I fear Google's control of the web - <AUTHOR> http://scripting.com/2018/06/12/140329.html <comment><USER2> People are going to dismiss Dave Winer as a crank right up until the day they or one of the things on which they rely get "googled," and then they will wish they'd listened sooner.

Google's power over the web today, already, is not healthy. There are a lot of people within Google who care deeply about the free and open web, and a lot of people who don't, or who define "free" or "open" in ways that involving trusting a for-profit corporation more than anybody wise ever should. Many people get upset when they see Google being attacked, because the part of Google they depend on is a part that really supports the free and open web, or because they themselves don't value the freeness and openness as much as they should.

Google delivers a lot of value right now, and without people pushing back, hard, that value will enable them to get away with anything.

Anybody who has been around long enough ought to understand that power you grant to someone you trust inevitably ends up in the hands of someone you don't. Political parties switch back and forth, CEOs and corporate priorities come and go. Sometimes it's best to accept an option that is second-best today in order to avoid giving too much power to the organization providing the first-best for them to misuse tomorrow.

<comment><USER3> I agree that Google has far too much control over the web. However, this is a silly reason to argue against HTTPS. HTTPS is an open standard. Google doesn't control it. HTTPS doesn't require anyone to use any Google product. You can use HTTPS just fine by getting your certificates from LetsEncrypt and browsing with Mozilla Firefox. Or Microsoft Edge. Or Internet Explorer. Moreover, the security guarantees that HTTPS brings to the web benefit everyone, not just Google.

More generally, Dave Winer seems to have an attitude of reflexively opposing everything that Google advocates, merely because it is _Google_ that is advocating for it. It reminds me of the late 90's and early 2000's when open- source people talked about "M$" and reflexively opposed everything that Microsoft did merely because it was _Microsoft_ that was doing it, leaving aside technical merits or other considerations.

Corporations are neither pure good, nor pure evil. They are collections of people with collective interests that they pursue. Sometimes, like in the case of HTTPS, or net neutrality, those interests align with our interests as developers and users. In those cases, we should ally ourselves with corporations and use their leverage to effect change more quickly. In other cases, such as with RSS, and vendor lock-in, our interests diverge and we should oppose them with all our might so that we don't lose the free and open Internet that we've become accustomed to.

In both cases, however, we should examine the issue on the merits of that issue, and neither support nor oppose merely because the "right" or "wrong" organization is pushing for it.

<comment><USER4> > HTTPS is an open standard. Google doesn't control it. HTTPS doesn't require > anyone to use any Google product.

The problem is that Google controls the most popular interfaces to consuming HTTP and HTTPS, i.e. their Chrome browser and their search engine. And so Google is in a position where they control how these protocols are consumed, which is the crux of Dave's argument. Google is already discouraging the use of HTTP through warning messages in Chrome and by adjusting search rank algorithms for HTTP sites. Dave's concern is that Google will "turn off" HTTP access in the same way they did with RSS after capturing the market share for consuming RSS feeds and then shutting down Google Reader and removing discoverabilty of RSS feeds in Chrome.

Dave Winer has been around the Web for longer than most and you'd be foolish to write him off as a curmudgeon. Dave is to the open Web what RMS is to FOSS.

<comment><USER5> It is immensely frustrating to me that Dave's excellent point about legacy content is obscured by his characterization of the push to HTTPS. At the core, the idea that security only matters for transactions is wrong. For example, I want my blog to be served over HTTPS because I don't want anyone to be able to edit my words between my server and the person reading them.

Now, Dave acknowledges this: "They tell us to worry about man-in-the-middle attacks that might modify content, but fail to mention that they can do it in the browser, even if you use a 'secure' protocol."

The rhetorical slip here is bad. "They" is _me_. I say you should worry about man-in-the-middle attacks. I can't "do it in the browser." He keeps doing this; he's acting like Google is the only entity that thinks the move is a good idea.

It also fails to acknowledge that partial solutions matter! What, I should give up on putting locks on my door just because the lock manufacturer can go right through them? Further, right now I have a choice of three plausible browsers, and I can switch between them freely. There's a significant difference between the danger of man-in-the-middle attacks and the danger of a browser level attack. (Both pretty low, to be fair, but still.)

And that's just the concern about attacks. Tracking is a whole additional issue that he doesn't acknowledge.

So, yeah, he makes some good points. But since he won't engage in discussion on the topic, they're not useful and they get drowned out by the noise.

<comment><USER6> _won 't engage in discussion_ \-- it's been a long day, lots of discussion, and most of it repetitive. The fact that so much discussion is needed is a pretty good indication that the open web should not be corporatized. Google should create a new medium, like they did with AMP, and make it opt-in. Stop trying to be the dictator of the web. And you -- please stop saying bullshit about me. Thanks. Tired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "[Google] talks to me like I have no idea how tech companies work internally, but I do. After the next reorg they won't remember any commitments the previous management made."

OMG this is so true in our experience. Google doesn't quite lie, but they come very close. They are always changing people and policies, always in a downward direction. Makes me think they won't be around for much longer. They're just maximizing a monopoly, and everything they do reinforces that view.

<comment><USER8> _Google doesn 't quite lie, but they come very close._

The telltale sign for this is a lack of true commitment in their statements. It only counts when they draw a line in the sand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _" once Google has control of the web, they can turn off huge parts of it > for whatever reason..."_

What does "turn off" even mean? Following the links, it looks like the author is opposed specifically to Chrome pushing sites to migrate from HTTP to HTTPS, mainly because he claims "the web is a social agreement not to break things" and "we will lose a lot of sites that were quickly posted on a whim, over the 25 years the web has existed."

This is hard for me to get on board with. Standards evolve and improve because major players push them. We don't use floppy disks anymore either. HTTPS provides desperately needed privacy and integrity guarantees. And archive.org continues to make historical sites available -- over HTTPS even if the original wasn't.

<comment><USER10> Google could decide that it doesn't want to be associated with guns in any way and not allow advertising for any type of gun related content and purge all gun content on any of its platforms.

Replace guns with ________ and repeat.

<comment><USER11> well, there's two ways to solve that. Regulate or invest in the competition .. or create competition.

Which one would you like?

<comment><USER12> ISTM the best way to "create competition" would be to start using competing services... which is what DW and others are suggesting in this very thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ugh, Google Reader wasn't a "huge part of the web," it was a product offered by a company. If GR and RSS were basically equivalent then Google was right to conclude that RSS wasn't popular. RSS is an open standard and GR never had any compelling competition even though it should have if RSS were used widely at all. That people are still angry over this shows how out of touch many developers are with the real world / average consumers.

<comment><USER14> Google Reader was a huge part of the web experience for a small number of rather vocal people. It was a social network for many of them, and they feel like they lost something they built and owned.

Myself, I used google reader. But only for RSS. So I just moved to a different reader and I've been fine ever since.

<comment><USER15> I guess I just don't see the point of complaining when a company shuts down their own product.

It was a free product. It came with no guarantee. Just because you liked it doesn't mean you were entitled to it, and it doesn't mean Google did anything wrong by shuttering it.

If you are still using RSS, you need to get with the program. RSS aggregators are out of style for a reason...

<comment><USER12> What are you saying? That we should use Atom instead? There is no important difference between the protocols. Or are you saying that we shouldn't use "simple syndication" anymore? Why, so we can let Facebook tell us what to look at? Yeah no thanks.

<comment><USER14> I believe parent is saying that RSS became something publishers publishers did not prefer to Twitter, Facebook, and real-time search. Simple syndication might be preferable to users, but it is not for publishers.

<comment><USER12> Sure, but I don't see how that's a _criticism_ of RSS? "Nobody uses it because users prefer it!" Besides it still drives e.g. podcasting; apparently _those_ publishers are still making money.

<comment><USER14> Publishers of text, as a whole, do not prefer RSS to other options to serve the same purpose. That's not a _criticism_ , just a _comparison_. It means that given the choice, which publishers mainly are, they opt for things that aren't RSS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > but capturing RSS and then shutting it off

... what? Ultra, ultra hyperbole much? I get it, shutting down reader sucked, but seriously you can literally use any RSS reader to read feeds. Google didn't "kill RSS".

Seriously, voicing opinions is one thing but fear mongering and hyperbole is another and this article leans far too heavily towards the latter.

<comment><USER17> I'm not a big RSS guy, but when I read an article on that before, what I understand happened is:

1\. RSS readers everywhere

2\. Google comes out with one

3\. Other RSS readers wither on the vine b/c everyone uses #2

4\. Google decides to sunset their RSS reader.

5\. ???

Is that wrong?

<comment><USER16> Yep, not what happened. Google didn't make one; they acquired one. Google sunset that reader (I'll agree that in retrospect it was the wrong move, but regardless), but at no point did RSS readers stop existing. Two notes:

\- RSS readers are _dead simple_ to build. If you're an average programmer you could make an MVP within 2 days.

\- Many of the RSS readers are/were free. I don't think Google having Reader caused any great migrations, but even if it did I doubt it would have caused other readers to implode or anything like that.

I _believe_ what happened is that Reader had a small but vocal user group who were (understandably) upset at the sunsetting, and caused a big hubbub about it. I _suspect_ many of today's Reader complainers have never actually used Reader, and are just piggy-backing off some low-hanging Google bashing fruit.

Again, I'll happily nod at the badness of Google killing off Reader, but I intensely dislike the amount of hyperbole in the statement that Google "killed RSS". It's a thing that never took off. That's all that happened. It's still accessible, there are many clients you could use, and so on - it just so happens that most sites don't bother creating an RSS feed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Look at what happened with Google Maps recently. Was pretty cheap to use, people flocked to it. Then they changed prices. We went from never worrying about paying since we have a relatively small amount of traffic, to scrambling to reduce our usage. Now it is their product, they can do what they want with it, but how many sites are pretty locked into Google Maps?

This seems to be what Google does. They either kill off a free service that people relied on or begin charging lots of money.

<comment><USER19> Non-web person here: No idea that Google Maps costs money for anyone, assumed it was ad-supported like anything else.

<comment><USER20> Well, in this case it's if you want to use their API to show maps in your application. If you're doing that, you're going to need to pay them in terms of total requests to their backend. Their B2B service and advertising probably funds the normal consumer app (ie just logging onto 'maps.google.com' to find your local coffee shop).

<comment><USER18> I think they gave us 2 months, which isn't really enough time to adequately look at alternatives given all the other things going on in an organization.

Had we had more time I probably would have looked at doing our own implementation using leaflet and Open Street Map. But that is a pretty big project to throw in when are in the middle of a year long roadmap. I assume this played into Googles strategy. Give them enough of a heads up, but not enough time for most to move away.

<comment><USER21> You could simply pay them for the little bit of extra time that it would cost you to figure out where you want to move.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Combine this with yesterday's ill-received-on-HN 'HTTPS Anti-Vaxxers; dispelling common arguments against securing the web' [1], where Scott Helme calls out Dave Winer on his past articles that bemoan the effects of browser- makers' push towards HTTPS.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17287877](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17287877)

</comment><comment><USER23> Isn't this the guy that got a bone-on about https ranking higher on Google Search?

Edit: Yes, yes it is [http://scripting.com/2014/08/08/myBlogDoesntNeedHttps.html](http://scripting.com/2014/08/08/myBlogDoesntNeedHttps.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> > My fear is this -- once Google has control of the web, they can turn off > huge parts of it for whatever reason

Ask Dennis Prager, Steven Crowder, Philip DeFranco. This is old news, not a vague fear

> It's like when we change administrations in Washington. Very chaotic

Not at all the same. In the USA, we have a baseline of actions the government cannot take: it is described in the Constitution and contains a well defined appeals process, as well as a large set of tools to protect against tyranny. Google offers its users and even its paying paying clients none of these privileges.

</comment><comment><USER25> > once Google has control of the web

How does this even make sense?

This is like saying "Once flying squirrels take control of the government...".

Sure, a government controlled by flying squirrels is something scary. But that doesn't make any sense.

You should be scared of walled gardens displacing the web.

<comment><USER26> > How does this even make sense ?

Google is highly influential in how information is consumed and distributed. People use chrome to browse web, google search for searching information etc. If they have major control over how information is distributed, they have major control over the web. Ofcourse there are other similar services that are not provided by Google, but they are very less influential due to lack of users.

> You should be scared of walled gardens displacing the web.

What if web becomes a walled garden ? Look at what Google did with DRM[1], even Mozilla had to give up their efforts to fight against it[2]. How could that be possible without having a major influence over the web ?

[1] [https://boingboing.net/2017/01/30/google-quietly-makes- optio...](https://boingboing.net/2017/01/30/google-quietly-makes-optiona.html) [2] [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the- challen...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challenge-of- serving-users/)

<comment><USER27> Not to mention AMP on every news site, and Google Analytics on nearly every page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Google doesn't have any significant control over the web. Google wins big in two categories. Search and Ad Revenue.

Google Search processes 2/3-3/4 of all searches, with declining market share. Search is held hostage by user's expectations, if the quality of search were to decline users would leave.

AdSense is in a commanding position, but it is under attack from a lot of different directions. Facebook gives more targeted ads. Snap allows more qualified ads. Apple is revamping it's ad system.

Google is in a strong position, but this isn't a case of them gaining more control, and their power is defiantly under check by other interests.

<comment><USER29> Google has significant control of how people access the web with web browsers (Chrome), email (Gmail), video (YouTube), user authentication, and mobile operating systems (Android and ChromeOS).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Okay, I'm not even going to finish reading this drivel...

Using the closure of Google Reader as an example of how Google could "turn off huge parts of web" is ridiculous.

Google reader was just a web-based RSS reader. Its user base was dwindling because RSS was falling out of fashion. Google alerted users well ahead of time of the closure, and gave users ample opportunity to move their subscriptions to another RSS aggregator.

Closing their own service is not a big deal. It's wasn't the first service Google has shuttered, nor will it be the last. Every company does this to services that no longer benefit the company.

No data was removed from the web.

No functionality was destroyed.

The Google Reader source code was made available to the public.

Competing services were champing at the bit to replace Google Reader (and didn't succeed, because hardly anyone uses RSS anymore).

It seems like Dave Winner suffers from a lack of understanding of how the web works, and an irrational distrust of large corporations.

<comment><USER30> Yeah. I think a lot of people tend to scapegoat Google for the death of openly indexed content, when all they really did was jump ship well after it was clearly dying. I mean, it's true that Google Reader was a better product than the competition, and being free it probably did "suppress" the market for paid readers, leaving an impoverished landscape when they exited. But if RSS was a vibrant technology, would they have killed it? No, they'd have tried to exploit it somehow. But it was going nowhere.

Frankly, if you want to point a finger for the death of RSS, blame Facebook and Twitter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I find this guys fears potentially coming from a place of fundamental misunderstanding.

Personally I far more fear Amazon's literal control of the web and the monoculture they've created. For us personally moving off of AWS would be a _nightmare_.

<comment><USER32> Perhaps you should be making plans to be multiplatformable _now_?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Remember, _power corrupts_. If you're not worried about Google's power, you're probably not paying attention.

</comment><comment><USER34> RSS didn't die because of Google. Other services took over once Google Reader shut down. The same will happen when Google cuts off other arms of the octopus.

</comment><comment><USER35> Slightly off-topic...

From The China Hustle, Dirty Money, and The Big Short, it is clear people are putting a lot of trust in the "free market" across the board. Society seems convinced that abusive behavior is acceptable collateral damage required for "free markets" to work; that accepting white collar crime is better than regulating a big company; giving a $1B fine to a company that made $40B in profits is punishment enough to keep companies honest. It is not clear there is a better way...

</comment><comment><USER36> You should fear ATT & Verizon much much more.

</comment><comment><USER37> All for-profit organizations employ "Boiling frog" [1] strategy depending upon the market, consumers, and as their product goes through evolution. Whether the end-goal of it is for good or not, it's hard to judge.

The fear of change expressed on this article is natural. Enforcing HTTPS is good for consumers. But, we need to watch carefully with the market dominance of Google Chrome.

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

</comment><comment><USER38> I read through the comments on here and was reminded of Tim Bray's commentary from almost 15 years ago:

[https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePl...](https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePlace)

"To mangle three metaphors, if you drink that kool-aid, you're either locked in the trunk like Dave Winer says or if you like my metaphor-ware better, you're a sharecropper. Either way, it sucks."

</comment><comment><USER39> The pursuit of profit kills society. All our social suffering exists because we have been trying to merge two incompatible ideas. We expect our lawyers, doctors, technocrats, politicians... to do the right thing. However, the right thing is almost always detrimental to profits. Profit always trumps "right thing".

</comment><comment><USER40> The post should also mention AMP (E.E.E. for HTML) and Material Design animations (which appear to be applied to sites during rendering in Chrome, even when the sites don't use Material Design).

<comment><USER41> > Material Design animations (which appear to be applied to sites during > rendering in Chrome, even when the sites don't use Material Design)

Can you support this claim with examples?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> _" The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."_

Google is headed for a total crash on its current trajectory. Almost the entire business is built on an anti-user model. At some point there will be a reckoning. Their end will be triggered by technology trend that they will be unable to compete with.

The solution to fixing Google is funding more startups with ideas on how to take them out. Google's weapon here is keeping tens of thousands of good technology people locked up with golden hand cuffs. That and strangling startups in their cradle.

Microsoft's broken model got destroyed and so will Google's. It takes a long time for these slow motion train wrecks to play out.

</comment><comment><USER43> Dave Winer's writing is concise and simple. Somehow, he doesn't sacrifice beauty to achieve that.

</comment><comment><USER44> _But next year 's roadmap from Google will make the web more like AOL...._

And that's saying a mouthful.

</comment><comment><USER45> As a small publisher since 2004, every day for 14 years, I am sick and tired of Google's serfdom. Their monopoly on ads, their Panda updates, etc etc, do not respect anyone else, but Google's interests. They will make internet into a strip mall like entity with the same boring list of players, the monotonous list of websites, all for their own profit and monopoly.

Internet is supposed to be about the content, ideas, journalism, etc. But there is virtually no VC investment in the content. Nothing. That is scary, and Google is single handedly responsible for it.

<comment><USER25> > But there is virtually no VC investment in the content. Nothing

Have you stopped to consider that content is a nearly-worthless commodity for which very few people are willing to pay actual cash for?

<comment><USER45> No, it's not. Content makes billions and trillions, and has always done it. From print to theater to radio to movies, since Gutenberg and Shakespeare and first newspapers, content been generating the revenue.

<comment><USER25> Then I'm sure you'll have no problem finding people willing to pay to subscribe to your content.

Take a look at the finances of content providers over the past 20 years. How many publishers, newspapers, studios, etc. shut down? Why do you think that is?

<comment><USER45> How about, for starters, that Google and FB control 85% of the ad market, with the rest going to everyone else.

Also, I run a website for doctors. Google learns that my visitor is a doctor, and next time displays a doctor related ad on Candy Crush, when she is playing the game. So by invading her privacy, Google makes money and my website literally competes against Candy Crush for the ad revenue.

<comment><USER25> None of that solves for the fact that your readers aren't willing to pay anything to read your content.

You can remove Google and Facebook, replace by anyone else, or eliminate it entirely. It still won't solve the problem: nobody wants to pay for your content.

Maybe the problem is in your content...

<comment><USER46> maybe the problem is that google allows the quick indexing of all content produced on the web, including pirated content, and then uses a very opaque algorithm to guide users to sites. This has the externality of making ad- funded content easily available. Not very many people are going to pay for something when you can get the exact same thing for free somewhere else, and in a global marketplace it makes sense for someone to plagiarize paid content and reproduce it for ad-revenue alone. $20/day won't support me in California, but in India?

Removing Google and Facebook changes the game entirely. They have such a strangle hold on the way the internet operates financially--by utilizing their deep integration with users' usage of the web to feed them highly targeted ads --that alternate usage models can't compete.

<comment><USER25> > Not very many people are going to pay for something when you can get the > exact same thing for free somewhere else, and in a global marketplace it > makes sense for someone to plagiarize paid content and reproduce it for ad- > revenue alone. $20/day won't support me in California, but in India?

Exactly, content became a near-worthless commodity.

> Removing Google and Facebook changes the game entirely.

No, it doesn't.

But it seems that what you're suggesting is that ad-funded business models should be outlawed, is that it?

<comment><USER45> You have no idea about the content, but you think you do. Somehow, current deals for Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox are in the billions. And so is value of News Corp, CBS, AIC and so on. Why do you think you can proclaim the near worthlessness of the content or that people don't want my content? Because you are an opinionated nobody? What do you know?

<comment><USER25> I'm not proclaiming anything in particular about your content, but you don't seem to be able to fund anyone willing to pay for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm a bit tired of the fear that Google or Facebook or whatever will ruin the internet when the solution is so simple.

Just stop clicking on the freaking ads already!

<comment><USER48> Like most IT guys, I block _everything_ possible: cookies (whitelist), CSS history, ads, beacons, tracking of all sorts, http/s referrer, webrtc, browser fingerprinting, DNS prefetch, and much more, passing all of this through a personally-controlled remote non-US VPN that logs absolutely nothing. Ads? What ads?

I pass all traffic through this, including mobile devices, so protection even when away from home. Is it 100% foolproof? No. But I have yet to have issues, and Google and others have zero profiles on me, as I have no accounts with them or Facebook, et al. It's nice to be able to be relatively off-the-grid while still taking advantage of what the Internet has to offer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> It's a bit remarkable how quickly this sort conspiratorial thinking feeds on itself. The victim constructs a paranoid fantasy where a single company can "turn off huge parts" of the web. This is silly in itself but what's interesting is how the fantasy completely diverges from reality. Here the simple reality is Google single-handedly saved the web by introducing a browser, Chrome, that actually implemented web standards faithfully and made the web performant. And this is just one contribution: on the whole, including everything from web fonts to HTTP/2 to Android's support for the web... and it's clear that no other single entity has done more for the web than Google. But note the dynamic where the truth reinforces the paranoid fantasy. Every single contribution now becomes just more proof that Google controls the web and will shut it down!

</comment><comment><USER50> My favorites are the ones that never knew Google Reader existed, but use it as a martyr every chance they get.

>My fear is this -- once Google has control of the web, they can turn off huge parts of it for whatever reason, however thoughtless, and without disclosing why.

This person has either been watching too many movies that depict the web as a place where IP's can be traced by writing Visual Basic GUI's or doesn't understand how the Internet works.

<comment><USER51> For many people the web is google. If google drops a site out of search it is effectively turned off for many people.

Another point that he has been harping on is that lots of sites do not need https, but Chrome will shortly warn on visiting those sites. It stands to reason some future version of Chrome will block those sites outright. There are parts of the internet that could disappear when that happens.

You may not necessarily agree with his doomsday scenarios, but I assure you Dave Winer[1] understands how the internet works.

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

<comment><USER52> There is no site I know of - or to be more accurate, there is no user of an internet application I know of - that does not need transport-layer security.

<comment><USER12> I don't need it when I'm reading sports stories, when I'm researching a technical topic of interest, or when I'm reading out-of-copyright literature. If someone else does need it when doing the exact same things, that's fine, but my unsecured reading does not impose a cost on them.

<comment><USER52> Correction - you _think_ you don't need it when you're reading those things, which indicates a serious misunderstanding of HTTPS' problem domain.

Unless what you're trying to say is that you're totally fine with third parties (governments, ISPs, the person whose WiFi you're connected to, some random script kiddie):

\- snooping on your browsing habits (you can intercept and read off an entire HTTP request plain as day, including headers such as User-Agent strings, the specific URL that's being visited, etc, allowing you to build a profile of/digitally fingerprint the unsuspecting user; these are encrypted in an HTTPS request)

\- maliciously handling your requests, returning whatever response they please instead of forwarding it to the intended remote, allowing them to not just censor the content but straight-up lie to you without your knowledge

\- tampering with responses - injecting a cryptominer, tracker, script that adds your computer to a botnet or other malicious/non-benevolent script into the response before it reaches you or even just fucking around with the CSS or throwing in porn for the lulz

<comment><USER12> Why do I trust the host at the far end of the connection more than those in the middle? In fact HTTPS has done little to prevent any of the things you mention, especially through e.g. ad networks.

I wouldn't mind if they were to "throw in some porn for the lulz", but that has never happened for me...

The point is that for this sort of web use, my brain is already turned on, and there's nothing at risk. If someone rewrites a page to mislead me, I'll notice eventually, whether that someone is running a TLS site or MitMing a non-TLS site.

ps. your first sentence is pretty obnoxious; there's no need to personalize this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Google is just another big corporation with many shareholders from all over the world. They can't control or predict what's upcoming cause technology is shaping rapidly. I've seen companies go bankrupt because of this type of stagnation but I think the major problem of Google is that they dangerously centralizing everything (including open source) and they had privacy concerns in the past so yeah. In terms of innovation, stability, performance, or security I really trust them BUT in terms of privacy, spying and how they handle big data or how they shaping internet I think they will always suck. IMHO if not Google then X would actually have exactly the same plan.

<comment><USER54> > In terms of innovation, stability, performance, or security I really trust > them

Just wait till their automated algorithm suddenly (and mistakenly) blocks your account for "suspicious activity." (I've been there)

Maybe there is something "innovative" to using such algorithms but I'm not sure it's all good. What's bad though: stability, for you as a user.</comment></comment>


StorkStand – Transform Your Chair into a Healthy Standing Desk - <AUTHOR> https://storkstand.com/ <comment><USER2> Any idea what the Kickstarter pricing will be?</comment>


What would a teaspoonful of neutron star do to you? - <AUTHOR> http://io9.com/5805244/what-would-a-teaspoonful-of-neutron-star-do-to-you <comment><USER3> I find it fascinating that people often talk about science removing the magic of the Universe. And yet, science has revealed amazing, mind-boggling, alien wonders of the Universe that are far more fascinating than any anthropomorphic pantheons.

Is there anything in the bible, or in any religious text, that comes close to the story of a supernovae? A supermassive star putting forth unimaginable amounts of light and heat over its few million year lifespan, transmuting its component elements from Hydrogen and Helium all the way to Iron. And then creating this extremely bizarre stuff of neutron star matter during its death throes when it flashes so incredibly brightly that it can briefly outshine the entire galaxy it resides within and can be seen by the naked eye from so far away that it takes longer than the span of time that human beings have used tools for the light to travel that distance.

And think, every single human being alive contains within them atoms that were forged in just such an event.

To me that's far more awe inspiring than any origin fable.

<comment><USER4> ..the Universe is not only stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we Can imagine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like someone has been reading Niven. That picture shows a ship built off a General Products #2 hull, and is come straight off the book "Neutron Star": <http://ca.pbsstatic.com/l/41/6941/9780345336941.jpg>

With that hull you could fly past a neutron star and live, if you could survive the tidal forces.

<comment><USER6> The point of _Neutron Star_ is that the tidal forces kill you - although the #2 hull will be fine.

<comment><USER7> Actually, we should be precise - particularly as I first learned about how tides worked from that particularly novel - the tidal forces will only kill you if you are at either extremity of the ship. If you manage to stay balanced right at the very center-of-gravity, you'll be fine.

(We'll leave aside, for now, the highly unlikely scenario of a space travelling civilization visiting a neutron star in close orbit and not taking extreme caution regarding it's tidal forces)

<comment><USER8> But that's impossible to do. Just the length of the human body already counts as not in the very center of gravity.

<comment><USER4> But the guy in Niven's storey survived! By balancing in the center of his ship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great sense of humor:

      > Do not stand in your cargo bay when you beam up your
      > neutron star material. I cannot stress this enough.

<comment><USER10> Based on the rest of the post, I wouldn't want to be anywhere on the ship - <USER2> fact I'd like to be quite some distance away. Trillion megaton nuclear device equivalent? Riiight (requisitions shuttle)

<comment><USER11> Without running the numbers, I'd prefer the distance to be meaningfully measurable in light years.

<comment><USER12> That's excessive. As the article mentions, a neutron star can't exceed a few solar masses. You're much less than a light year from the sun without any ill effects from its gravity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _In case you're looking for a talking point for your next cocktail party, you might also be interested in knowing that degeneracy pressure (of electrons, rather than neutrons) are also what hold up white dwarves._

I can quite definitely state that I've never been to a party where that kind of observation would gain anyone's attention. In fact I'm picturing the audience backing away slowly, looking around for someone---anyone---else to talk to. Not sure if that's good or bad.

<comment><USER10> Last party I went to there were literally no non-techies present. That kind of fact would definitely have gotten you some points.

Good or bad? I'm not sure. At least you know some non-techies. In my social circle, being a windows user marks you as a target for victimisation. Using IE makes you an enemy. Not even knowing about OSs and their politics - let alone physics - makes you a second class subhuman non-participant.

Again, good or bad? I'm not sure. Time will tell I guess

<comment><USER14> I have actually heard people cursing at others with "you are not even a proper nerd!".

Strange times and strange places.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If the half-life of a neutron (outside atomic nuclei) is 10 minutes, why is it stable inside a Neutron star and what is it that makes it stable?

<comment><USER16> According to the article, degeneracy pressure.

<comment><USER17> Perhaps the same reason neutrons bound in atoms don't decay.

<comment><USER18> I wish he hadn't glossed over this. What is it that keeps them stable in atoms?

Edit: Wikipedia isn't very helpful, I may just be too dumb to understand this paragraph:

"When bound inside of a nucleus, the instability of a single neutron to beta decay is balanced against the instability that would be acquired by the nucleus as a whole if an additional proton were to participate in repulsive interactions with the other protons that are already present in the nucleus. As such, although free neutrons are unstable, bound neutrons are not necessarily so. The same reasoning explains why protons, which are stable in empty space, may transform into neutrons when bound inside of a nucleus."

<comment><USER19> In some senses, protons exert an "electrostatic pressure" on each other. The bound neutron cannot become a proton, because of this electrostatic pressure applied by its companion protons - if it were to become a proton, it would need to get over the hurdle of that "pressure". In empty space, this "pressure" doesn't exist, so the neutron can easily slide into a proton- electron-antineutrino state.

As an analogy, when you're hot (say temperature t1) you take your jacket off. However, if you are in a really cramped room with a lot of other people, you'll need to become a lot warmer (say temperature t2) to go through the hassle of removing your jacket and elbowing your neighbour in the eye. If the room is air-conditioned so that you only ever get to temperature t1.5 (where t1 < t1.5 < t2), you'll not take your jacket off, even though you would if you were in a free state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems like a viable plot device for a campy space opera.

<comment><USER21> Indeed, "the energy put out by the sun in 2 or 3 seconds" - sounds like a Culture handgun ;-)

<comment><USER22> In 'consider phlebas' it mentions the Culture use "CAM" or collapsed antimatter, as a weapon. It's a ship-to-ship rather than handgun-sized deal though- probably a good thing, since 200% of the mass gets converted to energy when it hits regular matter, not a measly 0.08%...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I love the analogies, but I got a little lost on the energy output. What kind of effect would "the energy put out by the sun in 2 or 3 seconds" have if released relatively slowly? (The half-life of neutrons is ~ 10 minutes according to the article.)

<comment><USER24> the analogies break down at some point. Turns out we haven't tried this particular experiment. And probably won't. Divide a trillion megaton bombs by ((10 min * 60 s/min)/3 s), and you still end up with 5 billion megaton blasts, sustained for 10 minutes. Would the teaspoon of mass survive that long? No. I'm pretty sure that the first quarter nanosecond of release would be sufficient to ruin anything on a human scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What would happen if an asteroid (say 30km) impacted a neutron star? Mind you, that rock would be larger, although much less massive. Is it possible for something like that to blast off material from the star?

I imagine something like a black hole feeding, the asteroid flattened into a disk and heated up, jets of x-rays from the magnetic poles of the star.

<comment><USER24> It would undergo something like the crab nebula. The mass would vaporize, but continue in toward the star, accelerating into the gravity well. The electrons would be stripped away as the nuclei accelerated, and eventually (eg, nanoseconds) the nuclei would either bounce off or be absorbed into the outer layer. Probably some of both. From space, it would just look like a bright puff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> here's a more readable format:

[http://m.io9.com/5805244/what-would-a-teaspoonful-of- neutron...](http://m.io9.com/5805244/what-would-a-teaspoonful-of-neutron-star- do-to-you)

<comment><USER26> Thanks. That link also works with JavaScript disabled, something the original link doesn't. Makes me shiver when a simple blog requires JavaScript in order to access the content.

<comment><USER25> the gawker network (which the io blog is part of) replaced their CMS with some hell-brewn javascript CMS some months ago. their blogs are rendered with JS now - which means without JS you will only see an empty page.

oh, and the performance is horrible.</comment></comment></comment>


How I wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/kazuo-ishiguro-the-remains-of-the-day-guardian-book-club <comment><USER2> Active discussion about the author's Nobel Prize:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408194](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408194)

</comment><comment><USER3> Loved the movie. Tried to read the book and simply couldn't. The author captures the fastidious nature of the house's servants and especially the head butler so well, it made me uncomfortable. Really outstanding structure and word usage, what I got through.

<comment><USER4> A lot of Ishiguro's works do this; I think The Unconsoled is a fantastic book, but it's so truly painful to read I understand why most people hate it. The Swedish Academy said he "in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world" which I think is a pretty good description of his style.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Remains of the Day is a great book.

<comment><USER6> I remember listening to the book on BBC on a program called off the shelf. Such a great book.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Enviro.Work – Find and fill jobs that benefit the environment - <AUTHOR> https://enviro.work# <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

Most of us want to do more in the battle against climate change - it's tough when your work life is unrelated. Right now, if you want to find a job that helps the planet, there's no clear way to go about that. You could look for environmentally focused companies individually and keep checking their site to see if they are hiring. But that's tedious and it's easy to miss new postings. Conventional job boards don't have a good way of filtering for this. A couple of environmental jobs boards exist, but they have low post volume and are dispersed geographically.

[https://enviro.work](https://enviro.work) is the place to come find green jobs in one spot. Think of it like a search engine for all Earth-friendly jobs out there. We aggregate eco-positive jobs from different sources and link you back to the source.

We wanted to help empower purposeful individuals to maximize their potential for the planet. Enviro.Work is linked with the community at [https://collective.energy](https://collective.energy), where you can find inspiration, feedback, and an audience for your eco projects. Turn climate ideas into plans into reality - then build your team with Enviro.Work.

I'd love to know what you think and hear your helpful feedback.

Thanks for caring! Eric (Enviro.Work maker)

<comment><USER2> There's no way to know who you are from the page, it's completely anonymous. For me that's always a big _big_ warning sign for any site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good call, I'll add some kind of About component

<comment><USER2> ;-)

Awesome! FWIW I dug in and found a comment from you on the community forums and found collective.energy and your site, so it's not as bad as I thought at first.

I also want to add that you and your work and community seem really great. Cheers!

<comment><AUTHOR> Really appreciate the support. Feel free to join us at collective.energy and share with anyone else who you think would benefit from the community

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A bunch of accounts created in the last hour or so have left inane comments here

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955624) created 20 mins ago 1 comment

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955469) created 48 mins ago 1 comment

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955575](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955575) created 20 mins ago 1 comment

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955523](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955523) created 44 mins ago 1 comment

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955323) created 10 hours ago 1 comment

<comment><AUTHOR> Not intentional or requested on my part. Please feel free to delete those comments mods

<comment><USER4> I believe you that you didn't request them explicitly, but it's clear from the data that those were posts by friends or fans who thought it would be a good way to help you out.

In reality, booster comments are the worst thing that people can do to help their friends on HN, because the community here sniffs them out at truffle-pig levels and regards them as spamming.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback! I'll try to prevent newcomers commenting next time

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I actually have a job writing greenhouse gas accounting software. The pay isn't great, but compared to the local booming software industries in Montreal, (ads, video games, porn, or "AI" which usually means ads again), it seems to be much more socially useful.

I'm never quite sure if my work is actually helping or not. For example, some of our clients are unethical companies such as tobacco companies. I reason that they can't use our greenhouse gas analysis for evil and that refusing to do business with them would only result in them not knowing what their environmental impact is.

I don't know if I'm doing good, but I think it's more likely that I am than if I were doing ads, video games, or porn.

<comment><AUTHOR> Being aware is the first step in changing. I'm certain that your impact is a net positive. Thanks for caring!

<comment><USER5> Thanks. I browsed through the job ads with keen interest, hoping to find something that could possibly pay more. Sadly for me, most of the list seems to be in the US. Ah well, hopefully the ecological software job market will expand so that competition for developers will also raise our salaries.

A somewhat sad thing is that ecological analysts (who are the principal users of my software) get paid a lot less than I do because our employers don't have to compete as much in order to hire them. For software developers, employers have to get their pick from the general pool of software developers who can generally get relatively high-paying jobs elsewhere, so that prevents my salary from going down too much. My salary, however, is about 60% more than a greenhouse gas analyst. This somehow seems unfair, but I don't know how to fix it.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're rapidly adding more sources. I'm based in Canada myself so I'll work on getting some more options for you. We'd love to have your company post their openings on the site as well

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just as an FYI: [https://enviro.work/search/?page=2](https://enviro.work/search/?page=2)

I clicked on the search with nothing in the search box and then hit the link for page two. You probably want to switch Django debug off and fix the error page.

That said, it looks really cool. It's a great minimalist design that gets right to the point. It loads instantly since you haven't loaded it with crap. It's really a pleasure to click around a site that just loads content without an amount of JS that makes everything slow.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! Fixed the Django debug issue. Really appreciate your support, it's a work in progress but if we can even help a few people find meaningful work - it will be worth it

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this is a marvellous idea. Environment and climate change is definitely something many of us would want to be able to affect in our daily jobs.

On a more universal level, a service like this, not just for climate work, but in more general terms helping people find a position matching their passion would do a great service to the world [1].

Frankly, a lot of us have just wound up in our current positions. If that position happens to be our vocation, it's probably just a happy accident, or then that specific field was very precise, and finding a position matching the passion was easy. In general case, it's not that easy to match these two, due to the work and timing required.

The problem is, a lot of people are doing jobs they are not the best match from the point of view of the larger community. They might be good and efficient at their jobs, but if they don't know the full power of their positions, and don't have the passion to push for the change, in the limits of their positions, they might not be the best people for that job.

To make the case even more problematic, a lot of positions, ones that people would consider as meaningless, especially in public sector, but also related to environment, actually could offer a lot of power in the right hands, with proper passion.

World is filled with wasted opportunities, but a service like this could help remedy some of the pain points.

That being said, like mentioned in a comment by mlthoughts2018 [2], this is not an easy problem to solve, given for one that positions might not match their descriptions.

But things have to start somewhere, and I think this is a great start.

[1] As a side note, IMHO, I'd like to think this mismatch between a passion and a position being the missing puzzle piece for making things such as public sector competitive over private sector.

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22955566)

<comment><USER7> In addition to the service itself looking good, the single act of making environment the central point of the service, works as agenda setting [1]. Because it's the central point of the service, the jobs are viewed through the lens of their impact on environment.

There's a bigger influence, from doing this kind of smaller things en masse that affects the wider discussion in great proportions.

Just a FYI, that all talk about important things, like environment, is more than needed.

[1] Wikipedia describes agenda setting as something only the big media does, but it is something that happens naturally when we discuss about things. Things that are brought up in discussion are implicitly considered important, as they are worth discussing in the first place. Basically agenda setting theory says that by mentioning important things in discussion, and by reminding the participants of the existence of those things, can help change the world. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda- setting_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda-setting_theory)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your support. Feel free to share the site around!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> While it's a good idea, what determines if a job "benefits the environment"?

A lot of jobs in the list - particularly any startup jobs - are at best unproven in their effect on anything and at worst are a drain on funding resources and have worse negative externalities to the world than being productive in a job that's not nominally "about" the environment, as well as the risk you'll invest years of labor under the assumption the company has a mission to improve the environment only to see it pivot when the business realities crash the party.

<comment><USER9> websites like this can only do their best to collect links to resources, it's beyond scope for them to perform a detailed environmental analysis of each listing. obviously you'll still need to make your own decisions based on what you believe is worth pursuing.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do our best based on a few criteria and provide as much information as possible but ultimately this ^

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> You might consider scraping and including US national park service and forest service jobs. While tangentially related to climate change, I would consider them roles that benefit the environment in a meaningful way. You might consider tagging jobs differently: environmental, climate change, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tagging is definitely on the product road map! Great suggestions, we'll see if we can get park and forest service jobs

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like the idea/theme, as a developer I always wonder "what good can I do for the world?"

But there more I see these type of job boards, the more I'm thinking. There are so many different job boards created. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing?

I don't know what to think of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally understand your feeling. I think the crucial part of doing this right is building a purposeful community, which is what we're doing at [https://collective.energy](https://collective.energy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for making a thing and sharing it here! I get a 500 when clicking on pagination at the bottom (randomly page 4, 11, etc). Also it would be cool to sort by geography, maybe alphabetically, so that a visitor could city/state faster?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! Will start working on those fixes and features

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thanks for this, I'll be keeping an eye on it.

I'm sure you're looking at the idea, but it would be nice to be able to add drop downs to quickly filter by role/location/sector/seniority.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that is on the product road map for sure. Thanks for your feedback and for caring!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great Idea. Bug Report: if I search for "Software" and then go to page two, the url does not include the search-term, which leads to a "ValueError at /search/"

That debug/error page shows a traceback and many server settings, which you might not want to share in a production environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed the debug traceback issue. Will work now on passing search params to other pages. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Awesome idea. Just wondering since I don't see an about-- how are these jobs found / curated?

<comment><AUTHOR> We did a lot of manual work to vet and curate the sources here. Using our own framework to assess in addition to common sense for what doesn't pass the smell test. Feel free to suggest new sources or provide feedback for any you don't think are a fit!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Now more than ever is the time do something about climate change, this is an awesome contribution. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now.

<comment><USER17> Spam alert!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can't go to next page and the search function doesn't work. Great mission!

<comment><USER17> Spam alert!

<comment><AUTHOR> Theres a valid bug report here

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Looks cool!

One very minor suggestion: Make it much easier to filter / search by location.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Would you prefer a dedicated location search bar or radio-button style filters?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reaching in a timely way to connect workers and work,easy to use.

<comment><USER17> Spam alert!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> First job I clicked on was no longer available

<comment><AUTHOR> We do our best to remove expired jobs but if you let us know which one it is, we can address it quickly! Thank you for your support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great idea! And it couldn't come at a better time with everyone who is looking for work right now.

<comment><USER17> Spam alert!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a great resource for anyone who is interested in an environment based career path

<comment><USER17> Spam alert!</comment></comment>


Augmented Reality has to jump the shark to become useful... - <AUTHOR> http://thewayoftheweb.net/2010/08/augmented-reality-needs-to-jump-the-shark/

<comment><USER2> Agreed. I have yet to use any of the location based services outside of Google Maps.

I will say this, though: Being able to search for an item (say, cigars) on Google maps, get a phone number, call for hours, click navigate, and be taken right there, is extraordinarily cool. It sure augments _my_ reality.</comment>


Even If You're All-Powerful, It's Hard To Fix The Economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/09/14/161153421/even-if-youre-all-powerful-its-hard-to-fix-the-economy

<comment><USER2> Funny, the article didn't mention the minimum wage, which was raised 20% by Nancy Pelosi in 2007, the start of our unemployment woes.

The law of supply and demand states that if you raise the cost of something, you will get less of it. Raise the minimum wage 20%, and you will get less jobs. Elementary.

<comment><USER3> Things aren't that simple. Raises in minimum wage in a modern economy rarely have much effect on employment numbers. The vast majority of those at minimum wage are employed in the service economy, so they compete locally, not globally. Therefore a minimum wage increase affects a business and its competitors relatively evenly. The business may be forced to raise its prices, but since its competitors are forced to do the same no competitive positioning is lost.

If you're competing against China, it's a different story. But if your company is that sensitive to the price of labour and competing against China it probably went offshore years ago. You compete against China with robots and high-skilled labour, not minimum wage labour.

The nice thing about giving money to people making minimum wage is that they spend it immediately, putting it back into the economy right away.

<comment><USER4> > The vast majority of those at minimum wage are employed in the service > economy, so they compete locally, not globally. Therefore a minimum wage > increase affects a business and its competitors relatively evenly.

Not so fast.

McDonald's isn't competing just with Wendy's. It's also competing with me making a sandwich.

My cleaning service isn't just competing with other cleaning services. It's also competing with me saying "hmm, I can live with that", etc.

The local retail store isn't just competing with other retail stores, it's competing with Amazon....

> The business may be forced to raise its prices, but since its competitors > are forced to do the same no competitive positioning is lost.

If I spend twice as much at McDonalds, I'm spending less money somewhere else. Or, I'm not investing it, or I'm not putting it in a bank where it gets loaned to someone else to invest/spend. (Cue the fractional reserve arguments about the multiplier on deposits.)

In other words, even if the minimum wage increase "works", it's a transfer from someone else. A tax, as it were, but an opaque one. (Yes, there are lots of evils in the world. It's unclear how that justifies creating more.)

> The nice thing about giving money to people making minimum wage is that they > spend it immediately, putting it back into the economy right away.

If you really believe that the minimum wage has almost no negative effects, why not raise it to $100. Either they'll spend it right away or they'll save some and buy houses and cars. The economy will boom.

Either you believe your theory or you don't.

<comment><USER5> Unless you're extremely poor, spending twice as much at McDonald's won't affect you (and, consequently economy) in any way but it'll affect people working at McDonald's.

Even if the total amount of money in the economy is fixed, the distribution of that money among people matters a great deal to the health of economy which is something your simplistic argument doesn't address.

In the most extreme example if one uber-rich person has almost all of the money and the rest of the country has just enough to buy food, it doesn't matter how much money that uber-rich person has - the economy will be in the shitters because uber-rich person only needs one house, one car, can eat out only in one restaurant per night etc. but if no-one else can afford a car, the cars will not be made (it's too expensive to make just one car).

If there are millions of people that are only one millionth as wealthy as our uber-rich person but wealthy enough to afford a car, a house, a tv set etc., the economy can develop - if there's market for million cars, someone has to be employed to make those cars, tv sets, serve food to those millions of people and a virtuous cycle develops where people employed to create things and services for wealthy people become wealthy themselves.

So the question is: is raising minimum wage creates more over-all wealth (by transferring more money from rich people who have excess of it) or less over- all wealth (by making services of poor people too expensive for rich people).

I don't know what the answer is but you certainly haven't proven that 20% rise of McDonald's prices would cause McDonald's collapse because of massive "I make my own sandwich" movement. Even if that was purely a matter of price (and not, say, convenience of getting a hamburger and fries in few minutes in the middle of San Francisco), McDonald would probably beat you regardless of what minimum wage is due to massive economies of scale, not to mention that making your own sandwich is like using Linux: it's only free if your time is worth nothing.

<comment><USER4> > Unless you're extremely poor, spending twice as much at McDonald's won't > affect you (and, consequently economy) in any way but it'll affect people > working at McDonald's.

Not so fast. I can afford to spend much more at McDonalds, but if I do so, I'm not spending that money somewhere else, regardless of how much money I have. You have to assume that I get no value from spending that money elsewhere to conclude that spending it instead at McDonalds doesn't affect me.

However, even with that assumption, it's absurd to claim that my spending more money at McDonalds and less somewhere else doesn't affect the economy.

You're going to have to argue that the economy benefits from spending money at McDonalds vs somewhere else. The folks who'd otherwise get that spending will be very interested to see that argument.

Moreover, you're making incorrect assumptions about McDonalds customers. They're (typically) not all that well off. More to the point, they're extremely price sensitive, hence the success of the "dollar menu".

We can test your claim in a situation more favorable to it than the real world, namely airports. It's inconvenient to "bag it" and the clientele is reasonably well off. Yet, many folks do, and not just because they don't like airport food. (The Denver airport, for example, has some decent places.)

You're claiming that airport food places could double their prices without affecting what people buy. Do you really believe that? (You can't argue "but airport food is already too expensive" without providing a quantitative argument showing that McDonalds in South San Jose isn't in pretty much the same situation.)

If folks are actually price-insensitive, what limits prices at airport places? (No - competition between restaurants doesn't explain it because the airport could charge them all more money.)

FWIW, I picked "cleaning service" for a reason. The low-end cleaning services in San Jose raised their prices 7-10% about a couple of years ago. (I looked around when mine did.) Mine claimed that she and her competitors lost accounts when they did so and that some went out of biz. She says that there's less money being spent on cleaning services even today.

How do you know that she's wrong?

And no, customers' response to a price increase does not depend on why the price is increasing. (They may be happy with a price increase accomplanied by some other change, but that's not what you're proposing.)

> I don't know what the answer is

You claim to know enough to know that there's no effect from raising the minimum wage.

> but you certainly haven't proven that 20% rise of McDonald's prices would > cause McDonald's collapse

I didn't say that it would cause a collapse. I'm pointing out that the "no change" claim is almost certainly wrong.

If you think that McDonalds is cheaper than a sandwich that you make yourself I understand why you want to avoid quantitative arguments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Energy is close to free. Peta-Watt-hours per day come into the earth from the sun.

The problem, in the US, is that the median income in real dollars has actually declined in the last decade/s. This means the mass market has lower purchasing power. For a while, debt was masking that effect, but that band-aid was ripped off. The fix is to increase median real income. This is mechanically simple, and politically next to impossible.

<comment><USER7> Oh that old saw... we get so much energy from the sun it's all hunky dory. The challenge of converting that energy to a usable form at the kind of scale needed to power a civilization is not mechanically simple. The supply chain and energy inputs (including fossil fuels) required for photo-voltaic are non- trivial. Conc-solar is still not proven at scale and again requires natural resource and energy inputs to build and maintain the systems. Energy return on energy investment is the key metric here and one that is not well understood by many, nor favourable for a lot of the proposed solutions.

<comment><USER8> This is a critical point. Energy return on energy invested (EROEI) is a concept everyone should be familiar with.

I suggest beginning with the work of Professor Charles Hall of SUNY-ESF.

<http://www.esf.edu/efb/hall/energy.htm>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure how much I buy this. With no discussion of the model it's hard to say what assumptions he did or did not make in terms of how all these factors respond to each other.

<comment><USER10> There are four kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, statistics, and computer models.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. And the model is from someone at Moody's! After the mortgage backed securities rating fiasco, it's hard for me to give them any credibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The only way to fix the economy is to _make_ stuff which people will _buy_. So lets all just get back to work and do that :)

<comment><USER13> well no. that only works if the people can buy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does one even begin to model things like this?

<comment><USER15> If this model were actually accurate, Zandi would be sitting on a throne of gold.

<comment><USER14> While true, I'm still interested in how a model with this many variables is created and run. It seems rather difficult (read: impossible) to model a global economy in my opinion.

<comment><USER16> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econometrics>

Econometrics is the science of modeling the economy. But like you said it's pretty much impossible to get calculations correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "long term plan to deal with the country's debt through a mix of tax increases and spending cuts"

Skip the tax increases and do the spending cuts.

We do need some serious tax simplification, but Congress is way too fond of using what should be a simple revenue raiser for social engineering.

<comment><USER18> Tax simplification doesn't win votes. A complicated tax system does win votes. Is your campaign weak with car wash owners? Add 2k lines to the tax code and make washing your car at a car wash tax deductible. Can't seem to get over the hump with the dog walker demographic? Another 1200 lines to the tax code will ensure their votes when you give them tax deductions on dog doo bags.

<comment><USER17> Yep, you're right. Doesn't mean I have to like it much. I do think you could make a campaign out of hating TurboTax though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> GDP relies on energy. Energy is getting scarcer and more expensive. GDP stalls and won't recover. This is somewhat oversimplified but resumes what's happening.

<comment><USER7> The right answer. Economic growth maps almost exactly to the expansion of available energy inputs. As fossil fuel flow rates peak and growth in energy availability falters, so wil GDP growth. We have an economic system designed to function in a world of perpetual growth and perpetual growth in energy / natural resource availability. Our system and its underlying economic theories are not designed nor tested for environments of perpetual contraction of either.

<comment><USER19> Absolutely. For those interested by this, an excellent blog is "Do the math": <http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/>

It explains through many articles how the law of physics put terminal limits on what we can achieve, and kills a lot of misconceptions, like "a service economy needs less energy", "we could replace nuclear/coal/oil with wind/solar/hydro", etc.

<comment><USER7> Cheers for the link

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Baloney, there's tons of work that is in desperate need to get done in this country. Give me access to the US mint and I'll get unemployment down to 0% in a few months.

All those college kids without job? Boom! School class sizes across the country down to 5. Too much crime? Ten times more cops! Potholes in your city? Gone! Want your city covered in solar panels? Done! Street litter? Gone! Dirty public facilities and public transportation? Spik and span! Decrepit bridges, roads, water infrastructure, electrical lines? They're new now!

Keep bringing me people and I'll keep coming up with stuff for them to do.

<comment><USER21> Would love to hear how getting access to the US Mint will do that.

<comment><USER20> I'd crank up the presses to pay all my new workers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Tax increases and spending cuts didn't pull us out of recession? Huh!

</comment><comment><USER23> Why not try something that the economists with the most credibility on depressed economies recommend: fiscal stimulus? I'd love to see what Zandi's model would come up with for that.

</comment><comment><USER24> Steve Keen has some non-traditional economic ideas that seem to make a lot of sense (although I'm not sure I buy his Jubilee Shares proposal). His economic model seems much more matched to reality than most I have seen.

<http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/manifesto/></comment>


Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I like your question and I am interested into other answers as well. I think the answer depends on the role you want to fit in.

I can tell you, that I will learn portuguesse in 2020 as my longterm goal is, to live in portugal and I will set the right foundation next year.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends what area you work in but as you are on this site I assume it's something nerdy :) I would like to be better at graphic design, nothing to complex, just the ability to design better icons, favicons, button graphics, blog post banners etc.

</comment><comment><USER4> I want to actually make an IDE in the coming year - I've been thinking about it for months and just need to dive in

</comment><comment> Crypt0-5haman 1) Learn to code

2) Read at least 50 books

3) Study new languages, for me it will be brushing up on Italian and starting studying French

</comment><comment><USER5> Better Finance skills, meal planning, creating good habits for completing side projects

</comment><comment><USER6> sprite and tileset design for video games

learn Gamemaker Studio

financial discipline

</comment><comment><USER7> civic participation and community organization

</comment><comment><USER8> meditation

cooking

physical fitness

empathy

</comment><comment><USER9> webapps security</comment>


Ask HN: In what OS do you develop? - <AUTHOR> I program mostly in Ruby and Rails but I know that people have a hard time setting rails and ruby to properly develop rails applications in windows.<p>On the other hand, I find it slightly annoying to have to switch between my Ubuntu installation and my Windows installation to do different things and I'd like to centralize everything in one OS. What is your strategy for this? <comment><USER2> For the last seven years I developed on Ubuntu/Debian desktop.

I recently purchased a Surface Pro with intentions of installing Linux on it, but actually was quite happy with Windows 10 (read more here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14062143](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14062143))

Right now I use Vagrant to setup my dev environments, and honestly, even if I went back to a Linux based desktop I would continue using Vagrant boxes to handle my environments. It's so nice to be able to spin up/down, reset, etc all without messing up my home base.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm trying to set up vagrant on my windows machine, but I can never installed it properly, there's always some error when installing a box (for example, the trusty64 hashicorp). It always says "it can't find this box", no matter which box I use

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Professionally, I program on my desktop running Ubuntu, and I interact with servers using Ubuntu LTS. On the rare occasion that I need test something in Windows, I boot up the Windows partition on my laptop. If I needed to use Windows more frequently, I'd look into buying or using a spare license to run Windows in either Virtual Box or VM Ware.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's cool. Are you running ubuntu with unity or any other DE environment?

<comment><USER3> For a while I was running Lubuntu with AwesomeWM which I really liked but I had a hardware failure so now I'm just running stock Ubuntu with Unity because I haven't taken the time to setup AwesomeWM again. I can't say I'm sad that Unity is being discontinued because it's never been completely stable for me.</comment></comment></comment>