Why Do People Stay Poor? [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/eopp/eopp67.pdf <comment><USER2> Without making the jump from washing plates/factory work to software I don't know how I would have escaped(still haven't) considering my pay increased 4 times. Just brutal when you trade hours for money directly at a low rate, I was doing 70hrs washing plates before and it was nothing ha.

Edit: there is the thought of living within your means, personally with a roommate I could live on $10-$20K a year which you can make doing labor jobs but not a lot saving. I'm lucky being single/having no direct responsibility eg. children.

It is my opinion though that if you want to/have internet/time then you can alter your life for the better, but yeah can't just say "learn to code". But other options available. I see the point about opportunity because I had a friend to crash on his couch when I was technically homeless that is helpful/bare min opportunity.

My jump was not fast, it took at least 2 years not including the 3 years before that of self-study/personal interest. I freelanced on the side while working as a dishwasher before first in office/full time job.

<comment><USER3> This sort of perspective is very important, especially here on HN where I see plenty of ignorance on this topic. When you work these jobs, often the local cost of living is pinned to these minimum wages, where you stagnate and are unable to save. How can you possible afford to move when your rent increases? You have no savings to rent a vehicle to move your things, nothing to put down up front for a new apartment, and at no guarantee of finding a job at the end because a manager for working class work is only going to bother hiring local candidates. Throw in an unforeseen cost, and you can see how easy it is for people to end up missing payments and living in their car or a tent while still working that minimum wage job.

<comment><USER4> People vastly underestimate how hard it is to do anything without capital/savings.

If you are one missed paycheque from going hungry, you can't afford any risks. No going back to school, no going freelance, no interviewing, no investing in anything. You can't afford the means to make money, whether it's a car, a computer or nice clothes. You can't afford them breaking down, but you also can't afford maintaining them.

The missed opportunities add up over time.

Grapes of Wrath is an excellent book that drives this point home really well. It hurts to read at times.

<comment><USER5> I try not to think too hard about how my recent progress toward not being completely hopeless depended on a few inflection points that could easily have gone another way or could have been inaccessible had a few earlier events gone a different way. Luck is a force multiplier that can go wrong as easily as it goes right. Circumstances determine how much you can prepare for either type.

<comment><USER6> Yeah same here. Just got a close to dream job, and if I had waited maybe another week to contact them maybe it wouldn't be available anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Easy answer: because expenses are higher for poor people.

Instead of buying a home, the lower class rent their whole life. Instead of their daddy giving them a home, the middle class pay interest on a mortgage most of their life.

Instead of buying a 20-pack of $necessary_product that costs $20 and will last for months, the lower class buy a 2-pack that costs $5 and lasts a couple weeks because they need the $15 to pay rent. And then they have to spend more money on gas (or bus fare, or a taxi, or time and energy walking, or ...) to get to the store again sooner.

Instead of the employer providing any supplies that are needed, the lower class have to buy their own uniforms or tools.

Instead of a 5% interest rate on their loan, they have a 25% interest rate.

Because they don't make enough money to set some aside as savings, they have to pay late fees or NSF fees or overdraft fees.

<comment><USER8> This is a great definition of what I consider to be the 'poor tax'..

Not to mention if they ever get un-poor they don't have the knowledge to 'build wealth' until they start slowly learning it or from a mentor.

We would better off teaching 'home finances, interest and banking' classes instead of Algebra 3 or geometry 2 (for 99% of people)

<comment><USER9> Agreed.

It is crazy that for a standard "Savings" account: \- interest earned is less than inflation. \- I pay tax on that interest earned. "Saving" money in a common savings bank account pisses away value.

Many people are not capable of more financial management capability.

The middle class is often locked into a mortgage - I am too! - and is barely one step up. But it is one step up.

Ultimately, poor people don't own things that make money. They are not "rent seekers". They don't own stocks or real estate or anything else where the simple act of ownership makes money.

<comment><USER10> I'm not a finance guy but I suspect it's axiomatic that you can't keep up with inflation without taking any risk. Like a law of economics.

<comment><USER11> Isn't a government bond basically equivalent to inflation? That would mean you have a risk-free way to get "inflation" returns, with the caveat that you can't access the money for a period of time. Although I guess you can argue that "tying up" the money is a form a risk, and almost certainly a luxury some poor people cannot afford.

<comment><USER12> >Isn't a government bond basically equivalent to inflation? That would mean you have a risk-free way to get "inflation" returns, with the caveat that you can't access the money for a period of time

It's not risk free, there is nothing that stops government from creating inflation so they can pay off the debt for in inflated dollars.

Today, central bank alone doesn't have power to make create money out of thin air. Government guaranteeing loans from banks to corporate players and projects is creating inflation. It's good for politicians as they can pay off their expensive mistakes in cheap money.

<comment><USER11> Treasury bills are considered "risk-free", although pedantically of course nothing is actually free of risk.

[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/risk- freereturn.asp](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/risk-freereturn.asp)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes thought, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and _would still have wet feet_."

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness._

<comment><USER14> I'm not trying to generalize, because I know poor people who are poor through no fault of their own (and we should provide public support for them), but I also know a larger number of people who contributed to their own dire financial situation and it wasn't because they couldn't afford quality boots, it was because they over-extended themselves with new cars, a way too big house, the big screen TVs and expensive trips and meals.

<comment><USER15> Poor people don't go on airplane vacations or own houses. Poor people don't have bank accounts. You don't know poor people. You know people who live beyond their means.

Poor people are in Section 8 housing or various other housing vouchers.

<comment><USER14> _You know people who live beyond their means._

Right. People who lived beyond their means and ended up poor.

Or are you saying if you once had money for these things, it's impossible to ever be poor again?

<comment><USER16> > ended up poor

I think we have to establish what it means to "end up poor" in this context.

I'm barely living within my means. I have a decent house, a very nice car, a respectable gaming PC with VR, and recently got into hobby RC cars. I take at least one 1-2 week vacation a year out of state.

But...I have $0 in my savings account, and less than $50K in my 401(k). I'm 38 and only started contributing to a 401(k) 6 years ago after I finished my CS degree and started working jobs that pay decently.

But I also have $0 in credit card debt. I tend to spend all my extra money, but no further. I'm not taking on extra debt (Beyond my mortgage and car loan) to fund my activities.

Would you consider me poor? I am after all, barely living within my means. Because of my spending habits, I'm almost living paycheck-to-paycheck.

<comment><USER14> No, I wouldn't consider you poor. But it probably wouldn't take much for you to end up poor.

I know people who make more than $100,000 per year and have a net negative net worth and take on more debt every month. I would define them as "cash poor".

Point being, these people end up poor when something unexpected happens, despite having made very good money for many years prior. They could have managed their finances better and weathered the storm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not going to comment about the article without reading it carefully; but just in case there are any aspiring data analysts online there is a chart that is interesting even without knowing anything about the data...

On page 64 (65 as the PDF numbers it), chart (b) "Distribution of savings rate" has an awkward little peak on the left hand side of the chart. It is very difficult to tell from inspection whether that is a real feature of the underlying data or if it is an artefact naive kernel density estimation.

If you ever see that pattern in your graphs, do consider trying logKDE [0] rather than ordinary Kernel Density Estimation a la geom_density() in ggplot. It also isn't perfect but the result is usually a bit better for things that approximate an exponential distribution.

[0] [https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/logKDE/vignettes/log...](https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/logKDE/vignettes/logKDE.pdf)

<comment><USER18> I think that's a real effect.

Intuitively I would imagine a lot more people save 0% (or close to 0%) of their income than save 50% of their income, I would also expect a lot more people to save or overspend 3% of their income than overspend or save 25% of their income.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is something I enjoy about our jobs up in Scandinavia - the salaries are very compressed around the mean.

Engineers, Lawyers, and other similar professions tend to earn 2x-3x of what the absolute minimum wage jobs earn. That's quite the difference compared to other countries, where Engineers can earn 5x-20x.

People here are still motivated to seek higher education and better paid jobs, even though they could live normal lives off those lowest paid jobs that don't require any education.

<comment><USER20> I agree but considering the minimum wage is 0 I don't understand how you came up with the 2x-3x number.

<comment><USER21> Nordic countries have minimum wages defined by collective bargaining agreements rather than the law - because unionization is so strong and the agreed minimums are relatively good, they don't really need national legal ones.

<comment><USER20> Yes, but it's still optional. Only 39% of small companies have signed a collective agreement in Sweden. Companies refusing unionization and paying way below the union rates is a real problem: [https://www.breakit.se/artikel/7599/i-spent-two-weeks- delive...](https://www.breakit.se/artikel/7599/i-spent-two-weeks-delivering- for-uber-eats-and-made-4-4-per-hour)

Even most people in Sweden think there is a legal minimum wage and are surprised to hear it's 0 and that you can legally pay someone 0.01 an hour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> To anyone interested in the topic, I recommend reading Duflo & Banerjee's 2011 book "Poor Economics". They pioneered the approach of using RCTs to test interventions in fighting poverty (for which they received the Nobel Memorial Prize together with Michael Kremer). They go into a lot of factors as to why poor people get certain economic outcomes, including but not limited to the poverty trap theory, and take a refreshingly "humane" / respectful view towards the people they are dealing with.

<comment><USER23> I second that. The RCTs get discussed most often. But what was eye-opening for me were their observations on how poor people manage the few resources they have matching the infrastructure they can access – like investing in bricks (Ch8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm not qualified to judge the technical merits of the paper, but their conclusion seems plausible. They concluded that in an illiterate rural population, there did seem to be a threshold effect in asset levels above which it seemed much easier to progress economically. But it's unclear to me how applicable this is to the poor in the US or other developed economies, particularly when we're talking about a population where almost everyone can read and write, and many of them have cellphones and internet access. Part of the reason that many people (including my family) try to emigrate from developing countries to more developed economies is that the same person, with the same skills, can be _vastly_ more productive in those economies, which is what allows that person to have a much better lifestyle. And much of the reason that high-productivity jobs are not available in those poor countries is _because_ of a lack of capital. So it makes sense that giving the poor some minimal amount of capital is required, so that those same people can be more productive. But it seems unlikely to me that adding capital (increasing the assets of poor people) would have the same beneficial effect in developed economies, given the large pre-existing 'capital stock'

This [article]([https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/08/27/by- globa...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/08/27/by-global- standards-there-are-no-american-poor-all-in-the-us-are-middle-class-or- better/#1c00d8035cb5)) describes what american poverty levels would be if we used the same measure as we do in developing countries and makes the point that by those measures there _are_ no poor people in the US, just "lower middle class". That doesn't mean we shouldn't try and improve the lives of people at the lower end of the income distribution, but we should at least understand that when we use the term _poverty_ in developing and developed economies, we're talking about something qualitatively and quantitatively _different_ \- so the optimal solutions are likely different too.

<comment><USER25> > by those measures there are no poor people in the US

That doesn't feel like a meaningful metric when there are as many as 17% of mothers with young children experiencing food insecurity [1]. Perhaps that's due to COVID, but 11% of households were food insecure as recently as 2018 [2]. Around half a million Americans are homeless, and 35% of them are shelterless [3].

Are all of these people "not poor" and are they "middle class"? This all to say that how we think about poverty should focus more on the outcomes that people actually experience (access to food, shelter, healthcare, etc) than key economic indicators. Claims like "the War on Poverty is over" and "there are no poor people in the US" don't seem to match up with the lived experiences of many Americans.

[1] [https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/05/06/the- covid...](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/05/06/the- covid-19-crisis-has-already-left-too-many-children-hungry-in-america/)

[2] [https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition- assistance/fo...](https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition- assistance/food-security-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics.aspx)

[3] [https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in- america/homeless...](https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in- america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-2020/)

<comment><USER26> You're agreeing with their point with good evidence. Whatever set of metrics or filters are used to identify 'poor' needs to vary based on the context of the conversation. I think most metrics have been left as is for decades to have consistent reporting like how we can say 'Poverty has fallen X% in [COUNTRY] since [20 years ago]'

But that doesn't give a fair view for all nations. Food insecurity is a metric that would quickly show poor improvement over decades, at least compared to current metrics. Maybe access to affordable housing, water, power, and other items on the first 2 level of Maslow's Hierarchy would work better.

In the end, we may learn a lot about 'first world' economies like the US and the areas failed by capitalism. I think many of the metrics pulled out could be used to argue either way Numbers on food insecurity could be spun as "We need to fund and support our citizens and make this better" or "Look how far ahead we are so do nothing or cut programs to save money!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Studies like this boil down a hugely complex issue into variables they can control for. There are a lot more theories as to why people stay poor than the two they offer at the beginning.

Why don't we study all of the people who have definitely risen from the ranks of the poor to a higher class and see what they have in common?

Sure, it's not the norm. But it happens all the time. There is enough data to form an opinion.

I'm guessing the way people rise from the poverty is much the same as people who are average becoming wealthy. They are willing to take risks (i.e., leave your neighborhood, buck the trends in your family tree) and they work on being prepared and available for opportunities that may present themselves.

We also know there are certain behaviors that absolutely correlate to and probably perpetuate generational poverty (children out of wedlock, crime, quitting school). The people I know who have risen out of inner city poverty in the U.S. (not the same as Bangladesh I know) distanced themselves from these behaviors and from the people who considered them okay.

</comment><comment><USER28> When you're stressed you don't make good decisions. You choose the fatty food, TV, booze because you want to cheer yourself up. Making 'good decisions' is so much easier when you have an income and you're not avoiding creditors calls. I've lived through it. It was exhausting.

</comment><comment><USER29> People stay poor because all the past unfairness never goes away. It clings to them. Real survivorship bias exists to muddy the reality of how bad it truly is to have bad things happen in early life. A lot of people can simply never recover when they were kicked so unfairly in early life contrary to their peers. I believe it's why there used to be experiments with lsd to see if memories could be erased.

</comment><comment><USER30> off the top of my head I think it depends on the type of poor you are.

Some people are poor because of their situation and some situations are more difficult to escape than others.

Some people are poor because of their habits and inclinations and they just don't change those habits (for one reason or another), so they stay poor.

<comment><USER31> >Some people are poor because of their habits and inclinations and they just don't change those habits (for one reason or another), so they stay poor.

That's true. But often the reason they have those bad habits is they were taught them by the environment that, through no choice of their own, they were born in.

<comment><USER15> Absolutely. It's not only bad habits they were taught, but the huge amount of things they _weren't_ taught.

I was taught how to budget, how compound interest works, and so on by family members.

I used to do rental property maintenance in places where people didn't know to use a dish strainer to prevent sink clogs, nobody ever taught them. Now, spread that out over hundreds or thousands of other things they're not aware of. There's tons of useful knowledge that middle/upper class people pass down t their kids that poor people have no clue about.

<comment><USER32> Agreed. And knowing is not enough, you have to have enough discipline or environmental training to act at the appropriate junctures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> For the individual, the answer is Debt. And servicing repayments of debt. Eg, that on the typical mortgage you repay ~3 times what you borrowed.

<comment><USER4> 3 times? How so?

<comment><USER33> Sorry - my mistake. I was going off memory.

2 times, including the principle.

Looking here: [https://finance.icalculator.info/mortgage- calculator.html](https://finance.icalculator.info/mortgage-calculator.html)

I enter, Mortgage Amount: 100000 Annual Interest Rate: 5% Term of Mortgage: 30years

The interest paid is 93255.20

<comment><USER34> But that is still cheaper than paying rent for 30 years

<comment><USER35> In our area average rent has now overtaken our mortgage payment. So glad we got off that treadmill.

<comment><USER36> It's cyclic.

Where I live, when I was too young to buy, mortgage was cheaper.

When I was old enough to buy, rent was cheaper and prices had already risen enormously, so I stuck with rent, and hoped prices would stabilise or fall. In retrospect this was a mistake, as prices continued to rise.

Now mortgages are cheaper than rent again.

<comment><USER35> That is interesting. I have only owned a house for ~7 years, so I likely haven't experienced this cycle. Thanks for the insight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Why does every econ paper these days read like a high-energy physics paper? I feel like I am reading about field theory, not econ.

<comment><USER38> Hum... What exactly did you expect?

It has a simple stochastic model and some statistics for verifying if the real world agrees with it. You are deluding yourself if you think one can study economics without advanced statistics.

<comment><USER18> Are these study's preregistered? It seems like there is so many degrees of freedom the researcher could easily take a stroll through the garden of forking paths.

<comment><USER38> > Are these study's preregistered?

No idea. I like this study, it doesn't have as many degrees of freedom as is usual, the theory is kept to a minimum, and the data is kept to the maximum available. But you are right, there is still a lot to go wrong.

Anyway, I haven't seen many empiric studies of poverty traps. The real test is, given many of those if they will agree with the theory, not what any single one says.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Here's a better question: how do people become rich?

Being poor is table stakes for being a human animal. The miracle of modern society is that billions of people aren't poor (as high as 90% according to Hans Rosling[1]). How did we make that happen? How do we make it happen for everyone?

[1][https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of- populatio...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population- poverty-thresholds?stackMode=relative)

<comment> ellis-bell correct, 90% of people make more than $1.90 ppp according to the data. but only 35% make more than $10 a day.

the poverty line is defined generously at ~$2 / day by most oecd countries, but making above the poverty line does not make you not poor.

all of that said, the field of development economics has been very rich in research these days, particular from the likes of duflo and banerjee

<comment><USER39> The chart measurement is in constant PPP dollars and clearly shows a downtrend in all poverty worldwide over time. Obviously the line of what constitutes "poor" is debatable, but what's far more interesting is the continuing growth in people who are rich.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Off topic, but I would recognize \documentclass{article} anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER41> >> The threshold above which people no longer regress into poverty is 9,309 BDT (504 USD PPP)

Am I understanding PPP correctly--this is a value equivalent to what $500 buys in the US?

That's surprising because the paper states this is above the amount available for conventional microfinance; I didn't realize it was indeed that "micro".

<comment><USER42> Yes. You'll be surprised by how much $100 can get you in a developing country and how few people actually have access to even that amount of money.

<comment><USER43> But that doesn't matter here, read the previous comment again

>this is a value equivalent to what $500 buys in the US?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> > Structural estimation of an occupational choice model reveals that almost > all beneficiaries are misallocated at baseline and that the gains arising > from eliminating misallocation would far exceed the costs. Our findings > imply that large one-off transfers that enable people to take on more > productive occupations can help alleviate persistent poverty.

Balboni, C, Bandiera, O, Burgess, R, Ghatak, M and Heil, A. 2020. 'Why do people stay poor?'. London, Centre for Economic Policy Research.

[https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.ph...](https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=14534)

</comment><comment><USER45> Wealth, in it's most fundamental form, is a mindset.

</comment><comment><USER46> TLDR;

"We have shown that poverty traps exist. People are poor because of a lack of opportunity. It is not their intrinsic characteristics that trap people in poverty but rather their circumstances. Poverty is not an innate condition. This has implications for how we think of development policy and for the value of eliminating global poverty."

<comment><USER47> Based on data from the Third World and destined to be used to argue for policy changes (towards wealth redistribution) in the First World.

<comment><USER48> This is anecdotal, but having grown up poor, I can tell you that the research is perfectly applicable in the first world.

<comment><USER47> And I grew up poor and can tell you it's not. In the First World, you have other opportunities to earn wealth than having more than enough livestock. Go to school, study something worthwhile, start a company and prosper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> does anyone read Piketty?

</comment><comment><USER50> The paper says:

> The question is whether the bimodality is symptomatic of a poverty trap, > namely whether poor people do casual jobs and hold nearly no productive > assets because they do not have the talent to do anything else or whether > the fact that they are poor prevents them from acquiring the assets needed > to climb the occupational ladder.

The cause/effect inversion, of talent/ability => asset acquisition, is always worrying. We might benefit, as a society, if we confront the IQ problem honestly and head-on, in order to have a more complete/accurate policy picture especially because it seems reasonable that wealth transfers should be optimised to enable higher productivity.

Consider: "The Bell Curve Review:IQ Best Indicates Poverty"(Benjamin, 2018), in which:

> I find that IQ is more correlated with poverty than socio-economic-status in > every regression, regardless of what is included in the regression, by a > factor of 3.

Also: Hsu(2015) [https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2015/04/income-weath-and- iq.ht...](https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2015/04/income-weath-and-iq.html)

> Income mobility is strongly affected by IQ. In fact, IQ is a much stronger > predictor variable than race for escaping the bottom quintile of income.

<comment><USER30> Being intelligent certainly sounds helpful. I think that falls under my first point if intelligence is primarily situation (as the life you're born into is a situation and thus so is your genetics).

It certainly does make sense that intelligence has an effect on social- economic status, since intelligence is valuable.

How do you suppose we confront "the IQ problem"?

<comment><USER50> > How do you suppose we confront "the IQ problem"?

\- A "Manhattan project" to discover protocols, tools, medications, cybernetics, new modes of education, anything really, that can enhance general human intelligence.[0]

\- A rethinking of social welfare policies to take into account what we're learning about evolutionary biology and genetics. If certain heritable/genetic factors have a disproportionate impact on outcomes, we need to consider the hypothesis that certain well-meaning policies might not have a significant impact on permanently liberating people from poverty, given game theoretic constraints. We would need to find a way to make our economies positive sum, rather than zero sum games.

[0]: [https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection](https://www.gwern.net/Embryo- selection)

[1]: Converting Moloch from Sith to Jedi [https://youtu.be/hKvVdGNzCQk](https://youtu.be/hKvVdGNzCQk)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> This reminds me of the study of how long people tend to hold onto a FRN.

[https://moneymaven.io/blackwealthchannel/community- building/...](https://moneymaven.io/blackwealthchannel/community- building/asians-keep-a-dollar-in-their-community-120-times-longer-than- african-americans-2ZvNTGNxpkClloXlXK_wMQ)

</comment><comment><USER52> Simply, because of banksters, rotten owners of manipulated 'financial system' \- the rothschilds & their bitch€s, institutions, and so on. Killuminati. That system is very easy to manipulate (for them, not for us)... They've created the most powerful currency ever. No, not USD, but the DEBT. With this, they can do everything today, as they owe also governments and the rest. They can create 'crisis' just like that, usually to rob working people of valuable assets (that comes from real work, not from usury), to cover their worthless (melting since '71) "money". And tell the people that's their fault. Again and again. Decade by decade. The sad thing is that so many people still believes in that whole rotten, satanic system; only some people have their minds open enough to understand this, to know that's our sad reality (it's not about what we believe in, but what we SEE); the others are blind, 'too busy' or 'too lazy' even to think, so it's easier to call it 'conspiracy, theories, etc'. Today, if mainstream f __ __ng media call something as 'conspiracy', you should think about that twice and analyze why. Same about pseudo "law", that concerns us, but doesn't apply to them... Which promotes deviation, but banishes almost everything that is actually good for us.

That why people do stay poor - because of corrupt puppet governments owned by these 'elites'... The humanity should have much bigger, much better, beautiful achievements so far! But that's impossible in this system, which makes the people focusing mainly on bullshit, instead of things, that really matters! What people can do? Well, nothing special, just WAKE UP and start to think! The more the better. This is what the system fears: awake, thinking people. People who have the potential to be free... The system needs slaves! That's why the world looks what it looks like, that's why people suffer - needlessly! Thank you & good luck (we all need it).

</comment><comment><USER53> A sterling argument could be made that Capitalism as a concept requires a permanent underclass of low income workers. for example, Guardiola-Rivera believes that poverty and inequality are political issues that can only be solved when the poor organise and come up with a solution to liberate themselves.

Rising income inequality is breeding more inequality in educational opportunity, which results in greater inequality in educational attainment. That, in turn, undermines the intergenerational mobility upon which Americans have always prided themselves and perpetuates income inequality from generation to generation. This dynamic all but guarantees a permanent underclass.

</comment><comment><USER54> I also know some people who have a poor mentality. That is, they consistently refuse to seek out better-paying opportunities despite abundant mental ability in the name of "happiness," complain that their series of low-paying roles deserve more money, and advocate for hard socialism to enable redistribution to make that possible. The problem, you see, is all the other people.

<comment><USER55> Them, and those straw men.

</comment></comment><comment> globular-toast This seems to be "Why do people stay in poverty?" "Poor" has a different meaning depending on who you ask. For example, students are popularly considered "poor". Some people would consider themselves "poor" if they can't afford a car. Some people consider themselves "poor" because they are not millionaires.

<comment><USER31> I have not read the article, but assume that their use of the term "poor" was carefully defined.

<comment> globular-toast Yeah but my comment was more about the fact people here are talking about mortgages and things. Not really the same kind of poor.

<comment><USER31> Oh, ok.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> This is why Booker/West-style baby bonds could have a significant chance to alleviate structural poverty. Beyond a certain threshold (and I think we're past that in the US) equality of opportunity (better education, etc.) won't make up for starting out poor. What people need is seed capital.

For a fraction of the cost of universal healthcare, we could endow each child born in the US with a $250,000 trust fund at birth. That would be game changing.

<comment><USER57> I'd bet a significant number of people, upon turning 18, would learn that their trust fund had been emptied out by their parents.

<comment><USER58> Assume that happens, and that no effective countermeasures are derived. How are poor families worse off for having the option in the first place? It's not like Booker is proposing to take the money from some other service offered to the poor: Booker proposed paying for it by increasing taxes on capital gains, which poor people weren't paying to begin with.

<comment><USER57> That's not really the point.

Who do you think would be more likely, and more in need, to raid their children's trust funds? This would be yet another program where the poor don't get what was promised to them and the rich do just fine. Rich kids would get their $250k, and poor kids would find out exactly how their parents were able to pay the rent the whole time they were growing up.

If you want to help poor kids you need to make sure nobody else can take the money you give them, even though everyone around them has a very strong incentive to take that money. Otherwise you aren't actually helping who you intend to help.

<comment><USER59> Even the worst case you're describing sounds like a win to me, relative to the present. If gaming the system looks like "the child doesn't have to worry about stable housing while growing up", that seems like an upside.

But I'd caution against the idea that lower-income parents are so predisposed to both gaming the system and stealing money from their children, which seems like an unintentional undertone of your comment.

<comment><USER57> > If gaming the system looks like "the child doesn't have to worry about > stable housing while growing up", that seems like an upside.

To be clear, you are talking about children's trust funds being raided as a good outcome.

How would you feel if that violation of your rights happened to you, and it didn't happen to other children, and then some adult told you that it was ok that it happened?

<comment><USER59> Probably about the same as I'd feel if I had no chance of affording college because my family was below the poverty line and I spent my teenage years working part time to help pay the rent, all the while knowing that other children lived lives of relative luxury.

<comment><USER57> Your answer ignores the hypothetical trust fund you were supposed to get, which would be enough to pay for college (if your parents hadn't stolen the money from it).

This is actually a pretty good example of how bad it would be if parents raided their children's trust funds, which is something that would _definitely_ happen. Kids who had their money stolen wouldn't be able to go to college.

<comment><USER59> It's worth restating that I don't agree that a significant percentage of lower income families would raid their child's trust funds. I think that perpetuates an inaccurate stereotype that people with lower income are somehow more inclined to unethical behavior, or more willing to steal from their own children.

But I directly addressed the impact of both the hypothetical trust fund and the hypothetical theft: if my hypothetical parents stole my shiny trust fund money to pay rent, I'd not need to spend my own part time earnings on it, and all of us would be way more likely to be able to set aside money for college, what with us not having to use our incomes for rent.

<comment><USER57> > and all of us would be way more likely to be able to set aside money for > college, what with us not having to use our incomes for rent.

Savings from a child's part-time job would not come anywhere close to the hypothetical $250k proposed for the trust fund. This is a completely unconvincing argument. And you are still defending theft rather than condemning it!

Do you honestly believe it is acceptable for parents to steal money from their children? If not, why are you arguing that children should work to make up for the stolen money?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Wealth is mean-reverting along genetic lines. I.e if your removed ancestors were poor, but your immediate ancestors were rich, chances are you or your descendants will revert to being poor. Together with available data conditioned on factors like geography and ethnic background, by far the most likely hypothesis is that expected wealth is mediated by factors like intelligence and time preference, which are strongly genetically heritable.

</comment><comment><USER61> Because we decided to place as many things in the market as possible, so necessities of life like housing and food can only be got via labor for the employer class who underpay (that's where profit comes from) and if they don't like you you can't even access that low pay and become homeless and either starve, live off charity, or eat extremely unhealthily which reduces your capacity to be useful to the employer class over time.

Redefining basic necessities as human rights and placing them outside the market will do so much to reduce poverty it will blow peoples' minds. However, this will of course come at the expense of the privileges of the powerful so such things are opposed.

It's helpful to think of this as a design question. Do we design a UI that many users fail at or is the problem the system design?

</comment><comment><USER62> I'll probably read the whole thing at some point, but I'd say that it's due to the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle), basically "don't assume you're special". Or "don't assume any one sample of a thing is special", from the start.

And since the natural state of humanity is poverty (after all we all started as hunter-gatherers), breaking out of it on your own is extraordinary. I wouldn't be surprised that the first communities to break out of poverty had 1 extraordinary individual that lifted their entire family/clan/tribe. Then through social osmosis more people in their vicinity were lifted, provided they cooperated/were open enough to the new thing that made their neighbors rich/were not discriminated for a million reasons/...).

Look at the Industrial Revolution. It basically spread geographically from the UK and is also spread socially to UK off-shoots, first.

<comment><USER43> >And since the natural state of humanity is poverty (after all we all started as hunter-gatherers), breaking out of it on your own is extraordinary.

The natural state was sharing resources and taking care of a small group of people. Not working for a boss.

<comment><USER62> What does that have to do with anything I'm saying?

<comment><USER43> I don't agree humanities natural state was poverty. Yes, they were poor compared to now, but resources were shared and no one was "breaking out on their own". If you had a good hunt this was shared with the community, unlike the world we live in now were wealth is hoarded by a small few, so your comparison makes little sense.

<comment><USER62> Ah, the noble savage myth. Go read up just how friendly relations were between those noble savages were and how high the incidence of violence was.

If you think we're more violent now, in the age of plenty...

<comment><USER43> >If you think we're more violent now,

Don't strawman me, I didn't say that, or anything about violence. All I was talking about was distribution of income.

<comment><USER62> Ok, let me rephrase this, because we now have inequality and some people still live like back in the Stone Age, things are worse now?

Keep in mind all people back in the Stone Age lived... like people in the Stone Age :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Heroku's uptime for June says 99.28% but it's really 96.25% - <AUTHOR> http://davidsommers.com/2012/07/23/heroku-uptime-numbers-are-off.html

<comment><USER2> An app that can "idle out" can only be running on a free plan, and is therefore not considered a "production" app by Heroku - <https://twitter.com/blakegentry/status/220456696068321281>

<comment><AUTHOR> Which is fine. The site was down for both free and non-free apps. Down is down. The number of free or non-free apps shouldn't matter. But thanks for looking that up - useful to know.</comment></comment>


Why I Always Tug on the ATM - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/03/why-i-always-tug-on-the-atm/ <comment><USER3> My card was once copied - but not at an ATM but from a self-service pay terminal inside a large mall. Like this one: [http://www.blattus.de/oldies/scans/2012/lesegeraet.jpg](http://www.blattus.de/oldies/scans/2012/lesegeraet.jpg)

Apparently some criminals broke into the mall, and manipulated all terminals to record and wirelessly transmit the card information. The skimming devices were not visible from the outside, since they were mounted on the inside of the terminals. Therefore they haven't been found for multiple months - <USER2> finally money was withdrawn with cloned cards. In my case it was around 100€ that were withdrawn somewhere in India. Fortunately my bank immediately detected it, locked the card and notified me and also gave me my money back later. When I reported it to the police I learned that thousands of people where affected. Since that point of time the mall has locks and anti-tempering seals around all card reader terminals.

</comment><comment><USER4> > I've noted in countless skimmer stories here, the simplest way to protect > yourself from ATM skimming is to cover your hand when entering your PIN. > That's because most skimmers rely on hidden cameras to steal the victim's > PIN. As easy as this is, you'd be amazed at how many people fail to take > this basic precaution.

I wonder how hard it is for a trained eye to guess the PIN when typed this way. Perhaps you could even do it with a neural network.

<comment><USER5> I think according to HN, anything is solvable using a neural network

<comment><USER6> Didn't a NN extract pins from Wi-Fi signal strength?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I enter my pins with at all least three fingers touching the keypad at once (with only one finger doing the pressing) for an extra layer of obfuscation.

Many banks also allow multiple accounts under the same umbrella. It then becomes possible to maintain a shallow petty cash account with a dedicated debit card (the other cards stay at home without activation).

<comment><USER8> In my country is possible to withdraw money from most ATMs by typing 6 digit code from mobile banking app (generated randomly). The withdrawal then is confirmed in the app (you see the detailed address of the ATM). The only downside is that you need internet access but that's usually not a problem.

Another option that's starting to be widely available in ATMs is just using NFC payments (HCE, Android Pay).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting! Maybe not good advice though. I can see this backfiring and someone who tries it getting busted for something stupid like destruction of property, or even being accused of trying to install a skimmer themselves.

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8273-atms_how_to_break_them_to_s...](https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8273-atms_how_to_break_them_to_stop_the_fraud)

<comment><USER11> i really want to listen to this, but I honestly cannot make out what she is saying. It sounds like a combination of english and another language, and there aren't subtitles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why do atms not have a perfectly flat front? This would require the atacker to carry around a big unconcielable front cover.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is something I've been doing for the last two years, that and shielding the keypad with my hand. If anyone were to ask or notice then I'd explain I'm checking for skimmers and maybe they'll start doing the same.

</comment><comment><USER14> What have ATMs not yet instituted chip readers rather than the three track magstripes? Why are bank ATMs so slow to deploy? If most PoPs can deploy chip readers, so should banks, no? Is something else holding them back?

<comment><USER15> While my bank (credit union) has deployed ATMs with chip readers, they've been slow to deploy cards with chips. As near as I can tell, they're replacing the debit cards on their regular cycle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would love to encounter one of these in real life some day and take it home as a trophy.

<comment><USER17> Bad idea!

This is when the police may belatedly show up in all their glory and detain you with the device in your possession, and you'll have a hard time explaining that you're not part of a skimming gang.

The other possibility is that the skimmers may be watching and once they see you're taking their device, they may decide to recover it, beat you up, or even call the police on you claiming that you're the criminal.

If you see something like this, the best course of action is to leave it alone and discreetly report it to the police.</comment></comment>


Behind the Scenes: Twitter, Part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3317-behind-the-scenes-twitter-part-1

<comment><USER2> I thought this would be a 'behind the scenes' look at Twitter, the company. However, it's about using Twitter as a support channel at 37signals.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting that they encourage Twitter as a support channel, as a user I like Twitter for support, but as a company I absolutely loathe it. It's hard to get details and follow up, and if anything requires an explanation or sensitive details you need to get an email anyway...

<comment><USER4> There are cases when people need to follow up with an email, but there are many more people who just have quick questions that can be answered publicly with a few words or a link to what they need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looking closely at the main screenshot, I only see one tweet related to product support. Look forward to future posts discussing their filtering methods. Raw word list? Bayesian learning? 440+ tweets is not insignificant, but experience tells me this takes about 3 or 4 hours per day just to manually identify/categorize using a sane level of effort.

<comment><USER6> The next two parts will have more detail, but the short answer is "yes" to both a raw word list and a Bayesian filter in terms of techniques we've tried here. One of the simplifying things that makes the problem a little easier is that we don't try to classify beyond "does this need an immediate reply or not."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The description of the requirements sounds like a very close match with what ExactTarget's "SocialEngage" service offers. If you checked it out and dismissed it, I'd be interested to hear why.</comment>


Ask HN: If you develop a codec in a cleanroom is it still encumbered by patents? - <AUTHOR> Hey all! Eating lunch something crossed my mind:<p>If you develop a new awesome video codec in a cleanroom (provable you didn't contact the outside world) and it overlapped with e.g. H.264 in some way would you still be in legal trouble using it due to their patents on it? <comment><USER2> Independent invention at a later date is no defense against a patent. So, you are still in trouble.

Independent invention is a defense against a copyright though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes. Patents don't care if you knew about them or not.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nope you're still liable for infringement. It does help you avoid the treble damages for "willful infringement."

</comment><comment><USER5> Copyrights no (that's what cleanroom gets you), patents yes.</comment>


Obsessive Learner Challenged Magnus Carlsen. He Had One Month to Train - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNF0LkIodXw <comment><USER2> An utterly impossible task. This video is of no chess interest. The guy lost a piece immediately. I read some of his blog about this. He originally meant to play the "Play Magnus" app, where you can play a simulation of Magnus at various ages, not his fault the real Magnus agreed to play. But it was just a waste of Magnus' time, not showing due respect. The guy's preparation was pretty embarrassing to read. Asking someone who had some idea about chess for advice would have been a good idea. It seems he tried to memorise the openings Magnus had played. Good luck with that, Magnus plays more different openings then anyone. And you will blunder as soon as your memorized lines run out, which is what happened. Just doing tactics training would have been more useful. Reading about some of his other challenges was interesting, but in this one he had no idea, no respect and no chance.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The thing that surprises me is that he has some knowledge of the game. How could he expect to achieve this goal?

The more you study the game, the more you realize just how phenomenal is the ability of any grandmaster ranked player.

A more reasonable but still impressive goal might be to enter a real tournament after a month of study and win one game from other unranked club level players just starting out in tournament play.</comment>


Hypnosis as a digital therapeutic? Mindset raises seed round to do just that - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/15/hypnosis-for-health-investors-have-placed-a-1-1-million-bet-on-mindset-health-that-it-can-work/ <comment><USER2> wow been reading heaps into hypnosis recently, seems like its just a tool to deliver therapy more effectively in this case

[https://time.com/5380312/is-hypnosis-real- science/](https://time.com/5380312/is-hypnosis-real-science/)

supposedly works for most of the population too (even for pain management in surgeries)

[http://accurateclinic.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/A-meta-...](http://accurateclinic.com/wp- content/uploads/2016/03/A-meta-analysis-of-hypnotically-induced-analgesia-How- effective-is-hypnosis-2000.pdf)

[https://cdn.journals.lww.com/anesthesia- analgesia/Fulltext/2...](https://cdn.journals.lww.com/anesthesia- analgesia/Fulltext/2002/06000/The_Effectiveness_of_Adjunctive_Hypnosis_with.52.aspx)

[https://www.mindsethealth.com/blog/acute-vs-chronic- pain](https://www.mindsethealth.com/blog/acute-vs-chronic-pain)

<comment><USER3> You'd probably be interested in Igor Ledochowski's hypnosis techniques. He's one of the best people I've seen describe conversational hypnosis and turn it into a framework that is reasonably flawless in practice. After learning his way of thinking about hypnosis, you'll notice the techniques used by politicians quite regularly, and you'll know what they're up to before they even get to the punch line. It's not a coincidence that Bill Clinton suddenly started talking and gesturing like Anthony Robbins during his impeachment trial.

Incidentally, I discovered another path to self-hypnosis - write a few scripts "in the style of" some of the accomplished modern hypnotists such as Igor Ledochowski and Sean Michael Andrews, for an issue that is near and dear to yourself. Really think your way through making scripts that you feel would differentiate their styles while also acknowledging the similarities. Improve them until you are convinced that the scripts you wrote is how they would have hypnotized you. Be able to explain every nuance as if each hypnotist is teaching you their method specific to the problem you are working on.

This makes you write scripts that you'll respond to effectively - using their styles and frameworks, but using your own thought process. It's a kind of Socratic path to self hypnosis, and easily bypasses your "critical factor," as Igor would call it.

Modern hypnotists are all still doing Bandler and Erickson methods in the end, even if barely detectable, but with current language, modern metaphors, and a rapidity that doesn't allow for examination before responding.

The two things that stick out most among all the modern hypnotists: NLP-style pattern interruption, and "embedded commands." Master those, and everything else we know about hypnosis today falls in line.</comment></comment>


Measuring GPS Precision - <AUTHOR> http://blog.oplopanax.ca/2014/03/measuring-gps-precision/ <comment><USER2> This is a nifty tool, but it doesn't offer statistically independent samples. For many people, they don't care, but calculating from just a single track is really a measurement of how much your track "drifts" as satellite move across the sky, and not so much your location error.

A better (but still not perfect) way to do this is to take measurements at several known location benchmarks, and then repeat this over a few days. Your local city government probably has a listing of known benchmarks, in Las Vegas the website is: [http://www.lasvegasnevada.gov/Find/survey_benchmark.htm](http://www.lasvegasnevada.gov/Find/survey_benchmark.htm)

Doing this over the course of several days is important because you get data from several different GPS satellites from several different positions in the sky. This is much more labor intensive, but you will get a much better spec of how much you can trust your GPS.

<comment><USER3> I do this with some vehicle tracking equipment I run at ski resorts.

They run the machines over the snow on a daily basis. After a week or so of passes over the same trail, you get a much better idea of where the average line is.

The data my clients typically initially supply me with is usually taken with a single pass using a Garmin unit strapped to the handlebars of an ATV. They often wonder why it differs so much from the results they're getting from the vehicle tracking equipment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ...Until you get a GPS that assumes slow movement is measurement error and you calculate infinite precision regardless of what actually is the case.</comment>


The Third Depression - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/opinion/28krugman.html

<comment><USER3> Considering that his Keynesianism has basically destroyed Japan's future (while at the same time he faults them for not borrowing enough) I'd hope he'd proceed with a bit more caution. The basic problem he has is that he doesn't really understand why we're here. When debt chases bad assets it's a disease that has to be cleared.

He ignored some pretty serious depressions in his analysis as well. The panic of 1819 comes to mind as a pretty serious one. People ignored the desires of those long on stocks and real estate to bail them out. They realized the problem was too much debt and just let it work itself out despite the pain it caused them in the short run.

Then there is the depression of 1920-21. This depression probably highlights most clearly the Austrian theory of the business cycle and why the Austrian response to the bust is the correct one. There were no interventions in the economy following the bust. It was a very serious contraction by any definition.

We live in a world that's consumed by debt. We're taught that debt is good despite our instincts to the contrary. We're taught that being irresponsible is the way to get yourself out of short term pain. Listening to these people seems like madness at this point. The real reason that budget cuts are on the table is that everyone knows we're all broke. After 10 years of this I imagine people are going to get fed up with bailouts and inflation. Krugman will still be crying for more stimulus while a few people might get serious enough to let the banks fail and start over.

Our fear of short term pain might be the worst part of the modern political system. We'd rather avoid some of the short term pain even if that means dragging things out for decades.

<comment><USER4> _Our fear of short term pain might be the worst part of the modern political system._

When people realize that they can vote themselves more money, they will. Government will then promise more than it can deliver and proceed to spend money like no tomorrow just like what happens to Greece and California.

But it's _heresy_ to suggest that democratic institutions should be scrapped altogether. Everyone thinks democracy equal freedom, but it's really just majority rules.

<comment><USER5> _When people realize that they can vote themselves more money, they will._

I would agree had you said "When people _think_ that they can vote themselves..." because who are they kidding? There is no "Obama Money." The government's money comes from the people, as the residents of Greece and California are discovering.

I suppose you can vote yourself more money if you can vote and yet pay no taxes, which might be the true problem. Perhaps in order to have a say in the direction of the country, you need to have skin in the game.

I don't think that chucking democracy is really the right reaction. I stand with Winston Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

<comment><USER6> _Perhaps in order to have a say in the direction of the country, you need to have skin in the game._

One of the original thoughts behind establishing a bi-cameral legislature was that only (real-estate) property holders could participate in the senate. The idea being to prevent the masses from voting the property to themselves. Eventually, it was settled to give the senate to those who were competent enough to organize themselves into local governments/states. Still, it would be interesting to have a house where one man == one vote and a senate where one dollar == one vote. I'm not sure human nature would allow the government to be primarily funded by power-mongering but it'd be a fun experiment to try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I suspect the real problem is the evaporation of superficial jobs. We have become a nation devoted to our wants, but when things look bad people quickly cut back on such things. A tiny fraction of our population are "farmers" but with the over abundance of food produced and the only way to make money is to either suck on the governments subsidies or create specialty _locally grown, free range, Organic etc_ goods.

I think only long term way to get out of chronic high levels of unemployment is to either accept we are going to live in a welfare state, or remove the minimum wage.

<comment><USER8> what do you think of basic income?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income>

<comment><USER9> Maybe in the future, but it sure seems like a disincentive to working. I would prefer we implement a flat-rate tax on income filed as individuals and not as a family. Something like a 20/20 (first 20k exempt then 20% of the rest). I am not sure about the actual numbers (sounds like a big data crunch through the IRS income reporting would be good).

Regardless of policy, it is very important to get as many people in the mode "I am paying for this government" so that fiscal responsibility is desired by most as opposed to a handout mentality.

<comment><USER8> > Maybe in the future,

what are the criteria for this future?

<comment><USER9> I guess when robots get too good at replacing humans (reasoning, mobile, perform skilled work).

<comment><USER8> so why are people unemployed now? isn't it, as Retric put it, that superficial jobs are being automated?

do you think all those unemployed now are just lazy?

<comment><USER9> wow, talk about interpreting what I said way out of context and intent......

No, I don't think unemployed people are all lazy. Where the heck did I even come close to saying that? I believe the "basic income" as described in your link is wrong for right now and has more of a basis in some future.

People are unemployed because we are in an economic downturn and people are not spending and capital has also dried up. Companies are going without more than automating. This isn't the consequence of some tech revolution, it is the consequence of poor decision making on Wall Street and in Government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I click the article. I see it's Krugman. Before I read further, I say, "Ah, Krugman. I bet his solution is to print money."

> ...governments are obsessing about inflation when the real threat is > deflation, preaching the need for belt-tightening when the real problem is > inadequate spending.

That's Krugman's answer for everything. Dot-com crash? Create more money:

2001 Krugman: "During phases of weak growth there are always those who say that lower interest rates will not help. They overlook the fact that low interest rates act through several channels. For instance, more housing is built, which expands the building sector. You must ask the opposite question: why in the world shouldn't you lower interest rates?"

Oh, wait, they did that and that created the housing bubble that he's now suggesting we prop up by... creating more money.

This quote from the article is even crazier:

> But no: over the last few months there has been a stunning resurgence of > hard-money and balanced-budget orthodoxy.

Balanced-budget orthodoxy? Man, the guy's got huge cojones, at least. When your policy causes problems, insist it on even louder as the solution, and point to classical common sense ("balance revenues and spending") as orthodoxy. Good economics, not so much, but huge cojones definitely. Startup founders could do worse than emulating his confidence when pitching investors.

<comment><USER11> I'm glad to finally find someone who knows exactly what caused the housing bubble and subsequent crash. Could you explain it to me? I find the whole matter very confusing myself, although I've read a lot about it. So: low interest rates caused the housing bubble. Could you explain how that happened exactly?

<comment><USER10> > I'm glad to finally find someone who knows exactly what caused the housing > bubble and subsequent crash. Could you explain it to me? I find the whole > matter very confusing myself, although I've read a lot about it.

Yeah, it is a complicated topic. What did you want to know specifically, what were your questions?

> So: low interest rates caused the housing bubble. Could you explain how that > happened exactly?

Low interest rates were a big part of the problem - the price of money got below the cost of inflation. That means borrowing as much as you can is profitable. Let's say your interest rate is 4%, but the rate of inflation is 5%. That means that all things being equal, your rents on a commercial property are increasing faster than you're paying in interest! That doesn't seem like a big difference to a layman, but the gap between 4% and 5% is huge. That's 20% on your money.

In that kind of environment, it means if you borrow as much as you can, you turn bigger and bigger profits. This drives housing prices up. It also drives the stock market up. But the assets are artificially high because the money lending rates are artificially low, ie, set by the Federal Reserve. An arbitrage like this would be much less likely to happen over such a long period without the rates being set artificially low for political reasons, to make things look good when they weren't.

And then you know the rest of the story after that.

For the most straightforward, plain English explanations, I'd recommend Peter Schiff - he was correctly predicting the housing crash almost to the letter and getting mocked on news analysis programs for it. Here's a link to some of his clips from 2006 and 2007:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw>

He's got some free videos and wrote some books, check the clips above out - he's consistent with that message - and then check more of him out if you want to understand more.

If you have any specific questions, I'll try to answer to the best of my ability.

<comment><USER11> I guess my question was very vague. Let me be more specific.

When people talk about causes, they can mean a few different things. For example, if someone is crossing the street at a walk signal, and is hit by a drunk driver, we tend to say that the drunk driver caused the accident. The accident could have been prevented if the pedestrian had been more careful, perhaps, but he was generally justified in crossing at a walk signal. The driver, on the other hand, was doing something unexpected and dangerous. So in this sort of situation, we can point to a cause.

Then again, there are other accidents where there is no single cause. If you ask what caused Chernobyl, you could answer that it was caused by bad reactor design; or by failing to follow safety protocols; or by running a dangerous experiment; and, from what I've read about the accident, all of these explanations would be somewhat correct. All of these actions were reckless, and the absence of any one of them could have prevented the accident. So with Chernobyl, there are many independent factors which collide in an unpredictable way to create a catastrophe.

Yet again, there are systems like the weather. If you want to know why it's raining, you can point to particular things that happened recently - <USER2> moisture moving in from the pacific or what have you. Each event that occurs has some proximate causes. But overall, the weather is chaotic and unpredictable. There's not really any way to analyze it into overall causes - the best we can do, long term, is the ultimate forecase of the 'hippy dippy weatherman': 'the weather will continue to change, on and off, for a long, long time'

So, for me, right now, the economy is pretty much like the weather. There are highs and lows, and each one has its particular characteristics, but I can't see an overall system to it. I'd love to have a level of understanding where it is more like the driving accident: I could point to the particular asshole who caused the mess. If that's not possible, I'd at least like to have a Chernobyl level of understanding, where I have some sense of what mistakes were made.

So anyway, I guess I've read some pieces of the story from a few different sources, and they all give a fairly plausible story of how A preceded B, and ~A would have prevented B. Some of these are: deregulation, low interest rates, government interference in the housing market, bad modeling of risk on the part of finance firms and credit agencies, capitalism itself. I have a little bit of an understanding of each of these stories. But I'm still confused over which of these could be considered independent causes. For example, if the financiers somehow _needed_ to find a place to put their money, then it may have been a _consequence_ that they came up with risk models which drastically underestimated the risk of certain products.

So, what I'd like to know is, how did low interest rates lead specifically to this housing-led finance bubble? Were the other factors coincidental, or forced?

I hadn't ever heard that borrowing was actually below the rate of inflation - so that's very interesting to me. But then, why didn't the bankers just borrow money and put it into treasury bonds or the stock market? Why build up this house of cards with subprime mortgages and mortgage-backed securities and whatever else?

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. I'll also look into Schiff later (I don't really like video, but I'll see if my library has one of his books).

<comment><USER12> I find the recent financial trouble really fascinating, partly because so much of it was predictable, and partly because I'm not certain that it was avoidable.

Let's rewind the clock. IIRC, in 2000-2001 we had the dot-com crash and its various effects on the economy, but there was a relatively fast recovery, partly due to low interest rates. Low interest rates in and of themselves didn't directly affect consumers' habits, but they did have a powerful indirect effect in the form of easy credit.

This easy credit prompted the poor and lower middle classes to overextend themselves. They took the opportunity to buy consumer products they couldn't technically afford, in the form of new cars, electronics, furnishings, etc., and that in turn caused a brief period of economic boom.

But, one of the interesting things about the poor and lower middle classes is -- despite another article on HN this morning -- they're always on the lookout for a way out of their situation. Especially anything that looks like a "cheap" solution.

The housing market. The combination of cheap credit -- with lenders practically falling over themselves to hand out loans to individuals that didn't qualify on paper for the loans -- along with the mentality of the lower socio-economic classes that housing was suddenly "a good investment" -- because prices were going up, up, up and _nobody_ at the time believed they could ever fall -- caused a housing gold rush.

In places like the Bay Area, a lot of the available land for new housing is party far removed from everything else. This is the classic suburban housing model, and it's also going to be factor.

Because, things actually were going pretty great for about a year or two. If your credit was shaky for any reason, you couldn't afford to move or buy a house, but hey, everyone else is happy. And, remarkably, the price of basic goods and services didn't _seem_ to change much during that period -- just the price of housing, which exploded.

And then, in a perceptibly short period of about a year or so, gas prices went through the roof. (I still don't understand why that happened, but it was timed nicely with the war in Iraq.)

What happens if you're running down a hill as fast as you can, and then you try to make a slight course correction? There's a pretty good chance that you eat pavement, and that's what started to happen.

The over-extended poor and lower middle classes had by this time used much of their available credit, and they were doing fine, unless the day-to-day cost of living changed much. Thing is, many of them had nice homes that were a 30 minute commute from work, and many of them had nice, huge vehicles. Both of those turned into the perfect storm of a price sensitivity on gas.

The first stumble happened in the car market. The distinctly American SUV, which had been considered invincible, suddenly started to see a slow-down in sales. A slow-down of anything in a bubble economy makes people nervous, but there didn't seem to be a very noticeable reaction from any major groups.

But, the price of gas stayed fairly relentlessly high, and significant numbers of people started to fall slightly behind on their credit card payments. This led to effect number 2: a very slight downward change in consumer spending.

The really neat effect though was on housing. Seemingly overnight, nobody wanted to move farther away from work. Houses started to stay on the market longer, but the prices didn't drop, at first. Thing is, too many of the people trying to sell were doing so because they themselves were overextended in credit, and they were trying to get some of that free equity out of their home that everyone had promised them.

Realtors at the time were still naively optimistic though, so they -- nearly to a one -- encouraged their sellers to stick to their price and wait it out.

The net effect was precisely what most people had considered impossible: the housing market stalled, and then crashed.

The lower socio-economic classes by now were really beat up financially, so even when the price of gas fell again, they just weren't spending money anymore. A huge number of people got soaked on their home purchases, seeing decades of savings evaporate seemingly overnight.

The big financiers and creditors then ran into trouble, and we all know the rest.

I think that the price of gas was the metaphorical straw that broke our economy's back, but I also think that the trends at the time were totally unsustainable and doomed to failure eventually. I also see how people are so willing to blame low interest rates and cheap credit (two sides of the same coin), but the thing is, those also resulted in the rapid growth of economy. What few people want to admit is that a healthy modern economy absolutely depends on the lower socio-economic classes spending money; the more they spend, the better off everyone else is. Maybe someday our economy won't work that way, but for now, it does.

Without those low interest rates, it's just as likely that we would have seen a long period of stagnation coming out of the dot-com crash. Whether that would have been intrinsically better or worse for us is way over my head.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I often wonder why more engineers don't get into economics. It is a control system and would be well suited to engineering graduates with expertise in control systems.

<comment><USER14> Sweet mother of jesus no. Engineers would gravitate towards a centrally controlled system in no time. Economics is _not_ a control system, it's emerging behavior from independently acting agents (free market economics is, which I argue is the only morally defensible system). A UK (?) technology- oriented scientist build a computer-controlled economic system for some South- American country in the 1970's, complete with a Star Trek like control room. There was a revolution before it could be put to proper use though. I don't remember enough details to google it, anyone else who can dig up some links?

<comment><USER15> Project Cybersyn:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn>

Discussed here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190508>

<comment><USER14> Thank you, that's the one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So, besides drugs and entertainment, what were the growth industries during the Great Depression?

<comment><USER17> Government ( 1/2 :-).

That's certainly the case right now; since the start of the recession, according to the BLS government jobs have increased by 590,000 and 7,960,000 private sector jobs have been lost (<http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/06/026620.php>)

<comment><USER16> Yes, but I know there are several other private sector industries that held their own or even flourished during the Depression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Related article from this morning's reading: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_prit...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/7857595/RBS- tells-clients-to-prepare-for-monster-money-printing-by-the-Federal- Reserve.html)

<comment><USER19> ...directly addressing Krugman's viewpoint:

"The Krugman doctrine of perma-deficits is ruinous - and has in fact ruined Japan."

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> America is saturated and inhabited by people who will live on <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_income>

</comment><comment><USER21> We're certainly in a great depression already - with real unemployment close to 20% (shadowstats.com), most of our states having greece-like deficits, people losing 50%+ wealth from the market/real estate crash. We don't see soup lines because we have food stamps and unemployment checks mailed to our home and deposited right into our bank account .

And it's only the beginning. Global austerity is here (except US and Japan is fighting valiantly to steal more honest work from its people via printing). World's biggest consumer, the boomers, are retiring. Automation/Software will keep reducing jobs permanently.

The ancillary point is, boostrap your startup wisely. Hire smartly. Don't spent money on things unless you have to. Don't take money. Keep control of your company.</comment>


Internet Trends 2015 by Mary Meeker - <AUTHOR> http://www.hackingnews.com/technology/internet-trends-2015-mary-meeker/

<comment><AUTHOR> You must watch this presentation. If you want to invest in a product, if you are searching for an area of technology, if you want to see interesting graphs, watch these slides.</comment>


Cars just a pixel in Google's sweeping AI vision - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=74307 <comment><USER2> I imagine AI is really the last great frontier of computing at this point, isn't it? Unsurprising that Google wouldn't be sleeping on it</comment>


Boeing 787 Reaches 801 MPH as a Jet Stream Packs Record-Breaking Speeds - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-sn-jet-stream-flight-20190219-story.html <comment><USER2> Note to readers, land speed not equal to air speed. As the article discusses it doesn't break the sound barrier.

That said, the news here is that the jet stream is carrying more energy than it has in the past (air mass is moving faster, kinetic energy content is 1/2mv^2). I read a paper a long time ago which talked about the impact of thermal 'tubes' where denser cold air travelling at speed would "punch holes" in high pressure systems leading to more complex weather patterns. Sadly I cannot find it! The question I think about when reading this is the impact on the duration and temperature swings of the winter months in the north east of the continent. In particular, atmosphere so cold as to support hurricane formation over land. Most famously exploited in a fairly mundane movie "the day after tomorrow" but the modelling works if the temperatures meet certain conditions.

I don't know if winter "super storms" are possible due to other moderating influences but if they are, having the jet stream behave in a new way is a prerequisite (feeding very cold air into the system).

<comment><USER3> Do you know if the rides in higher energy jet streams are less comfortable, or is it undetectable by the passengers?

<comment><USER4> I've had a SFO -> London flight once where the pilot intentionally flew into a very strong jet stream current (saved us a lot of flight time, think it was close to an hour). Experienced a short burst of mildly rough turbulence entering and exiting, but otherwise smooth sailing.

<comment><USER5> Just curious... How do you know that? I wonder how some nervous passengers might react if they learned the pilot decided to enter a turbulence area on purpose.

<comment><USER4> The pilot got on the intercom and specifically stated he was doing it. He assured everyone there was zero risk outside the brief bumpiness and it would get us there much faster. He got loud cheers of support from the cabin, so I guess those nervous just kept to themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is probably a stupid question, but how is "ground speed" measured?

Is it how quickly the airplane moves past a fixed point at it's altitude, or along the earth's surface? I.e. the plane is effectively moving along the surface of a sphere, but if the plane is 30,000 ft up, then the radius of the plane's sphere is 30,000 ft greater than the radius of the "ground" so traveling at the same angular velocity will require a higher speed the higher you go.

If I'm thinking about this right, across their respective "planes," the airplane will be moving faster than it's shadow. So maybe a better way to ask this is: is ground speed the speed of the plane, or the speed of its shadow?

<comment><USER7> [https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/move.html](https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airplane/move.html)

ground speed is the speed of the plane, relative to an observer on the ground, air speed is how fast the people on the plane are going relative to themselves.

Airspeed = Ground Speed - Wind Speed (wind blowing towards front of plan is positive, tailwind is negative)

<comment><USER8> I'm a bit under the weather, so my comprehension may be lacking, but I think you've got your signs reversed (or your head/tail terminology flipped).

If tail wind (moving _with_ the plane) were negative, then air speed would exceed ground speed. Intuitively, that doesn't make sense. Air speed can only exceed ground speed if the wind is blowing in an opposing direction, i.e., the plane must travel faster against the wind to achieve the same speed relative to a ground observer.

<comment><USER9> Wind is "named" after where it comes from. If you fly north, and the wind is a north wind, you fly slower. (This terminology is in line with what GP said.)

Then, ground speed = air speed - wind speed.

Thus, GP seems to have either the sign wrong, or ground and air speed mixed up (but not both :-)

<comment><USER10> > Wind is "named" after where it comes from.

This is absolutely true, but has always infuriated me because it seems needlessly contrary as compared to the way we speak about anything else travelling in a direction as read from a compass. Does anybody know why it's the case?

<comment><USER11> Can you name anything else named after where it's going, not where it comes from? I can't think of anything named like that, but I guess there must be some.

<comment><USER12> Within a marine context, current is typically given as direction to while wind and waves are direction from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This makes me think that some time in the distant future, when we're really great a terraforming, we could influence the weather of the planet specifically to create functional jet streams that we could use to make travel faster, and then plan air routes specifically to use them.

A more serious question: I assume this kind of event doesn't actually save fuel because the airplane still has to maintain the same airspeed to avoid stalling, right?

<comment><USER14> > A more serious question: I assume this kind of event doesn't actually save > fuel because the airplane still has to maintain the same airspeed to avoid > stalling, right?

If a plane maintains the same airspeed, but gets extra ground speed thanks to a tailwind, it'll complete its journey in less time and therefore should save fuel. (Unless it ends up having to circle the destination airport while it waits for its original landing slot!)

Of course, planes going the other direction will use extra, so overall we don't win.

<comment><USER15> > Of course, planes going the other direction will use extra, so overall we > don't win

Aren't some(all?) long-haul routes chosen on a flight by flight basis to take advantage of favourable winds where possible?

Compare yesterday's eastbound BA11 (LHR-Singapore) vs the westbound BA12 (Singapore-LHR) flights.[0] Neither route looks like a great circle.

Eastbound routing: London - north of Berlin - Minsk - Voronezh - Volgograd - cross Caspian sea - Turkmenistan - Lahore - New Delhi - KL - Singapore.

Westbound: Singapore - KL - south of Jaipur - Iran - just touched Turkmenistan - south of Baku - Tbilsi - Turkey (just) - south of Prague - south of Dortmund - LHR

[0] flightradar24.com or similar

<comment><USER16> Typically yes. Right now there is a general avoidance of Ukrainian (Crimean and nearby) and Syrian airspace so the flight plans will take that into account, the winds aloft, and the airways available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For those of you who find this interesting, there's a whole site dedicated to this: [https://groundspeedrecords.com/](https://groundspeedrecords.com/)

801 MPH is not even close to the record, even for a 787.

<comment><USER18> 865mph in a 744 is something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interestingly the National Weather Service in Wilmington, OH posted about the jet stream and its affect on their weather balloon yesterday [0] (please forgive the link to Facebook)

[0] [https://www.facebook.com/NWSWilmingtonOH/photos/a.1920894441...](https://www.facebook.com/NWSWilmingtonOH/photos/a.192089444195219/2552201944850612/?type=3&theater)

</comment><comment><USER20> So what if they suddenly left the jet stream, for example flew a bit below or besides... If that's possible... and happened to be in normal wind speed, the plane would disintegrate due to sonic boom?

<comment><USER8> It wouldn't disintegrate due to a sonic boom, because this extraordinary speed is due to the plane being helped along by tailwinds. If the tailwinds disappear, the plane slows down; it doesn't speed up.

What I'm not clear on is, would the passengers feel like they just decelerated by 200+ mph in an instant?

<comment><USER21> But doesn't the plane have any inertia?

<comment><USER9> Yeah. Good question. It would really seem to depend on how fast the air speed changes.

I mean, the opposite effect is well attested to - you fly along with a headwind (and sufficient airspeed), then comes along a sudden tailwind, and your airspeed drops sufficiently that you stall, or at any rate descent. Wind shears, often associated with cold fronts or thunderstorms.

Maybe a) mach 1 is further from cruise speed than cruise speed from stall speed, and b) drag slows down the plane more effectively and quickly than the engines can accelerate it.

That could explain why wind shear has and does lead to stalls, but not to sonic booms/structural disintegration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >The ordinary cruising speed of a Dreamliner is 561 mph, with a maximum propulsion of 587 mph. Any speed gained on top of that is thanks to Mother Nature's helpful boost.

Wow, cruise speed is that close to 'max' speed? Or maybe that's just a max suggested cruise speed.

<comment><USER23> I'm not an expert. But my understanding is that the "maximum propulsion" speed (587 mph) is limited by the "critical mach number" of the airframe, which for jetliners is something like 0.85.

Faster than that, air around portions of the plane may start moving faster than the speed of sound (even though the airframe as a whole is going slower than the speed of sound), and this wreaks havoc in terms of lift, drag, controllability, and structural integrity ("mach buffet").

I think cruise N1 is something like 80% (that is, of full power). If you pushed the engines to 100% power at cruise altitude, they could probably get you past 587 mph / mach 0.85, but you'd be having a really bad day.

<comment><USER24> When I was getting my pilots license I stumbled into a really cool video NASA did showing exactly what happens when you reach a fluttering condition like what you described. This is a link to the NASA recording if anyone is interested.

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhwLojNerMU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhwLojNerMU) (Older with music, kinda funny old-school science video from NASA)

Edit: formatting.

<comment><USER25> In practical terms, flutter due to approaching transonic conditions is probably pretty rare. That kind of flutter is (mostly or most often) due to the interaction of normal shocks with the control surfaces, or coupling with an elastic mode of the wing or tail surface.

The flutter in the first video is occurring at very much subsonic speeds, and looks to be either the result of flying a purposely underdesigned tail surface, or flying a properly built one beyond its rated flight envelope. The second video contains a wide variety of flutter instances, some of them aeroelastic, some of them transonic, and so on.

 _One_ way to get into a transonic flutter, however, is to be a hotshot business jet pilot who flies higher and higher and faster and faster. The higher you go, the lower the density, so your minimum speed increases. Also, the temperature goes down, so the speed of sound decreases. Where these two meet is called "coffin corner," and you don't always have to fly yourself into it by increasing your speed and altitude; you can fly close to coffin corner, and then fly _into_ colder air or less dense air. No matter how you get there, you're stuck. Slow down, and the wings stall, the nose drops, you pick up speed, and hit transonic flutter. Speed up to stay in the air, by dropping the nose, and you hit transonic flutter directly.

<comment><USER24> Interesting.

Do you have any thoughts on composite-based aircraft like a Cirrus and flutter? A few times I've had a Cirrus SR22 into a pretty steep descent with poor controller sequencing for an approach into busy terminal space and had to push it down, but the plane felt solid even at 180-190kts TAS. I backed it off only because I get nervous with any unexpected turbulence which is not uncommon in Florida.

The Piper Saratoga I flew for a bit didn't seem to like the speed as much, that or the toga was a bit more vocal than the Cirrus in what it was feeling with regards to airspeed.

<comment><USER25> Only in the most general terms, and from first principles: Composite structures will have a higher stiffness per unit mass, which will cause the fundamental frequencies to be higher both for the pure structural modes and the control surface interaction modes. It's therefore likely that you'd only begin to encounter these aeroelastic modes at higher speeds. In other words, if you take the driving frequency as something like the inverse of the time it takes for air to pass over the wing, that may match the metal wing more closely than the composite wing. Modeling that stuff in a wind tunnel is very tricky, and you used to end up with these not-at-all-realistic-looking models that, nonetheless, captured some aspect of the full-scale aircraft being modeled.

Don't die. Stay in the envelope. Flutter is only the quickest way to ruin your airframe and day, not the only one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> An incredible visualization of winds aloft (and several other parameters can be seen at [https://earth.nullschool.net/](https://earth.nullschool.net/). Currently the jetstream (i.e. winds at 250 hPa altitude) are hitting around 230mph (360km/h).

<comment><USER27> When I first heard about global warming, the physicist in me said, hmm, the major effect of this will be energetic weather systems will become more energetic.

Now put that together with my personal experience of extreme weather events both in NZ and ZA, the jet streams has _always_ been involved.[http://squall.sfsu.edu/scripts/shemjetstream_model.html](http://squall.sfsu.edu/scripts/shemjetstream_model.html)

ie. If I see a major stream coming near me... Big Stuff happens with the weather. If something extreme is happening with the weather, I check and a big stream is going very near by.

ie. I expect we will see more interesting stuff happening with the jet stream as the climate cooks.

<comment><USER28> Apparently, climate change brings more irregularities to the jet stream

[https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31102018/jet-stream- clima...](https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31102018/jet-stream-climate- change-study-extreme-weather-arctic-amplification-temperature)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is this dangerous for the plane if the wind hits it sideways or something? Does this mean the flights will be extremely bumpy?

<comment><USER30> If you stay within the jetstream, it is a surprisingly smooth ride - a bit like being in a canoe in a middle of a fast flowing current in a river. Jetstreams tend to be fairly long and continuous.

Where it gets bumpy is if you are transitioning in or out of the jetstream zone - a bit like the abovementioned canoe hitting some rapids in a shallow part of the river.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I remember once being on an almost empty flight from SFO to ATL a few years ago. I checked the flight information on the seatback screen in front of me and was startled to see we were going well over 700 mph ground speed. That was pretty much the quickest flight I've ever been on; I think the whole trip was well under four hours.

<comment><USER32> For me on a trip right now, I have:

2h drive to ORD 2h airport security Theater 4h Flight to SFO 1h to deplane get an Uber to someplace

So 9 hour total journey on a direct flight. A 50% faster flight would make it be 8 hours instead of 9? I don't think I would pay anything for that.

<comment><USER33> 2h airport security? In Zürich im usually done in 10 or 15 minutes...

<comment><USER32> Well, parking to at my gate.

If you park at the airport - It's about a 20-30 minute journey from parking lot to the front door of the airport. If parking offsite it can even be longer.

Then going through TSA, even with pre-check, can be from 20-60 minutes. 20 minutes is about the minimum time, just due to how BIG the airport is. You can end up having to walk a mile door to gate. I can run a mile pretty fast, but that is generally frowned upon.

And if you need to somehow deal with an agent for checking bags or anything else? That can easily be another 30 minutes down the crapper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The tweet from Peter James: [https://twitter.com/jetpeter1/status/1097682898013044736](https://twitter.com/jetpeter1/status/1097682898013044736)

</comment><comment><USER34> Last time I flew from SFO to MUC, we had almost 100mph tail winds, that was already very impressive and shortened the flight time considerably, but nothing compared to this.

</comment><comment><USER35> Gee, maybe in an extreme case, to fly from NYC to Tokyo, fly east out of NYC and take the jet stream and save time and fuel!

</comment><comment><USER36> That is 1289.085 kilometres per hour! The title should be updated on to include a measurement used by the rest of the world including the scientific community.

<comment><USER37> If you're being pedantic about science-related matters, it's 1290 km/h. Don't give false precision with your conversion; there's no way the original measurement has >3 significant figures.

Even better yet, 361 m/s. km/h is a derived unit. ;)

<comment><USER36> You're right I did just paste that figure from Google conversions.

Using the metric system over the imperial system isn't being pedantic, it's just courtesy in 2019

<comment><USER37> It's from a USA-based newspaper. I hate imperial with a passion, but it is still their backarsed standard. Surely anyone with a scientific bent can do a rough calculation in their head. For me, it was "oh, around 1300 km/h, cool" and moved on...

<comment><USER38> In many countries, miles are as obscure to people as leagues, perches and gills probably are to you.

In others, the word refers to a significantly different measure. For example, Norwegian and Swedish people often use the word to mean 10km, and can misunderstand a phrase like "it's just five miles outside London".

There's a list of possibilities here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Does the Supermoon affect the Jet Stream?

</comment><comment><USER40> Ground speed

<comment><USER41> Isn't that the one that truely matters some you want to go from A to B?

Genuinely curious I know nothing about aviation.

<comment><USER42> I suspect that a 787 traveling at 801 MPH airspeed might suffer some damage to the control surfaces. 787s aren't designed to break the sound barrier.

And I would argue that not damaging the plane matters more than how long it takes to get there.

<comment><USER43> It's travelling at 801mph relative to the ground.

If I'm swimming down stream at 1 mph in water moving at 4mph, relative to the bank I'm doing 5mph relative to the water 1mph.

No sonic booms where involved.

<comment><USER42> I'm quite well aware of that. I'm not sure how you read my post as saying anything different.

boyter asked how anything but time from A to B could be relevant. Well, _not damaging the plane is relevant_. And therefore the airspeed _not_ being 801 MPH matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> So why do planes get slowed down by a jet stream? Can't they simply stay out of it?

</comment><comment><USER45> can any pilot here please comment on the danger of this?

<comment><USER4> > danger of this

Essentially zero.</comment></comment>


The costs of configurable settings in your web application - <AUTHOR> http://joshua-go.blogspot.com/2010/02/cost-of-configurable-settings-in-your.html

<comment><USER2> "There are a lot of obvious benefits to making software configurable, and these benefits are plain to all."

I must no longer be part of all. There are many websites that offer little configuration and work just fine for the vast majority of users (look I'm on one now!).

I've worked on enough projects to know that users will always want to be greeted by LOLcats instead of "Welcome to boring-corporate-system" or be able to change the background to lime-green. Focus on making a system usable from the get go, instead of letting each person craft usability out of a tangled web of configurations.

</comment><comment><USER3> Configurable settings are like diamonds and herpes - they are forever.</comment>