Amazon's policies promote counterfeiting - <AUTHOR> https://www.elevationlab.com/blogs/news/amazon-is-complicit-with-counterfeit-sellers <comment><USER3> Apparently, the US Customs and Border Patrol is in charge of seizing counterfeit goods.

[https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/cbp- interce...](https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/cbp-intercepts- over-3m-counterfeit-goods)

I wonder if contacting US Government representatives to ask them to have CPB investigate Amazon warehouses as a nexus of counterfeit goods would be useful.

I bet if CPB officials raided an Amazon warehouse and went through and seized all counterfeit goods in the warehouse, Amazon would quickly find a solution to this problem.

</comment><comment><USER4> Full disclosure I work for Amazon (on the web services side).

The author of this article clearly doesn't know much about selling on Amazon, because what he is asking for is possible. It's called the Amazon Brand Registry. You can contact the infringment team using the details here and initiate the process of getting your brand / ASIN locked so that other people can't sell it without your permission: [https://www.amazon.com/report/infringement](https://www.amazon.com/report/infringement)

Also check this out: [https://services.amazon.com/brand- registry.html](https://services.amazon.com/brand-registry.html)

If you have a popular product then counterfeiters are unfortunately inevitable, but you do have options to fight back and stop them.

There is also Brand Gating which is a little harder to get. Look up ASIN or Brand Gating for information. Basically you can order the counterfeit product and report it to Amazon. It can cost a couple thousand in legal fees to register your brand and get all the paperwork unless you are capable of doing it all yourself, but it is possible.

<comment><USER5> Why is Amazon not actively seeking out patterns of counterfeiters and suggesting this to sellers.

Just doing simple image machine learning should get 90% of scammers.

He AWS team is great about this. Looking for abnormalities. Looking for posted AWS keys. Proactively. The retail guys need to get some of the cloud guy smarts. Or ethics. Either/or will help stop this.

I don't sell, but I can barely buy from amazon because of all the scam copies and fake reviews.

<comment><USER6> I see this sort of complaint ("I can barely buy from Amazon because of all the scam copies and fake reviews") somewhat often online, and I don't understand. I've placed 15 orders in 2018 so far (76 in 2017), and I've yet to find a detectable fake. (One of those things was even a printer toner cartridge, which I halfway expected to be fake given the stories you hear.)

What are people buying and receiving fakes of?

<comment> yoz-y Anything and everything probably, it can be seen even in reviews. I was looking up some gloves and often the reviews are split 50/50 between great and complete garbage. I assume that the unlucky half got counterfeits. Recently I have bought some plastic plates to put under a flower pot. The dimensions were completely wrong: as in, the advertised plate was for a pot of 22 cm in diameter and this was even printed twice on the plate itself - it was not even 18cm large. This was on a product with over 4.5 star average.

I still buy stuff on amazon because returns are very simple, but I got into habit of immediately returning anything which is not good enough. I feel that most of the stuff one can buy there is garbage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I ordered an instant pot on amazon. instant pot box shows up, with mfr.s packaging.... I opened it and similar-looking - but much cheaper - <USER2> knockoff was in box.

if amazon's customer service wasnt so good i would have dropped them already. (I know it's not them making the mistake, but still..)

however I buy stuff there much less frequently now since i have no way to know if I'm getting counterfeits for certain types of goods.

<comment><USER8> This is a really important point that Amazon seems to completely ignore: counterfeit goods aren't just a ripoff, they're downright _dangerous_. A fake instant pot could burn your house down or scald you when it fails to depressurize properly; a fake phone charger could overheat and catch your bedsheets on fire; a fake smoke alarm could fail to detect smoke properly and not activate in time to save someone's life.

I can't believe there hasn't been a slew of lawsuits over this, especially in the highly litigious culture of the US. Could I just be mistaken in thinking this is such a serious problem? Or has Amazon just been lucky?

<comment><USER9> Agree with the rest, but the US is not highly litigious, common misconception, probably created by corporations trying to defend themselves from "frivolous lawsuits".

<comment><USER8> Out of curiosity, what countries are more litigious than the US and why? I've always been told that the US is unusually litigious, but if I'm wrong about that I'd like to know better.

<comment><USER9> In this list, the US is #5, curiously having more lawyers per capita. [https://www.clements.com/resources/articles/The-Most- Litigio...](https://www.clements.com/resources/articles/The-Most-Litigious- Countries-in-the-World)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The writer advises people to "look at the seller," but Amazon's commingling of products means that doing so is often useless. I believe I've also seen mention that there's a way to prevent that by assigning your own numbers and paying Amazon more, but for something like this where there is only one legitimate supplier I'm not sure it would do any good. (edit: NathanKP posted relevant links as I was posting)

What's amazing to me is that these days I'd consider eBay a safer option for a lot of purchases - at least there I know what seller I'm dealing with.

<comment><USER11> You need not pay Amazon to label your products with your FNSKU to avoid commingling -- sellers can do themselves with a printer and tape. Amazon simply offers the option and charges $0.20/unit to do it.

<comment><USER10> But if you're already the only legitimate source for that SKU what do you do? If a counterfeiter orders one of your items then duplicates the packaging including the SKU/UPC will it get commingled with your product even if it shouldn't?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Counterfeit products [1] and scams [2] are persistent problems on Amazon. It's very unfair to the legitimate merchants who are trying to compete without screwing over customers. They've been yelling at Amazon for YEARS to do something about this. Presumably Amazon decided that making it harder to sign up as a third-party seller would hurt their metrics more than it would help customers.

[1] [https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/amazon-counterfeits-no- starch...](https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/amazon-counterfeits-no-starch.html)

[2] [https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/amazon-fraud-scam- sellers.htm...](https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/amazon-fraud-scam-sellers.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> I have absolutely started to reduce my purchases on Amazon due to my lack of confidence in what I'm going to be getting. The counterfeiting issue is real and serious.

At this point, I trust that if I go to the trouble to ensure it's not "fulfilled by amazon" _and_ I'm buying from the actual seller, I'll probably get a legit product. Otherwise, I have no way of knowing what I'm going to get.

I continue to be mystified why Amazon doesn't view this as a huge issue.

</comment><comment><USER14> Really enjoy this post and the reactions of it. I also have been looking around on Amazon for small furniture and some other small products, but as a consumer, a great deal of research is needed to detect fakes or sub par products.

If you know what you want to buy, you are indeed best off buying directly from the product creators site and not get tempted by far cheaper alternatives amazon suggests... Birkenstock is a great example of this where it escalated [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/12/22/birkenstock-...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/12/22/birkenstock- accuses-amazon-failure-tackle-fake-replicas/)

</comment><comment><USER15> I think this is a pretty big deal and has been for at least a few years, yet there have been no repercussions for Amazon yet. It feels like it should be illegal to enable this kind of thing.

<comment><USER16> I think Amazon should go back to just being a bookstore, maybe seller of indie items, kind of like that etsy-like nichce and focus on AWS, which is their clear cash cow at this point.

This whole being an "everything" store thing is a drain on them, and a drain on our economy. Plus they aren't exactly winning in some of the categories they thought they would be now -- groceries for example -- Walmart has shown they will fight to the absolute death on that, and I don't think they can win in that space (buying Whole Foods was a nice gesture, but Whole Foods reputation was fading from that "cool grocery store that has all this organic stuff" to "just a really expensive grocery store" especially once all the other grocery stores started carrying organics).

Of course the kicker is if they can release their fully autonomous drone fleet. Which may be what, 10...20 years off after sorting through FAA regulations at the minimum?

<comment><USER17> But wouldn't having a lot of consumer mindshare contribute to their cloud infrastructure being more attractive? People choose names they recognize.

<comment><USER16> AWS was put on the map almost entirely by engineering blogs (which I am not saying is a bad thing -- it's a testament to their services), like the famous Netflix moving everything to AWS article. Before that it was blogs on S3 and SQS. They were well known and generating a billion in revenue as early as 2011, and this was well, well before AWS was "mainstream" in terms of you start seeing public adverts now for AWS everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have sold on Amazon for about 3 years now, over 2000+ skus FBA. The items I sell are pretty easy to counterfeit (much easier than OPs). There have been plenty of sellers come in and undercut price and subsequently destroy my products ratings because customers received fakes.

I started moving my products into the Brand Registry and all of a sudden the counterfeit sellers started disappearing...and now they don't exist anymore. So at one point a few years ago I was on this guys side and was starting to write up cease & desists but I believe Amazon is getting better at it. Haven't seen any counterfeit sellers on my listings that last for more than 30 days in a while.

<comment><USER11> With so many SKUs, it's easy to relax. OP has nine so one fake seller can wipe out a substantial amount of revenue overnight for her.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I have all but stopped buying from amazon due to this problem. But I have to say, this part bothers me:

"For the record, I love Amazon as a customer, I buy way too much stuff with Prime, I'm a long shareholder, and think they are on track to become the biggest company in the world (unless they get broken up for anti-trust reasons)."

If you are actively losing money from this problem and still buy from them, you are actively sabotaging yourself!

<comment><USER20> Show me who among us is not contradictory in our behavour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Because of the counterfeiting on Amazon, I'm becoming price-insensitive and ordering direct from brand websites. I'd rather order once at full mark up than burn time dealing with fakes.

</comment><comment><USER22> I've become quite disenchanted with Amazon because of this counterfeit issue along with the fake review problem. In addition, Amazon customer service -- traditionally excellent -- has only been good to acceptable recently (they've started using Chinese agents who don't really seem to understand American customer service and also sometimes struggle with English).

I _really_ wanted to drop Prime this year, but the wife uses it for some books and movies she likes and begged me not to. However, I've started ordering my stuff directly from sellers whenever possible. Occasionally, I order from Amazon if I need something quickly, but prefer to order directly even then if the seller has a rush delivery option (attention sellers! always offer an expedited delivery option, even if you think no one will use it!)

<comment><USER23> Chinese agents? Are you sure? I thought most overseas customer service was outsourced to Phillipines or India ... or to Amazon's AIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is ruling out Amazon for so many categories of product and has been going on for years.

Yet they don't seem to be bothered.

So now I look on Amazon, then see if I can buy direct or from a different retailer.

<comment><USER25> I've seen this especially in the power charger category... Apple power chargers I end up always just having to go to the Apple Store for now. Sigh. I want to use Amazon, but have had so many sketchy "Apple" products sent my way.

<comment><USER26> It's outright dangerous to buy that type of product from Amazon, even if you buy "ships and sold from amazon" their inventory mixing means you can get counterfeits just as easily.

If selling fake solar eclipse glasses didn't hit them with the clue bat, I'm not sure what will.

<comment><USER27> This is good article you've probably already read on the topic of counterfeit eclipse glasses: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/09/science/eclipse- glasses-r...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/09/science/eclipse-glasses- recalls.html)

Perhaps the worst thing in my mind about the lack of education (for one reason of another) with reference to eclipse glasses is that good pairs can easily be shared around with minimal planning (I always buy extra new pairs as souvenirs more than anything). The partial phases just aren't things that anyone stares at for minutes on end, and totality requires that eclipse glasses be removed.

Hopefully there'll be more experience at hand and education by 2024 to avoid a repeat of 2017 (which in the grand scheme, was mostly isolated cases of poor outcomes - for most people, the biggest risk would have been driving to an eclipse site).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I designed a hardware product but haven't brought it to market because even if it is successful, Chinese manufacturers will reverse engineer it and then have a cheaper clone on the market within weeks, long before I can recoup even the cost of manufacturing, let alone make a profit. And since I can't afford to pursue legal action, it seems pointless to manufacture the product, and everybody loses. I wonder how much innovation is stifled this way.

<comment><USER29> I remember a while back there was a kickstarter for a phone case that folds out into a selfie stick, it got successfully funded.

Within weeks of the kickstarter finishing, before the kickstarter had even delivered or even started manufacturing the cases, they were for sale on Aliexpress.

It seems so easy for someone in China to do this. Look for successful product kickstarters and you already have market validation. Something like a selfie stick case would be so easy to set up a production run for.

<comment><USER30> An engineer friend noticed this with civil engineering applications as well.

Chinese companies troll RFPs for bridge and other designs. In this case, my friend saw a unique bridge/overpass that he was associated with in some obscure province that was completed before the original. He knew it was their design because it did not include changes that were made after the contract award.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> My mileage apparently varies, because I've been shopping heavily on Amazon for _years_ and have never had a counterfeit item show up on my doorstep.

<comment><USER32> The things which really get my goat are the awful-quality print-on-demand facsimiles I sometimes accidentally buy when I'm looking for an old book. Seriously putting me off Amazon. Nationalise and break them up already!

<comment><USER33> Try AbeBooks instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've basically stopped buying things from Amazon because it is so hard to tell where your goods are coming from. With co-mingling even if you buy from a legitimate seller it is impossible to ensure that you get a legitimate product.

I'd rather spend a few extra dollars and remove all of this hassle and buy directly, or from a more trustworthy place.

</comment><comment><USER35> Last year I had two products I bought on Amazon arrive that were obviously previously opened. No warning at all when making the purchase. They didn't appear to be counterfeit but I still returned them. Now I avoid Amazon whenever I can.

</comment><comment><USER36> > Jeff Bezos, if you're reading this, come on - this is day 2 activity.

It's always "Day 1" at Amazon.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTwXS2H_iJo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTwXS2H_iJo)

</comment><comment><USER37> Isn't it possible to bring a class action lawsuit? This is precisely the kind of things that a class action suit is a good remedy for.

<comment><USER30> It is. But read before you click!

"Any dispute or claim relating in any way to your use of any Amazon Service, or to any products or services sold or distributed by Amazon or through Amazon.com will be resolved by binding arbitration, rather than in court, except that you may assert claims in small claims court if your claims qualify. The Federal Arbitration Act and federal arbitration law apply to this agreement.

There is no judge or jury in arbitration, and court review of an arbitration award is limited. However, an arbitrator can award on an individual basis the same damages and relief as a court (including injunctive and declaratory relief or statutory damages), and must follow the terms of these Conditions of Use as a court would."

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=508088)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is why I only buy Apple products from Apple, Amazon is flooded with counterfeits.

</comment><comment><USER39> Counterfeiters on Amazon have been hitting the board game market hard. From an interview [1]:

> We feel, and this number is speculative (but it's going to be somewhere on > that range), that Asmodee North America's sales are going to be affected > somewhere between five and ten million dollars, this year alone. We believe > for some games, that more than 70% of all sales in the U.S. market have been > counterfeit.

1\. [https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/39296/icv2-interview- asm...](https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/39296/icv2-interview-asmodee- execs-counterfeiting)

</comment><comment><USER40> Not only that, Amazon India openly allows misleading product description and the cse "overlooks" it when you talk to them. In India it's a standard practice to overstate objectively wrong things about products. Eg. Hard drive model number product make: pvc dumbbells vs cheap plastic filled with sand. Yes that's a thing on the site. The attitude of Amazon India is we don't care about bad publicity as long as people are buying from us so not even shaming them here, just mentioning.

</comment><comment><USER41> I always thought the counterfeit good program was fulfillment by Amazon mixing items with the same UPC code.

I ordered a power supply once and it had all chinese writing on it, and plus it didn't power up unless I kept turning it and fiddled with the connector. Was concerned, so sent it back. Didn't want it to catch on fire. It had a English brand name on the listing though too.

I was looking at new earpods, and even in the reviews people mentioned they got fakes. [https://www.amazon.com/Apple-MD827LL-EarPods-Remote- Mic/dp/B...](https://www.amazon.com/Apple-MD827LL-EarPods-Remote- Mic/dp/B0097BEG1C/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1519959044&sr=8-3&keywords=earpods) \- I went to a local walmart instead and bought it online. Even Walmart, NewEgg and Sears website's have the same program as Amazon with counterfeits.

I don't trust them as much as I did when shopping online. The NBC nightly news did a story about this last week. [https://youtu.be/klbPhwE44hI](https://youtu.be/klbPhwE44hI)

"Ships from and sold by Amazon" I guess to look for... I still use Amazon for AWS and Kindle though... But for Physical products I feel like I got to be more careful. Edit: It looks like from "0xcde4c3db" Post, it still can happen even if sold by Amazon. Wow.

One of the things they recommended to do is to buy directly from the brand's website, which is kinda annoying since need a bunch of accounts, and Amazon Prime is a nice benefit too you can't use externally. Which is a great thing for digital nomads who don't want to wait for a package in the same area too long.

Another thing is fake memory too. SD Cards and flash drives. If you search "2TB USB flash drive" on Amazon and scroll down some. There's some 2-2.5 star ones where some of the reviews mention it's fake. One of them even mentioned no company currently makes a 2TB USB Flash drives. However they do make 2TB USB SSD's.

Plus I wouldn't want to try your luck with some of these items, as if you they are fake and you return it. I'm unsure if Amazon counts those returns towards the total returns before they close your account. I wouldn't want to risk it and be proactive. If i'm unsure about a item, it's less of a headache to just buy elsewhere.

I hope they solve this somehow, as Amazon is really convenience and I really want to trust them more. There's really no other online store like them that's a one stop for all. Still like Amazon but got to be more careful with all these stories lately.

<comment><USER11> >"Ships and sold by Amazon" is something to look out for I guess

Don't get too comfortable. Malicious sellers can open a vendor account with Amazon and sell their counterfeits this way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> A large chunk of the most important and/or profitable tech businesses are really private "markets." That is, they don't just sell goods and services. I would put all advertising businesses in that category too

Amazon is an obvious (and very literal) example, as are app stores. But, Youtube is another example. People post videos. People watch videos. People place ads on videos. Google is at the centre coordinating this stuff.

Very few markets are cleverly designed or run. Adwords was an example of a clever one. The auction, is the centrepiece and it reached its current state pretty early in adwords' history. It was designed cleverly, with a ton of attention to incentives and 2nd order effects.

Youtube, as a marketplace, is terribly designed. The "monetisation" systems are almost designed to produce spam, and discourage unique "maker" content. The differentials in earnings of similar content on youtube, vs any other medium are immense.

Why does a podcast, TV show or other medium (lets assume it's the same content) make so much more than a youtube channel. How is it possible that a million views a week is not enough to pay for a 2-man basement operation?

The big boys need to get some economists on board, good ones.

</comment><comment><USER43> Amazon will replace whatever stupid crap you end up with. This is why it doesn't hurt their brand. You know they will fix it, so it's just a minor inconvenience to the customer, most of the time. Meanwhile, it shuts down businesses.

You'd think politicians might care about this, but they're too busy handing out billions to get them to move to their state.

<comment><USER24> It's hurting their brand, even if they haven't realised.

I don't want 3 attempts and returns to buy a battery, or charger, or any of the dozens of categories this affects. I don't want to be buying co-mingled inventory on lines I _know_ are prone to counterfeiting.

So I think of Amazon as 2nd rate - (because of this). So do many of my friends who have been affected by this as it's become far from rare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> They sold me a counterfeit Horowitz and Hill [0], since it was outside of the return window the support person basically said, "you have an interesting memento".

[0] [https://artofelectronics.net/the-book/counterfeit- editions/](https://artofelectronics.net/the-book/counterfeit-editions/)

<comment><USER30> File a credit card dispute.

<comment><USER45> That's a great option until you realize they can close your Amazon account for chargebacks, which in my case would mean the loss of thousands of dollars worth of Kindle books.

<comment><USER46> You know you can download them and remove the DRM.

<comment><USER47> Has the latest DRM been cracked yet?

<comment><USER46> I don't know if the new DRM that is applied to the books as they are on the device has been cracked, but there are links to download books to a computer (on the "Manage Your Content and Devices" Amazon page), and those can be unlocked by a Calibre plugin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Ironically, Alibaba is trying to fix counterfeits in the supply chain. Amazon should follow suit.

[https://medium.com/@alitech_2017/blockchain-based-qa-the- end...](https://medium.com/@alitech_2017/blockchain-based-qa-the-end-of-fake- products-in-e-commerce-6f9b28a75735)

</comment><comment><USER49> I have been purchasing more and more from Walmart. Initially I thought it was hopeless for Walmart to catch up to Amazon but counterfeits are destroying my trust in Amazon and Walmart has really stepped up their online ordering the last couple years. Amazon is feeling increasingly like eBay.

</comment><comment><USER50> Jeeze, looking at the product page it's really hard to spot the seller and make sure you've chosen a legit vendor.

Also, Anchors are a great idea. I'm a VR developer and my desk is pretty crowded with headsets, so I just ordered a few to try them out. Hopefully the real ones arrive!

</comment><comment><USER51> Oh my god, I want this product(original) but it is not available on amazon.de! It would be amazing to get your products in Germany. I just ordered it on amazon.co.uk as shipping was less expensive than getting it on www.elevationlab.com.

</comment><comment><USER52> Are there the same problems with counterfeiting in their grocery department? How can you be sure that your organic flour, almonds and coffee or are really what they claim and not some relabelled non-organic GMO product?

</comment><comment><USER53> Fed Chair Jerome Powell's response when asked earlier today why inflation has remained so low for so long: "It's a phenomenon we don't completely understand... it could be partially explained by the Amazon effect."

</comment><comment><USER54> > And Jeff Bezos, if you're reading this, come on - this is day 2 activity.

That is a serious burn. It really drives home the point of how serious this issue is.

</comment><comment><USER11> You should not have left a one star review on your competition. That's a surefire way to land in hot water if they report you.

</comment><comment><USER55> Amazon should do what they can to weed out this kind of thing.

But consumers can also be more aware of the sellers on Amazon.

<comment><USER56> You can "buy from" a seller that provided 100% legit units and still end up with a counterfeit because Amazon threw them all in the same bin ("commingling"). This is the basis of the Daimler lawsuit: there were counterfeit items "sold by Amazon.com", whereas Amazon had previously gotten a pass because they weren't actually selling the counterfeits themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I wonder how tolerant of Ring product knock-offs Amazon will be now.

</comment><comment><USER58> What do people here think of rfid blockchain products like VeChain that are hoping to solve this problem? Is it a solution?

</comment><comment><USER59> I used to shop waaaay too much on Amazon, but I've largely stopped and almost entirely as a result of counterfeits. If I wanted the experience of shopping in an open air market, I'd hoof it to one. I also really feel for people like the OP who do nothing wrong, but have a good idea and market it successfully.

Amazon, I'd be back in a heartbeat if you fixed this. Sellers and buyers deserve better, and this kind of thing, along with bullshit reviews are a cancer in your business. If you wait for the first frank signs of disease to register, you'll already be in terminal decline.

</comment><comment><USER60> Dear OP: I'd prefer a cheaper, "counterfeit" version of the product you discuss to the one you produce.

<comment><USER47> I can understand wanting to have a similar but cheaper product. Good enough is fine for most people. I don't understand why you'd want counterfeit branding too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> while i agree with your post, "The current counterfeit seller, suiningdonghanjiaju Co Ltd (yeah they sound legit), " could be construed as a racist comment

<comment><USER62> I think it could be CONSTRUED as a racist comment, but the person thinking of it that way would be really stretching, in my opinion.

1\. All of these counterfeit items are coming from China.

2\. The legit seller is ElevationLab, which "suiningdonghanjiaju Co Ltd" is not.

3\. "suiningdonghanjiaju Co Ltd" is a Chinese name.

4\. "suiningdonghanjiaju Co Ltd" is a very customer-unfriendly name -- not something you'd see from a big foreign-facing Chinese company.

So all in all, it doesn't seem racist at all to point out that this company name seems illegitimate.

If the author had MADE UP a "Chinese-sounding name" like "nihaobaobaomao," then yeah, I could follow an argument pointing out that statement as being reasonably construed as racist. But in the context of talking about Chinese companies producing cheap knock-offs, I don't see a problem with naming the company and pointing out that the name itself does not sound like a legit company at all.

<comment><USER63> Some counterpoints and comments.

1\. So many legit items come from China that as a consumer you can't dismiss something out of hand just because it came from China. 3\. Huawei is a Chinese name, Xiaomi is a Chinese name. See #1. 4\. This is a legitimate point. The company did not optimize their name for a non-Chinese audience.

I think the main thrust of why that comment has racist tones is because it feels like the main complaint is that it's a foreign (non-Western) sounding name, hard to pronounce and funny looking, therefore it cannot be legitimate.

(Actually, I don't know if you did it on purpose, but nihaobaobaomao is a great name... It's very cute and sounds like "Hello bundle kitty"...)

<comment><USER62> Great comments, but I think I disagree with some of them. :)

> 1\. So many legit items come from China that as a consumer you can't dismiss > something out of hand just because it came from China.

This is true, but I don't think it's a counterpoint. Regardless of how many legitimate products come out of China, the fact remains that the huge, huge majority of counterfeit products are from China. So if you're looking at a counterfeit product, the odds are that it will be from China, regardless of how many other legitimate products out there are from China.

> 3\. Huawei is a Chinese name, Xiaomi is a Chinese name

Those were ones I was thinking of, which is why I added the "not something you'd see from a big foreign-facing Chinese company" bit.

It's a foreigner-unfriendly name, terrible for marketing, searches, and sales. I can't imagine a legit company trying to use it overseas. Something like Huawei or Xiaomi (or in other cases, Samsung, Hitachi, BMW, Volvo, etc.) are short and sweet, simpler to digest and remember.

> I think the main thrust of why that comment has racist tones is because it > feels like the main complaint is that it's a foreign (non-Western) sounding > name, hard to pronounce and funny looking, therefore it cannot be > legitimate.

I do completely agree with that, but in my opinion, with the evidence in this case, the complaint itself couldn't reasonably be construed as racist. In hindsight, my argument about "shorter, more professional names" is basically this quote ("hard to pronounce and funny looking") boiled into more reasonable terms...

> Actually, I don't know if you did it on purpose, but nihaobaobaomao is a > great name... It's very cute and sounds like "Hello bundle kitty"...

You caught me. :P

I couldn't bring myself to type something really stereotypically racist.

<comment><USER64> > > Actually, I don't know if you did it on purpose, but nihaobaobaomao is a > great name... It's very cute and sounds like "Hello bundle kitty"... > You > caught me. :P > I couldn't bring myself to type something really > stereotypically racist.

Hello cat buns!? Of course that's racist; accusing people of eating cats....

:)

(Yeah, that's how I read bao at first...)

More seriously, consider Fenix or Anker; they have "short professional" names, but are not particularly western (esp. the spelling). Both are newer companies, based in China, sell fairly heavily on Amazon, and are frankly some of the best providers of their product niches.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Half of England Is Owned by Less Than 1% of Its Population, Researcher Says - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/world/europe/england-land-inequality.html <comment><USER3> > Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light > turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off > in the mountains — all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those > improvements is affected by the labor and cost of other people and the > taxpayers. To not one of these improvements does the land monopolist > contribute, and yet, by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. > He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the > general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own > enrichment is derived…The unearned increment on the land is reaped by the > land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service, but to the > disservice done.

— Winston Churchill, 1909

<comment><USER4> Uhm, has Winston Churchill never heard of taxes? Property tax, income tax, capital gains tax.

<comment><USER5> Winston was writing in England (which is what the article is about) in 1909.

Property taxes in the UK essentially don't distinguish between "nice house" and "an actual palace". A tiny bedsit pays grade A taxes, my nice flat is grade B, My mother's old house (a four bedroom cottage in a pleasant village where lots of rich people live) would be category H. There aren't any categories above H. They're charged to the occupants, so if you own a town of a hundred dwellings and let them out, the residents pay those taxes, not you. The exact mechanism has changed substantially since Winston's time (and indeed was the cause of major riots decades ago) but this general thrust has been true for generations.

It's true that rental income due to a landlord is taxable income, after expenses, but I don't see how that's relevant?

Capital Gains Taxes only kick in if you sell. If you're content to profit off ownership indefinitely you are never charged CGT.

<comment><USER6> To put a number on it, band H properties are at least 8 times the value of a band A property, but pay only 3 times as much tax.

(From A POOR TAX COUNCIL TAX IN LONDON: TIME FOR REFORM, although the same info is on government websites).

<comment><USER7> Council tax and poll tax before it were very clearly examples of trickle up taxes. Massively regressive compared to the rates.

Yet no one is complaining, demonstrating or rioting.

<comment><USER8> They did protest and riot, but the government ignored them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Worth noting 1% of England's population is about 550,000 people, as is mentioned in a linked article - half of Scotland is owned by ~600 people!

[https://www.holyrood.com/articles/comment/land-reform-and- in...](https://www.holyrood.com/articles/comment/land-reform-and-inequality- what-does-debate-tell-us-about-scotland)

Edit: In my own opinion, this iniquitous state of land ownership in Scotland is somewhat compensated for by the fact we have the Right To Roam - <USER2> means even though a lot of land is kept as hunting estates anyone can wander about pretty much as we please (with some fairly minor restrictions).

<comment><USER10> 1% of England's population is about 550,000, that is extreme inequality. You seem to think its OK for a small percentage of people to have everything as long as you have the right to roam around. I respectfully disagree. Wealth equals political and social power and it should be divided more evenly in order to ensure democracy. Make not mistake Capitalism mean fair and free - but in our warped form of Capitalism we have those with money rigging the rules for their own benefit and as such we don't have Capitalism we have Aristocracy.

<comment><USER11> how can we cure these poor people from this delusion that they have a right to possess what they have not earned?

life is inequitable you have to fight to get a higher station. substituting taking responsibility to create wealth for convincing yourself you're entitled to it just disempowers you.

I'm not saying it's not hard. but that it is hard is not special and that it is hard is the motivation to overcome it. and when you get there that your hard earned achievement can be taken away by people who don't want to overcome is wrong.

The fundamental point is this wealth is not some free right it's not some magical thing that just exists. wealth is precisely the value created by overcoming difficulties.

wealth is made by work and the people who make it ought to be free to choose what they do with it rather than coerced into surrendering it in the name of equity, a false equity which is inequitable to the moral nature of wealth, responsibility and hard work. that kind of idea is a disease that will erode away the social foundation.

I'm not saying wealth disparity is easy nor that it creates no problems. it creates a lot of problems but I don't believe the solution is by redistribution. at least not at this stage of human and economic evolution. while our species is still bounded by the amount of energy we can extract from our surroundings.

taxes yes, State yes, a social welfare net yes, but not to an excessive degree, and not to cure inequality.

if energy was free of course it should be distributed to all without cost. like air.

but it's not. to do so would bankrupt our species in the name of compassion. the greater compassion is the realization of the poor state we're in, and the preservation of all. not the temporary satisfaction of some who convinced themselves that things should be easy.

one day as a species we will get there. no crushing disparity. but we're not there yet. trying to live like we are already there is a toxic delusion that doesn't help us get to that more compassionate future.

<comment><USER12> > wealth is made by work

It's also naturally abundant in the form of land, those cadastral game tiles on which life plays out, dominion of which are allocated by the state in a system of hereditary monopolies.

Wealth is not allocated the same way it's created. That's why we have the concept of rent-seeking, behavior that increases one's share of wealth without creating more wealth.

Owning wealth lets you accumulate more wealth without working, because you can charge other people rent in exchange for using your wealth. Not only that; you can also hire people in an arrangement where you automatically own everything they produce using your capital goods.

Rich people know that labor is a very inefficient and tedious way to increase one's own share of wealth. That's why they prefer rent, interest, and staying on the top of the employment hierarchy where they have a legal claim on the products of others' labor.

Yes, work is a true source of wealth, and so is capital and land and the other factors of production. There's a long history of criticizing how most of the wealth created by working ends up owned by the owners of capital and land—that's the essential critical point in the discussion of capitalism, whether Marxist or Georgist or Ellermanite.

Or you could say the crucial question is _how can we cure the rich people from the delusion that they have a right to appropriate what they have not produced?"_

<comment><USER13> How do you extend this argument to, let's say, three of the richest people on the planet namely Bill G, Mark Z and Jeff B ? What cure do you suggest for them?

<comment><USER14> That's why the Marxist critique of capital is wrong. Was use of capital to extract rent from others ethical or not? Maybe yes, maybe not, who knows. It is impossible to decide.

Georgist perspective doesn't blame the rich capitalist, but the rentier, no matter if rich or poor. Rentiers provably extract others people's and businesses' labor.

<comment><USER12> Renting out capital is not an ethical problem, but renting labor is. Human actions are not a commodity, and treating persons as tools is wrong for the same reasons "voluntary slavery" is wrong—it violates inalienable rights. The problem with capitalism is that capital owners alienate persons from their own natural property rights through the injustice of employment contracts. (Land ownership is also a problem in our world but it's sort of orthogonal to capitalism, although it depends on how you define capitalism. Georgists make a big distinction between capital and land; maybe we can talk about both capitalism and "landism" as different strands of the economic system?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is oddly seen as something to be proud of rather than an embarrassment among some of the media:

>It is encouraging that a man whose family first got rich because his ancestor was the fat huntsman (gros veneur) of William the Conqueror has £9 billion today, 950 years later. It shows that our culture respects private property over government interference. It gives hope to us all.

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/13/a-dukes- wealth-i...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/13/a-dukes-wealth-is- the-natural-result-of-a-free-society---and-sho/)

<comment><USER16> > William the Conqueror has £9 billion today, 950 years later. It shows that > our culture respects private property over government interference.

I'd love to know how they think William came to acquire that property.

<comment><USER17> If you're open to a bit of interesting fiction, _The Wake_ by Paul Kingsnorth is a post apocalyptic novel set after the Norman invasion of 1066. Kingsnorth wrote the book in an invented version of old english:

[https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/27232308-the- wake](https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/27232308-the-wake)

Here's Kingsnorth writing about the consequences of the Norman invasion upon England today:

> [...] legacies of 1066 remain with us. Take that law enacted by Guillaume in > 1067. In Anglo-Saxon England, the idea that one man — the king — literally > owned the entire landbase of the nation would have been unthinkable. Today, > it remains a legal reality: England is still owned, as a whole, by the > Crown. The hereditary monarchy introduced by the Normans remains too, and > the French concept known as 'primogeniture' — in which estates are inherited > wholesale by the first-born son, rather than parceled out between children > as was more common in Anglo-Saxon England

> [...] Today, Britain is the country with the second most unequal > distribution of land on Earth, after Brazil. More than 70 per cent of the > land is owned by fewer than two per cent of the population. Much of this is > directly traceable to Guillaume, whose 22nd-great-granddaughter sits on the > English throne today.

> [...] ask yourself whether the development of early modern capitalism in > England would have been possible without that concentration of land, and > therefore power and wealth. What about the consequent empire? Did the > industrial revolution begin in England because that funnel of power and > money made it possible? Or what about class, which is directly connected to > all of those things? We are still one of the most socially and economically > stratified countries in Europe. In today's England, the rulers still drink > wine and the 'plebs' still drink beer, just as they did in 1066.

[https://aeon.co/essays/why-1066-wasn-t-all-that-england-s- en...](https://aeon.co/essays/why-1066-wasn-t-all-that-england-s-endless- resistance)

<comment><USER16> > [...] The Duke dealt with this problem in characteristic style: with > violence. He marched his army up through the south-east, burning, looting > and raping. He circled London, burnt Southwark to the ground and then > marched west, brutalising the populations of Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, > Middlesex, and Hertfordshire.

Quite, some good old fashioned respect for the rule of law there...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The social class system in the UK has shown incredible resiliency over the centuries. The names of Normans who came over after the conquest in 1066 are apparently still over-represented at Oxbridge [0]. Further, and per one study, "social status, wealth, education and occupational status was highly heritable – even more so than one's height – and could be correlated to one's family name".

[0] [http://www.lse.ac.uk/website- archive/newsAndMedia/news/archi...](http://www.lse.ac.uk/website- archive/newsAndMedia/news/archives/2013/10/SocialClasses.aspx)

[1] [https://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/30/whats-in-a-name-wealth- and-s...](https://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/30/whats-in-a-name-wealth-and-social- mobility.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> About 40% of US non-residential land is owned by 1% of US families.[1] Up 50% in a decade.

[1] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/21/ameri...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/21/american- land-barons-100-wealthy-families-now-own-nearly-as-much-land-as-that-of-new- england/?utm_term=.dc66dcecb389)

<comment><USER19> Before anyone reads this article. It is talking about actual acreage of land, not dollar value. Most of these 1% own large ranches in rural areas. For some of these people, the reason they own large rural lands is for conservation purposes. For example, the number two private land owner, Ted Turner, uses most of his land for environmental conservation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's certainly preferable to the old situation where more than half of the __world__ was owned by less than 1% of the the British.

<comment><USER21> it's certainly preferable, but that is just once slice of data at one time... what is more important is the trend... are we in the midst of a huge reversal back towards those times?

it would seems so, and if so, i would argue it needs to be stopped before it becomes completely intractable...

<comment><USER22> There's a sobering book "The Great Leveler" that argues that the only time growing inequality is reversed is during large scale war or other mass death event like plague.

<comment><USER23> Both Thomas Piketty and Branko Milanovic have made similar arguments in their respective tomes. The 1950s to 70s in the West were an exception, maybe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's an observable reality that all gains in income by the unlanded class are captured by the landed class in the form of rents. There is hysteresis, so in the short term it can appear the landlord class is losing ground, but it's just an illusion and they always catch up eventually.

Moral: if you have significant financial assets and no real property and you want to provide lasting wealth for your descendants, then a portfolio rebalance is in order.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's also an artifact of the leasehold/freehold system, most properties you buy do not come with a right to the land and you continue to pay a land use tax to the actual owner of the land.

This means that you for example can buy a flat in a newly built development and you'll have to pay like £100 a month for the land use.

The lease itself is assigned to X number of years with laws being passed to force longer and longer leases as well automatic renewal as there have been issues with homes towards the end of their lease with <100 or even <50 years left essentially tanking in value since technically at the end of the lease the land reverts back to its owner.

Don't get me wrong this system is completely shit but this is a click bait.

</comment><comment><USER26> One of my favorite tidbits of history, introduced to me by the Poldark stories, is that of the Basset family of Devonshire. They are one of the few aristocratic families that has an intact patrilineal descent going back to _the Norman conquest_. Which means that in 2066, they will have maintained their family holdings _for 1000 years_.

</comment><comment><USER27> By land area. But that's to be expected really. Most people live in towns and cities.

How many people own 50% of Britain's land by _value_?

<comment><USER28> In towns and cities you often cannot buy a freehold. Is all 100 year leases. The land is rarely up for grabs compared to the countryside.

<comment><USER29> > In towns and cities you often cannot buy a freehold. Is all 100 year leases.

Are you talking about England?

I'd bet quite heavily that in every city in England outside of London 99% of people would have no trouble finding an adequate freehold home

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> That's a bit higher than I would have thought. I had to check my own country, UK's neighbour Norway.

"The distribution of net wealth is highly skewed in Norway. While average net wealth for households is NOK 1.6 million, the median net wealth is NOK 900 000. Households in the highest 10 percent for net wealth own roughly 53 per cent of total net wealth, the richest 1 per cent control 21 per cent, while the top 0.1 per cent own 10 per cent of total net wealth." [1]

So not as high but still quite high here as well. 10% is about 520.000 which is still substantially more people than the 25.000 that own 50% of the UK wealth.

[1] [https://www.ssb.no/en/inntekt-og-forbruk/artikler-og- publika...](https://www.ssb.no/en/inntekt-og-forbruk/artikler-og- publikasjoner/wealth-distribution-in-norway)

<comment><USER31> You seem to be confounding wealth in general and land ownership. I'd be actually surprised if Norway had as inequal land ownership distribution as UK.

<comment><USER30> Ah, that is true.

Home ownership is quite high here [1], 77% of households own their own home. A lot of that is mortgaged. I can't really find equivalent numbers to that in the UK. A lot of the land is "utmark", like out side of cultivated areas, and can be used by pretty much anyone and a lot is just government owned.

[1] [https://www.ssb.no/bygg-bolig-og-eiendom/artikler-og- publika...](https://www.ssb.no/bygg-bolig-og-eiendom/artikler-og- publikasjoner/stort-flertall-eier-boligen)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Hansard 4 May 1931 Commons Sitting ORDERS OF THE DAY

The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr Philip Snowden)

1933 - 34 Financial Year "... a tax at the rate of one penny for each pound of the land value of every unit of land in Great Britain..."

"By this measure we assert the right of a community to the ownership of land. If private individuals continue to possess a nominal claim to the land they must pay to the community for the enjoyment of it, and they cannot be permitted to enjoy that privilege to the detriment of the welfare of the community."

</comment><comment><USER33> This is an improvement from before, right?

</comment><comment><USER34> What amazes me most, is that they still have a queen/king thing going. I am completely unable to wrap my head around how that can happen, in a developed country, in 2019.

<comment><USER35> Britain's democracy evolved gradually from feudalism, without much in the way of violent uprisings or outright revolution. The entire system is based upon incremental changes to give us the democracy we have today with various checks and balances. The monarchy is a vestigial part of that system. Look at stuff like the Privy Council which continues today, and Magna Carta, which was one of the starting points for it all. Technically, the monarch still has a huge amount of power, but in practice they are required not to exercise it. They have to sign everything into law; in a very real sense the law still is what the monarch signs their name to, as is the freehold system of property rights. All the land is owned by the monarchy; you get a freehold on it.

Like the enlightenment and the industrial revolution, democracy wasn't imposed, it came into being here for the first time, and while it's not perfect, there's a lot of factors, including sentimentality and inertia, keeping the status quo going. You could argue that a clean start with a proper written constitution and federal government (with separate state governments for the different countries) would be a good move. But like for any working system, it's painful to disturb entrenched structures, and there's always the risk of breaking something important. The US was able to do a better job; it's easier when you can start from a clean slate with the knowledge of hindsight.

Also, the monarchy has for the most part been a net positive. Compared with what elected MPs have done to the country, I see it as a rather more benign institution in comparison, in recent centuries anyway.

<comment><USER34> "All the land is owned by the monarchy; you get a freehold on it."

I know I'll get downvoted, but I am genuinely amazed by how a small minority of people can gain so much control, and absolutely no one complains. I know there are historical reasons, but it is fascinating nevertheless.

<comment> frosted-flakes All the land is "owned" by the monarchy, but in reality, that theoretical control would be removed in the blink of an eye if they ever made a claim on it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I remember a friend telling me when looking at maps of canada, this one person HMQ seemed to own an awful lot of land.

<comment><USER37> 'Crown Land' in Canada is not owned directly by the Queen as some of the other properties. It's de-facto federal land. Whereas in the UK it's a different structure for her land.

Fun fact: 89% of Canada is 'Crown Land', so about the size of the continental US.

<comment><USER38> 90 percent of the uk crown estate revenue also goes to the public purse.

<comment><USER37> Yes, but I think it's different.

'Crown Land' in Canada is de-facto literally government land, parks, open spaces etc...

In the UK there is 'Crown Estate' (which you are referring to), i.e. the Queen's landholdings, from which a bunch of revenue is derived ... and 'Public Estate' i.e. regular public land in the UK, which is more like 'Crown Land' in Canada.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Either we find a way to avoid excessive wealth concentration, or we are headed for a violent revolution.

<comment><USER29> Are we? What suggest this? We've had very long stints of governments hell bent on increasing inequality and regaining all they "lost" after WW2, yet what violent revolutions have we had?

Look at the small army of police they deployed this weekend for some climate activists. What would the response be to anyone more violent...

<comment><USER7> History suggests this pretty clearly.

The small army of police being friendly and respectful as the demonstrators are being entirely peaceful. Demonstrators who are going out of their way _to get arrested,_ and who have complained enough have not been yet. How did the civil rights protests achieve change? By civil disobedience. Which two deprived regions of England got most immediate help, and a regeneration programme led by Heseltine, during the 1980s deindustrialisation? Why the two that had riots of course - Toxteth and Brixton. Not the regions hardest hit or the only deprived or affected regions.

For a more violent protest you might not even need as many police. They would no longer need to be quite so considerate and use 4 officers to carry away each lying down protester, or other friendly methods of control and containment.

In many ways the extinction rebellion protests have been truly heart warming - in the nature and scale of protest and also in the police response. Mainstream media is finally discussing the issue properly.

Funny that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Meritocracy depends of equality and you can't conceptually have equality with wildly differing starting points.

The transition from feudalism to capitalism would require land reform for equality and meritocracy to have some measure of credibility and meaning but capitalist states seem to have 'forgotten' the crucial step of equalization and moved straight to talking about conceptual 'equality' and 'meritocracy' as if they are operational. This is disingenuous.

'Capital'ism by definition favours capital and the only group that had it in the transition from feudalism were the feudal class who had monopolized all resources and used it to accumulate more wealth and power.

Humans have fought for land and resources for millenia and the equitable distribution of this most basic fundamental resource is the prerequisite for an equitable society. It can't be ignored in any discussion about equality and meritocracy and to do so is so deeply flawed and untenable it requires some level of self interest or simplemindedness to accept.

But a population who fail to have empathy for their fellow citizens and are disingenuous about equality and meritocracy every time they talk about it is perhaps a bigger problem.

</comment><comment><USER41> What form of estate taxes would resolve this issue?

<comment><USER42> Say I die and the state wants to decide what to do with my million-acre farm.

They either have to give it to one person, split it up amongst multiple people, or run it themselves. If they do the first, the headline is unaffected, if they do the last, the headline becomes "half of England is owned by the state".

That leaves splitting it up. But splitting up a farm in a useful way is not always trivial. And if you split one farm into three, how do you choose which three people should inherit these tremendous blocks of land?

It seems almost like we have a simple choice between socialism on one side and pronounced inequality in land ownership on the other, when it comes to large- scale agriculture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> That's why we're the 99%

<comment><USER44> What would you do with more land? Considering that in the UK there are significant restrictions on what you can do with the land.

It's a silly metric.

As someone else pointed out in this section, you need to look at holding by value not by area. That's the more important figure.

I can by 1 acre of land in the country for say £20k but I can do nothing with it except perhaps mow the grass. But that £20k wouldn't get me 1msq in the City of London - because that land (well more of it) can be used to generate lots of economic activity due to its proximity to/location within the world's economic centre.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This doesn't account for land value. Much of this land might be worthless on a m2 basis.

</comment><comment><USER46> This is the crowd that wants to stay in europe- if you get support per square kilometer for farming, and you are a noble with a estate- this is why you want the poor to support the rich.

</comment><comment><USER47> Am I only one who thinks it's absolutely insane to advocate stealing from someone because some people think they are too rich? That is mob rule.

You don't have a right to the wealth of the 1% anymore than they have the right to your wealth.

<comment><USER48> I guess, you have to answer the question as to how the 1% earned it. If they started on a level playing field and just worked harder or were smarter than everyone else, I would say keep it. More likely though it was passed down for generations and they did nothing to deserve it, I find that situation absolutely insane. We found out in the great depression having an insanely wealthy class of people (Rockafellers,Gatsbys, Vanderbilts... )is not good for society.

<comment><USER49> You did nothing to deserve winning multiple genetic lotteries, namely having sufficient intelligence to fall into the HN cohort and being born into a wealthy country and household with access to it and similar resources. You didn't earn your spot in the global 1%, but it in no way follows that you should be expropriated to correct the alleged injustice.

 _Ex post facto_ law has since the Enlightenment recognized as unjust and even tyrannical. Digging back across generations in search of some offense generations ago and punishing innocent parties today is at best a recipe for chaos.

Lavrentiy Beria was head of Stalin's secret police and famous for saying, "Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime." Expropriating _present_ people because of unfair advantages — a criterion never precisely defined and forever subject to political fads of the day, which is to say meaningless — allegedly enjoyed by _past_ ancestors or owners of property is merely another form of the Beria method.

By your own reasoning, neither did the state today do anything to deserve the property that they'd seize. Even if it were justly redistributed, you're forgetting about the cut taken by the middlemen in charge of carrying it out — who also did nothing to deserve taking a share of the loot.

No sound economic case can be made that the distribution of wealth was a cause for the Great Depression. Considering how many human abilities have normal and power-law distributions, _e.g._ , attractiveness, musical ability, intelligence, vertical leap, height, programming skill, lifetime poker winnings, writing quality, golf handicap, typing speed, cooking skill, time to change a tire, ability to plan and manage complex tasks, future orientation, _etc._ , _etc._ , _etc._ , income and wealth accumulation being anywhere remotely uniform would be amazing. Considering the math of power-law distributions, your approach would have a huge majority ganging up on a comparatively tiny minority but ironically in the name of fairness.

"No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic."

<comment><USER50> >Ex post facto law has since the Enlightenment recognized as unjust and even tyrannical. Digging back across generations in search of some offense generations ago and punishing innocent parties today is at best a recipe for chaos.

That's not what's going on here at all. The idea is that property gained through unjust means originally means that the wealth derived from it is still unjustly derived, even if this unjust appropriation happened long ago when it was not deemed unjust then. You would be right if the case were if you were to be punished for the fact your ancestors owned slaves, but the issue is the benefit gained which is currently there.

>income and wealth accumulation being anywhere remotely uniform would be amazing.

Nobody is saying it would be uniform, they're saying that the situation at the moment is _not_ due to the difference in those abilities other than perhaps brute strength in subjugation and plunder. It is difficult to imagine what the world would look like if it hadn't happened, but the distribution of wealth would not be as we see it today in any case.

>By your own reasoning, neither did the state today do anything to deserve the property that they'd seize.

The state may act on behalf of those at a comparative disadvantage, and we have an easier case for arguing they deserve something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I know only one _real_ revolution in history, where the elites were replaced by new blood -- the communist one. Communists killed/expelled anyone who was a little richer than others.

In all other revolutions elites stayed mostly the same.

<comment><USER52> Why was there only one communist revolution? If you're feeling up for seconds, which one was the real one?

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Isn't this how capitalism works? The riches buy out or grab all the valuable assets and everyone else has no choice but to work for them.

<comment><USER54> No, because the rich in this case didn't buy the assets, they inherited them from people who were gifted them for being lieutenants in an invading army 1000 years ago. England is still an occupied country, and the only solution is to revolt against the occupiers.

<comment><USER55> What's the temporal cutoff to your line of reasoning? England was invaded continuously by the Norse before William conquered in 1066. Should we appropriate private property from people who have Norse surnames?

<comment><USER56> No, we recognise that all pretty much land in England has been appropriated by force from the original inhabitants, and that all claims of ownership are tainted by blood.

<comment><USER55> Agree. Except expand your sentence to include the entire world, rather than just England.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> The other 99% needs to stop slacking.

<comment><USER58> Sorry, I'm only working 6 days 18 hours a day this week in the cotton mill. The master has given us Easter Sunday off, because he's a good Christian man. I will endeavor to make up for it next week.

<comment><USER57> You should learn how to contribute more to society.

<comment><USER59> /s? I sincerely hope you are joking.

<comment><USER49> The point is that it's always easy to spend someone else's money or to call for taking it away to fund the latest Good Idea.

Flipping it around to suggest that the _real_ problem is the original proponent needs to step it up so the state can take more of her money triggers a shift in perspective. Everyone thinks _he_ pays his fair share, but that guy down the street is another matter.

<comment><USER58> I didn't read the thread parent as being completely serious, and my not entirely serious reply highlighted the flaws in the argument.

You talk about 'fairness' but you could argue that many different ways. Everyone paying $10000 a year flat rate tax is 'fair', as is leaving everyone with the average income.

Clearly those 2 approaches have problems. At minimum the rich don't want a French revolution type event. But society benefits when people attempt risky ventures, that work out. So clearly you want a balance between these 2 extremes.

The traditional defense of letting richer people keep more of their money is that they worked to earn it through their superior skills. This kind of generational wealth makes a mockery of that.

 _Personally_ I would argue for a higher inheritance tax, let each generation compete on a leveller playing field, decrease the tax burden on the living.

<comment><USER49> The UK's generational wealth discussed in the article and the generational wealth in France at the time of the revolution were propped up by special treatment in the law for nobles, aristocrats, and the "upper class." I believe you and I agree that grants of special privilege by the state are unjust.

As for leveling the playing field, what evidence do you present that it is not already more or less level in jurisdictions that do not prop up class systems? Sure, you can cherry pick Paris Hiltons, but the plural of anecdote is not data. What is the distribution of wealth inherited by present millionaires? What studies can you point to that show conclusively that people who are good at building wealth are also good at transmitting these skills to their children, which would be remarkable?

Perhaps natural processes take care of the problem well enough already if overcontrolling micromanagers would only get out of the way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Typical myopic NY times static view. Omission of dynamics.

Did the same families/people/organizations own this land five centuries? If so, England is in the company of Florence families.

Who was the owner at different points in time?

See Taleb on inequality [https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in- the-game-d...](https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the- game-d8f00bc0cb46).

</comment><comment><USER61> This is not necessarily good or bad, one has to look at everything.

An alternate interpretation is half of the property taxes are paid for by less than 1% of the population, who also are acting as environmental conservators by not subdividing and developing large tracts of unspoiled wilderness.

<comment><USER62> The UK has no property taxes while it has high income taxes therefore increasing the inequality.

<comment><USER35> Property taxes (including inheritance taxes) can introduce huge inequalities of their own. Look at Italy for an example, where there are many beautiful villas left to go to ruin because the taxes were unaffordable for the families who owned them. Many landowners both in Britain and Italy are not really rich, particularly when they inherited them. Taxing them simply forces them off the land their families have owned for generations, and that's not really fair either.

You can buy whole Scottish estates, complete with castles and lochs and hundreds of square miles of wilderness, for less than the cost of a small flat in London. They aren't necessarily particularly viable economically, despite their size, and the owners aren't necessarily wealthy (though some are of course). They get put up for sale all the time for a good reason! They are a huge money sink.</comment></comment></comment>


Speed up Google Chrome by enabling hardware acceleration and pre-rendering - <AUTHOR> http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/03/03/speed-up-google-chrome-by-enabling-hardware-acceleration-and-pre/ <comment><USER2> (I'm a Chrome dev)

about:flags is useful for testing but, in general, you shouldn't switch on random features. If you're doing web page development and want to see how hardware accel affects things, then sure. But if the feature was ready for general use, it would be enabled by default. It's not worth crashing your browser for a few extra frames per second.

(And pre-rendering is something completely different, not related to hardware accel at all!)

<comment><USER3> Can I ask, is any of this going to speed up SVG rendering as well? I noticed that it mentioned "GPU Accelerated 2D Canvas". I'm working on a web app that utilizes the Raphael JS library and SVG heavily, choosing that over Canvas. So, should I have chosen differently? Is Canvas going to get a lot faster vs SVG? Or will these speedups aid both?

<comment><USER2> I believe that speeding up SVG using the GPU is planned but that a few intensive operations on canvas are likely to get switched on first (image compositing, for example).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had hardware acceleration switched on, but I turned it off. I run Linux on a laptop and, from what I've read, xorg's EXA and 2D/3D through OpenGL is problematic for things like minimum power and P states. Heat is already a problem and I don't want the laptop using the GPU unnecessarily.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just found out "Tab overview" in about:flags, it's Expose for Chrome tabs... Awesome!

<comment><USER6> This is already enabled in the OS X build. 3-finger swipe down brings up an expose-like view of all tabs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> YMMV, but I've had problems with Google Maps -- specifically zooming with the mouse scroll wheel -- when I had Chrome 9's hardware acceleration enabled through about:flags.</comment>


Better Email Search - <AUTHOR> http://rein.pk/better-email-search/

<comment><USER2> I remember last year when Greplin was still working on improving search in Gmail - unfortunately I was never that impressed with the results, but I love the premise.

I would especially expect Google to do a better job with email search than they do. They know pretty literally everything about me, and have some amazing natural language processing tech. Of course, using all of the available data and, worse, the NLP algorithms, immediately becomes very expensive computationally. As covered in this Quora thread ([http://www.quora.com/Why- does-Gmail-take-longer-to-search-my...](http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Gmail- take-longer-to-search-my-inbox-than-Google-takes-to-search-the-entire-web)), there's an awful lot of email out there to search.

Maybe local clients like Sparrow are the solution to the high costs of good email search - I don't really mind if my computer bogs down for the half second it takes to get really great results.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like a job for latent semantic indexing. This is a very accessible piece on how LSI works and how it can be applied. <http://www.knowledgesearch.org/lsi/>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks this is fascinating!</comment></comment>


HTML for Microservices - <AUTHOR> https://blog.gladwell.me/html-microservices.html <comment><USER2> Hmm. Sounds a lot like a data format people were using a while back. What was it called? X.... Xm... XML!</comment>


Ask HN: Review my Startup - http://Cardnap.com - <AUTHOR> Check it out: http://cardnap.com/
In short, Cardnap helps you find the most heavily discounted gift cards for your favourite stores. We do this by aggregating the cards from all the various sellers out there, we've got plans to add the likes of Craigslist and eBay so we'll have nearly every marketplace out there. Although, this is just the beginning for us!
Would love your feedback on the idea, execution, and its direction! Bear in mind, this is just our MVP and we've got a long way to go from here. <comment><USER2> I suggest aggregating multiple identical listings into one line item. I decided to just sort all cards by % discount to see if there were any cards I'd actually use that were heavily discounted. After 3 pages of $25 Fandango cards, I gave up and left.

Edit: I decided to go back to see how bad it is. Pages 2-27 are Fandango cards. From my cursory scan, it looks like those 26 pages only list two different card values. I really, really think you should consolidate those listings.

<comment><AUTHOR> Argh! Yeah. This is the #1 most requested thing, we're working on it, trust me :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Clickable: <http://cardnap.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :-)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Woo! So launch is going well! Just got on LifeHacker: [http://lifehacker.com/#!5791193/cardnap-is-an-ebay-for- gift-...](http://lifehacker.com/#!5791193/cardnap-is-an-ebay-for-gift-card- balances) and Twitter is going crazy! <http://twitter.com/#!/search/cardnap>

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice! Here's my 10 seconds experience: in the search results page I got the sentence "Showing 125 cards worth between $10 and $200 discounted from 0% to 50% for ITunes." But the actual results have discounts between 8 and 10. In fact I clicked on "from 0% to 50%" and tried the range 45-50 but got no results; incidentally this distracted me from realising I could have clicked the column header and sorted in the first place. Perhaps the the sortable headers functionality should be more prominent by design. Great idea anyway!

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, we'll make that more clear in the design / text. Cheers

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Love the design. Lachy, you always come up with beautiful designs. Loved <http://paggstack.com> too!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Paras, I really view design as a very important part of a startup or new site. Gotta focus on making things as easy to use as possible, can be a great competitive advantage :-)

<comment><USER6> I agree. It's clean, simple, organized and I know exactly what the site is about in about 2 seconds. Great job.

I'm learning the ropes of design myself for an upcoming project and I'm curious about why you used the multicolor strip at the very top of the page. I've noticed this feature as a mini-trend in Web design and I'd love to know if there is an intentional thought behind it, besides "it looks pretty."

Is it supposed to liven up an otherwise somewhat dull page?

It seems like a lot of people advise sticking to no more than 3 or 4 colors, so I'm really intrigued by the breaking of that convention in this case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Everyone has already addressed the duplicate card issue, so the only beef I actually have is not being able to hit the arrow keys to select the stores that turn up in a search.

For example, I type "Amazon" and I see "Amazon.com" in the drop down, so I tap the down arrow to select it but I can't seem to.

Other than that, love the site and its design. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the compliments on the design. We'll fix those two issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Love the design and the idea (the company I work for could have used this, as they just bought a ton of giftcards). It seems like there are many similar results for the same seller, which I didnt fully understand (seeing as they link to the same thing: <http://cl.ly/1s3P1I3T2v3c0I3N1Z28>). Will come back to this site when I need to buy come giftcards again!

<comment><USER8> Thanks Frank, much appreciated feedback too. I'm Lachy's co-founder (and designer) on this one, very excited to have it up and running.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I typed in amazon and pressed submit and got a 404.I think I pressed 'submit' before the ajax could return a reply (I'm on a slow cellular connection). I clicked the 'buy' button on the homepage and it couldn't find the host for "<http://www.anrdoezrs.net>, which I guess is a referral program?

Cool idea though. Work out some of these kinks and add vendors!

</comment><comment><USER10> I love the idea. A few small comments:

\- On the front page, the little arrow-in-a-circle image rotates on mouseover, and rotates back on mouseout. This occurs whether or not the display is down. I think it makes more sense only to rotate when the item is actually expanded (if you want to indicate it's clickable, maybe you could use the color change thing for that purpose).

\- After doing a search for amazon, it found nothing, but... (\ _) there was still a horizontal list of letters A-Z, and I have no idea what that's supposed to do, (\_ ) the most prominent link on the page is the "back to top", even though I'm at the top already, and (\\*) there's no obvious way to re-search other than to click on the search bar at the top. I would think that, if nothing was found, you should have a "search again" box with the cursor already in it.

I absolutely love the sliders for the amount of discount. Very nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, we'll fix those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pretty cool idea. Nice design! I may be nitpicking but on the about us page you have "Shopping's fun, but it could be funner.."

Technically "funner" isnt a word. But since the branding of your product seems to play towards younger people you can probably get away with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, my co-founder and I had a bit of a debate about this and I won, hah. We let it go because it sort of fit our audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Awesome idea, great looking site, great usability.

The first thing i wanted to do was get a list of cards sorted by highest discount. It's almost like showing me where I can save the most.

I'm not sure how you're deciding on the original set on your homepage, seems quite random. If you showed me the highest savings, it promotes your site as a great way to get deals.

Now, it seems more like a place to get gift-cards with 'some' savings, often less than 10%.

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks good. Couple of issues:

When I search for Best Buy cards and sort by Discount (descending), the top result says a card value of $25 with a price of $24 is an 8% discount. It should be a %4 discount.

When I click the buy button for that Best Buy card (the seller is Cardpool), there isn't an option to buy the $25 gift card. Only $50 and $100 options are available.

Site looks good overall. Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER14> Looks amazing!

On the Rock Melt browser the search function on #filter-store disappears if I hover in the input field. Just a heads up. :)

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice design, although the text seems to spill out of the buy/sell/about boxes. May have to do with my system using large fonts, but I'd expect the divs to stretch anyway.

Is there any guarantee for the buyer that the cards will be valid and not used already? I wouldn't want to deal with multiple entities if a bum card came through.

<comment><AUTHOR> Each of the sites we support provide guarantees, yeah.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Less important of an issue, but about the main image with the text "Cardnap finds the cheapest gift cards for your favourite stores".

I'm probably being pedantic, but the text slightly clashes with the background... I thought a 3-4px white stroke would make it clearer.

Otherwise, the design is great

</comment><comment><USER17> One thing I noticed immediately is the duplication of cards. I wanted to sort by the biggest percent discount and basically the whole first page is the same 1-800-flowers.com cards.

The execution is very tight from what time I spent with it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks -- someone else noted this. we'll fix it asap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Prepaid mobile phone refill cards might be a good addition too. Not sure if there are existing sites to scrape for those like the gift cards. I usually go to ebay and expect to get 10-15% off refill cards.

</comment><comment><USER19> If I press "submit" without typing anything, I get a big fat nice 404. Might want to change that, maybe have it automatically search for iTunes, as is described in the example?

<comment><AUTHOR> Woooooooops! Will fix that.

<comment><USER20> This also happens with "submit" after any entry whatsoever if there's no JavaScript around. Basic search forms should ideally not require such things.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll fix that as well as keyboard shortcuts on the autosuggest. cheers

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Am I understanding 'Balance Checker' functionality right? Currently, it shows me the same results as finding discounted gift cards.

</comment><comment><USER22> Well done Lachy! Good start, and a great MVP. Looking forward to watching it develop..

</comment><comment><USER23> I remember you showing this to me last year I believe when it was still being designed, nice to see it live!

</comment><comment><USER24> cool idea. What did you build it in?

<comment><AUTHOR> Kohana / PHP</comment></comment>


Is it time to up the statistical standard for scientific results? - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/11/is-it-time-to-up-the-statistical-standard-for-scientific-results/

<comment><USER3> > These are the sorts of nuts-and-bolts reproducibility issues that drive > researchers crazy, because they can be affected by things like the specific > strain of mice you use, where you buy your chemicals, and even the pH of > your lab's water supply. No amount of statistical thinking is going to > change any of that.

This screams systematic error and error propagation to me. It's possible that we don't need to up the p-value, we just need to make sure researchers aren't stupid and can properly account for all sources of errors. The problem is that's often an acquired skill over time, not something younger researchers typically think about, especially those who aren't multidisciplinary.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the 95% confidence interval is completely arbitrary to begin with. Is it really better than, say, 94% -- which will most assuredly not get you published? In many fields, I think that a p-value indicating 95% confidence in the results is fine, you are never going to get 99.999% or even 99% due to the errors inherent in the subject of study, which doesn't invalidate the results out of hand. It's the other host of errors, up to and including blatantly cherry-picking or fabricating results, where the focus should be. There's been a series of recent posts encouraging scientists (and, moreover, journals) to publish negative results, which is probably a good starting point to promote greater transparency and honesty in the paper publishing game.

<comment><USER5> This is part of the problem. A p-value of 0.05 absolutely does _not_ (!!!) indicate 95% confidence in the results! What a p-value means is, _if_ the hypothesis in question is false, _then_ we have an x% chance of seeing the observed data. It tells you absolutely nothing about, _if_ you observe such- and-such data, _then_ how strongly should we believe the hypothesis.

For example, you could have an extremely unlikely hypothesis (eg. "dice are controlled by alien telepathy"), test it, and still come out with p < 0.05 because of something much more plausible ("the dice were badly made and are biased"). This is known as the base rate fallacy; an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. Moreover, to prove an extraordinary claim, you must show it is more likely _not_ just compared to chance, but compared to every less extraordinary alternative, including "the experimenters are faking the data".

It's also entirely possible to get a result at p < 0.05 that makes the hypothesis you're testing _less_ likely. Suppose you want to know how far away the nearest star is. The value in the textbook is 13.4 light-years, and you think it's really 12,000. You take some measurements, and get values of 19.6, 17.4, 20.1, 20.4 and 18.5.

Now, this is a significant result at p < 0.05 - _if_ the star is 13.4 light- years away, _then_ getting these numbers has a probability of less than 5%. However, these results completely _rule out_ the hypothesis you're testing. The numbers you get are pretty unlikely if the real number is 13.4, but _extraordinarily_ unlikely if the real number is 12,000, so this experiment makes the 13.4 number _more_ credible. This kind of thing is why lots of researchers still believe in psychic powers - they keep testing for psychic powers, and keep getting results at p < 0.05, but don't notice their results make psychic powers _less_ plausible. (Not joking - <USER2> [http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/11/Wag...](http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp- content/uploads/2010/11/Wagenmakers-Why-Psychologists-Must-Change-the-Way- They-Analyze-Their-Data.pdf) for a detailed explanation.)

This is an elementary mistake that every freshman statistics course warns against, and yet it's absolutely pervasive.

<comment><USER6> > What a p-value means is, if the hypothesis in question is false, then we > have an x% chance of seeing the observed data.

The hypothesis in question is the null hypothesis which must be assumed _true_ not _false_ for the p-value to mean a 100*p% chance of seeing the observed data.

I can see why elementary mistakes are so pervasive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The real problem is that effect size is rarely discussed. P-values only relate to variability, sometimes high variability is acceptable, sometimes it's not. Taken by itself, a p-value is worthless, no matter how small it is. For example, suppose you develop a fertilizer that you're 99.99999% certain will produce one additional ear of corn in 10,000 bushels. Who cares!? You see a lot of that in published papers. A lot of researchers stop once they get a p-value below 0.05 and neglecting effect size is the norm.

<comment><USER8> Effect size is important, because _all_ events in the real world except for true random numbers have _some_ correlation.

Eating an apple might help a broken leg heal faster or slower. There is certainly an extremely small correlation, and with a sufficiently large number of controlled experiments, a result rejecting the null hypothesis with p < 0.05 _will_ be found. The required number of experiments might be astronomically large, but if any correlation exists, it can be found with enough samples.

But without looking at the effect size, the result is useless. Even if eating an apple helps your broken leg heal 2 seconds faster on average, it is pointless to suggest this as medical advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In physics, we use 2-sigma (95%) limits all the time. 5-sigma (99.9999%) is generally required only for a claim of detection.

If you're just feeling your way around in the dark, 2-sigma is a useful way to work, so we use that to guide exploration.

Why 2-sigma? Well, it's twice as big as 1-sigma.

Experiment didn't go well, but you need a more-impressive result? Use a 90% confidence interval instead of 95%.

<comment><USER10> 1-sigma is 68% confidence. 90% confidence intervals assume 1.64 sigma.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, I'll add a line break to denote that they're separate thoughts. 1-sigma is indeed 68%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The problem with upping the standard is, as the PNAS article acknowledges, that you need a larger sample size to produce any given result.

Unfortunately, many studies -- particularly those in medicine -- are already conducted with samples that are too small to detect any effect you'd reasonably expect to see, because many researchers do not calculate in advance what sample size would be required. This has interesting paradoxical effects: the only published studies are those that _overestimate_ the size of the true effect.

[http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/power.html](http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/power.html) [http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/regression.html#truth- inf...](http://www.refsmmat.com/statistics/regression.html#truth-inflation)

So there's a tradeoff. Do you want to eliminate false positives at the cost of more false negatives? It's a difficult balance. I suspect there are many areas where poor statistical practice can be remedied to produce better results without greater expense.

<comment><USER12> I still think the answer is not in any particular standard in any particular field, rather it's outputting the final, worked datasets. Making the numbers themselves available and usable to the 'reader' or scientist following up will immediately clear up issues of reproducibility or not meeting statistical thresholds. If I see the same data, run it through my own processes and it looks like noise I'm likely to discount the results moving forward. There's nothing inherently wrong with saying 'look, I did this once, and this is what I saw'. And many times it's useful. It's less useful, but still reasonable in certain circumstances to say, 'look, I did this a hundred times and I saw this once'. There are occasions when the experiment cannot reasonably have more than a statistically insignificant 'n' \- but it still might be useful to see what happens. What is not reasonable is to say, 'this is what I (sometimes) see always (trust me)' and hide your data behind a 'representative' jpg and a 'statistically significant' p-value.

As I scientist who has worked with both rich, and poor datasets from standard and invented datatypes, I'd just say, "let me see the data".

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> >In most fields, if there's less than a five percent chance that you'd get the two numbers by random chance, then you can reject chance—the results are considered significant. In statistical terms, this is called having a p value of less than 0.05.

No it isn't [1].

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value)

<comment><USER11> The Ars definition of a p value is not precisely worded but, I think, reasonably accurate. It doesn't include the bit about also including the probability of obtaining results _more extreme_ than what you obtained.

The best definition I know is

> The P value is defined as the probability, under the assumption of no effect > or no difference (the null hypothesis), of obtaining a result equal to or > more extreme than what was actually observed.

S. N. Goodman. Toward evidence-based medical statistics. 1: The P value fallacy. Annals of Internal Medicine, 130:995–1004, 1999.

edit: oh dear, and then the Ars article says "Individual experiments may be wrong five percent of the time," but that's exactly what _p_ values do _not_ measure. Statistics is hard.

<comment><USER13> Yeah that definition is good.

For the purposes of understanding the definition, another way of looking at it is basically a 'statistical proof by contradiction':

1\. Assume null hypothesis is true

2\. Compute test statistic

3\. Ask the question, "What is the probability of obtaining that test statistic or one more extreme?" (this probability is the p-value)

4\. Pick a threshold (usually 0.05 but this is totally arbitrary)

5\. If p < threshold then conclude the null hypothesis is false and reject it.

Reductio ad statistico absurdum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Isn't the solution just to put funding into reproducing results? It's fine to have a wide-filter for exploratory research, but a big problem is that it can be decades before anybody goes back to reproduce.

Let's assume that 90% of results are false positives. Using a higher power experiment with even the same standard of p=0.05 would result in rejecting most of those, while hopefully keeping the majority of the true positives (due to the higher power of the new test). This would result in going from 90% false positives to less than half false positives, a considerable improvement.

It just seems that nobody ever advanced their career by trying to reproduce even a landmark result in their field.

<comment><USER15> The issue in day to day science is that people will work their numbers to get p=0.05. They'll have a hypothesis, that, say, lactating adenomas confer a protective effect against DCIS. And they'll pull, say, all lactating adenoma cases from 2001 to 2013. If that doesn't work, they might actually try _dropping_ the 2001 data and just using the 2002 to 2013 data if it gets them to p=0.05. The result is more brittle (we often test findings by asking "How would the p value change if we added one negative case?") but the alternative (pun intended) wouldn't otherwise be published.

This search for p=0.05 also leads to a lot of hair-splitting studies: take two diagnoses, say, usual and atypical ductal hyperplasia. Now, if you can find some constellation of parameters that define a middle category, say, "borderline ductal hyperplasia", you have a wide-open field to all sorts of p=0.05's, even if there's no change in treatment or outcome. You can say "cases previously characterized as UDH with a <parameter x> greater than <x> are 67% more likely to have <parameter y> (p=0.002)" because you lumped together a bunch of stuff that people already mostly agreed on anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My impression is there are a couple issues:

\- Methodology - If you're mining for answers, and then presenting only the statistically significant, you will still find false positives on larger datasets, it will just take more work.

\- Reproduction - If false positives were more fiercely chased down, then this would force researchers to be more careful. There is improvement along these lines.

Changing the p value is arbitrary, and may miss important results. I believe that encouraging reproduction of results, and reducing blind data mining is a better solution.

</comment><comment><USER17> If professional scientists do genuine and not so genuine mistakes, imagine what programmers (who are generally clueless about statistics and theory of experiment) do with benchmark numbers!

</comment><comment><USER18> My teachers always told me that main criteria in "science" is possibility to verify and reproduce. Study which relies on statistics, but no raw data or code is presented, is not scientific.

It does not take millions to check for basic mistakes. One person with computer and free afternoon is enough.

It is like heaving open-source, but without any source code.

<comment><USER19> While I think availability of data and code is important, note that it does not accomplish many of the functions of replication of experiments. If two people implement the described algorithm and get the same results, we can be a lot more confident than if two people run the same implementation, because the same implementation is more likely to have the same bugs.

<comment><USER18> Code has to be reviewed and _VERIFIED_. How can an article pass peer review, if nobody even checked code for basic mistakes?

<comment><USER19> Yes, precisely. Publishing code and data is necessary for _peer review_ , not for _replication_. Both are necessary parts of science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> No, it's not, unless you want _even more_ data dredging and p-value hacking. This won't solve anything, and it'll make matters worse.

</comment><comment><USER21> Researchers should just be forced to append ", probably." to their paper's title and any conclusions reached.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is it ever NOT the time to up the statistical standard? Should science not be constantly seeking to improve itself?

<comment><USER21> Many researchers in less mathematically rigorous fields lack basic statistical knowledge, such as how a p-value is calculated or what a chi-squared test is. And that isn't to be snarky towards them - they have a lot to absorb in their own field. It just means that they are slower to adopt or even know about various mathematical techniques.

This reminds me of the med researcher who rediscovered integration in 1993 and was cited many, many times:

[http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract](http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> [http://xkcd.com/882/](http://xkcd.com/882/)

</comment><comment><USER24> In most areas (social sciences, medicine) there is no "standard" for statistical significance. In economics, people try to deal with the issue by looking at the robustness of a result. If a result remains when you make various changes to the specification of your model, then it is less likely to be a statistical artifact.

Another step in the right direction is greater reproducibility, so that at least people can play with your analysis and see if what you did was the most direct and natural analysis, or if there are clear signs of playing with the parameters until you get the result you want.</comment>