the things that provide meaning and motivation" stuff. Still working on it.

</comment><comment><USER57> PG noted that getting rich is largely about running errands. In fact most of what society regards as 'work' is like this. What one needs is a _hard problem_ to work on.

</comment><comment><USER58> Read more Bukowski books, who knows maybe slowly you will heal yourself from this addiction. Also a great read How to Be Idle/Tom Hodgkinson

</comment><comment><USER59> I like the explanation, but I don't like the idea of telling everybody that things where different in the past. When most people were farmers they also worked more than 12 hours a day, since you need to take care of such a big place. When most people were factory workers people also worked more than 12 hours because the boss thought it would make him more money if you worked more (and with simple, mechanical work that's actually true). The kind of work changed, as well as the reason. But we always worked too much.

And there is one reason he didn't mention: When you don't work so much, you need to figure out what to do with your time. You can't watch movies all day. Nobody can do that for a long time. So you need to think hard about other reasonable things to do. And thinking is painful and scary.

<comment><USER60> Things were different in the past. Most people's lives involved far more leisure than today, for long stretches of the medieval period. source: [http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html)

<comment><USER59> You don't need to read papers. There are still preindustrial villages in many countries on this planet. And I can tell you from being to some in China that these people work more. Yes they have longer food breaks, but they also have much shorter sleep breaks at least than I can physically manage (5-6 hours, with 30 minutes for shower and going to work). And they don't have leasure breaks like watching two hours of tv before going to bed. The tv is always running in the background but only the elderly and little children sit directly in front of it.

<comment><USER60> The suggestion to ignore academic studies of the lives of people in medieval Europe because they contradict your experience of villages in 21st century China does not make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome)

</comment><comment><USER62> I don't. I stopped after I realised that with my skills and experience I can get a job any time.

</comment><comment><USER63> They want to keep us busy!

</comment><comment><USER64> "They are asking about a job. I am thinking about identity, community, purpose – the things that provide meaning and motivation. I am talking about my life."

Wow, leaving aside the complete "first world problem" approach that makes this relevant for like maybe 1% of the world population at best, this guy didn't just drink the Kool Aid, he's literally douching with it.

</comment><comment><USER65> Get Work Done Syndrome is truely a modern notion entirely absent from the laissez faire peasant farmers of yonderyear who tilled soil in return for a long glass of summer wine at the end and maybe a 20 minute long smoke of fine tobacco. Modern notions of work involve McDramas taking place in every western household where first world problems really are a truely despotic problem indeed. Master slave relationships engender this and it leads to a domestic tilling of the soil in the fields of suburbia, working for McJobs with a McPay. The kind of _real_ work; that of some spiritual understanding, or mastering the body, or doing shadow work of the mind; 'Dumping all your ailments on a plate for those to ponder' is entirely absent in the west, where it is assumed that only those more credentialed shall offer answers, and none else. The East might have these problems just not as severe, and I worry about the encroachment of americanisation into the Eastern mindset and rich tradition and approach to existential crises.

<comment><USER66> >Get Work Done Syndrome is truely a modern notion entirely absent from the laissez faire peasant farmers of yonderyear who tilled soil in return for a long glass of summer wine at the end and maybe a 20 minute long smoke of fine tobacco.

You mean, tilled soil for endless hours in the spring, fall, and parts of summer, in return for a glass of summer wine at the end, a 20 minute smoke of tobacco (shorter than a lunch break), a broken back, regular starvation, and infant mortality?

<comment> norea-armozel Actually, by the medieval period farming was mostly till the soil at planting and occasional de-weeding in the mix. The rest of the time was filled with tending animals or doing something else like fixing the roof and the like. It's why many labor saving devices were created in fact (water wheel for running milling stones comes to mind). Farming wasn't all that hard until you get into the beginnings of the industrial revolution since most farming was subsistence prior to that. When the industrial revolution got kicked off in the UK that's when the Lords started forcing more people into the cities, thus making a massive labor shortage in agriculture which made it a hard job (few vs many hands in the task). I'm not saying it wasn't labor intensive, but it wasn't like the average peasant farming household was erecting Cheop's pyramid every season.</comment></comment></comment>


New Digg CEO Calls Previous Launch "a Tragedy," Commits to Community - <AUTHOR> http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/20110202/new-digg-ceo-calls-previous-launch-a-tragedy-commits-to-community/

<comment><USER2> As much as I'd like to see Digg find relevance again, I just don't see it happening without some kind of pivot. The people who were there for the community mostly left after v4, and they haven't made any indication of coming back. I'm sure they can continue to break even and maintain their current membership, but that's as good as dying. They need to figure out what vertical they're really after and go for it.</comment>


Microsoft's quest to go 'carbon negative' inspires $1B fund - <AUTHOR> https://www.greenbiz.com/article/microsofts-quest-go-carbon-negative-inspires-1b-fund <comment><USER2> In countries where VAT tax exist, the whole chain of value pay a fraction of the added value they produce. It works with a differential between the VAT you bought vs the VAR you charged.

Why wouldn't we don't adopt a similar system for carbon? The fiscal framework would be very similar. This way a company wouldn't have to know how much carbon have been produced by its suppliers; it only need to count its own.

<comment><USER3> A far more streamlined implementation would be to simply apply a fee at resource extraction time on everything combustible taken out of the ground. It would do a little collateral taxation on carbon that ends up as unburnt plastics, but that's not necessarily a bad thing (if you want maximum accuracy, pay some back for non-degradable carbon upon reaching a landfill, the only form of sequestering that is used at scale)

Unfortunately I can't imagine how diplomacy could achieve something like that, given the extremely uneven distribution of resource extraction industries. Despite that it wouldn't even hurt the big oil nations, considering that they would not have a lot of difficulties passing on the cost to their buyers (assuming full global enforcement). The biggest logical opponents would not be oil/gas states like Saudi Arabia or Russia but those whose only domestic geological energy sources is carbon-inefficient coal.

(Edit: cleared up some illegible grammar and editing clutter)

<comment><USER4> Every flat tax is fraught with issues. Now a huge number of people who can barely afford transportation simply can't anymore. So much has been spent subsidizing roads and by proxy suburbs over 70 years, and any plan will have to involve helping people trapped by those ciecumstances, or they will overturn those plans democratically.

In short, some people can afford to pay for climate change fixes, and some can't. Any solution will simply have to be progressive and have a fair, equal _burden_ on everyone.

<comment><USER5> If the goal is to reduce emissions, then a tax on emissions is the only solution. Anything else is too open to avoidance (just look at corporate tax avoidance).

Maybe there's other ways to make it better for the people who can't afford it - a tax free allowance they can claim back or similar.

I'm still not sure if this is feasible across borders though. How can you stop carbon tax havens?

<comment><USER6> Tariffs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And yet, still makes political donations to those that deny climate change and work against Green interests

[https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1217882650515517440](https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1217882650515517440)

<comment> mr-ron Microsoft the company makes donations? Or the employees of Microsoft?

<comment><USER8> Neither, the PAC. The PAC members consist of employees and stockholders.

<comment><USER9> The company also exists of employees and shareholders. The PAC is administered by the corporation, has meetings on corporate grounds, is contributed to by the corporation, and has its contribution list published by the corporation. In anything other than a legal sense, the corporation runs the PAC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Awesome! What have people seen from the performance of these types of corporate venture capital funds? I'm guessing a lot of it will go towards carbon neutral, but I'm most excited about the carbon removal pieces like Direct air capture, carbon to value, and underground carbon storage.

If you had $1B for carbon negative tech, where would you invest it?

<comment><USER11> Start a biochar plant burning biomass for energy but leaving the charcoal as a long-lasting soil improvement and carbon storage product.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar)

Sell the biochar to homeowners:

[http://www.ultrakulture.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/10/4-Ter...](http://www.ultrakulture.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/10/4-Terra-Preta-biochar-soils-of-the- Amazon-1024x768.jpg)

I have no idea about the economics, though, maybe it's just not feasible without subsidies.

Edit: Why? Because the technique is simple, biomass is relatively cheap, you get electricity and heat you can sell in a cold climate, and that terra preta example makes me envious, as someone interested in gardening. If the char was cheap enough, I would want to buy lots of it myself. Helping the planet and helping my own plants.

I think you need a large scale plant to keep costs down. There are large scale biomass power plants where I live, but they specialize in burning everything, so some investment is needed.

<comment><USER12> I have a client in the biochar industry. They manufacturer "machines" or furnaces to produce biochar, as well as sell it directly. [https://newenglandbiochar.com](https://newenglandbiochar.com)

Using biochar in your garden, on your lawn etc. is a great way to sequester some carbon at a small scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the most important aspects IMO is the attitude they take:

> _" While we at Microsoft have worked hard to be 'carbon neutral' since 2012, > our recent work has led us to conclude that this is an area where we're far > better served by humility than pride," wrote Smith in the blog. "And we > believe this is true not only for ourselves, but for every business and > organization on the planet."_

</comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone know the name or ticker of the fund?

<comment><USER15> It's highly likely to be a private equity fund. i.e. You can't invest

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there an easy way for companies or individuals to offset (or more than offset) their carbon footprint?

<comment><USER17> You can significantly change your lifestyle and decision making process that will lead to behaviours that reduce your footprint.

... or were you looking for an answer like "buy some carbon offsets"?

I really don't want to pick on the parent comment, but the question seems like "Is there an easy way to effect meaningful, systematic change?"

I hear a lot of people talking about this and related issues but the things they propose are just not going to get it done. No one wants to stop traveling, drive less, eat local produce all winter, give up a globalized supply chain and their current lifestyle; meanwhile the frog is being slowly boiled alive...

<comment><USER18> I discussed this with a coworker the other day - buying carbon offsets is a good way of pricing convenience vs urge to do good in the environment.

He drives to work every day, because taking the bus is a hassle/takes time, etc. What's the value to him of taking the bus? Helping the environment in some unspecified way. If he pays for carbon offsets for his driving, he can now say "hey, taking the bus saves me $x/month, I think that's (not) worth it".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Love to see adoption of living building challenge even if it is their least rigorous certification.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's disappointing to see colossal amounts of money like this isn't used to address demonstrable human suffering happening all over the world right now. Microsoft could take this money, set up shop in Haiti, and develop over the course of a generation a tech sector in a country whose main export is t-shirts. They might even eventually make enough return to reinvest in other areas and bring the rest of the world up to first world standards.

Instead, this money is going to pool in upper class first world green economies as they use it to buy expensive electric cars, install expensive solar panels, and fund expensive climate change activists. That their efforts might slightly reduce the number of hurricanes in a hundred years is little consolation to the thousands of lives lost every decade in that country to natural disasters and disease, otherwise be preventable if the population wasn't living in shanty towns.

<comment><USER21> Could you have said the same thing about going to space many decades ago? Yet, with hindsight, we can see going to space had a huge return on investment.

<comment><USER22> Yes, the "nothing is worth doing while there are poor people anywhere in the world" argument.

We can work on environmental issues _and_ poverty.</comment></comment></comment>


Very Easy Changelogs with Git - <AUTHOR> http://tech.pro/tutorial/1649/very-easy-changelogs-with-git <comment><USER2> Worth mentioning is _" \--first-parent"_ argument to git-log, which is usefull when using git-merge --no-ff to keep clean history with summary commits.

With _" \--first-parent"_, git-log only follows the left-hand (first) parent, thus listing the shortened history, by skipping over the right-hand ancestors of merge commits.

<comment><USER3> I didn't know about --first-parent. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Whether or not this makes sense depends on how you manage your commmits. For many projects, I think the changelog would produce too much noise. I would argue that your users care mostly about three things: what bugs were fixed, what new features are available, and any backwards incompatible changes. This can be hard to quickly glean from the commit history.

That said, if your history works with this model, then it's a handy tip :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I recently started using git. thanks for the tip skiskilo

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd say shamelessly copied from the much better article from here:

[http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Basics-Viewing-the-Commit-His...](http://git- scm.com/book/en/Git-Basics-Viewing-the-Commit-History)

I once needed a ChangeLog file, so I wrote this:

# create ChangeLog file out of git history

alias g.changelog="git --no-pager log --format=\"%ai %aN %n%n%x09* %s%d%n\" | sed \"s/\ _\ \_ /*/g\" > ChangeLog"

g.ch<TAB> completes it for me in zsh.</comment>


Design Thinking: B2 APIs and the Hidden Costs of S3 Compatibility - <AUTHOR> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/design-thinking-b2-apis-the-hidden-costs-of-s3-compatibility <comment><USER2> I wonder if you could get the same functionality of AWS, with the same implementation of B2, by having a single URL to POST files to, that simply sent a redirect to the correct location (apparently there's the 307 HTTP status code for exactly this).

E.g:

      => POST https://upload.backblaze.com/bucket/file
      <= 307 redirect to https://pod-000-1007-13.backblaze.com/b2api/v1/b2_upload_file/...
      => POST https://pod-000-1007-13.backblaze.com/b2api/v1/b2_upload_file/...

<comment><USER3> Strictly speaking, it's possible but it's not reliable and it shouldn't be used.

A redirect on a POST never results into another POST with the same content.

\- API typically don't follow redirects (without special flags). Too much risk to cause damages by doing repeated calls.

\- Browsers follow the redirect by a GET with no data. It's typical for a completed form to redirect to another page, do not re submit the form there.

There are some settings and flags to alter the behavior into what you describe but it's not a good idea to go there. It will definitely not work out of the box with much of anything.

<comment><USER4> There are different kinds of redirects. See the discussion of 303 See Other vs 307 Temporary Redirect in RFC 7231:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-6.4.4](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-6.4.4)

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-6.4.7](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-6.4.7)

303 means "GET this new URL" while 307 means "resend your request at this URL without changing the verb or body".

<comment><USER3> And you can see that the RFC only talks in terms of should and may. It's beyond basic HTTP functionality, the RFC is basically moot at this stage and you're dealing in implementation specific details.

You will have to work individually on every client you plan to support, both browsers and libraries. It can be done but it's not necessarily a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm really surprised B2 doesn't seem to charge for upload API requests. I have a project which uploads several billion small objects to Amazon S3. The vast, vast majority are written, stored with a 15 month TTL, and never touched again. Some small number are downloaded each month.

To illustrate this, here's a recent S3 bill:

$0.005 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests 289,727,754 Requests $1,448.64

$0.004 per 10,000 GET and all other requests 62,305 Requests $0.02

$0.023 per GB - first 50 TB / month of storage used 18,990.009 GB-Mo $436.77

As you can see, most of our spend on S3 is from the PUT requests, not the storage, or download. Probably there are some things we could do to reduce the number of PUT requests. We don't really care that much, because the total cost is not that large, but there is at least some incentive to reduce the number of PUT calls.

But if it was free? I would never change this system. Does Backblaze really want this sort of traffic profile?

<comment><USER6> Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> Does Backblaze really want this sort of traffic profile?

Oh heck yes, we would very much like your business! :-)

Backblaze only charges you $0.005/GByte/Month so your $436.77 bill would go down to $94.95 and we would be happy to have it. That is profitable for us. (Since Backblaze doesn't have any deep pockets or VC funding, we have to stay profitable.)

<comment><USER7> So your pricing is aligned with the storage cost. But youre explicitely not pricing in write throughput/IO access, deletes, or similar caused by lifecycle events? How does that square with long term trends to greatly increase density while IO remains flat for the past decade?

<comment><USER8> > IO remains flat for the past decade

Although I agree that storage density growth for HDDs has greatly outstripped any I/O growth, I don't agree that the latter has been flat (i.e. no growth).

Are you sure you're not doing something like comparing 7200rpm drives from 10 years ago to 5900rpm (or slower) or variable-speed "green" or even SMR drives from today?

That said, I think what many people forget is that for "cloud" storage, the I/O bottleneck is almost certainly going to be the network and not the backend storage, especially for mainly sequential access.

If each of their "pods" holds 60 drives and each "vault" holds 20 pods (17 of which are non-parity data), that's over a thousand drives per vault. If each drive is 7200rpm non-SMR, it can saturate a 1Gb ethernet with sequential I/O, and random I/O would divide that by 10 or so. That's the equivalent of 100Gb/s, per vault.

That kind of bandwidth is possible and even affordable to provision inside the datacenter without metering and charging for it and is likely to dwarf the size of the connection to the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a bit unclear to me what is so expensive about the load balancing nodes. Care that explain why it's substantially more than a few round robin'd smart reverse proxies moving data to the correct storage node? With S3/Dynamo design the back end destination is largely known from the hash ring.

Also- Wasabi has fantastic pricing and full s3 compatibility.

<comment><USER10> > It's a bit unclear to me what is so expensive about the load balancing > nodes.

They also use Reed-Solomon and split data into multiple pieces to store on multiple servers. So they need all those "load balancing"-like nodes anyway and probably no new hardware or infrastructure is necessary to conform to S3 API.

<comment><USER6> Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> They also use Reed-Solomon and split data into multiple pieces to store on > multiple servers. So they need all those "load balancing"-like nodes anyway

Yes. We definitely do "load balancing" or more accurately "disk space loading balancing" but we do it all in software. The net outcome is the same, but the cost is lower.

> probably no new hardware or infrastructure is necessary to conform to S3 API

No, it would require additional hardware we do not purchase at all right now. Backblaze's philosophy is to shave off cost at all layers if it doesn't actually contribute to uptime or durability. Put differently, if there is a lower cost way to achieve the same uptime or durability with some intelligent software or possibly an extra network round trip, we do it that way instead of purchasing extra hardware.

<comment><USER9> What special hardware vs a few cores with a reverse proxy? Surely a trivial cost.

<comment><USER6> > Surely a trivial cost.

So we both agree it is more than zero cost? Backblaze saves that cost passes on the savings to customers. I'm not sure what the exact costs would be because Backblaze did not implement it that way.

> a few cores

By "a few" do you mean 10, 100, 1000 or...? For how much bandwidth will your solution support? For example, can your few cores support 10 Gbits/sec? 100 GBits/sec? 1 TBit/sec?

Backblaze is COMPLETELY FREE of worrying about these questions, because our solution does not require this additional step and this additional hardware, and therefore does not have this choke point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone know why Amazon didn't adopt existing standards like SCP / SFTP / WebDAV? I've always found the S3 APIs to be difficult to work with, especially for authorization and large uploads.

<comment><USER12> Because S3 is a K/V Store, not a file system.

<comment><USER11> File systems can be used as key value as well. The Key is the path, and the value is the contents of the file. Most modern filesystems also have metadata.

Granted it's not hierarchical, so listing a bucket lists everything in every folder, but I don't see why that's too big of a concern. Especially since there are pseudo directories in many of the S3 tools. Many people use S3 and have a folder-like hierarchical naming convention anyways.

With WebDAV, the URL is the key, and the value is the contents of the upload / download.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article contains some misunderstandings about the S3 API.

> The interface to upload data into Amazon S3 is actually a bit simpler than > Backblaze B2's API. But it comes at a literal cost. It requires Amazon to > have a massive and expensive choke point in their network: load balancers. > When a customer tries to upload to S3, she is given a single upload URL to > use. For instance, > [http://s3.amazonaws.com/<bucketname>](http://s3.amazonaws.com/<bucketname>). > This is great for the customer as she can just start pushing data to the > URL. But that requires Amazon to be able to take that data and then, in a > second step behind the scenes, find available storage space and then push > that data to that available location. The second step creates a choke point > as it requires having high bandwidth load balancers. That, in turn, carries > a significant customer implication; load balancers cost significant money.

In fact, S3's REST API requires callers to follow HTTP redirects, and the PUT documentation expressly mentions the HTTP "Expect: 100-continue" mechanism precisely so that the S3 endpoint you reach in your initial PUT request does not have to handle the HTTP request body.

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/Redirects.ht...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/Redirects.html) [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/RESTObjectPU...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/RESTObjectPUT.html)

> The Dispatching Server (the API server answering the b2_get_upload_url call) > tells the Client "there is space over on "Vault-8329." This next step is our > magic. Armed with the knowledge of the open vault, the Client ends its > connection with the Dispatching Server and creates a brand new request > DIRECTLY to Vault-8329 (calling b2_upload_file or b2_upload_part). No load > balancers involved!

Again, this could be done directly with HTTP. PUT to the first server, receive a redirect, PUT to vault-8329, receive "100 Continue", transmit file. There's no need to have a separate API call to get the "real" upload URL.

> 3) Expensive, time consuming data copy needs (and "eventual consistency"). > Amazon S3 requires the copying of massive amounts of data from one part of > their network (the upload server) to wherever the data's ultimate resting > place will be. This is at the root of one of the biggest frustrations when > dealing with S3: Amazon's "eventual consistency."

Wait, I thought they were load balancers? Why does the load balancer need to copy any data once it's done uploading?

As for eventual consistency, there is truth to this complaint -- but much less truth than in the distant past. Every S3 region except us-standard has always had read-after-write consistency for new objects since launch, and as of August 2015, us-standard does too:

[https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2015/08/amazon-s3...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2015/08/amazon-s3-introduces-new-usability-enhancements/)

If your PUT returns 200 OK, a subsequent GET will return the object, assuming you're using unique keys. This prevents the 2015-and-earlier problem where you'd create a new S3 object and enqueue a job to process it, then the job gets 404 Not Found while retrieving the new object.

There are other cases where S3's eventual consistency can be an issue, but none of them have been dealbreakers for my applications. Having said that: S3's consistency model is a weaker than the model B2 provides, so this is not an argument against providing an S3-compatible interface.

<comment><USER6> Disclaimer: I'm the original author of the blog post. :-)

> In fact, S3's REST API requires callers to follow HTTP redirects...

Yes. Let's take the example of uploading 3 small files.

With S3, _every_ upload call must start by hitting the same URL that is then redirected. To upload the same 3 small files in B2, it is a little different. For B2, one call is made to the "dispatch server" to ask for where there is spare space, then there is no redirect. The client must disconnect, and contact the final destination three times. So for this example, S3 would need to do 3 redirects (3 total network calls) and Backblaze B2 would do zero redirects but make 4 total network calls to upload three files. I hope that makes sense.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, and I freely admit S3 can be a little more intuitive. But it saves Backblaze money to not have such high loads and high uptime demand on the original URL.

> Again, this could be done directly with HTTP.

Yes I agree it could have been.

> There's no need to have a separate API call to get the "real" upload URL.

The "need" was to save money. See example above. Amazon S3 would require 3 redirects from the original URL, while Backblaze B2 chose a different tradeoff that is zero redirects and 4 total requests where 3 out of 4 requests were NOT redirected. The 3 out of 4 requests go to the final location DIRECTLY.

If you are only uploading one file, the Amazon S3 API is about as efficient as Backblaze and I agree with you. But if you upload 1 million files, the Backblaze B2 architecture is cheaper/simpler. But either way, it is the tradeoff we chose.

> as of August 2015, us-standard... has read-after-write consistency for new > objects

TIL. We launched the B2 API before August of 2015, sorry if I propagated old info!

<comment><USER13> > For B2, one call is made to the "dispatch server" to ask for where there is > spare space, then there is no redirect.

An API call that retrieves the address of another machine to contact is functionally the same thing as an HTTP redirect, just with different syntax, right?

> The client must disconnect, and contact the final destination three times.

This seems like the key idea that wasn't quite explained in the blog post: the client is expected to cache and reuse the same "vault" server for future requests, not just for multiple pieces of a single upload. If the client doesn't conform to that expectation, your approach would end up with exactly the same performance characteristics as S3.

What I find interesting is that unless I'm misunderstanding the API documentation [1], file downloads apparently _do_ go through a load balancer. That is, you make an HTTP request to a single endpoint that's the same for all files in the account, and it fetches the data from whichever "vault" server is actually storing it. So does that mean that Backblaze's rate of incoming uploads is much larger than the rate of downloads? Otherwise it seems like you could just reuse the same load-balancing infrastructure for both.

[1]: [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/b2_download_file_by_name.h...](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/b2_download_file_by_name.html)

<comment><USER6> > An API call that retrieves the address of another machine to contact is > functionally the same thing as an HTTP redirect

If you are only uploading exactly one file -> yes.

But if you are uploading 1 million files, a redirect system would result in 1 million redirects. The B2 system would result in less load on the dispatch server.

> the client is expected to cache and reuse the same "vault" server for future > requests

Yes, exactly! This is the very core part of the B2 architecture. In fact, it is a waste of time and performance to keep asking the dispatch server for a location for every file. Just assume the last vault you got continues to be "valid" until the vault kicks you off with a 503. In B2 world, the 503 is _NOT_ a fatal error, it means "go back to the dispatching server and ask for a new location to upload to".

> file downloads apparently do go through a load balancer

Correct. Because we wanted the ability to serve up static web content such as this picture (this is served out of B2): [https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/bucket9/cute3.jpg](https://f001.backblazeb2.com/file/bucket9/cute3.jpg) and do it in a highly available and highly scalable way if the content goes viral. The way we do that is we have load balanced "download servers" that also act as a caching layer. The FIRST time somebody fetches a file from the vault, the caching layer has to ask the vault to reassemble the file from parts, and then the caching layer caches it on fast SSDs inside the download servers. The second time (in 24 hours) that a customer requests the file, it comes out of the cache and not out of the vault. Otherwise, if a video went viral the vault would get crushed trying to reassemble the video for all 10 million views. :-)

The load balancers we used are described in a different blog post here: [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/load-balancing- and-b2-cloud-s...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/load-balancing-and-b2-cloud- storage/)

> does that mean that Backblaze's rate of incoming uploads is much larger than > the rate of downloads?

Yes. VERY MUCH yes. Backblaze has more than 10x the incoming bandwidth as outgoing bandwidth. Backblaze started as an online backup company with the "Backblaze Personal Backup" solution. Online Backup is highly inbound heavy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> That "get_upload_url()" trick they invented was in AppEngine's BlobStore since 2008. Although Google deprecated it in favor of GCS.

</comment><comment><USER15> That's all fine and good, I don't care if you're S3 compatible or not....

I do care if I have to write my own API client for your storage backend. Or if you have examples to go off of. Backblaze doesn't seem to offer either for non-C++/Swift languages. Complete non-starter.

The, perhaps obvious, win of being S3 compatible is that you open the door to thousands of existing S3 clients already implemented in my different technologies, for free. And you get the developers who use them as customers.

<comment><USER6> Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.

> Backblaze doesn't seem to offer either for non-C++/Swift languages.

On each of the API web pages there are code examples for the following languages: 1) cUrl, 2) Java, 3) Python, 4) Swift, 5) Ruby, 6) C#, and 7) PHP.

For example, go to [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/b2_authorize_account.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/b2_authorize_account.html) and scroll ALL THE WAY TO THE BOTTOM of that web page, and you should see "Sample Code" section. Click on the blue buttons to see the different code examples.

If your favorite language is missing, we can add it for you! One of our client engineers wrote most of the code examples in all 7 languages in less than 1 week. With these working code examples, the expectation is you should be able to get B2 working in literally less than 2 days in any application in any language.

<comment><USER16> FYI, the most popular Node B2 library seems to be in the process of being abandoned: [https://github.com/yakovkhalinsky/backblaze-b2](https://github.com/yakovkhalinsky/backblaze-b2)

Would be nice if there was an official Node library.

<comment><USER6> I really want to do more JavaScript support and examples and SDKs for B2 (both web page and server side).

While I think of myself as a 'C' programmer, the GIGANTIC amount of work being done in JavaScript nowadays is just amazing, and you can reach so many customers via JavaScript that I think JavaScript is a huge part of the future of computing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's great that cost of elasticity is not hidden. I'm glad that there are alternatives.

</comment><comment><USER18> Honestly surprised that AWS, GCP, or Azure haven't acquired BackBlaze by now. Seems like an obvious move.

<comment><USER6> Disclaimer: I am the author of the blog post and work at Backblaze.

> surprised that AWS, GCP, or Azure haven't acquired Backblaze by now

Sometimes press/customers/people ask us how many customers has Backblaze "converted over from" S3 to B2. To be honest, I think the answer is approximately zero. If a customer already has a Petabyte uploaded into S3, it is simply not practical or cost effective to download that from S3 and import it into B2. The S3 download costs are extremely expensive (9 cents per GByte to download out of S3, vs 1 cent per GByte to download out of B2).

Most of Backblaze's B2 customers fall into one of two camps:

1) New customers starting out that have just started to look at cloud storage and need to decide where to put their data. They look at S3, compare with B2, and make a decision and Backblaze B2 gets some of those customers. Realistically we don't even get half of these new customers either because B2 is missing a feature the potential customer needs, or because the customer has not even heard of Backblaze. So Backblaze is probably not causing Amazon too much lost revenue yet.

2) Multi-cloud customers. Any one "cloud provider" can have outages, including Backblaze and including Amazon. So if you store an entire copy of your data in Amazon S3, and also store an entire copy in Backblaze B2, you will (by definition) have both more durable data and higher availability data than a single copy in either one alone. By definition this doesn't actually cost Amazon S3 any sales, because you STILL need a complete copy in S3!! For multi- cloud, Backblaze B2 doesn't harm Amazon one bit.

> Seems like an obvious move (for Amazon to acquire Backblaze).

Amazon has never offered to buy Backblaze, but also we are not for sale. Or at very least not at the prices Amazon would probably want to spend (or could justify to their board). I don't know if this is common knowledge but Backblaze is employee owned. We never took any significant VC funding, so the only people with voting rights on the board of directors are the original 5 Backblaze founders (including myself). We like what we are doing and we COMPLETELY control our own destiny and work environment. Literally nobody (except customers) can tell us what to do, how to price our products, or what features to build. Backblaze is a fun company to work at, and we all make a good living. So it would be inordinately expensive to buy us out just to put us out of business and dissolve our tight-knit group here and ruin all our fun. Our plan is to stay independent forever.

<comment><USER19> > Amazon has never offered to buy Backblaze, but also we are not for sale. Or > at very least not at the prices Amazon would probably want to spend (or > could justify to their board). I don't know if this is common knowledge but > Backblaze is employee owned. We never took any significant VC funding, so > the only people with voting rights on the board of directors are the > original 5 Backblaze founders (including myself). We like what we are doing > and we COMPLETELY control our own destiny and work environment. Literally > nobody (except customers) can tell us what to do, how to price our products, > or what features to build. Backblaze is a fun company to work at, and we all > make a good living. So it would be inordinately expensive to buy us out just > to put us out of business and dissolve our tight-knit group here and ruin > all our fun. Our plan is to stay independent forever.

This as much as anything encourages me to trust and invest in Backblaze. Long may you live. Maybe I'll get around to writing that Rust SDK I've been meaning to write for a while...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Design Thinking" >>cringe<<</comment>


Why Use a URL Shortner? - <AUTHOR> What make you use a url shortner like billy or any other one ? Like what is the main reason and what do expect from them ? <comment><USER2> It's great to collect stats on how many people clicked it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good faith use: Portability.

Bad faith use: Obfuscation.

</comment><comment><USER4> if I write a letter by hand or read the URL over the phone a shortener is invaluable

<comment><AUTHOR> i like this one, so a kind of human readable short url would be great...

<comment><USER5> Hmm, it might defeat the purpose of a URL shortener, but I pictured something like what3words [0] (geocoding with memorable/human-readable words) but for URLs - for example: big.brown/bear

[0] [https://what3words.com/](https://what3words.com/)</comment></comment></comment>


Twitter Data used to predict election outcome in Turkey - <AUTHOR> https://ataspinar.wordpress.com/2015/10/28/4-more-years-of-akp/ <comment><USER2> Sorry for jumping like that before reading your blog post carefully but did you consider the fake user factor on your results? There are tons of accounts on Twitter posting 1-2 exactly the same or 2-3 character altered tweets from an unknown database per week. Those fake accounts mostly support AKP. I believe those are the ones that make your prediction inaccurate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello yigit, Actually I did consider it. In short; out of the >200.000 users who posted Tweets regarding politics in the period of 1 May to 06 June there were a few dozen users who posted thousands of Tweets instead of only a few (<10). However, because there are only a few dozen users like this in a total set of >200.000 users, their actions do not affect the result much.

Unfortunately I did not have enough time to do a similar analysis on the Twitter data from Oktober. But I hope that the same conditions apply. In any case, I will take your concerns into account and try to do more analysis on the set of users from the dataset of September and Oktober if I have some time today or tomorrow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't believe this will the result. The results of this snap election will be exactly like the last in which AKP won't be able to form government by themselves and a coalition will be required.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would've guessed a lower percentage forthe justice and development party (AKP). I'll keep a watch on your blog, thnx for sharing:)

</comment><comment><USER5> wow that is very nice predictions, you should be nominated for nobel peace price. wit this we can allow for prediction for world affares

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting results</comment>


Better remote collaboration will make protectionism harder - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3330-better-remote-collaboration-will-make-protectionism-harder

<comment><USER2> Hmmm...Not sure I agree with this, because I don't think it scales. Look at all the off-shore investment that corporations have investing in cheaper IT markets. Eventually those markets get more expensive. And then there's the quality debate for anything that requires multiple resources.

Also, theres a huge cost in time and risk in finding these remote resources, at least more so than Local.

But for finding a few golden-people for your small company, sure, that works.

</comment><comment><USER3> You know, no matter how much disposable income I get in Warsaw, Poland, I can't make it suddenly sprout Dutch or Swiss quality of public transportation, health care, food and entertainment. And commuting (by public transport) encourages cohesion within cities as well. So yeah, sorry, but I'd rather have the 120, lower disposable, and live in a nicer place. I also remember climate in SF was pretty nice.

Not that remoting is evil or anything, but if it became a monoculture just like working from office was just a few years ago, the side effects can be devastating to some finer points of life. Too many great food places live off office workers eating lunch in them, and if a regular 15-minute rhythm train service between nearby cities stops making sense for commuters, my ability to visit a friend in there on a whim disappears as well.

<comment><USER4> There are plenty of cities in the world that have a cost of living that's a fraction of the cost of living in San Francisco but have just as impressive infrastructure and weather.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dang, I wish I had the results, but a friend of mine wrote some code to pull in data from several different sources on all of the cities in the world. He's a remote worker, single, and can live anywhere in the world. He compared all kinds of things including cost of living, weather, crime rate, internet speed, and a bunch of other variables.

He moved to Panama City, Panama.

<comment><USER5> So he had no attachment to any lover, friend, family, city or even country. Could be also described like hell on earth for some of us...

<comment><USER6> Sometimes your family & friends are already spread all over the globe, and you can't live near more than one or two of them at best.

Sometimes the city you're living in is a haunted place for you already -- after a severe personal loss, attack, stalker, etc..

Sometimes you suddenly find yourself with few close connections where you currently live (prime example: finishing grad school), and you have the opportunity to stretch your boundaries by _not_ simply moving back to your hometown (or even home country).

Or you may just have "itchy feet" syndrome, and you start getting pretty unpleasant to be around if you're stuck in one town for more than a few years, seeing the same people around.

I'm married and we have two kids; each of us was born in a different country. I didn't leave the US initially for lack of people who liked my wife & I; to the contrary, the support of our friends was quite necessary because it was not always easy, initially. But it gets easier; and making human connections in a few disparate environments is enlightening, to say the least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That is step one.

Step two is that the best workers move out to cheaper locations -- after all why not command mostly the same salary from some tropical location? Look at how the people who take outsourced work in India live and compare it to your standard of living. Do you have a driver? Chef?

Anyway this is basically rehearsing the decades old arguments about outsourcing -- which didn't exactly kill software development in expensive countries.

</comment><comment><USER8> One really annoying factor about collaboration across timezones is trying to get schedules to sync up. Especially if there is an 8+ hour difference. Back and forth communication ends up taking much longer and can significantly slow down the project. One interesting solution was examined in Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe [1] where online communities form based on the sleep cycles of people rather than their location.

It would be possible for remote workers to use melatonin supplements and light therapy to intentionally manipulate their sleep schedules to sync up with their HQ if they are willing to tolerate the offset from the local schedule. Even more interesting would be if everyone switches to something like Uberman [2] so that working at various timezones becomes feasible.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Standard_Tribe> [2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep>

<comment><USER9> Yes, sometimes the timezone difference can be difficult if the two parties are not equally as empowered (or even as good). But I'll give you an example. A guy I was working with decided to transfer to my company's singapore office (12h difference). Working with him was _awesome_! I could be working on something all day, then write him an email on where things where at EOD, along with things I wanted him to take care of. When my morning rolled around again, everything was done, and I had an email from him sitting in my inbox of stuff I needed to look at. Our work was getting done literally 24 hours a day :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Small colocated groups invested in the future of the company are always going to outproduce (comparing hours to hours) disparate resources pulled together on the fly.

The best exception to the colocation rule is the open source model, but OS can "get away with it" because the contributers are very, very invested in the outcome.

<comment><USER11> This is a straw man. Why would you compare one team invested in a company, to another, remote team 'pulled together on the fly'

I say this as part of a three man team, all remote from each other, and all invested in the company.

<comment><USER10> Because I've worked at no less than three companies that have done exactly that, and the entire basis of the article talks about the monetary value of how you can move hours around, completely eliminating the human nature of work and craftsmanship. People who work on projects that they aren't going to be associated with in the future usually care less about quality.

Working colocated is only one facet of the equation. I would think ownership is a well understood concept in the startup industry. Being invested means more than being colocated or even having a financial stake. (open source development -- again, some small number of passionate developers generally in it for the long haul)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is exactly why we started Codedose[1] as a bunch of Java developers with origins in the banking/consulting industry: to stay with our families and friends in the beautiful city of Wroclaw, Poland, and keep our margin on the attractive level working remotely with UK companies. Getting on a plane to London is actually faster and more convenient than travelling to Warsaw by train.

[1] <http://www.codedose.com>

</comment><comment><USER13> Another way of saying this is that "Things change. They change in all fields.In technology they change faster than most anywhere else."

I'm not sold on split teams, but I am sold on finding the right people no matter where they are. Another strategy that works is using remote workers as leverage. Lots of neat things happening here.

I live in the U.S. When politicians say stuff like "We need to keep more jobs from going overseas"? I don't even know what they're talking about. We should make things in a more expensive fashion and force ourselves to buy them? We should make all of our workers noncompetitive? We should make the world economy conform to our ideas about how things work instead of how they actually work? None of that makes any sense to me, so I'm at a loss at what an intelligent person would be doing telling me these things.

As economies continue to get more virtual, we in technology will see how the flat world plays out ahead of folks like doctors and realtors. Interesting times ahead.

</comment><comment><USER14> I like his vision. I hope it does come true.

To get there we need better collaboration tools. Although you can make it work with IM/email/VoIP, it's still kind of clumsy.

</comment><comment><USER15> This argument will carry a lot more weight when there is a successful company (say, Instagram-successful) build and run by remote collaboration.

<comment><USER16> 37signals doesn't count as a successful company?

<comment><USER15> Sure, but they are still essentially a Chicago company. <http://37signals.com/svn/writers/>

How about a company with principals/co-founders in different regions?

<comment><USER17> We built Basecamp while I was working from Copenhagen, Denmark. I currently live and work and wrote that piece from Spain. Out of some 35 people, only about a third has base in Chicago. Out of that third, maybe half of them go to the office every day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _I live in the U.S. When politicians say stuff like "We need to keep more > jobs from going overseas"? I don't even know what they're talking about._

They're talking about not playing in a race-to-the-bottom for global wages, and using an internal market to the benefit of the majority of the people (instead of businesses), which might not like having to pay more for a device produce domestically, but they certainly like having a job economy and being able to afford housing and bread on their table.

> _We should make things in a more expensive fashion and force ourselves to > buy them?_

The guy without a job because his went to a least expensive overseas facility cannot afford many things in the first place, if anything. Getting things in a "more expensive fashion" would be great for him. And he's like the majority.</comment>


Big Mac trademark cancelled across Europe - <AUTHOR> https://m.independent.ie/business/irish/its-like-connacht-winning-against-the-all-blacks-supermacs-ceo-responds-to-big-mac-trademark-success-against-mcdonalds-37713005.html <comment><USER2> They are only in Ireland and they have been in business for over forty years under that name.

I don't think anyone accidentally walks into their store thinking it's McDonald's.

[https://goo.gl/images/KqX3tJ](https://goo.gl/images/KqX3tJ)

I mean look at this.

Mcd can always hit back with a lawsuit if there is evidence I'd credible deceptive after practice.

</comment><comment><USER3> relevant excerpt from [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/15/mcdonalds-l...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/15/mcdonalds- loses-big-mac-trademark-legal-battle-supermacs) :

> because McDonald's had argued that similarity between Big Mac and Supermac > would confuse customers

What's more ridiculous is McDonalds trademarked the name of a competitors (arguably) flagship product - which they(McD) never used:

> "They trademarked the SnackBox, which is one of Supermac's most popular > products, even though the product is not actually offered by them," said > McDonagh. "The EU is basically saying either use it or lose it."

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.supermacs.ie/menuproduct/mighty- mac/](https://www.supermacs.ie/menuproduct/mighty-mac/)

I can't possibly imagine why McDonalds would be litigating against this chain!

</comment><comment><USER5> I guess I would need to see the decision. I think a "Big Mac" is a fairly known thing. There even is a Big Mac inflation index, because of how uniform they are.

Edit: I guess it is a purchasing power parity index.

<comment><USER6> Here is a sort of interactive infograph version of the Big Mac index: [https://www.economist.com/news/2019/01/10/the-big-mac- index](https://www.economist.com/news/2019/01/10/the-big-mac-index)

The data is on github: [https://github.com/TheEconomist/big-mac- data](https://github.com/TheEconomist/big-mac-data)</comment></comment>


The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-most-interesting-star-in-our-galaxy/410023/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> The name of the star is KIC 8462852

<comment><USER3> Shangrila</comment></comment>