Recognizing magic as a rare and valuable art form and national treasure - <AUTHOR> https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-resolution/642 <comment><USER2> The English language seems to be missing some word that other languages have.

In Dutch, "goochelen", performed by a "goochelaar" is doing tricks in a show, where you know it's all illusions but it's still very impressive. On the other hand, "toveren", done by a "tovenaar" would be doing something supernatural. Typically a "goochelaar" is somebody on a stage with a black top hat, while a "tovenaar" is more like an old man with a long white beard and a purple pointy hat in fiction.

In English, both seem to be called "magic". It's very confusing...

<comment><USER3> On the other hand though "magician" unambiguously refers to a person that performs stage magic, in a modern context at least.

<comment><USER4> Magician contains in it stage magic, as well as street magic, parlor magic and other forms. It doesn't limit itself to the stage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's nice to see that lobbying isn't just for large corporations, but vegas showmen can milk this ridiculous, broken system too. /s

<comment><USER6> And environmental groups. And human rights groups. And consumer rights groups. And safety advocacy groups... etc.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but they're not so well funded, and their positions are fundamentally harder to communicate than simple, manipulative, well funded campaigns. It's like comparing a pre-school and a military school because they both share the words "School". You won't be totally wrong of course, but you will have missed the point.

<comment><USER6> I don't disagree, but a lot of people don't understand that the term "lobbying" in fact does not just refer to evil corporations bribing politicians, and thus should not be categorically made illegal.

<comment><USER5> I think it's worth remembering that when people talk about "Lobbying", they are often talking about a particular subset of lobbying attached to extremely vast sources of money and power. More, the unrestricted nature of that lobbying, in practice, breaks the system down.

It would be the case if this were happening with well-intentioned environmentalists too, although I'm sure it would look very different in the particulars. The fact is though, that in history doesn't teach us to be concerned about vastly wealthy and powerful environmental interests. Maybe that will change someday, but it's not the history of our planet at least.

tl;dr Context

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> But _why_? I am reminded of Davy Crockett's "Not yours to give" speech.

<comment><USER5> Because of a strong lobby, especially from David Copperfield. As usual, just follow the money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Reads like an advertisement for Copperfield. But in terms of advancing the art form and of classic prestidigitation, I can think of no better current practitioner than Ricky Jay.

<comment><USER4> There are so many people, it'd be difficult to compile a list and not leave anyone out. It's a rich field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And for their first trick, getting this through both houses and signed into law by the president. That would be the illusion of functioning government...

</comment><comment><USER9> Magic is already recognised on bank notes and in the pledge of allegiance.

</comment><comment><USER10> Where's Penn and Teller when we need them?

</comment><comment><USER11> >Whereas magic enables people to experience the impossible

Someone really didn't put much thought into this statement.

And all the references to Project Magic does lead me to consider who put them up to proposing this

<comment><USER12> What's wrong with "experience the impossible"? Seems like a reasonable description of the situation to me, that's the whole point of magic.

<comment><USER13> If magic existed it would, by definition, be neither impossible nor supernatural.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for explaining that to me.

The ordinary experience for someone viewing a magic act is that something impossible has happened. The fact that we know, logically, that it cannot be the case doesn't change the fact that what we _experience_ is impossible. It's unexplainable by the majority of viewers.

If the argument is "magic doesn't exist, therefore what you experienced is entirely normal and unremarkable" then frankly the interlocutor just don't get the point of why people watch magic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's really awesome to finally see conservative Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives quote gays and atheists in the text of their proposed legislation.

</comment><comment><USER15> Anyone else picturing Rep. Sessions as holding a sign saying, "We Demand to Be Taken Seriously"?

</comment><comment><USER16> It makes more sense once you realize they're talking about bunny-in-hat magic and not magic magic.

<comment><USER17> once it passes, you can add "Wizard" to the official list of professions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I believe this motion is to support surviving First Nations culture.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is this to improve taxation for David Copperfield or to get money in some other form from the government?</comment>


This house believes that the cloud can't be entirely trusted. - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/409

<comment><USER2> The cloud _will_ be huge at some point, right now the numbers simply aren't there and there have been too many high profile glitches in recent times to get fence sitters to switch in large numbers.

Comparing the costs of cloud hosted computation and storage facilities with a 100 Mbit flat rate box with 500G on board for $130 / month is a good exercise and seems to indicate that cloud storage and bandwidth are much too expensive to be competitive except for some very specific uses.

Price is of course only one factor in making this decision (reliability, scalability are the others), but as someone put it nicely building your small web app on top of the cloud infrastructure is essentially a case of premature optimization.

It's a time of transition, maybe in the long run everything will be 'cloud based', but I think there is definitely a hybrid possible, where the same architectural tricks that go in to cloud computing are used by hosting centers to facilitate easy deployment.

Portability between suppliers is another key sticking point, right now the cloud seems to be more about locking in customers than anything else.

<comment><AUTHOR> The only thing the cloud can do cheaper right now is massive amounts of compute power for short periods of time. If you need to do something every month which takes 1000 CPU-days, but needs to be done in a day for the results to be of use, you've either got to buy lots of hardware or use the cloud.

The ability to do this cost effectively could make certain computations viable, opening up new opportunities for people to do interesting and useful things.

<comment><USER2> Yes, exactly, that is what I had in mind with my 'specific uses'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't think the question is whether it can be trusted or not. That's pretty ambiguous and, as mentioned, you can't really put 100% trust in anything. Also, the meaning of 'the cloud' has become diluted, seeing it's now analogous with pretty much anything web based. We might as well call it "scalable, distributed and virtualized computing" or something.

The question, for me, comes down to education and understanding. The term 'the cloud' is relatively nascent, but the basic underlying principles are not really that new, just more evolved. The cloud is as secure and reliable as you make it. By definition it promotes redundancy, accessibility and scalability.

I work on a 'cloud' claims management application and it's targeted at the enterprise (finance/insurance) market, who are notoriously slow to adopt new technology. Trust me, it's a tough audience, but not as tough as you might think. The realization that data can be accessed (and work done) anywhere, at negligible cost with existing hardware is simply too compelling for any forward thinking company.

Quite simply, the pros seriously outweigh the cons - whereas the opposite is true for traditional client-server technology.

<comment><USER4> I don't think client-server is the alternative to the cloud. The only company- wide client-server application I saw in most organizations was Outlook. The rest, from time tracking to individual performance evaluation, was all done in the intranet. So the real choice is between hosting in the cloud or self- hosting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just like the goldbugs say (in respect to owning physical gold instead of holding it in ETFs), "If you don't hold it, you don't own it."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> But can anything be _entirely_ trusted?</comment>


'End of an Era': Weird Stuff Warehouse (Electronics Surplus Store) Closed Sunday - <AUTHOR> https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/08/sjm-l-weirdstuff-0408/ <comment><USER2> It was the end of the line for surplus junk, but a wonderful superstore of toys. It will be missed. There still are a few places in Silicon Valley where precious junk can be found.</comment>


Ray Dalio Says the 'World Has Gone Mad' with So Much Free Money - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-05/ray-dalio-says-the-world-has-gone-mad-with-so-much-free-money <comment><USER2> Money is less powerful than it used to be.

Technology and global markets have driven tremendous efficiencies. Companies can make more money selling a $300 TV to the poor than a $3,000,000 TV to the rich.

Up until around 1900, in the US, the top 10% lived drastically better than the bottom 10% (or whatever top/bottom chunk you want to look at).

Now, extreme money just doesn't buy you anything special. It will have more gold on it, less inconvenience, be bigger (or smaller), faster, etc.

\- Bezos has a private plane, the poor have Southwest \- Gates has a Porsche 959, the poor can take a bus \- Buffet lives in a small house in Nebraska (well, bad example)

So the rich earn and/or accumulate more and more money, but since they can only spend $1200 max on a new phone once a year, it mostly get re-invested into the market.

<comment><USER3> This article is about how money has become more detached from reality to the point where investors can throw money around [to strike gold at overvalued unicorns while every other venture bleeds money -my take]. There's definitely an overlap with the other articles from various news sources reporting on how millenial apps and services are fueled by this "reckless" spending that bleeds losses.

Sure, most Americans can afford the bare necessities of life: food, water, housing. However many cannot afford it without going into debt, which then fuels the financial lenders with more money to spend through parasitic interest usury (in addition to the central bank engaged in schemes to pump more money into these lenders to "stimulate the economy"). Not to mention the state of medical care where many cannot afford it or else they will go bankrupt.

Money is also increasingly being funneled into the top percentages with the relative lack of wage growth since the 70's. (What filled that gap? Going into debt.) "Free money," as the article states but is in the form of debt, is given to people with good credit scores and denied to people with bad credit scores. This in itself helps creates the divide that the article refers to "The system of making capitalism work well for most people is broken." and "...which contributes to the rising wealth, opportunity, and political gap."</comment></comment>


The Positive Impact of Advanced Safety Systems for Cars - <AUTHOR> http://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/positive-impact-of-advanced-safety-systems-for-cars/ <comment><USER2> My feeling is that we don't need fully autonomous cars to get a lot of the safety benefits. About 40,000 people die on US roads every year, along with millions of injuries.

[http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road- safet...](http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety- facts/road-crash-statistics)

Shouldn't it be possible to cut these numbers in half with advanced "assistance?

<comment><USER3> It is also possible to cut those numbers with low tech: less driving. Stop subsidizing roads and parking, start allowing walkable development. Take back the streets. [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236825193_Street_Ri...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236825193_Street_Rivals_Jaywalking_and_the_Invention_of_the_Motor_Age_Street)

<comment><USER4> "Walkable development" led to two-bedroom apartments in SF averaging $4637/month.

Cities are getting way too big. It's much worse outside the US; NYC was 8 million in the 1960s, and it's 8.2 million now. Beijing is up to 21.5 million, and China's government is trying hard to keep it from growing further.

<comment><USER5> '"Walkable development" led to two-bedroom apartments in SF averaging $4637/month.' \- citation massively needed.

If walkable areas are expensive, that's presumably because

A) people want to live in them and will pay a lot for it.

B) there is more demand for said areas than supply.

Which, in effect, means exactly the opposite of your assertion - forced sprawl (making most of the bay low density suburban) is what led to the aforementioned $4637 /mo apartments.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why We Need Monads - <AUTHOR> https://steven741.github.io/posts/2018-07-28-haskell-tutorial-1.html <comment><USER2> The intro was well and good, like a soft and gentle foreplay. Then suddenly, the conclusion was like a bang! Head spin again. No idea what just happened. Is monad like a mutex?</comment>


Tokyo's suburban housing became vast ghettoes for the old - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/11/how-tokyo-suburban-housing-blocks-became-ghettoes-for-the-old <comment><USER2> A very interesting read, clearly concentrating the elderly poor in this fashion was not intended, but I imagine now that they are concentrated it will be quite hard to resolve as the lack of services must make the area very unattractive to anyone with the freedom to choose.

It seemed doubly tragic that many described in the article were estranged from their families, though it's hard to tell if that is representative or unique to the individuals.

</comment><comment><USER3> The author should visit the trailer parks of central Florida.

My grandparents sold a beautiful home in Wisconsin to move into a dilapidated retirement community run by a tyranical HOA. They are too proud to admit it, but it has financially ruined them and my family is now having to adjust our budgets in order to plan on supporting them once their finances run dry.

It is no ones fault but their own, but unfortunately they are old and mentally incapable of making informed financial decisions, while legally being entirely in control of their finances.

My grandmother also has severe dementia and an active drivers license, but that is an entirely seperate conversation.</comment>


Sometimes a big switch statement may be better than polymorphism - <AUTHOR> http://reprog.wordpress.com/2010/04/09/slicing-your-2d-classfunction-matrix-vertically-or-horizontally/

<comment><USER2> I wonder whether multiple-dispatch would solve that problem?</comment>


Are Bosses Necessary? A radical experiment at Zappos - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/are-bosses-necessary/403216/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Worth reading "The Tyranny of Structurelessness". It's from the 70s and is specifically about the women's movement, but is applicable to these kinds of discussions.

Whenever you have a flat hierarchy, informal structures will arise in place of explicit ones.

[http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

"A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones."

<comment><USER3> 100 times this. Eliminating structure just transfers the heavy lifting to informal mechanisms -- i.e. your "culture." No culture is sufficiently well- defined that everybody has a consistent definition of it, meaning you will inevitably have a situation where 2 people are doing directly contradictory things in the name of the company culture. The whole situation at GitHub from a few years ago with a founder's wife running reckless is a perfect example of this.

Ultimately there are probably non-hierarchical models that allow for effective and interesting coordination in certain types of small organizations (viz the Kibbutz), but Holocracy seems like it's replacing Shit Umbrellas with Shit Centrifuges.

<comment><USER4> Holacracy actually has way _more_ structure than a hierarchy. Just look at the constitution ([http://www.holacracy.org/constitution](http://www.holacracy.org/constitution)), or read about the rigid way they conduct meetings.

<comment><USER5> > _read about the rigid way they conduct meetings._

It reminds me of common rules of order, except untested by the courts and not covering the many, _many_ permutations of motions that can arise.

I'd just be inclined to use Robert's Rules or a local equivalent. Meeting procedure works very well, when you use it correctly and consistently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hierarchy is not only there for 'telling X to do ABC', but also to make clear who takes responsibility. If there's no leader, who's responsible for decisions taken? A random person who happens to be in a team who did something which turned out to be very stupid? All of them? No one? When a decision is made by X, the people who execute it didn't decide on it, X did, which means X takes responsibility, not the people who execute the decision.

Another aspect which is overlooked in the article is: to get things done, you have to make unpopular decisions sometimes: i.e. cut features to make a deadline, to ship a version, to stop adding stuff and work towards a release. No-one wants to make those, they're called 'unpopular' for a reason. But you have to make them to avoid a state where things aren't ready and never will be. There's a difference between 'being able to ship' and 'being able to ship a usable product'.

Funny that they refer to Valve with the text:

> At the video-game maker Valve, new employees are told not to expect > instructions, because even the managing director "isn't your manager," says > the employee handbook. "You have the power to green-light projects. You have > the power to ship products." And so they do.

I'd like to mention 'Half Life 3'. ;)

<comment><USER7> >If there's no leader, who's responsible for decisions taken? A random person who happens to be in a team who did something which turned out to be very stupid?

Blame-shifting doesn't always happen, but when it does, it almost universally goes down the hierarchy, not up.

<comment><USER8> Almost universally? Got any examples that show this almost universal attribute? Off the top of my head, from the past couple of months alone, I can think of the VW CEO, Ellen Page (reddit's former CEO) who were ousted from their companies for decisions that didn't go over well.

<comment><USER9> We should probably put a "*" by Pao since, as far as I know, we're not sure if she was actually responsible for the decision that ostensibly got her ousted.

<comment><USER10> When there's a big enough controversy, the CEO will usually be one of the first heads to roll even as there are larger investigations going on (BP/Deepwater Horizon is a great example of this).

<comment><USER11> (Volkswagen)

<comment><USER7> You think the Volkswagen CEO resignation was a result of blame shifting?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's an interesting experiment, but two tendencies of human nature prevent this sort of thing from being conducive to running an efficient company, in my opinion.

One, having everyone in the company able to make executive decisions or at least influence them sounds great, but inevitably more outgoing and charismatic workers will gain influence, even when it's a supposed democracy. You can structure the system to have all the meetings and groups and power structures you want that seem equal on paper, but when someone is popular and outgoing often people will follow with that person. There are going to be people who slip into leadership roles--it's human nature, and trying to minimize that instead of steer it is impractical in my opinion.

The second thing is that having everyone in on the decision making is simply information overload in most cases. I think tasking everyone with being informed and voting on a wide array of things will make them either pretend to know all the issues properly and vote uninformed, or they'll vote the way they see their favoured peers voting. Maybe I'm letting my own experiences cloud my opinion here, since I work at a company that has a fairly flat managerial structure, but it's certainly a problem for me. If they're making executive decisions while not seeing what other ways the company is moving, that seems bad too.

I think there's definitely merit in promoting equality among employees, and it leads to better teamwork. But I just don't think that end of the extreme ever works particularly efficiently, and I think human nature tends to influence most companies toward the more normal business hierarchies.

<comment><USER13> These concerns make sense if we assume that they have no processes. My understanding is that they are using holocracy, so there are defined processes each with leaders (like boards with a chair) and these process are organized in a hierarchy that allows some to be overridden/replaced/reformed by boards with more central power. So, people can and should try to have many roles but will naturally get pushed out of things where they lack time, knowledge or trust, and not everyone is involved in every process or is allowed to nominate themselves to be involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> None of the recent articles have mentioned it but hollcracy is a American commercialized edit of Sociocracy aka Open Governance ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy)).

The seminal text is "We the People" ([http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0979282705/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0979282705/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1444302659&sr=81&pi=SY200_QL40&keywords=we+the+people+sociocracy&dpPl=1&dpID=51GeMtGtfCL&ref=plSrch)) [no affiliate]

The analogy would be how Scrum was created as a commercialized revision of Agile XP.

A key tenant is the rights of each circle (team/committee) to actively chose how it will make decisions, and it's free to use systems such as voting or putting someone "in charge", but it also has a bunch of innovative decision making approaches that achieve much better buy in and are based on achieving consent as opposed to consensus. It's the difference between, 70% of people are on board so we are going ahead regardless of what the rest think. And we'll we've heard from everyone and even those that have stated publically to try rest of the group that they have concerns they are no longer blocking "paramount" concerns and we are united in our agreeance to go ahead.

<comment><USER5> > _The analogy would be how Scrum was created as a commercialized revision of > Agile XP._

Scrum was developed independently of, and is quite distinct from, XP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I tried to go without assigning bosses on my R&D engineering team, a group of about 8 people, and I did this for about six months. I thought these are creative smart types and don't really need a boss. But after time I found, without bosses, people do crazy stuff, like sit at their desk for two days without internet/email access and just not tell anyone about it or ask for help to fix their issue. Now, all teams have a report and that just works better.

<comment><USER16> That sounds like an entirely different problem. You shouldn't need a boss to speak up and communicate to someone that your work environment is broken.

<comment><USER17> OK, there's an entirely different problem. Who is responsible for fixing the problem if not the guy's boss?

<comment> UK-AL The infrastructure team?

<comment><USER17> If a guy has sat at their desk for two days without internet/email access and didn't tell anyone about it or ask for help, you can hardly blame the infrastructure team for not fixing a problem they weren't told about.

The problem is either a cultural one within the team (if he was scared to ask colleagues for help) or an induction one (if he didn't know how to ask for help, or didn't know he had to) or a communication one (if he had no way to contact infrastructure or anyone on his team) or a motivation/expectation setting one (if he felt like taking an in-office vacation, or that nobody would notice or mind if he did nothing) or a hiring one (if he didn't know what a computer was, or he was being intentionally uncooperative as some sort of protest against his own job)

All those problems are things I'd expect a competent line manager to address.

<comment><USER18> On the communication one: I work for a large pharma company that switched from physical phones to VOIP through Lync. Well they sent an email a week in advance and updated Lync, but the update required a user to sign in again. I had many people ask me what to do, but the other wisdom floating around was to call our IT help line. Without Lync, we can't make calls to fix Lync.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For further reading, the New Republic article thread a few days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10329831](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10329831)

<comment><USER20> That was a good article, I thought. The process to get yourself a raise sounds ridiculous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This seems very similar to Valve's boss-free "flat" structure - [http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...](http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf)

<comment><USER12> Indeed the article briefly mentions Valve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was at a conference and sitting in an open space about leadership when I came to an epiphany: 'You hear of organisations that are management heavy all the time, but you never hear of organisations being leadership heavy'.

<comment><USER23> I worked in a place that became leadership heavy. They gradually were losing business and kept bringing in more executive-level "heavy hitters" to hopefully turn things around.

In reality what happened was that every one of them that was hired was made to think they were the silver bullet and now that they were there, everything would turn around, as long as we did things their way.

Well, you get a few executives on board who are in theory all on the "same level", all thinking they are the silver bullet, and all thinking that things need to be done their way and you can imagine the epic power struggles that ensued.

Did not end well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> To the many people who say "this will never work": luckily, we don't have to theorize abstractly about "human nature" and can just go look at successful non-hierarchical organizations. Frederic Laloux describes the practices of 12 of them in the 2nd and 3rd parts of his wonderful book Reinventing Organizations ([http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/](http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/)). Still some very new ideas, but these organizations have enough interesting properties that we should really explore how to make them work.

</comment><comment><USER24> I had leading positions in the past.

I saw two problems there:

1\. Most people don't want to make any decision.

2\. The few people who want to make decisions, do it only for their personal gain. Deciding for stuff they like or they just like the prestige a decider- role brings.

I ended up in such roles, because I know 1. can be a big problem and before nothing happens, I just tell people what to do.

And I often quit jobs, because of 2. and the bigger the institutions get, the more of 2. you get.

<comment><USER25> Furthermore, there's a good filter in place for the kind of people who can succeed on the 'down' end of the Boss interface. It's usually a college degree or work history of some sort. There's no good filter for the kind of people who are able to actually make decisions. I mean, you might be able to recruit from some particularly agent-y community, or design a test based off of constructive developmental theory, but good luck with all that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I appreciate their optimistic counterpoint, but some of the challenges Zappos have created for themselves -- how do you exactly keep "earning badges" a fair and representatives measure of an employee's worth? -- will be difficult and challenging to overcome.

Hsieh is asking a lot of his employees. I hope it ends up being worth the confusion and anxiety being generated for the entire workforce there.

</comment><comment><USER26> When you do not make any changes to your web site for 2 years bosses are not necessary.[1] Just doing nothing is enough.

[1] [http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/10/7/zapposs-website- fr...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/10/7/zapposs-website-frozen-for- two-years-as-it-integrates-with-a.html)</comment>