Ask HN: Would you choose Dalvik VM to Arduino? - <AUTHOR> Hi All,

    I developed a Dalvik VM in C from scratch which let you code in Java with lambdas.

 It runs as fast as Arduino UNO/MEGA on a cheaper board with similar power consumption.
 Would you use an Arduino UNO like board which can be programmed in Java?
Below is the list of features
* >1M instructions on STM32 based BluePill board(<$3).
* Precise compacting GC. No fragmentation!
* Interrupt support.
* Native C interface generator.
* Platform abstraction layer for HW peripherals.
* Arrays, Float, Switch, Exception, Interface, Multiple inheritance, dynamic and etc.
Any information is appreciated!
Best Regards <comment><USER2> Do native Java APIs, when paired with special hardware work on such a solution? For example I think It would be cool to attach an Ethernet NIC to such a board and just use Java's HTTP libraries.

Another aspect is, the size of the binaries, as many of those prototyping devices are not limited by their processing speeds, but the flash size.

What about Kotlin support (I presume it works, since Kotlin is compatible with java).

Cheers.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is doable, but I do not believe existing java libraries not written well enough to perform great and consume less space.

I do believe in separating code between the fast and slow path. My goal is to bring open source, well optimized common libraries to VM world.

Platform can handle a simple http server with a NIC as of today but with custom apis.

Kotlin and groovy works for hello world, did not tried further as I am thinking of bringing those languages by eliminating Java ties. I am aware of Kotlin native but 200K for a hello world is not reasonable. I can fit in 21K for VM.

If you have killer app idea for this platform I can make it happen in a very short period of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like a cool project!

I prefer C++ to Java, but I think there's absolutely a niche in the US educational market because the AP Computer Science A test uses Java. It could be pretty nice to have a Java-compatible MCU for the high school students I mentor because that's the language they know, and it would make some cool hardware projects more accessible.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will love to do a demo to you. I can provide a demo sdk if you want to give it a try.

What are the top 3 reasons you prefer C++ to Java for embedded systems?

Do you have a killer project for students in your mind which will help them learn with fun with this?

<comment><USER3> This reply is a little late, but I work on things in the robotics space where there are much more robust libraries for C++ than in Java, and some little extra features (e.g. operator overloading for linear algebra libraries) really make a big difference.

For students however I think that Java is probably the better call (fewer footguns, more resources like the AP curriculum.)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Lower-Level C Learning Resources? - <AUTHOR>

After dabbling in programming for the last 15-20 years and never imagining I'd be much of a programmer, something clicked around 9 months ago. I taught myself C and am now writing code many hours a day, and may soon start dipping my toe into the pool of Assembly.
I'm now to the point where great, detailed, thorough resources are becoming particularly useful as I'm able to better follow them. At the same time, they are becoming more difficult to find.
I'm curious if there are any low-level C programming resources that you consider to be must-haves. My interests have found me in things like... designing hash functions (and writing code that designs highly-optimized hash functions based specific key sets), writing my own TCP/IP stack and working with DPDK for faster packet processing and management, GPU programming, OS design, algorithm design, etc.
For an idea of what I'm looking for, some resources I've found most valuable and as frequent references have been the linux kernel code and documentation, TCP/IP Illustrated (particularly vol 1, first edition), and Agner Fog's work with Assembly.
Thanks for any ideas you might have. <comment><USER2> The Intel reference guides are dense, but well worth spending time on, likely even if you are not writing specifically for Intel chips: [http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/architectu...](http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/architectures- software-developer-manuals.html)

The are the source for many of Agner's excellent materials.

The Software Optimization Reference Manual might be the best starting point: [http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...](http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/manuals/64-ia-32-architectures- optimization-manual.pdf)

Intel's IACA tool is also well worth exploring: [https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel- architecture...](https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-architecture- code-analyzer)

It's relatively unknown, likely due to its terrible interface and poor documentation, but once you get past that, it's invaluable for understanding how the processor actually executes the instructions you provide it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Watch Casey Muratori on Handmade Hero write a video game from scratch with no 3rd party libraries or engines, live on Twitch, 5 nights a week. (All episodes archived on YouTube.)

He has written his own hash tables, his own software renderer, shown how to use compiler intrinsics to write SIMD (SSE) and multithreading optimizations.

He wants to show people how computers actually work and things from game engines to generic UI frameworks shouldn't need to be considered as magical black boxes.

[https://handmadehero.org](https://handmadehero.org)

</comment><comment><USER4> I am currently reading a couple of materials in order to fully understand lower C. Looks like we should correspond, my email is in my profile.Interest area: web server and compilers.

</comment><comment><USER5> As I've gone lower level with C and assembly, I've more books, papers, and specific hardware datasheets for whatever processor or device I'm working on have been relevant to my interests.

</comment><comment><USER6> Linux kernel source code</comment>


Why Church chose lambda (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/3022/why-church-chose-lambda <comment><USER2> For those as confused as I was: "x^" is how the author renders "x̂" (or x-with-circumflex, for the font-challenged).

<comment><USER3> Something seems to be wrong with how Chrome renders this: [http://imgur.com/a/z1tLz](http://imgur.com/a/z1tLz)

<comment><USER4> Funny, works fine on mobile Chrome: [http://imgur.com/ZZseIyB](http://imgur.com/ZZseIyB)

<comment><USER5> It actually works fine for me on Chrome on Linux if I change the font to almost anything but Verdana. The mobile Chrome screenshot seems to be using Roboto, so that would explain the difference.

A bug in Verdana (as it seems to affect Firefox on Linux too)?

<comment><USER3> Is it even op to the font to decide this? It seems that there's some confusion about whether it should combine with the previous or the following character.

<comment><USER5> Combining characters are defined (in Unicode, at least) to always combine with the previous base character.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not that it kept me awake at night, but the question did pop up in my head from time to time. It may be more a topic of cultural history than anything else, but it's nice to get close to an answer.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ah, this makes much more sense considering the big lambda, that is just an angle, ie. a big ^, \hat, carret, whatchamacallit - not a topped over small y.

</comment><comment><USER8> B^A counts functions from A to B. Curious if he was thinking about exponentials.</comment>


Supercharge Your Python Developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeffknupp.com/blog/2013/11/15/supercharge-your-python-developers/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HackersGonnaHack+(Hackers+Gonna+Hack)&ModPagespeed=noscript <comment><USER2> Reminds me of falling into the pit of success[0]. Make it easy to do the right thing by default. I'm about to embark on a new project at work, and setting up a development and testing environment that others find easy is my main goal right now.

[0][http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/08/falling-into-the- pi...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/08/falling-into-the-pit-of- success.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Any reason `should_i_commit_this.sh` wasn't set up as a Git hook? We did this with one of my past teams and I think it has a couple advantages. First, the dev gets immediate feedback and second, they don't have to think about it once the hook is set up. We implemented this for Python with PEP8 and Javascript with JSHint and I quickly saw changes in code quality.</comment>


The Ghosts of the Tsunami - <AUTHOR> https://longreads.com/2017/10/24/the-ghosts-of-the-tsunami/ <comment><USER2> Here is another excerpt from the book that this article is taken from, this one talking more about the disaster at Okawa Elementary School. Be warned, it might be difficult to read.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/24/the-school- ben...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/24/the-school-beneath-the- wave-the-unimaginable-tragedy-of-japans-tsunami)

<comment><USER3> I read that at the time of publication. It made me both sad and angry; all of those children... because of what amounted to bureaucracy. I can't imagine what being a parent at work and too far away to react in time must have felt like. Harrowing stories.

<comment><USER4> It doesn't seem to me that the issue was bureaucracy, but the extreme scale of the event and the complete lack of preparation regarding it. And to a degree, the arrogance of teachers who should have realized they didn't know what to do given the useless manual.

It was bureaucracy that stopped them from going to hill... but thats simply because the bureaucracy was doing what it does to stop panic and chaos. In a situation where the event was prepared for, having a small group of kids yelling orders and running off _is exactly what you don 't want_. You don't want conflicting orders running around; else (if the bureaucracy judged correctly, and went to the hill), you'll end up with a group of kids and teachers or parents not following orders and staying in the school instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The cult of the ancestors, mentioned in the article, is nothing specific to Japan. Most civilizations in antiquity had their own version of it. And progressively distant ancestors become god like figures, this is a well observed mechanism outside of the leading monotheist religions.

<comment><USER6> Wile true, how many others can claim to be the main religion of an industrialized nation after centuries of preachers from the ones holding sway over most of the globe?

<comment><USER5> You are aware that Japanese massacred Christians en masse right? That explains the current situation.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: BreakoutEx – A breakout clone written in pure Elixir - <AUTHOR> https://breakoutex.tommasopifferi.com/ <comment><USER2> wow this really stuttered for me but i am using firefox so who knows? 12core/32gig ram tho so its not my machine!</comment>


Mozilla experimenting with Mobile OS: Boot to Gecko (B2G) - <AUTHOR> http://hothardware.com/News/Mozilla-Developers-Testing-Mobile-OS/

<comment><AUTHOR> Large version of those display mockups can be found here:

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/UI#Ben.27s_interpretation_of_de...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/UI#Ben.27s_interpretation_of_description_of_UX_team.27s_ideas)

</comment><comment><USER2> To be honest, I rather just see HP open source webOS and assign it to Mozilla.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you feel about shorthand? - <AUTHOR>

The age of moleskine mania has thankfully mostly left us by now; only a couple years ago it seemed like the whole internet had agreed that one simply could not get any work done unless one had a Fisher Space Pen and one of several very specific notebooks at hand at all times. Nevertheless it seems that some people still do find it useful to keep a notebook with them, and are generally still interested in the process of writing things down—even while the majority seems to think that writing by hand is a skill as worthy of personal development as, say, horse-buggy skills.
For several years now I've been developing my own system of shorthand. It started as, simply, my own system of letter shapes, because I had terrible handwriting—I just devised a single, consistent, attractive character set for myself and then trained myself to use it exclusively and always, so that my handwriting was more attractive and even.
But as these things go—informed by a personal interest in historical text systems—I started to include extra-alphabetical characters into the mix. First an ampersand, then a couple special double characters, a dollar sign; quickly I moved on to ligatures—some pre-existing in the Roman alphabet, but some of my own creation. And then characters for common words, prefixes, suffixes. I started using superscripts and subscripts and drawing inspiration from historical scripts like old Anglo Saxon writing, Tironian Notes, the Abbreviationes of the Middle Ages, et cetera. And so now I've got a relatively sophisticated system with several hundred different characters in it, and a whole set of rules of composition.
Partly this is an exercise in efficiency—my writing is much shorter and faster than plain English—but it's also an aesthetic undertaking. I do derive a lot of artistic pleasure from it, from the system of it, and from the look of it on the page.
So my question is: does anybody care about this? Of all the people I've told about it, many of them thought it looked awesome when I showed it to them, but only one person ever expressed any interest in learning it for himself, and so I don't even know how learnable it is. I wonder if there's some geeky demographic out there on the web who would find value in my documenting the whole thing, writing a couple explanatory essays, scanning all the characters, etc., et cetera. If there isn't, by the way, that's ok. Like I said, I am quite proud of it for its own sake and it's fun to trot out at geeky parties. But if I thought that I'd get any kind of response from the web at large, I'd think hard about putting in the (non-trivial) effort to really document the whole thing and try to make it as learnable as possible. <comment><USER2> I think for me it would be much like the Dvorak keyboard layout: It would save me so much time and I would love it, but I just can't unlearn something so deeply ingraved into me. I've tried, but it just turned out to be counter productive cause of the time spent relearning = time could have just typed the damn thing in QWERTY.

Btw, I was hoping this article was about ternary operator shorthand. (e.g. result = a > b ? x : y;) In that case I would have said HELL YES.

<comment><AUTHOR> The one advantage that my system has is that it's a little more like Colemak than Dvorak—to drop the metaphor, my system basically takes a standard line of plain text and does a lot of character substitution. So not only is any line of my system's (got to think of a better name) text non-lossy with a single unambiguous line of Roman alphabet text, but you can basically learn it as you go: writing everything down normally and replacing characters and clusters as you learn those new glyphs. You don't have to start from scratch like in Dvorak, or like in all those nutty swoopy shorthand systems of yore.

<comment><USER2> Well to answer your question more directly, I'm 100% sure there are plenty of people who would enjoy you documenting it. Even if I didn't use it, I'd read it. Never underestimate our geekiness! I'm sure I'm not the only one who surfs Wikipedia several hours a day learning the most random shit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I briefly thought about learning real shorthand because I couldn't write fast enough. Never really followed through on it. If I wasn't so lazy, I'd probably stick with a standardized version instead of yours. I imagine most other people would be the same, unless you could convince them your system is significantly faster or easier to learn.

</comment><comment><USER4> +1 very interested in reading about it.</comment>


Intern at a YC Company - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/intern-at-a-yc-company <comment><USER2> In case anyone still can't access it:

Intern at a YC Company

by Y Combinator

Would you like to intern at a YC company this summer? We're helping place paid interns at YC-backed companies like Dropbox, Stripe, Optimizely and others.

You'll get:

> A chance to work with one of Silicon Valley's most exciting companies

> An invitation to YC's intern conference

Please fill out our application[1] by March 21, 2014. We'll notify you by March 31 if you've been accepted.

[1] [https://ycombinatorevents.wufoo.com/forms/intern-at-a-yc- com...](https://ycombinatorevents.wufoo.com/forms/intern-at-a-yc-company/)

<comment><USER3> >Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private) YouTube video introducing you.

Does this violate equal opportunity employment or is there some weird legal exclusion?

<comment><USER4> As someone with no legal expertise in any area: Well, the companies are getting age/race/gender information from seeing you and they could use this information to discriminate against a protected class, but I don't see how its different from in-person interviewing where they would have access to the same information.

<comment><USER5> >I don't see how its different from in-person interviewing

An in-person interview is a two-way conversation and costly (in time and energy) for both sides. It is ideally a rich experience with a lot of infomation.

What we have here is a call for a very short (1 minute) one-way look at the candidate, who is asked in incredibly vague terms to introduce themselves.

IANAL but it seems like an attorney could make a case that such a short video with so little non-visual content -- no meaningful prompt, no real chance to show skill -- is a pretext for discrimination based on age or race or gender. Not that _I 'm_ saying it is, mind you, but asking for a video "introducing you" does suggest that the content of what the speaker says is incidental to who the speaker is. Particularly for a job that does not involve introducing yourself all the time (are these sales interns? receptionists?).

Why not a prompt like "...introduce yourself and explain why you're interested in working for $COMPANY..."?

<comment><USER6> > An in-person interview is a two-way conversation and costly (in time and > energy) for both sides. It is ideally a rich experience with a lot of > infomation.

That's a valid point, but I don't think that discrimination laws say anything about the time and effort required by each party.

<comment><USER7> Time and effort are being used here as evidence against wrongdoing, not as something inherently legal or illegal. Think "security footage confirming an alibi". Laws about murder say nothing (or very little) about security footage, but that doesn't mean it can't be used as evidence.

Suppose that it is illegal to discriminate by using information of type A and that the following media transmit the following types of information:

In-person interview (IPI): A,B,C,D,E,F,G

Vague video upload (VVU): A,B

Cover letter + resume (CLR): B,H,I

In this slightly oversimplified example, it would be illegal to request VVU+CLR because the only possible motive for requesting VVU+CLR instead of CLR would be to obtain information that was illegal to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Please submit your application by March 21. We'll notify you by March 31 if > you've been accepted.

That's it? There's no interview or coding test? I'm all for a quick process, but I've never seen a tech company accept interns like this. Or does accepted mean you've been accepted for an interview at a YC company?

<comment><USER9> It looks more like a higher-level or job searching for startups. If YC thinks you're a good fit, they add you to a job pool for the start-ups to pick and choose people to actually interview the candidates. Some companies function like that, where the "startups" are the company teams.

This is all perception of whether YC will actually follow this method of course..

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A bit of advice. Do check that you are not doing an internship with immature first time CEOs/CTOs.

I've seen an intern lied to, abused and dismissed without recommendation letter and promised salary by a CEO/primary founder of a YC company that I was with. This was no fault of that intern and AFAIK was done primarily because that [recently immigrated from India] CEO wanted to save about $3k of moneys. One of the reasons I've left that company and dropped from YC BTW...

edit: a clarification. this _is_ anecdotal evidence and probably doesn't reflect statistics of YC companies in general.

<comment><USER11> Interesting how you consider "[recently immigrated from India]" to be relevant here.

<comment><USER10> I don't know. Maybe I'm very wrong here. But I think there is a correlation between 'fighting for scraps' behaviour and 'recent immigrant'. I do not have statistics to confirm that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Any prospect of accepting high schoolers who have the necessary skills? Would it help if I am concurrently enrolled in college as well?

<comment><USER13> Go for it and apply. I'm sure you're qualified :-)

<comment><USER12> Thanks, I'm filling out my application at the moment :) Hopefully being in HS doesn't affect my prospects too adversely.

<comment><USER14> Might have an opportunity for you. If you don't get an internship at a YC, let me know! (details in profile)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I suggest looking at interns all year long and not just during the summer months. University of Waterloo has a co-op program for students where they have work terms throughout the year.

Interns can be very high value if the environment is setup for them to contribute.

<comment><USER16> Agreed. Especially since University of Waterloo seems to be churning out more talent than ever.

A little more info for those interested:

University of Waterloo has the generic Computer Science program as part of the Math faculty, as well as an another Software Engineering program as a joint program between the Math and Engineering faculties. Both programs offer co-op all year around. For more information, check out: [https://uwaterloo.ca/jobmine/employers](https://uwaterloo.ca/jobmine/employers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Any chance this will be an ongoing program not limited just to summers?

I ask this because there are a growing number of schools (including mine) that have full time Intern/Co-op programs in during the Fall and Spring semesters that I know would have interested and talented students.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is Kat, YC's Director of Outreach. We're beta testing this program on a small scale for Summer 2014. It may evolve based on how things go this summer, but I can see it becoming an ongoing program.

<comment><USER17> Awesome,thanks for the reply. I'll keep an eye on it going into my last Co-op next Winter/Spring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What if I graduate in march (this year)? Can I still apply? (I would require a J-1 visa, but recent grads can get it, it seems)

</comment><comment><USER19> Is this just for technical internships?

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a great idea which I thought YC should have been doing for some time now. It also translates well to hires because of culture, experience, and passion for the team/product.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think most US undergrads start applying for internships during the fall semester and many of them will have already accepted an offer by now. I strongly suggest YC to open up this application earlier, ideally in October or November.

<comment><USER22> In my experience at Stanford, this usually wasn't the case. Most people started looking for internships around February-April. Obviously not the case everywhere... but it's the case at arguably one of the closest talent pools to YC.

<comment><USER23> I'm a current Stanford junior. In my experience most people feel stressed if they haven't committed to an offer by early February. The major career fairs for internships take place mid-January, with a more full-time oriented fair occurring in October.

The majority of CS majors I know were locked in before mid-February.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm curious if YC itself is looking for interns.. it looks like they might need help fixing the blank screens people have been getting, haha. Nonetheless, this is awesome!

</comment><comment><USER25> Can grad students who are interested in leaving academia apply?

<comment><USER26> Yes :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is sweet news, I don't have any actual job experience so getting an internship this way would be amazing. Good luck to everyone applying!

</comment><comment><USER28> Do we get a choice of what we do? I am interested in testing and security only not so much feature building and front-end work.

Also, do grad students qualify?

</comment><comment><USER29> >An invitation to YC's intern conference

That sounds neat. Will interns working at YC companies but not placed through this program be invited?

<comment><USER30> Incoming Dropbox intern here. Interested in that as well. Could someone from YC answer that? Many thanks!

<comment><USER31> Another YC intern here. I want to know this too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is intriguing but the application website isn't working for me. The blog post is working fine though.

</comment><comment><USER33> Do you think applying for this as well would negatively effect one's summer YC application?

</comment><comment><USER34> Wish this was posted earlier, already landed a job. Will this only be available for summers?

</comment><comment><USER35> What if I'm not from the US and require a work permission? Any chance of applying?

<comment><USER36> I have no inside info, but my guess is probably not. Unless we're talking about AirBnB or Dropbox, most YC companies aren't going to want to take the time out to deal with the regulator¥ hassles of H1B sponsorship.

That said, for the perfect candidate, exceptions will be made.

<comment><USER37> Internships would fall under J1, which isn't all that hard to get.

<comment><USER15> North American interns with a technical background should be eligible for TN visas as well.

<comment><USER38> Are you speaking from experience? I've found the TN process really confusing for an intern, and if you have any experience with the application process, I'd love to hear about it.

<comment><USER15> Yes. Get the company's lawyer can fill out the paperwork for you and you show up at the airport with the paperwork and receive a visa. You can't apply in general for a TN, it is company specific.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Does anyone know what are the dates for this internship? Is it May-August?

</comment><comment><USER40> Are there remote interns ?

<comment><USER41> Yep, would it be possible to work from a different continent and a different time zone?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I get a blank screen....

<comment><USER43> maybe this is part of the test?

/jk

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Nothing but a blank screen in the latest version of Chrome.

<comment><USER45> I've noticed a strange bug with the latest version of Chrome where pages sometimes don't render. Try opening the developer tools, this usually causes the page to render for me.

<comment><USER36> I've noticed the same bug, but dev tools doesn't seem to do anything and view- source is blank. This one though seems to be a site issue:

        $ traceroute blog.ycombinator.com
        traceroute to posthaven.com (184.108.40.206), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
         1  10.142.83.65 (10.142.83.65)  0.892 ms  0.719 ms  0.769 ms
         2  216-13-232-1.dedicated.allstream.net (126.96.36.199)  1.213 ms  3.646 ms  1.234 ms
         3  216-23-136-13.dedicated.allstream.net (188.8.131.52)  2.256 ms  8.470 ms  1.299 ms
         4  66-46-123-225.dedicated.allstream.net (22.214.171.124)  18.638 ms  12.393 ms  13.011 ms
         5  eqix-ch.godaddy.com (188.8.131.52)  58.324 ms  61.302 ms  60.216 ms
         6  * * *
         7  * * *
         8  * * *
         9  * * *
        10  * * *

etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Is this the first year that they are doing this?

</comment><comment><USER46> Do you have to be a current student to intern?

</comment><comment><USER47> Can international students apply?

</comment><comment><USER48> Crossing my fingers!</comment>


Flash Game Simulates Living on $9/hr. - driftsumi-e http://playspent.org/ <comment><USER3> I find that I live a much more active life in this game than I ever have in real life. Back when I was making $9/hr, I can't remember a single week where my dog died, I got injured at work, the neighbor kid broke my window, I decided to see a therapist and one of my co-workers came down with a terminal condition.

I only made it to day 13, but already I've spent more in that game than I did in real life over the last month. I realize it's trying to make a point, but all it's really doing is making me suspect that it's fibbing a bit. More realism might turn out to be more convincing.

<comment><USER4> Right. And here's a different flash site, which shows that literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide increased their real income over the last twenty years:

[http://www.gapminder.org/labs/gapminder- china/#$majorMode=ch...](http://www.gapminder.org/labs/gapminder- china/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly=2003;lb=f;il=t;fs=11;al=100;stl=t;st=t;nsl=t;se=t$wst;tts=C$ts;sp=4.0174193548387;ti=1990$zpv;v=0$inc_x;mmid=XCOORDS;iid=pp59adS3CHWfKPVb7dEexFA;by=ind$inc_y;mmid=YCOORDS;iid=rvalNLkeEs-y9Tp1T-SZb0g;by=ind$inc_s;uniValue=20;iid=pp59adS3CHWfpIxpjegY4bw;by=ind$inc_c;uniValue=255;gid=CATID1;by=grp$map_x;scale=log;dataMin=83;dataMax=101655$map_y;scale=lin;dataMin=8.8;dataMax=83$map_s;sma=53;smi=2$cd;bd=0$inds=;modified=80)

Somehow hundreds of millions of people in China and elsewhere went from far more deprived conditions to first world status over the span of a few decades. Nothing in that game compares to the horrors of the Cultural Revolution or the mass starvation of the Great Leap Forward. So clearly it is _possible_ for an entire civilization to pull itself up by its bootstraps through capitalism. [0]

Finally, as noted the game stacks the deck against reality. It starts you out as a single parent with no savings and evidently no family members who will help you out...without any acknowledgement of the fact that broken homes, divorce, out-of-wedlock births, a lack of a high school diploma, and a failure to save are _the_ major causes of poverty. [1], [2]

If the game started a few years earlier and asked "do you want to complete high school" and "do you wait till you're financially stable before marrying & having children", the overall message would be very different. Indeed, the authors would likely be accused of having unfashionable political sympathies for simply advising that people mimic the behaviors of middle class Asian immigrant families.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/Third-World-First- Singapore-1965-2000/...](http://www.amazon.com/Third-World-First- Singapore-1965-2000/dp/0060197765)

[1] <http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba428>

[2] <http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/2010/pdf/bg2465.pdf>

<comment><USER5> I agree with your main points, but did your closing sentence need to get racist?

<comment><USER6> That statement may have a bit of racial stereotyping as we can be sure that not all (100%) Asian immigrants were so frugal but I don't see any malicious intent ... I get the impression that the statement is positive. I know I've been impressed by the work ethic of many immigrants I know (Asian and otherwise) compared to those who sit and wait for their government welfare checks. I understand welfare for those who are truly needy, but there needs to be a way to lift them up so that it's not permanent (with perhaps the exception of those with disabilities that prevent it).

<comment><USER7> I guess I don't mind providing people the bare minimum to live without strings attached. I'd actually agree with Hayek and Friedman that we should attach _fewer_ strings and just make them cash payments, because that's less distorting; all the book-keeping and social engineering to try to get people off welfare, and to not "waste" the welfare money when they're on it (Section 8 housing, food stamps, etc.) costs more and distorts the economy more than just paying them would.

I don't think great things in civilization get done solely out of people needing to work the bare minimum to survive anyway; if that's all they were going to work, just paying them $10k subsistence is not a huge loss to society, and even pretty cheap by the standards of the other stuff we spend money on. Actually it'd be a pretty sad commentary on civilization if it were only the threat of literally being homeless/starving that inspired people to work; that's what it was like in subsistence-farming days, but surely a wealthy country can move beyond that, and make the baseline something higher, even if only "ramen + crappy apartment"? Plus, I think we'd make it back in how much it'd increase entrepreneurship if people felt more confident in a safety net being there if they failed (people from lower-class backgrounds w/o a family safety net, in particular, are _very_ afraid to leave steady jobs if they have one).

<comment><USER8> Lets assume that ten percent of Americans choose to take the ten grand/year you suggest.

Thats 30 million times ten times one thousand. Thats 300 billion dollars. That is ten times the cost for the war in Iraq back in 2001 and 2002 (both years). How on earth do you think the US could pay that considering that it has a deep deficit in the first place?

<comment><USER7> Well, in the first place, that's 8% of the federal budget, which seems like a pretty small price to pay for ensuring that everyone has a basic existence (minimal food/shelter). There are certainly stupider things we spend 8% of the federal budget on.

And in any case, one purpose is to be a replacement for the current piecemeal programs we have, which aren't cheap to begin with. Food stamps + Section 8 + EITC currently costs about $150 billion per year, plus some additional amount in bureaucracy and litigation due to complex rules, plus some additional economic damage caused by market distortion due to the fact that food stamps + section 8 aren't normal cash (EITC is better for that). That leaves maybe $100-150b, some of which is probably also redundant with existing welfare programs (I just picked three big ones), or about 3-4% of the federal budget.

If you want to keep it budget-neutral, how about an across-the-board 3-4% cut to all other budget categories in return? Or, we could just, as you point out, remove the temporary "overseas contingency operations" (Iraq/Afghanistan wars) supplement to the regular DoD budget, which is $125b in 2012, returning the DoD to its baseline budget. If I had a line-item veto pen I could pretty easily come up with another few hundred billion in savings if you'd like (cut agriculture subsidies, cut Medicare Part D, transition TSA/air-traffic-control to being fully user-fee-funded, do another round of domestic military-base closures through a BRAC-like process, etc., etc.). :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What a joke. In the month, I got sick twice, had two 'best friends' get married, had a grandfather die, needed a root canal, wrecked my car (even though I chose to pay the max rent and live 5 miles from work, it told me I still _had_ to to have a car), had my sink break (and the landlord refuse to fix it), got caught hiding pets in my apartment (why do I have a pet? I can't afford a pet, that is just a bad decision.).

I get it, they are trying to make a point. However, the point they are making is crap. It is very hard to live on $9 an hour. However, making $9 puts you in the top 1% of all humans who have ever lived. There are lots of social programs that will help a little. They don't make you rich, but they help a little.

The first thing I ask anyone who complains about being unemployed or underemployed: "Do you have a TV? Do you have cable or satellite tv?" You wouldn't believe how hostile people are when you suggest that they might benefit from turning off their tv and using that time to study or learn a new skill. As a child my family was on food stamps and welfare. My mother raised 4 boys on her own. As it turns out, I am now in the top 1% of wage earners in the US, but _I_ don't have time to watch TV. I have never taken a real vacation. I suffered through 6 years of Army Reserve so I could pay for college. Every free minute I have is spent working, hustling, studying, experimenting.

I don't believe the hype. If you are willing to work your ass off, if you show up to work on time and aren't high or drunk, and you don't steal, it is very easy to get a job, today. It's easy to get 2 jobs. Working 80 hours per week isn't something that you want to do, but it's a walk in the park compared to the conditions our ancestors lived in.

It's really hard to take care of kids when you are a single parent and you can't get childcare, especially if you don't have family that is willing to help. Maybe we should do more for people in this situation, not to help them, but to at least give the kids the opportunity to do better. For everyone else, I say stop whining, throw away your tv, and stop being so entitled and lazy.

<comment><USER10> I just played a round of this game (ended with $322), and I felt like it was a compelling demonstration of why I'm not poor.

I know they wanted to present an argument of "oh, all these bad things happen that keep people poor", but I really saw a bunch of small decisions that, when made poorly, accumulate into having no money.

<comment><USER11> > I know they wanted to present an argument of "oh, all these bad things > happen that keep people poor", but I really saw a bunch of small decisions > that, when made poorly, accumulate into having no money.

I think the latter is much closer to reality, at least for people who are on their way to poverty. Or maybe a mix of both. There are problems that are equally probable to rich and poor, but the former can sometimes just throw money at them until they're gone, and the latter have to deal with them the hard way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like the concept a lot but the game is just too rigid to be realistic. It's essentially a propaganda piece and the choices it gives you are no-win by design (so that the game has opportunity to lecture you on the plight of low- wage workers). Real life is not so restrictive.

It seems a bit involved to get across what could have been an infographic.

I'd really like to see someone take a more serious and/or interesting approach to this concept. This game plays like an old "choose your own adventure"; you have "choices", but everything is pre-determined and there are only a handful of available story routes, which in this case are designed to make it difficult to complete the game while selecting any of the presented moral options and then to show that you'll only have a few dollars left in exchange for abandonment of all principles.

<comment><USER13> I had no problem getting to the end of the month with cash left over. Of course, I also work for a factory so I know an awful lot of $9/hr workers and how they live, so it wasn't that hard. You have to make a lot of hard choices. No, it's not easy.

While this is a bit overdone, there's a lot of truth to this thing. I've seen the results of an unplanned child, days people come in sick because they really can't afford to miss work, and things like that first hand.

Some of the people really have dug themselves into holes all on their own, but there are other folks who are just trying to scrape by with the crappy hand they've been dealt. It depends on the person, really and I could give you examples of both.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are three things I find annoying by this game.

I shouldn't be driving a car if I don't have money for it. I should sell the car and always take bus, since later in the game it says I have that option.

I had to choose if I should stay with an hourly paycheck or work by the piece. I choose piece because then I thought I could put in some more work, but then it just said I couldn't work that much. Well if I had known that I would have stuck with an hourly check, that's math you can actually work out in real life before making that decision.

It says I have a college degree but that wont help me, and then it says I'm probably too uneducated to help out my children with math homework.

All in all some interesting facts about the american low-income society, but the choices and different aspects of it are very strange. You could do a lot more to save money as well as make more money than is presented here. Well basically, kind of annoyingly simplified.

<comment><USER15> The game is also advocating playing on the lottery as investing in your future.

That's not even the right message to send out.

<comment> driftsumi-e I don't think much encouragement is needed there. I hear the phrase "If / When I win the lottery..." cited too often as a cure-all. That weekly or daily lottery allotment would be better spent elsewhere but unfortunately isn't.

<comment><USER16> Non-linear utility of money, especially when negative money is involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My major reactions while playing the game tended to follow a theme:

        Game: Mobile phone bill's due.
        Me: I have a mobile phone??
        Game: Landlord wants pet rent for the dog.
        Me: I have a dog??
        Game: Car payment's due.
        Me: I have a CAR???
        Game: How about some $60 internet?
        Me: How about the $20 non-broadband type?
        Game: You lost your car, so you lost your job.
        Me: No, see, that's why I paid extra to live close.  We call them bikes.

<comment><USER18> A "let's gain empathy by playing being poor" game seems like a horrible idea overall.

If it was a decent game and let you learn and succeed by smart choices, it would only give you a feeling of superiority to poor folks.

If (as it does) it inflicts you with pre-existing poor decisions and random "the gods are angry" punishments, it seems to impart a feeling that poor folks are somehow hopeless and cursed, which isn't really helpful either.

Wouldn't it be a lot more helpful to teach teenagers and pre-teens real-life strategies for independent living? Things like showing you how much money you end up paying to rent furniture or lease a car?

Maybe something like the old board game Pay Day?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_Day_(board_game)>

<comment><USER19> Or the old Sierra game "Jones In The Fast Lane".

Something like that (more sophisticated, with more detail, and more opportunities to make dumb and smart decisions) should be compulsory playing for young kids. Much like astronauts training for their missions, I reckon that by the time kids get old enough to make their own life decisions, they should have done it in the simulator hundreds of times.

I'm being somewhat facetious, of course, you can't make a simulator anywhere near as detailed as real life. Still, I think life-simulation games have a part to play in teaching children good values like delaying gratification and so forth.

<comment><USER18> I am a huge fan of this line of thinking. I love your astronaut example which I hadn't heard before. Nor had I heard of _Jones in the Fast Lane_ which is exactly the kind of game rarely seen today.

I'm a career game programmer and web developer. In the last five years, I was on two game shows in the last five years and before each one, knowing I only had one shot, I made software to help me simulate the experience and work out the strategies I would use. I did well in both cases and am convinced that simulating things really helped.

So I'm really sold on simulation being a great way to impart practical knowledge. There's a lot of stuff out there that could really use that treatment and I agree with your enthusiasm for it. Let's get in touch and see if there's some way to push this forward.

<comment><USER19> Email in profile. I can't promise to be able to provide anything other than moral support, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This would be a lot better if it were more realistic, it banks on you not being able to make smart decisions to ram the various factoids down your throat. It would be a much better experience if the basics were spread out over multiple months with the occasional clustering of events.

This 'perfect storm' of trouble is just setting you up for failure, the deck is stacked against you much further than it is in real life. You are also not given the full picture up front, nor are you given the option on which services you subscribe to.

Also, if you can't afford a mobile phone you probably shouldn't have one, and if your landlord does something illegal an alternative option is to tell him to go f*ck off rather than to pay or move out. Good luck evicting me if I'm up to date on payments and the contract stipulates terms that I've lived up to.

That said, it's probably a useful tool to get people to put themselves in the shoes of someone that has it worse than they themselves do.

<comment><USER21> _if your landlord does something illegal an alternative option is to tell him to go f_ ck off rather than to pay or move out. Good luck evicting me if I'm up to date on payments and the contract stipulates terms that I've lived up to.*

I have never ever experienced a landlord trying to raise my rent mere days after I moved in, like they seem to do in this game.

<comment><USER7> It's not uncommon if it's cheap housing that's only semi-legit to begin with. When I lived in Santa Cruz, I heard all sorts of this kind of shady behavior going on with sublets, which due to housing shortage was the only thing you could really get for <$1000.

<comment><USER19> But what are they gonna do? They can't legally evict you under those circumstances, so just keep paying the originally-agreed rent.

<comment><USER7> You might be able to prevail, yeah, but many people are a bit scared of finding themselves on the street, unable to find another apartment, so aren't willing to play hardball. With an unofficial sublet (no signed lease, etc.), landlords don't necessarily resort to proper court-supervised eviction proceedings; "eviction" can take the form of "change the locks and dump your stuff on the curb, and deny that you ever lived there", which probably rarely happens but seems to be a common worry of people renting irregularly with no paperwork.

Then you'd have to find somewhere to live, and undertake the time/expense of suing. The best protection is probably a bit of a mutually assured destruction angle if the landlord is breaking the law through the irregular rental in the first place (in Santa Cruz many of the rentals are off the books because they aren't even legal rental units--DIY converted garages and attics and such).

Not sure how big that "informal rental" section of the economy is, though, so maybe this isn't a common situation. I'd guess it's highest in NYC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I played the game, and came out $199 ahead...and that when faced with absurdly limited options (say, the rowdy roommate would see a Mosin/Nagant ($29!) instead of the landlord when told to leave, so no extra $100 cost there). No risky sacrifices (medical bills paid, job attended to), no luxuries until affordable (and sentimentality is a luxury).

I should have taken copious notes (maybe I will on another pass) and comment how, instead of viewing it all as crushing poverty, it is indicative of living in a luxurious society. Opt for the $1 hamburger, and be told "that's why so many poor are overweight"? WTH? If it's got that many calories then cut it in half and eat it across two meals! If you're obese, you're not poor; talk to the half of the world's population which lives on less than $2/day.

So, coming out a couple hundred dollars ahead, I could run this "poverty" scenario for 4 months and have enough to buy a refurbished MacBook Air and join the Apple Developer's Program, with which I could bootstrap an iOS App- writing business. Seems some others played, came out over $1000 ahead, and could jump in to app-writing in one month flat.

Read between the lines in the game, and see the opportunities that abound. Sell the car and take the bus. Focus the kids on learning entrepreneuring instead of sports. Take in a decent paying roommate (and throw out the rowdy one bodily if need be). Use the library for education and internet businesses. Eat the $1 hamburgers featuring caloric abundance. Heck, save the $1 and make two 1.5lb loaves of great bread (coming to my blog soon!). Organize with other "poor" to leverage opportunities (carpooling, babysitting, etc.).

First-world problems indeed.

ETA: Downvoters, take a stand and tell me why this post is wrong.

<comment><USER23> > Heck, save the $1 and make two 1.5lb loaves of great bread

Assuming you have the time and the oven, neither of which are guaranteed but both seem to be universally assumed.

(Also assumes you're urban poor and not rural poor. Urban poor has access to Wal-Mart and Albertson's. Rural poor has access to a gas station grocery and hunting/fishing if they're rich enough to afford the accoutrements and the time.)

<comment><USER22> "Rural poor has access to a gas station grocery and hunting/fishing if they're rich enough to afford the accoutrements and the time."

A week ago I watched the movie "Winter's Bone", which depicted grinding rural poverty. As the protagonist (teen girl) split logs for heat, cooked inexpensive meals, and hunted squirrels, I realized I'd grown up very near the same way - and never considered myself "poor", despite our huge garden, wood stoves, etc.

You say "rich enough" for hunting? Hunting license is $9 here in GA. Gun-show rifle was $30. One 7.62x54R round is $0.25. For under $50 and a weekend morning/evening, you can get several hundred dollars worth of meat. Fishing is similarly cheap if you're so inclined. Just because people spend thousands on a sport doesn't mean you have to for sustenance.

As for other sustenance needs: 50 pound sacks of bread flour are $16 at Costco, 100 packets of food garden seeds are $10 at Dollar Store, chicks are cheap at the local farm supply store, and pots/pans for cooking over a fire are a few dollars at Goodwill.

I've lived very close to that lifestyle. Living on a near-zero income is not unreasonable...quaint even.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, there's already a lot of comments here pointing out that he game is unrealistic and rigged. But I'd like to add to this a bit, and to say that the memes which the game is rigged to spread are not only wrong but pernicious.

There are two views of poverty in rich countries. One view holds that poverty is caused by poor people who make bad decisions, and that it's possible to lift yourself out of poverty by making good decisions instead. The second view holds that poverty is caused by external factors, that it's a trap that poor people can't escape, and that the way to solve poverty is by giving ever- increasing amounts of taxpayer-funded free stuff to the poor until they stop being poor. The cartoon versions of each of these extremes are silly, and there's a bit of truth in both of them.

The real trick, though, is that the first belief, the belief that poor people can pull themselves out of poverty, is true only to the extent that they actually believe it. A poor person who believes he can get out of poverty by making sensible decisions will make those decisions. A poor person who believes his poverty is the fault of, and can only be solved by, other people will not. Convincing a poor person that someone else is responsible for their situation is just about the worst thing you can possibly do for them.

Those who want to support increased welfare are openly hostile to the idea that poor people can take responsibility for their own decisions and start making better ones to solve their problems. And this, I think, is a huge factor in perpetuating poverty.

I want to help the poor, really I do, but I'm certain that teaching them the correct _values_ is far more important than handing them cash.

</comment><comment><USER24> Great. Playful (asking you to solve a "train a travels at 70mph..." question when you say you can help your kids with their homework) and creatively designed (cute distance-from-work slider for picking where to live). Of course it's propaganda, but regardless of the realism it does do a good job of simulating the low-income mindset, where every decision ("The ice-cream truck rolls round. Can your kid have an ice-cream?") ends up about money.

</comment><comment><USER25> "Nickel and Dimed" was mentioned in one of the fact-bubbles. I highly recommend the book for anyone who wants to learn more about the decisions people face when in situations like this. I was spent for a time (about 10 months) being unemployed and lived on about $40 per week, skirting my rent, not having phone/internet, and getting my power cut (twice). Even though I ended up taking a job I didn't like, it payed well and I pulled myself out of that situation. Never Again.

<comment><USER26> I had the same problem with "Nickel and Dimed" that I had with this game. She made a series of completely irrational decisions which resulted in expenses larger than they needed to be.

As a counter to this, I highly recommend Scratch Beginnings by Adam Shepard. [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061714275/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061714275/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=keysofgeni-20)

The summary, from Amazon:

Adam Shepard graduated from college feeling disillusioned by the apathy around him and was then incensed after reading Barbara Ehrenreich's famous work Nickel and Dimed—a book that gave him a feeling of hopelessness about the working class in America. He set out to disprove Ehrenreich's theory—the notion that those who start at the bottom stay at the bottom—by making something out of nothing to achieve the American Dream.

Shepard's plan was simple. With a sleeping bag, the clothes on his back, and $25 in cash, and restricted from using his contacts or college education, he headed out for Charleston, South Carolina, a randomly selected city with one objective: to work his way out of homelessness and into a life that would give him the opportunity for success. His goal was to have, after one year, $2,500, a working automobile, and a furnished apartment.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for the recommendation - looks like a good read.

Its been a while since I've read Ehrenreich's book but am curious - <AUTHOR> decisions of hers did you find irrational?

I will say that a fundamental flaw in Nickel and Dimed, (and most likely in Shepard's book as well) - is that she ultimately had a choice. Many people in these situations have no choice. Many of them have children. Many of them have no college education to fall back on. I count myself among the lucky.

<comment><USER27>
          which decisions of hers did you find irrational?

I recall her writing about a job requiring a belt, and spending $40 to buy one new. Without a mention of a thrift store.

As someone who lives on about $750/month [1], both the game and the book seemed not to notice major ways to save money like having a lot of housemates, commuting by bus, combining proteins, and thrift stores.

Being poor definitely sucks, but the book and game imply it is impossible, which it clearly is not.

[1] this doesn't include taxes and health insurance, which are deducted from my paycheque, but if I were making only $750/month I would have free health care from MA and negative taxes (EITC)

<comment><USER16> Combining proteins?

<comment><USER27> Combining two incomplete proteins (rice, beans) to get a complete one. As opposed to eating generally more expensive complete proteins (meat, dairy).

This saves money, but it's actually pretty small compared to other ways to be more frugal. So I probably shouldn't have brought it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I saw this on fark.com about a week ago, and decided not to cross post it here because it's far too biased. I understand what it's trying to do, but I don't think it's successful in doing so. My biggest complaint is that it attempts to show that it's not only about making poor choices - but the choices that the character has obviously taken prior to getting to the point where I control it were poor choices, and now I am trying to deal with it. My second complaint is that the simulation should have been one day longer - so you would have to pay rent again - that's when the real issues start happening.

Even with the odds against me, I was able to finish the simulation a few times with over $1200 available (thus being able to pay the rent on the following day).

</comment><comment><USER22> This sort of sociopolitical whining is exactly why I created <http://abuckaplate.blogspot.com> \- featuring $1 meals.

</comment><comment><USER29> Meh. I got to day 25, but there were so many dumb economic choices it forced me to make that it was essentially impossible to win the game scenario. There were a great number of future benefit choices to make, but the game forces you to think only for the moment, which is the prime reason why poor people remain poor.

Like, whoa! Suddenly $225 in utilities bills ($225? Seriously??? It doesn't even cost that much in Tokyo!) that I somehow didn't know about to be able to plan for.

And whoa! my car starts acting up, and I can't even think to park it and take the bus for awhile until I can afford to fix it (you know, rather than running it into the ground and wasting even MORE money).

And whoa! that leak in my sink has become a huge nightmare because I didn't handle it when it was a small issue and it was obvious the landlord wouldn't do anything about it.

And why the hell do I remain unemployed for so long instead of taking some part time work to keep my savings up while I look for a real job?

Seriously, a little planning ahead goes a LONG way.

</comment><comment><USER30> Time for an anti-American rant. You buy premium healthcare but still need to pay the doctor ? You don't have unemployment aids ? You can get fired for _talking_ to a union guy ? (if that happens to you in France, that is your way to wealth through court action)

<comment><USER31> You should probably do some research before ranting.

 _You buy premium healthcare but still need to pay the doctor?_

That obviously depends on the provisions of the healthcare contract. It's common to pay a deductible and/or token co-pay. But these plans can always be tailored to address the needs of the buyer, and of the provider. (I might rant about the problems with enforcing a one-size-fits-all plan.)

 _You don't have unemployment aids?_

Yes, we do. There is unemployment insurance, welfare, food stamps, disability insurance, and so on, to provide a safety net.

 _You can get fired for talking to a union guy?_

No, you cannot (labor regulation in America is absurdly skewed in favor of the workers). The employer is forbidden from interfering with any labor attempt to organize. However, our Democrats have been attempting to pass a regulations called "card check" [1] which would take away the workers' right to secret ballots when voting for unionization. (And the Democrats are supposed to be the ones standing up for the little guy?!?)

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_check>

<comment><USER32> >> You buy premium healthcare but still need to pay the doctor?

Yes. That's the short answer.

The longer answer is that there are plans without co-pays, etc., but that they are to the best of my knowledge not available to purchase by individuals or far too expensive for our hypothetical $9/hr worker (think more like $1000/mo).

>> token co-pay

In the context of a $9/hr job, "token" co-pays probably shouldn't be called "token," when they can easily run over $40 for a single visit. I certainly don't consider 4+ hours of my compensation to be a token amount.

>> You can get fired for talking to a union guy?

The short answer is yes, you _can_ be fired for talking to a union guy. As in your employer will not be stopped from firing you on the spot, and it's then your turn to try to get reinstated/compensated through legal channels. You're right that legally you can't be fired for organizing. But in the calculus of business and the working poor, it's actually fairly common for low-wage employees to be fired for attempts at organizing. The employer wagers (usually correctly) that the person who just lost his $9/hr job today will have more immediate priorities than finding an attorney he can't pay to take a case he'll probably lose due to being able to only secure the services of one lawyer and not a team of the best money can buy.

<comment><USER31> _As in your employer will not be stopped from firing you on the spot_

Are you suggesting that the French have found some way of physically preventing this improper action from ever occurring? I'd have to guess that the French are just as vulnerable to such misbehavior.

<comment><USER32> I don't see such a suggestion in my post.

I'm not knowledgeable about the French labor system, so I won't rebut your guess with speculation of my own. I was simply pointing out that labor law isn't always as useful for day-to-day offenses as the well-off often assume.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This describes the life of around 50% (may be more) of Tunisians. The probability of bad things occurring to you is increased by the bad infrastructure, evil government, the general hardness of life and the chaos the country is living on.

So for me, this is completely realistic. Just drop the costs (and also the earnings) around 10 times (for poor people) to adjust for the living expenses.

<comment><USER20> Aye, but Tunis to me is solidly part of the third world. This game is about America.

As soon as you get out of the wealthy countries your odds diminish rapidly.

<comment><USER33> Certainly. However, I wouldn't be surprised that some parts of America have a serious lack of infra-structure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This was a very interesting exercise, but some of the numbers don't seem very realistic. For example, is $600 really the cheapest rent a poor person has to pay? Even in a city like London, I've lived on $300 per month, including food, when times were tough for me.

<comment><USER35> $300 including rent? I thought I was doing well (in far east London) renting a room in a student share house for £257 a month, 9 years ago. Plus bills.

<comment><USER34> I'm _really_ cheap, but to be fair that was 5 years ago. But I'm sure if I had to, even now I could live on very little money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Like many others, I also ended the game ahead at the end of the month with a fair amount to spare. It was't necessarily easy, I had to critically think about each decision. I also consider myself fairly 'financially fit' in making decisions. Many of us are problem solvers and entrepreneurs so the fact that we can 'beat' the game says nothing about the difficulty less educated have in real life.

</comment><comment><USER37> $1500 to recover your vehicle after getting pulled over for expired registration?

I've gotten a half dozen tickets for expired registration in Texas and the result is you pay an extra 30 bucks when you register and a 10 dollar fee to waive the ticket if you register within 10 days of the citation. What state impounds your car?

<comment><USER19> The same state where internet is $60, the power bill for your tiny apartment is $100 a month, where landlords increase your rent the day after you move in, and where you can't get an apartment for less than $800 a month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> If you want to see another take on the whole problem, go to Netflix and watch the 30 Days episode called Minimum Wage. It's the same guy who did Supersize Me. He and his girlfriend try to work and live on minimum wage for a month. Doesn't go much better for them than it does for players of this game.

<comment><USER19> An experiment like that proves nothing if it's being undertaken by somebody who starts out with the agenda of proving how damn hard it is to survive on minimum wage. It's far too easy to make deliberately stupid decisions, like the $40 belt mentioned elsewhere as a feature of Nickel and Dimed.

What I want to see is the opposite -- someone who goes to live on minimum wage for a month in order to prove it's not all _that_ bad, and we can see what happens to them. They have the incentive to try hard to make it all work. I know this has been done at least once.

I could do this experiment... if I thought it was likely to sell me some books. First thing I'd do, though, would be to move the hell away from the San Francisco Bay Area. I don't know where exactly, but aiming for a combination of low unemployment and low housing costs I think I'll choose Iowa. Cedar Rapids sounds nice (never been there, it just has a good name). Now, minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and let's assume I only work 40 hours a week -- that's $1284 a month. I assume I'm not paying significant taxes. Looks like I can rent a decent place for $500 a month. Fifty bucks a week for groceries. Yeah, I can do this.

<comment><USER39> > _Fifty bucks a week for groceries. Yeah, I can do this._ //

It's actually not hard, IMO, to live on a low income for a short period. It's when your living accommodation starts to fall apart, the clothes you've been wearing for 10 years are all holed and worn out, you're missing meals, you always have to say no to your kids, you never get a trip out, you never get a change from cheap food, poorly made clothing, a cold house, etc., it's knowing you have to work if you're sick, have no pension, no savings.

It's the dull drudgery of it that wears one down, erodes ones hope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is depressing. But I'm not sure how donating $5 to some mission is going to solve these problems; the game itself says poor people are wary of accepting handouts, and that's all this will be, right?

I'm also not sure I'm comfortable subsidizing people's bad choices. If I have to support someone, it's my nature to micromanage their lives to make sure they are using the money efficiently. No cell phones. No Internet. No music downloads. No nights out drinking.

In the end, I try to imagine how I would act if I were poor, had a child, and had no marketable skills. The first thing would be to find the smallest living space available, to save on rent, heating/cooling costs, and electricity. That means sleeping on mats that come out of the closet at bedtime, washing dishes by hand, cooking everything on the stove, and taking a bath with my kid every night to save hot water. If rich people in Japan can live this way, poor people in America can live this way. I would try to live close enough to work to not need a car (cars are nice, until they break), but if that's not possible, I'd use a car for commuting and a bike for errands. I wouldn't have a cell phone or Internet access; I'd queue up my Internet needs (buying household essentials in bulk online, resyncing my CPAN mirror, whatever) and go to the library. This would also be a good time to get some public-domain music and some books to read for the week.

It sounds primitive but I know I could make it work. If you're dumb, lazy, and have kids, guess what, life is not going to be the same as those Hollywood stars on TV. You don't get to buy everything you want. You don't get to have fun with your friends. You get to work, cook, read, help your kids with school, and keep your bicycle in good working condition. And honestly, I don't think that's a life that's missing anything at all. You get human relationships (family), a chance to contribute to society (work), education (reading), a hobby (cooking), and exercise (cycling).

So I guess the problem is: how do we convince people to want what they can have, rather than to want what they can't have? It's a cultural thing, and it's going to be a very hard problem to solve. We may be able to give people free healthcare, but where will they live, what will they eat, and how will they get to work?

(And I know what you're all thinking: the reason I'm not poor is because I can think things through and be analytical enough to make smart choices. Yes. That's why "solving poverty" is a very, very, very difficult problem. Feeling bad and giving someone money is not the solution. Deep changes to our educational system and our cultural values are probably the only way to make things work.)

</comment><comment><USER41> I don't want to simply reply to a comment, there's a theme flowing through this thread, that capitalism makes everyone better off in a society, that our choices lead to where we are. I think you're ignoring a fundamental truth. There aren't unlimited opportunities for every person who works hard...just opportunities for those who work harder, on the margin, than others. Capitalism isn't about working hard and getting rewards, its about being better on the margins and getting rewards.

</comment><comment> driftsumi-e This one hits real close to home for aspiring entrepreneurs.

</comment><comment><USER42> Someone needs to check their numbers. A little research suggests that 275$/month health insurance premium is really high. A good emergency coverage should be closer to 50$. 60$ for internet? I get mine, high-speed, for half that. 75$ phone bill? That's the average for -smart phones-, basic services should only cost 10$.

And I managed to finish with 1157$ anyways. Clearly low-income people need to learn to be frugal. :)

<comment><USER43> I live in Texas and currently pay $780/month for health insurance through my employer. Over 1/4 of the people in the state have no health insurance at all. So no, that number isn't very high.

<comment><USER44> That would be almost $10k a year. I work for a large manufacturing company and I pay $40/month. You have got to have messed something up there.

<comment><USER43> Not at all, though I did leave out that I am insuring myself, my wife our child. This doesn't include the deductible of $10,000 out of pocket per year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The game is actually fairly accurate in my experience. I came out with $350 left, without starving or killing my dog, making similar choices I made when I was in similarly dire financial straits in real life. My parents kept me healthy and safe growing up, but I did have to miss out on some things that "everyone else" was doing, and I think if anything I'm better for it, especially if things get bad again.

</comment><comment><USER46> Morgan Spurlock did an episode of his 30 Days with him and his girlfriend living on minimum wage, it also very well illustrates the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER47> I don't know what kind of crappy restaurant they're modeling in this game, but you can make much better money at most places waiting tables than what they are claiming.

Also, I like how every decision, no matter if its a good one or not ends up with a "Surprise! You made a good choice that should be free in real life, but we're going to charge you an arbitrary cost anyway!"

When I lived on less than this, I sure don't remember these oddball things. And obviously cheaper choices, living further out, are still discusses like they are penalties, "but you still have to pay for gas!" Duh, but it's still a ton cheaper.

Opting in to Health Insurance = you don't get sick, but opting out and I got sick twice.

How about this one? "Two bills are due today. What do you want to do?"

1) Pay mobile phone bill

2) Pay car insurance

3) Pay both

4) Ask a friend

where's my #5? Don't pay either? Also..why the hell do I have a mobile phone and a car? I don't remember that being a choice. I'd rather not have a phone and ride the bus.

ack...ridiculous.

Oh, and $843 left at the end of the month.

</comment><comment><USER21> Made it through the month with $411 left, a root canal to pay for and apparently I owe a collection agency money for a car.

Wasn't terribly impressed with the choices I was given though, because I've been in similar situations in the past and, while it may be very different in the US, I have never had any significant problems. Also, why do bills like car registration cost more if I choose to pay them later? In real life I once had to pay my electricity bill a month late because I didn't have the money - <USER2> called them up and they deferred the payment by a month. They didn't suddenly charge me extra.

EDIT: Just played it again and made it through the month with $274, with no outstanding bills.

</comment><comment><USER48> This flash game (ok, flash video) is a much more awesome way to show the same thing:

[http://www.popmodal.com/video/1251/BILL-COSBY--Economics- Les...](http://www.popmodal.com/video/1251/BILL-COSBY--Economics-Lesson-With- Monopoly-Money)

</comment><comment><USER49> "A definition for wealth is spending less than your income." --<http://www.dynamicrange.org/2007/05/food_stamp_chal_6.html>

</comment><comment><USER50> This reminds me of one of my favorite flash games! Third World Farmer!

<http://www.mofunzone.com/online_games/3rd_world_farmer.shtml>

</comment><comment><USER6> I sit at a keyboard all day typing and earn 100% of my living via the computer. Funny that I couldn't pass the typing test. I'm pretty sure the problem is that I don't have practice copying the text ... my time is spent typing words (and code) that's flowing from my brain.

Does anyone still take dictation? Are there really jobs like this? I had an AA at my last job and in the nine years I was there I don't remember ever having her type up notes, etc.

<comment><USER27> I think this part is actually quite realistic. Temp jobs have typing speed requirements and when you go in to sign up as a temp they find out how fast you are. They also measure how fast you can use word, excel, etc.

<comment><USER51> _They also measure how fast you can use word, excel, etc._

Like the parent, I also spend my days in front of the computer developing software and doing general business-running activities. But I'm almost certain I would fail this test. I think I used Word once in high school and that is about where my experience ends.

I have never found a use-case for an Office suite. There are _always_ better tools for any job that it might be able to tackle. For it to be a prerequisite for finding a job outside of the software industry is kind of frightening and sad.

<comment><USER27> Someone looking to hire a secretary to temp for a week to cover a vacation cares that the temp will be productive. This means that that secretary can teach the temp what they need to do for the week, and the temp will be able to do it quickly and efficiently using the templates and tools that the office uses. If they keep track of accounts in excel, you need to be able to quickly enter data into excel to use their system. They're not going to switch to something better just so they can employ you for a week.

This doesn't mean you're unemployable outside of software, just that this heuristic suggets you are a poor candidate for a temporary secretarial position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> So I made it through the month with 3$ left. It has some interesting facts, but altogether it's a bit odd that everything breaks down in a single month.

<comment><USER53> All it takes is one bad month for someone living paycheck to paycheck to go from okay to not okay.

<comment><USER54> If you're living paycheck to paycheck, it means you're spending 100% of what you get. A bad month makes it expenses > income.

The trick is to not live paycheck to paycheck in good months, and it seems like $9/hr should be enough for a bit of savings.

<comment><USER53> How much could a person working $9/hr save during a good month? A couple hundred dollars?

It would take several consecutive good months to offset a single bad month.

<comment><USER27> I live on $750/month [1], $9/hour is ~$1450/month, so in a good month I could probably save about $700.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3070904>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Quite a silly game, but it does a decent job of showing how all the options are not always considered by the people who most need to consider them. It's easy to say "I would make a fun homemade gift, take advantage of charitable dental programs, get a roommate," etc., but the people in hard situations often don't have the mindset to do this.

</comment><comment><USER56> This game seems loaded as in the message behind it. That's fine but I think its slightly misleading. I paid off registration but later I still got charged 1.5k for my car not being registered. Also is it me or for the maths question no matter what you choose does it say you got it wrong? Despite having a college degree.

<comment><USER57> The math question told me that "I was lucky that I am capable of helping my child in Math and Science" so I guess it does work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Meanwhile in India, the government is wondering if 60 cents a day would be a reasonable poverty line for urban areas (somewhat less for rural areas) [http://the-diplomat.com/indian-decade/2011/10/04/govt-backtr...](http://the- diplomat.com/indian-decade/2011/10/04/govt-backtracks-on-poverty/)

</comment><comment><USER59> Although people are saying this isn't that good of a simulation because of all the events that happen so fast together, as the saying goes, "There's always someone who has it worse." Just a simple what-if would be fine for this, and this was well-well done (note the double well :] ). Kudos to the creators. :)

</comment><comment><USER60> $225 gas/electic bill on day 6. Do they charge for utilities in advance and without a grace period in Durham?

</comment><comment><USER61> I think this game is pretty interesting. It's not realistic by any stretch, but it does get your attention more than yet-another-infographic-with- statistics-on-it. It's a simulation in the very slightest sense of the word, but you probably would have ignored the infographic.

</comment><comment><USER62> Cool, but apparently I have a kid and a family pet. At what point did I make those decisions?

</comment><comment><USER63> Reminds me of a game about trying to survive as a peasant in Haiti. Might have been this one: <http://ayiti.globalkids.org/game/>

Same problem that it had only options rigged for failure to chose from.

</comment><comment><USER64> Why in the hell does the bottom rung pay so much tax? That is ridiculous. Even in the UK we have a "lower cap" of tax free earnings, so that people who have bugger all money aren't paying tax.

</comment><comment><USER65> It's interesting that almost all comments thus far uniformly criticize the game for propaganda bias and that real-life is not this hard.

A special-ed teacher I work with has a dimmer view than most of the US education system - because she sees so many of its failures and that for a living. I can easily see how the propaganda perception by an outsider is just the everyday reality in the eyes of <http://www.umdurham.org/>, one of the two game sponsers.

IMHO the game does a good job of creating a forcing function to make decisions that atleast I haven't had to make in a long while, if ever.

Imagining myself as the game designer, suspect I too would favour inciting empathy to accurate "real-life"-ism.

</comment><comment><USER66> why did i -- as a person with no marketable job skills -- start with 7300 in credit card debt? and why didn't i get a roommate for my apartment i can't afford?

</comment><comment><USER67> Too bad the game doesn't allow you to ditch the car. Car falling apart is huge money sink. First thing I'd do is to get rid of it.

<comment><USER67> Heh. You can loose your car if it isn't "road legal". But this caused me to loose a job (probably because I was living far away). This didn't stop them from firing me second time in the same game when I tried to join union.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> in America you are still in a first world country!! have you ever lived in Calcutta??? Oh please come on, stop the whining!

</comment><comment><USER69> For the first year and a half after starting my company I made considerably less than this and got alone just fine.

</comment><comment><USER70> I've lived on $7ish an hour.

It is very, very hard to break even. Any fluctuation in your hours can result in a savings decrease.

</comment><comment><USER71> This is only for a month. Being broke usually lasts a lot longer.

Anyone have any ideas on how to hack this kind of situation?

</comment><comment><USER72> Way too depressing to play right now as it hits too close to home (or used to). Good game

</comment><comment><USER73> Not quite how I remember making $8/hr at an internship right out of college for 6 months.

</comment><comment><USER74> Life isn't that depressive even with a 9$/hr job.

<comment><USER75> It easily can be. Consider a twenty-four year old fresh out of college with an animal science degree, school loan debt, dependent parents, no car, no openings in her field, forced to take fast food job. The job usually gives her forty hours a week, but scheduled so she works 10-20 days before a single day off. Rent started lower, but has been slowly jacked up to $800+ before utilities. This describes my best friend for the past year. Paying bills is tremendously difficult, much less saving any money.

<comment><USER76> So get a roommate, look for a new place, move to a cheaper area, get a different job. I've done all of these things at one time or another.

I've paid as low as $125 per month in rent, but most typically in the neighborhood of $225-300 (this is in one of the 15 biggest cities in the US, a major college town, to boot).

Serving/bartending you can easily make $15-25 per hour and work 25-40 hours per week. I've also worked as a valet part-time for another $10-15 per hour. Package handlers can make $13 per hour (last I saw, several years ago) working the late shift. These are jobs that generally have no degree requirements whatsoever.

My roommate was once a couple grand short on tuition money. He stripped for a couple weeks and was able to pay it all off. My sister's husband brings in close to $40K in the Army, and they give money to pay off student loans, too. I've had several friends work in Teach for America or as an Americorps Vista, receiving relatively meager salaries but getting a living allowance, money toward student loans, and a resume-building experience for aspiring non-profit workers.

Meanwhile, remain tenacious in seeking out opportunities that make use of that degree, and make every use of student loan deferment and forbearance until all high-interest credit cards are paid off. Enter into debt management in order to get credit card interest rates down into the 5-8% range.

The only saving that should be happening is an emergency cash fund. It doesn't make sense to save until your debts are paid off, unless you can reliably invest at a higher return (e.g., your employer matches your contribution up to 3% of salary for an effective 100%+ ROI).

I know how easy it is to get dejected and want to give up, but you absolutely must soldier through it. Cut costs everywhere (don't eat out, sell that car, start biking, take up cheap hobbies instead of paying for entertainment, cancel cable, etc.) and pay down high-interest debts. Things get a whole lot easier once you start having some cash margin each month.

That was the main thing I hated about the quiz. Everything was so binary. Rarely in life are we constrained to a box other than the one we construct for ourselves.

<comment><USER73> Great advice.

I've had to moonlight as a valet in between jobs and I could make anywhere from $10/hr to $35/hr with tips. They would have hired anyone to work that job.

<comment><USER76> Yep, valet parking was probably one of my favorite part-time jobs. They put me on a mailing list for valet events and sent out weekly emails; I picked the shifts I wanted to work. I got a good friend a job there, too, and we often worked together. It was a great way to get in shape making decent money to drive nice cars. And there was generally a 1-3 hour lull during the event to relax, shoot the shit, make plans for the night, and meet new friends.

<comment><USER19> Sounds like a good job!

In the game I took the option of being a waiter working for $2.15 an hour plus tips, thinking that based on all the waiters _I_ know I could easily earn some pretty good money. It told me I wound up earning $8 an hour, and this was average. I remain skeptical.

For one thing, that's minimum wage, and as I understand it, the employer is obliged to subsidise your wages up to minimum wage if you don't make that in tips. Secondly, assuming a standard 15% tip that means I'm only serving about $40 worth of food and drink per hour, in which case I'm in a _really_ bad restaurant. (OK, maybe we need to share some of the tip total with busboys et cetera, but that's still astoundingly low). Thirdly, there's no way that can be the average, because it's the minimum, and some waiters are earning a whole lot more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Political propaganda disguised as a 'flash game' tops hacker news...

I'll bet the people behind it are laughing at their clever social engineering.

<comment><USER7> That's actually what I find interesting about it. Propaganda _film_ has been written about and practiced extensively, and we have a pretty good idea of various ways to make it, as well as analyses of how to use things like juxtaposition/framing/pacing/etc. for propagandistic effect. But propaganda _games_ are a pretty weakly explored concept, and it's interesting to think of how to use game mechanics (rather than just in-game dialogue) for propagandistic purposes, especially since that overlaps pretty heavily with grayer-area things like "expression" and "persuasion" (propaganda is just sort of the limit case of persuasion with some poetic license).

I'm not sure this is the _best_ game in the genre, but it's an interesting entry. Here's one satirizing airport security from a few years ago, which I think comes off as a bit more honest in that its clustering of events is also more frequent than would be the case IRL, but it clearly positions itself as satire that's exaggerating to make a point: <http://www.shockwave.com/gamelanding/airportsecurity.jsp>

This is a pretty decent book on the subject, fwiw, but I think the area of game-rhetoric, of which propaganda games are a nice highlighting case, is still pretty open (and to me at least, more interesting than stuff like gamification): [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262514885/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262514885/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=abxxm-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0262514885)

Submitted separately, a 2009 blog post analyzing six ways to use game mechanics for rhetorical effect (which can of course mean propagandistic effect): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3070404>

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> It's hard to simulate poverty. Of course I can make the right decisions. I'm not hungry, and this is a game. Sure I'll choose to buy the cheapest, and healthiest food I can. Real life is different, after being hungry for a while my decisions would be different. I don't feel this game highlighted how the mentality of the situation compounds itself.

</comment><comment><USER79> I have an undisclosed pet, an $80/mo cell phone plan, and _both_ my gas and electric bills are over $100. Also, I'm adamant about keeping my car, even though I'm right by work. I make very, very poor decisions.

(honestly, I learn more about difficult lives by watching Judge Judy and similar)

</comment><comment><USER80> The game is a lot easier if you act like a total sociopath (e.g. don't buy your mom's medicine, let your pet suffer, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER81> I quit in the first scenario: "Find a Job" or "Quit".. Anything but a job!</comment>


Whole Messages in Slack - <AUTHOR> https://josh.works/whole-messages-in-slack <comment><USER2> I'm a huge fan of "whole messages".

I fondly recall a situation while at a startup, with a room full of engineers.. we were all in a slack channel, and a contractor working on an infrastructure project began asking a question... in parts...

I almost died, watching several people in the office watching the slack channel, waiting for the next part of his question, seeing the contractor was "typing" and literally just waiting for him to press enter... a sentence at a time.

Their inability to form a complete though before sending the message, literally interrupted several engineers focus and had them waiting for the whole message. Rude.</comment>