$15 minimum wage didn't hurt NYC restaurants - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-15-minimum-wage-was-supposed-to-hurt-new-york-city-restaurants-but-both-revenue-and-employment-are-up-2019-10-28 <comment><USER3> Is the author really in Buffalo? That's the other side of the state.

From my personal experience in nyc, and from talking to neighbors who own restaurants, small and family owned businesses are absolutely hurting. They've reduced staff, and owners are making up lost hours themselves. Delivery has been mostly outsourced. The price of everything on the menu has gone up. A number of lower-cost restaurants have closed completely. Whatever reported numbers the author based this upon do not tell a complete story.

<comment><USER4> > _From my personal experience in nyc, and from talking to neighbors who own > restaurants, small and family owned businesses are absolutely hurting. > They've reduced staff, and owners are making up lost hours themselves_

Well, if they were hurt with such a raise, perhaps they were not viable businesses and are better closed.

The employees might lose a crappy near-subsistence job, but both the employees and owners can then concentrate their efforts into something better...

Somehow Europe manages to have viable restaurants despite decent minimum wage and not tips-oriented compensation...

<comment><USER5> What if the alternative is unemployment?

<comment><USER6> There are such efficiencies to be have in restaurants. In Japan I went to a curry restauraunt that was run by 2 staff. Two people did the cooking, taking orders, collecting bills, serving food. The whole operation was two staff.

Back home I went to an equivalent size burger joint that had 6 people on staff that I could see.

With good design and prep a curry restaurant was able to serve the same amount of food with 1/3 the staff. They could double the wage of the staff and still have money left over with better prep and design.

<comment><USER7> Plenty of places drop down staff. Taco bell cuts down to a staff of 2 during the night shit. However, if there is any sort of rush on food, it all breaks down.

<comment><USER6> My point was that well designed and well run places can run during busy times with minimal staff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know a ton about the economics but my living experience lines up with this article. At least half of my closest friends are in the service industry. I spent most of my 20s and 30s in NYC before the wage increase. Those friends generally couldn't afford much of anything, outside of rent and a steady supply of cigarettes. It's the reason bartenders tend to "give the bar away" in NYC. Because their friends can't afford much else.

Then I moved to Seattle and noticed something entirely different. Same sort of friends - mostly service industry. And this was before the increase to $15/hr, when it was $12/hr. What was starkly different was that our new friends could actually afford to do things. Nice dinners, bars around town where we didn't know the bartenders, movies, trips to Portland and Vancouver. Same jobs, but with money to spend.

And then there's the side that was close to home. My wife was, for the first 2/3 of our relationship, a bartender. In NYC she had her good weeks, pulling in over $2k and her bad weeks, making somewhere around $100 for the week. Hard to say what was "normal" and impossible to predict. It was impossible to plan around her income so I basically just asked her to give me half and it would essentially even out. Then we moved to Seattle, again at $12/hr minimum (she was making $17-$20 I think) and our whole situation was different. We were already doing fine because I make a good living but now I could finally count on her contribution. We were able to save, plan trips, etc in ways we couldn't before because now we had a baseline amount that she would always make. The tips we're just a cherry on top.

And then we moved to Chicago with a shitty mimimum wage for servers and my wife left the industry entirely. She had gotten used to some stability in her income and now with a low minimum wage for servers, there is none. Even at a nice theater gig, she was making less than any job she had in Seattle and again relying upon the whims of her customers rather than the stability of the industry.

<comment><USER9> Retail jobs aren't meant to be bread-winner jobs. Any zero-skill job is going to pay whatever the local market minimum is.

There are two ways to raise the minimum market wage. First is minimum wage laws. Second is to increase labor demand or shorten labor supply.

There's clearly a surplus of no-skilled labor in the US, yet we're still importing more of it. Businesses are capitalizing on the market conditions and exploiting the labor surplus, that's why we're seeing the proliferation of so many chain restaurants and and other little-to-no-value businesses.

<comment><USER10> > Retail jobs aren't meant to be bread-winner jobs. Any zero-skill job is > going to pay whatever the local market minimum is.

Says who ? Why is your tech job supposed to be a bread winner job ?

<comment><USER11> Says the monetary value created from a tech job vs the monetary value created from a retail job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The comments on these types of articles always hurt my brain. Blaming minimum wage increases for McDonald's, Walmart, pretty much everybody bringing in automated tellers for instance.

I'm always bemused by the arguments against minimum wages, they almost always boil down to "My business can't survive unless my employees are living in poverty." which, in reality for a lot of businesses, is "I won't be as profitable if I have to pay a living wage".

If people really believed this, there would be staged minimum wages: Walmart pays $25 minimum while small, struggling restaurants pay $15.

<comment><USER13> _My business can 't survive unless my employees are living in poverty_

Another way of looking at this would be: a job in McDonalds is not supposed to be a means of supporting the family of four. It's a side gig for teenagers, not a "full-scale" job.

<comment><USER14> That is not the reality of it unfortunately. Might be a side gig for teenage you, but not everyone has the education or network to do better.

<comment><USER15> That is the tragedy of the next couple decades that needs to be solved. What do you do with the increasing share of people that do not have the capabilities to be productive in the economy?

<comment><USER13> Teach a profession at school?

<comment><USER16> Which profession? All of them? Who pays for that sort of support in school? And given that there are only so many hours in the day, what do we lose? Do we need even more of our soft skills and arts removed as we build a society solely around getting people into a career and keeping them there? Are we OK with people who don't understand history or geography because they don't need really need those skills as plumbers?

And wasn't a high school education good enough 50 years ago for most positions? Companies have been able to force the burden of debt for gaining the skills required for a job onto the individual, through exorbitant college fees and unpaid internships, now you're advocating the government should take on the specialization that the private industries require?

As a college student one is barely able to figure out their interests - there's so much push to start planning well in advance, I have no idea how we can expect a tween to commit to a career path.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As a business owner if I am required to pay my workers at minimum 15$ an hour I will need to off set the impact to my bottom line. This can be done by:

Automate whatever can be

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/edrensi/2018/07/11/mcdonalds- sa...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/edrensi/2018/07/11/mcdonalds-says-goodbye- cashiers-hello-kiosks/#2eb695366f14)

Raise the price of goods and services

Outsource to other countries (if cost is cheaper)

For those that aren't aware typical rent in NYC on a corner lot for a restaurant is about 18k per month.

<comment><USER18> > As a business owner if I am required to pay my workers at minimum 15$ an > hour I will need to off set the impact to my bottom line.

Honest question, if you're still profitable (and I read this as implying you are), why do you need to offset it, or offset it aggressively? Sure, if it becomes extremely tight to not-profitable, that isn't good and would need rectified, but again, your comment doesn't come off like that.

<comment><USER19> So who gets to decide how much profit this person is allowed to make? Maybe he wants to save for his kids college or against a recession? He is taking the risks (leases, capital tie up, etc.) he should be allowed to decide his payout. Most restaurants run super lean and have high failure rates. The long term effect of these laws is yet to be seen.

It is also unclear to me why we expect an unskilled worker at McDonald's putting fries into a basket to make a "living wage". These jobs are largely for students, retirees and other temporary workers. A high minimum wage isn't the way to end poverty, no taxes under $60K, needs based UBI and other tax incentives are much better options.

The issue is that business that employ unskilled labor will tend to raise prices but rich people don't shop at WalMart; poor people do. So great, they make more but their buying power may have actually gone _down_. This is the conundrum. Everyone wants $40/hour unskilled manufacturing jobs making throwaway products that they can buy at the dollar store. You can't have it both ways. People really want buying power, not necessarily higher wages.

<comment><USER20> > It is also unclear to me why we expect an unskilled worker at McDonald's > putting fries into a basket to make a "living wage". These jobs are largely > for students, retirees and other temporary workers.

This is utter nonsense and insulting. Go talk to people who actually work those jobs. These people are adults, just like you are, and they deserve to be treated with dignity. If you don't pay them a living wage, then the government will have to make up the gap. Is that your goal?

<comment><USER19> I'm not insulting anyone. I _actually_ worked these jobs in the past. I _know_ the people personally. And yes, if you read what I posted, I _explicitly_ stated that the government needs to make up the gap. We can tax high wage earners and redistribute the money to them _directly_ without immediately raising the prices at the stores they use. So I'm saying I'll personally pay more taxes to help raise these people out of poverty. I think that is treating people with dignity, apparently you disagree.

<comment><USER20> You really don't see how saying one's job is "for students, retirees, and other temporary workers" and that their work doesn't deserve a living wage could be insulting to someone who does not fall into one of those categories but has chosen to work that job?

<comment><USER21> I mean, if a "living wage" means that you're not able to provide a net value for your employer, or at least that other options like investing in automation is substantially more profitable for them, it just doesn't work out. Why would you "deserve" for someone to pay you more than what your labor is worth? They just won't hire you then.

I agree that everyone _does_ deserve to live a dignified life and afford all their basic needs, no matter where they work. I'm not sure that the solution is to force employers to pay more than what they get out of you. I don't think I've ever heard of a solution that's entirely convinced me (it seems to me to be a very hard problem), but I'm leaning towards an UBI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "According to an analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, if low-wage workers have more money in their pockets, they will have more money to spend, potentially expanding the number of consumers who can afford to eat out."

^ This seems to me to be the most brain-dead obvious response to trickle-down economics, and income inequality. Like, More people getting money, means more money flowing. We should tax the rich for this reason alone. Otherwise money stagnates, and doesn't do anything. It's functionally useless. Jeff Bezos has admitted as much saying something to the effect of "I don't know what to do with all of my money".

<comment><USER23> The brain-dead obvious response to this is that Jeff Bezos isn't hiding his money under a mattress. He's (directly or indirectly) investing in ventures that employ people anyway, and the mechanisms that allocate his investment funds are possibly better at producing productivity returns than e.g. having several thousand people eat out one extra time per month.

There are reasonable responses to the above but nothing about these discussions appear brain-dead obvious to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Why is $15/hr the magic number? Just because it's some round number?

If raising the minimum wage has had nothing but positive effects, why not raise it to $20/hr - or some other number calculated for maximum benefit - <USER2> knows what that would be?

<comment><USER25> Do you think it'd be as snappy if Bernie was up there at the podium asking for $14.79 per hour?

These are arbitrary numbers, when thinking on an economy-wide scale, because $15/hr does a LOT more for someone in a small town than a big city. The point is to pick something reasonably high, a non-starvation wage, that is also easy to market to the masses.

I don't think economists are huge fans of $15/hr across the board, so $20/hr would probably be abhorrent to them. But economists can be totally wrong and still keep their jobs and respect due to the political use of economics these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The author fails to answer one of the hypotheses she raises: were hours cut?

</comment><comment> barry-cotter There may be a careful analysis of the effect of a $15 minimum wage on the restaurant industry in New York but this isn't it. It doesn't mention whether entry of low skilled workers into the industry decreased, the effect of the change on hours worked, substitution away from labour or decreases in non- pecuniary compensation.

It could be that every single one of these points to the minimum wage hike having small to non-existent effects but the article reads like a brief, not an analysis.

Compared to the Seattle minimum wage study. They had an objective study set up and when they didn't like the results they got some political hacks to re- analyze the data and release their results beforehand.

[http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/seattle-is-getting-an- obje...](http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/seattle-is-getting-an-object- lesson-in-weaponized-data/)

> Two weeks. Two studies on minimum wage. Two very different results.

> Last week, a report out of the University of California—Berkeley found > "Seattle's minimum wage ordinance has raised wages for low-paid workers, > without negatively affecting employment," in the words of the Mayor's > Office. That report, produced by the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics > at Berkeley, was picked up far and wide as proof that the doomsday scenarios > predicted by skeptics of the plan were failing to materialize.

> And while another study that came out Monday from researchers at the > University of Washington doesn't exactly spell doomsday either, it wasn't > exactly rosy. "UW study finds Seattle's minimum wage is costing jobs," read > the Seattle Times headline Monday morning. The study found that while wages > for low-earners rose by 3 percent since the law went into effect, hours for > those workers dropped by 9 percent. The average worker making less than $19 > an hour in Seattle has seen a total loss of $125 a month since the law went > into effect.

Edit: RickJWagner points out

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21386070](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21386070)

> business owners ... say the extra money comes with an unforeseen cost: > higher good prices, fewer working hours and layoffs.

> "Many people working in the restaurant industry wanted to work overtime > hours, but due to the increase, many restaurants have cut back or totally > eliminated any overtime work," Andrew Riggie, executive director of the New > York City Hospitality Alliance, told Fox News. "There's only so much > consumers are willing to pay for a burger or a bowl of pasta."

> Roughly 77 percent of NYC restaurants have slashed employee hours. Thirty- > six percent said they had to layoff employees and 90 percent had to increase > prices following the minimum wage hike, according to a NYC Hospitality > Alliance survey taken just one month after the bill took effect.

[https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/new-york- city's-15-mi...](https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/new-york- city's-15-minimum-wage-now-officially-disaster-71761)

<comment><USER27> I guess some studies don't actually focus on what matters )hours worked/take home pay) but would rather build s narrative even if the on the ground effects of the narrative are counter what they say they are and actually adversely affect those they presumably want to help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There's a certain assumption that minimum wage advocates have that I don't really connect with. The idea is that of the _business_ having responsibility for making sure their employees have a "living wage".

Why is it on the business? This seems like such an old-school, patronizing view of the relationship between a business and its employees. It's a business transaction between two parties - nothing more. If we as a society believe that people shouldn't be earning so little money, then fine - we can tax richer people and give the money to people making less. But that's on _everyone_ in the society, not just the specific business owners that just happen to employ these specific workers.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't understand why people still tip if they make 15 per hour. As it writes in the article they have tip credit but the employer would still have to cough that 15 bucks if they didn't make enough in tips.

<comment><USER30> Less tip = more cost employer = higher prices. One way or the other you're roughly paying the same, only in a way that does not incentivise good service as much.

<comment><USER31> If tipping is necessary to incentivise good service (i.e. workers doing their job properly), why isn't it the norm in every job?

<comment><USER32> Most countries have restaurant tips, but afaik only the US has it as a standardized part of the prices and actually a part of the staffs pay.

I get good service in restaurants because it's their job, but I can tip 0-10% if the service is beyond what I expect.

The important thing isn't that the pay is guaranteed for staff that doesn't provide good service, what's important is that their pay is guaranteed _even if there are no customers_. Bringing in customers isn't the job of waiting staff (apart from providing good service) - so their pay should never depend on it.

<comment><USER33> "Most countries have restaurant tips"

That is not true. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratuity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratuity)

<comment><USER32> I think that map at least very few countries have it as something unknown/surprising/frowned upon. I do consider the "round up bill/not expected" we have where I live as definitely "having restaurant tip"

<comment><USER33> Round up the bill has mostly sunset with the advent of electronic card payments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> When I started washing dishes, minimum wage was $1.50. Hard to get used to inflation of 1000%.

<comment><USER35> Oh my god! How long was that? I was working in a restaurant long ago in Spain but I made like 5 euro per hour.

<comment><USER34> As I look at [http://www.thedigeratilife.com/blog/federal-minimum-wage- his...](http://www.thedigeratilife.com/blog/federal-minimum-wage-history/) I see the minimum wage was actually $1.60 at the time, but I was paid $1.50. Might have had to do with the fact that I was 15.

<comment><USER36> Fun comparisons around a $1.60 minimum wage in 1968:

\- An hour of labor would buy ~4.7 gallons of gasoline. If minimum wage had kept pace, it would be $12.32.

\- Average home could be bought with ~15k hours of minimum-wage labor (around 8 years). Had minimum wage kept pace, it would be $14.96.

\- Average car price was $2,822. Using this as the sole deflator would put an equivalent minimum wage at $20.89 today.

\- The average public university tuition + room & board cost $1,143, which could be earned in 714 hours at minimum wage (this could be physically accomplished in a summer of hard work). If minimum wage had kept pace with these fees, it would be $27.28 per hour. (There are not enough clock hours in a summer break, assuming no sleep, to earn enough at minimum wage to pay for a year of the average public university.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm surprised that the natural wage in NYC was not that much already ... given how expensive that place is.

I wonder if employment falls as a result of the wage being raised.

I have family that runs a maid service business in San Jose. The minumum wage is much lower than $15 and they are already talking about closing up their business. I assume that if the wage is raised to $15 that the business will surely close. Which is sad because the maid service business is already the only source of employment for the women who work there. They aren't choosing to work there against other options. Its the only flexible hour work they can get, and they are allowed to keep their kids with them when they work ... which other employers don't allow.

I'm sure if given the choice between no work and the maid service work, they'd probably choose the maid service work. But that choice wouldn't be up to them and the employer.

<comment><USER38> Entry level jobs in austin now pay 15. Who in NYC would work for less?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Costs to consumers are up, too. Minimum wage is a way to guarantee a minimum standard of living to employees, but we collectively pay for it through increased prices for goods and services, which disproportionately burdens the poor.

The EITC/UBI is also a way to guarantee a minimum standard of living, and we collectively pay for that through progressive taxes, the burden for which disproportionately falls on the rich.

<comment><USER40> > we collectively pay for it through increased prices for goods and services, > which disproportionately burdens the poor.

Employees provide services not goods, so the cost of services goes up, but the cost of goods such as food stays the same.

The rich disproportionately use services over the poor who cant afford to pay some one else and just do the work themselves.

Example:

The rich go to restaurants while the poor cook at home.

<comment><USER39> What? The cost of labor is an input into the production of basically all goods we consume.

You're right that a lot of employees provide services, but a lot of them work at factories or stores that produce/sell goods also (retail).

Poor people purchase from this value chain, too.

Markets are remarkably good at minimizing the input required to produce a unit output. The reason why labor costs have fallen so dramatically is because markets have minimized the input cost of labor. This is good for ALL consumers. However at the end of the day, labor's gotta eat. This is where welfare comes in.

<comment><USER40> > The cost of labor is an input into the production of basically all goods we > consume.

True but most products are not produced in America, the products that are made in America, are made by robots, the cost of labor on goods in America is just not significant.

In contrast to services which are all done in America by American people this is huge.

> This is good for ALL consumers. However at the end of the day, labor's gotta > eat. This is where welfare comes in.

You got your classes mixed up the working class are the consumers not the rich. A rise in wages for workers means consumers have more money to spend which is good for consumers and business.

<comment><USER39> > True but most products are not produced in America, the products that are > made in America, are made by robots, the cost of labor on goods in America > is just not significant.

> In contrast to services which are all done in America by American people > this is huge.

This is becoming less true, as we speak. As standards of living in developing countries increase, the cost of labor also increases, until it more or less matches minimum wage in developed countries[1][2].

> You got your classes mixed up the working class are the consumers not the > rich. A rise in wages for workers means consumers have more money to spend > which is good for consumers and business.

A rise in CASH for workers means consumers have more money to spend. The disagreement here is in how we deliver that cash to the worker. It's definitely beneficial for workers to have more money, but forcing businesses to pay them inflated wages (i.e. greater than their market worth) simply causes the cost of that business's output to be inflated by a commensurate amount. You're correct that it gives workers more spending power, but it also distorts the market downstream by increasing the price of their output for people that buy the good/service that the worker in question uses their labor to produce.

In contrast, providing workers with some minimum cash (let's say, whatever the desired minimum wage is multiplied by 8 hours of work minus their existing daily wage), will provide workers with the same amount of cash on hand as a minimum wage, which as you say is "good for consumers and business", while still keeping the cost of their own output low, and therefore, accessible to consumers (rich, middle class, and poor).

Today, using minimum wage as a way to ensure workers enjoy a minimum standard of living just so happens to distort the market that impacts the rich in America slightly more than the poor, but that's only temporary. In the long run, it has the same effect of increasing prices across the board. Using welfare/UBI/EITC (paid for by the rich) in lieu of minimum wage achieves the same goal, while avoding the market distortion caused by inflated wage prices, while ensuring that goods/services are cheap for the middle class and the poor, regardless of the state of the labor market in developing/developed countries.

[1] [https://tradingeconomics.com/china/wages-in- manufacturing](https://tradingeconomics.com/china/wages-in-manufacturing)

[2] [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/27/chinese-wages-rise-made- in-c...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/27/chinese-wages-rise-made-in-china- isnt-so-cheap-anymore.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I don't think high minimum wages really hurt employment as much as small/family business ownership rates since this just increases the startup capital and operating cost needed to run a business. So for some cities the trade off is probably worth it, but this is also why you see the same chains all over and a lot of unique/niche stores dying out.

<comment><USER12> Amazon, Walmart, and Costco are killing most of those stores, not minimum wage increases.

<comment><USER42> Nonsense. Of _course_ increased operational costs for businesses most sensitive to labor costs has an adverse effect on small business. That such increases occur at the same time price competition shrinks margin - such as price competition from the volume sellers you mention - simply exacerbates the problem.

<comment><USER12> Since real dollar wages are stagnant or declining for decades, with recent changes in minimum wage laws either barely correcting or not correcting this disparity, how can this be nonsense? How can decreasing real dollar operational costs (wages) be an increased cost?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> San Francisco is hurting from this aspect and food delivery partnerships. Didn't read the article but they all blame the minimum raise hike, high rent, and the amount that food delivery services eat out of their bottom line.

Many have stated they regretted working with food delivery businesses and would have preferred just serving customers in house.

<comment><USER25> Is SF as a whole hurting, or just restauranteurs? If their businesses are hurting in a capitalist society, maybe they should look at their practices, re-evaluate, and survive the competition, or else bust. I don't have too much sympathy for those entrepeneurs going into a notoriously difficult industry who then complain that paying lower-class wage workers slightly more is killing their investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The problem with minimum wages is that displaced workers who can't perform minimum wage work still need the little money they could get from a less than minimum wage job. The government would have to offer a job guarantee that is below minimum wage to cover these people on a case by case basis.

</comment><comment><USER45> Do small businesses like mom and pop shops pay minimum wage? Just curious who the policy actually impacts.

</comment><comment><USER46> Rebuttal to the New School study: [https://www.minimumwage.com/2019/08/the- new-schools-bogus-an...](https://www.minimumwage.com/2019/08/the-new-schools- bogus-analysis-on-nyc-restaurant-growth/)

</comment><comment><USER47> Ok, revenue is up because they are charging more for products to cover min wage. But is profit up?

<comment><USER42> Of course not. If it was, they'd have led with it. But by arguing revenue is up, it's almost always burying the lede that profit is not.

<comment><USER48> Is profit the ultimate objective of every human activity? Isn't it enough that the minimum wage raise has helped employees better their living conditions even if at maybe a cost in employer profits?

<comment><USER42> Without profit, someone doesn't get paid. If you don't pay the landlord he can kick you out. If you don't pay the electric company, you can't keep the lights on. If you don't pay the gas bill, the gas company can turn off your heater and your stove. If you don't pay your vendors, you can't by food to cook and sell. If you don't pay your Internet Service Provider, you can't run credit cards. If you don't pay the bank you've got a loan with, they can shut your whole operation down.

Restaurants are notoriously low margin and owner-operator endeavors. So more often than not, the first person that doesn't get paid is the owner, who sinks hour after hour into the place to try and keep the doors open. But eventually the owner has to pay their own mortgage, car payment, etc.

So while profit may not be the ultimate objective of every human activity, it is _essential_ if you want to stay in business. And if you don't? Your workers find out the hard way that the real minimum wage is $0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Yeah, NYC is rich as hell. There's simply enough cash to go around, so this can work. In my small town, this would kill so many small businesses.

</comment><comment><USER50> I don't understand why minimum wage isn't just increased somewhat quickly over a few years.

e.g. 7.25 -> 8.25 -> 10.25 -> 13.25

Over a few years to allow businesses to adjust their margins gradually. Increasing the income at the bottom will increase spending, which should be good for businesses like these that are employing low skill/pay workers.

<comment><USER10> That's what they did in Seattle & San Francisco

<comment><USER50> Ah, I did not know that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> >Even a one-time increase of 10% to 15% is unlikely to dissuade large numbers of customers from dining out. That would amount to an extra $1.20 on a $12 burger.

On the other hand, an extra $1.20 on a $3.50 burger might dissuade large numbers of customers from dining out. A $12.00 burger is pretty high end in most parts of the country.

<comment><USER20> > On the other hand, an extra $1.20 on a $3.50 burger might dissuade large > numbers of customers from dining out.

That's the whole point of the article. The experiment has been performed and they are analyzing the results. The results are that people accept a 10% increase and/or that the buying power of increased wages at the bottom expanded the market enough to make up for your hypothetical lost income.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Every time I see a discussion about minimum wage I see at least three things:

1- You can immediately tell who has experience running a non-trivial business. Let's define that as a business that actually makes physical products (not private labeling something someone else makes) and has, say, more than ten employees. People who are not exposed to business mathematics say things that cause any business owner to immediately go for a forehead slap and jaw drop.

2- Nobody ever fires-up Excel to do some math before opening their mouths.

3- The intense effects of an educational system that has indoctrinated people with the most ridiculous of ideas. These include such things as "corporate greed" and business owners wanting to build a business on top of people "not earning a living wage". There's more. Lots of truly ridiculous ideas.

If I haven't lost you, read-on, you might just learn something.

I was going to put together a quick spreadsheet in an attempt to educate those who might be interested in actually thinking through the problem and, as part of the process, learning something. However, I fear the effort will have few takers. It's easier for people to stay with comfortable preconceived notions than to be exposed to mathematical facts that destroy what they've been told. Most people are not interested in learning they are wrong.

Instead I found this [0]. It's a decent article which exposes the numbers for starting and running a basic restaurant. Anyone with non-trivial business experience has gone through this kind of math many times. After a while you understand the business equation viscerally and know what such things as government-forced costs --be it wages, regulatory or other costs-- can do to a business.

Most businesses do not run with huge lavish profit margins. This is certainly true of most restaurants. Competition is such that profits tend to find equilibrium somewhere above zero but certainly not very high above zero, in most cases likely not double-digits. Which means most businesses operate at a very delicate balance on the very edge of financial insolvency if they are not run carefully.

Anyhow, if you care to learn and not say things that truly make absolutely no sense whatsoever in the context of the reality, versus the fantasy, of running a business, please read this article, do the math and then do a little more research.

As an exercise, take this article and increase your labor costs in steps between 25% and 50%. In this exercise, please explain how you are going to stay in business, what changes you would implement and how these will affect your product, ability to compete with others, ability to survive economic downturns or additional competition (you don't get the entire market to yourself) and long term viability of your business.

Forced, artificially high minimum wage causes damage to the very people who actually support politicians who push for these populist measures in order to get their votes. It's a very destructive force that actually hurts a lot of people rather than help them. The politicians, ironically, actually benefit from pushing for these populist ideas because voters will never do the math and understand they are slitting their own throats. The politician wins elections and continues to make millions atop a very well protected hill while truly doing nothing, or worse, causing harm, to the people they are supposed to help.

Don't believe me? OK, do the same exercise suggested above and DOUBLE labor costs. If a high minimum wage is so good, well, why not go to $30 per hour then?

Another important point: Forcing a hike in minimum wage shifts the entire cost of labor upwards. Why? The person who was making $15 per hour when minimum wage was $10 will demand a raise when the $10 worker starts making $15. So, the $15 worker moves up to $20, the $20 to $25 and so on. It's a chain reaction up the labor cost scale with pernicious effect.

For a deeper dive into restaurant labor costs, read [1]. You'll be surprised to learn how tight the range of labor costs is for different types of operations in order for a restaurant to remain viable.

[0] [https://www.7shifts.com/blog/restaurant- costs/](https://www.7shifts.com/blog/restaurant-costs/)

[1] [https://www.7shifts.com/blog/restaurant-labor- cost/](https://www.7shifts.com/blog/restaurant-labor-cost/)

</comment><comment><USER53> I mean 15 dollars an hour might be enough to live in a sewer in New York. It's hard to imagine this has a huge affect on anyone.

<comment><USER54> NYC is surprisingly affordable if you're not in Manhattan

[https://www.padmapper.com/apartments/new-york- ny/l-38104265/...](https://www.padmapper.com/apartments/new-york- ny/l-38104265/under-1000?box=-74.30015,40.55659,-73.59139,41.03416)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> If raising the minimum wage didn't have an adverse affect on revenue and employment, then clearly it's time to raise the minimum wage again. Right? Why not $50/hr? $100/hr?

If increases wages increases revenue, why have all of these restaurant owners been damaging their business by paying lower wages?

<comment><USER55> What kind of a joke of a strawman is this? No one is implying that revenue will infinitely positively increase alongside minimum wage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The only positive argument that is ever made for minimum wage is that sometimes it does not have a perceivable adverse effect in a strong economy. There is never an attempt to explain the cases where there is a minor or major adverse effect.

Even when it doesn't noticeably hurt, a minimum wage doesn't actually make anything better. It doesn't improve poverty rates. It doesn't improve employment rates. It doesn't lift anybody out of poverty. It has no beneficial, measurable side-effect. And there is plenty of economic research that shows it hurts more than it helps. Just like rent control, it is popular with progressives because it 'feels' right.

>In fact, some people — including those from the Economic Policy Institute — have posited that a minimum-wage increase will actually lead to an increase in employment because of the effects of giving low-wage workers a raise. Other advantages to restaurants may include lower turnover rates and better job performance.

Why are we still speculating about this??? We've been studying the impact of minimum wage laws for decades. This is just hopeful thinking by progressives activists.

</comment><comment><USER57> Assuming that the min. wage increase has been great for NYC, I fear this would be used as "evidence" that a such a minimum wage would work everywhere in America. NYC is one of the most expensive places in the US to live and work.

Meanwhile there are entire diners in America that make $30/hr. They do just fine because they pay $200/mo in rent. A minimum wage of $15/hr would be silly.

<comment><USER15> If anything, we need less centralization on this kind of thing, and more deferral to lower jurisdictions. Trying to pass a national standard in the USA is going to be inappropriate almost everywhere. If New York City needs a minimum wage of $20, fine, as long as Jackson, Mississippi can have a $7.50 wage, if that is appropriate there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Wow, so by raising to $15, business is booming (guess it increased sales and decreased costs). Why stop at $15?! Lets raise to $200 per hour, and then revenue and employment should be go even higher. Sounds like it doesn't affect how much the restaurants are charging customers either, so we don't have to worry about that, we can just rest easy knowing we have lifted people from poverty without any tradeoffs to society just by changing one number.

</comment><comment><USER59> For another point of view,

"Roughly 77 percent of NYC restaurants have slashed employee hours. Thirty-six percent said they had to layoff employees and 90 percent had to increase prices following the minimum wage hike"

[https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/new-york- city%E2%80%9...](https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/new-york- city%E2%80%99s-15-minimum-wage-now-officially-disaster-71761)

<comment><USER60> That is the biggest problem these days even here in Canada.

A few years ago at my old job I finally got a big raise from $14 to $24/hour. Then almost immediately reduced to part-time from full-time but the same duties. I toughed it out hoping for a reversal but one day I was abruptly laid off without notice. Then three people were hired to do my job.

It seems business have no realistic view of employees. You're merely an "FT" or "PT" in manager parlance.

Working minimum wage is more difficult than it was years ago due to it being stuck at a specific rate for decades. But hours worked is just as important and the trend to cut everyone to part-time was an even bigger disaster.

Even the Fight for Fifteen group has been fighting for $15 for many years. They should be adjusting the rate for inflation, by now it should probably be $17.

<comment><USER61> > Then almost immediately reduced to part-time from full-time but the same > duties.

This means the same job could have been performed in less amount of time? If so, why not employers are incentivised to increase the efficiency and raise the pay at the same time?

<comment><USER60> No it meant management didn't have a clue. Just a few of my tasks took hours. Compliance duties where compliance officers picked away at options while I had to sit there. Escort vendors into the server room often for an entire shift if not longer. Preventive maintenance on equipment that could take a month. Those three tasks plus a couple of dozen other duties. Add to that other departments asking for help.

This place was notorious for reducing employee benefits to nothing. Employee reviews but the employee is at max pay rate so no bonus but still reviewed. No holiday parties. Overtime change from over 8 hours to only over 40. And on and on.

It was just a terribly run organization and I'm glad I'm out of it. There was a big exodus of long term staff in a short period of time just after I was laid off.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: My Firefox Shortcuts - <AUTHOR> http://browse-with-a-keyboard.pen.io/ <comment><USER2> Um, OS X already has a nice, built-in, free way to change keyboard shortcuts across _any_ application (with a GUI).

Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts. Then click the '+' button. Now change 'All Applications' to 'Firefox.app'. The rest should be self-explanatory.

(Frankly, this capability is one of my absolute favourites of OS X… really surprised you didn't already know about it).

EDIT: Unbelievable. Firefox actually broke this functionality years ago and it still isn't fixed¹! Now I remember why I stopped using Firefox. :/

――――――

¹ — [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=429824](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=429824)</comment>


The Estrogen Hypothesis of Obesity - <AUTHOR> http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0099776 <comment><USER2> Am I missing something? How does comparing GDP to obesity rates give any evidence that it is female hormones specifically that correlate with obesity? I'll admit I've only read the abstract and looked at the figures but I'm still lost how A gets to B here...

<comment><USER3> TFA observes that male obesity varies in response to GDP more than female obesity does. The thesis is that increasing exposure to "female" hormones with increasing GDP explains part of this phenomenon. I haven't read this carefully enough to judge that, however.

<comment><USER2> My field of study and my experience is not in medicine or public health, but GDP vs. obesity rates seems like poor evidence for this particular hypothesis. For example, one hypothesis I can think about that explains this is that in developing countries, it could be possible that women are often homemakers, and therefore, they don't have as much physical exercise as their male peers. In developed countries, where women are more free to work, the obesity rates are comparable...

I mean, I don't see a slam dunk "See, it's female hormones!" There could be a number of things from culture to lifestyle choices to work-life balance that can have affect on obesity that might correlate with GDP. They should have at least controlled against that, and I see no evidence of it.

The correlation itself is interesting, even without the female hormones.

<comment><USER4> Being a homemaker in the developing world frequently involves a _lot_ more physical activity than in the developed. Food and water are usually a lot less convenient, and may involve travel. Homemaking may also involve farming, and taking excess food from the garden to market which again, often involves travel.

Also, the physical effort involved in being in the workforce in the developed world can be almost nil. A lot of people have to stand up all day, or pick up boxes, but that's far from subsistence farming or hand-washing clothes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is more likely a diet comprised of mostly carbohydrates and processed food along with low physical activity is the cause. But that is a title for another blog/article post on another day.

</comment><comment><USER6> What would be some examples of "environmental estrogen-like substances associated with affluence?"

<comment><USER7> BPA: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A)

Bisphenol A is in a lot of plastics (See: Polycarbonate), including soda drinks, and leeches into the drinks themselves in small amounts. BPA exhibits "Estrogenicity", in that it mimics the behavior of Estrogen in the body. Nearly everyone in developed countries has some level of BPA in them.

BPA has been linked to Obesity as well: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Obesity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A#Obesity)

Polycarbonate: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycarbonate](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycarbonate)

<comment><USER8> Note that the BPA associated with soda is present in metal containers, as part of the plastic liner used to protect the can from the acidic soda. Those liners are in lots of other metal food containers.

Disposable plastic beverage bottles are almost all PETE, which doesn't contain BPA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Url changed from [http://www.mdconnects.com/articles/1789/20140613/female- horm...](http://www.mdconnects.com/articles/1789/20140613/female-hormones- making-western-men-fat.htm), which points to this.

<comment><USER10> Thank you! I was just about to post how terrible that blogspam site was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Didn't finish reading this, but was this data controlled for physical activity? In many developing countries, women are caretakers for the home and mostly stay home while men go outdoors for work, especially physical.

<comment><USER12> Yeah I am wondering this too. This has all the hallmarks of HAES / FA type logic. Activity levels and expected roles does have a lot to do with weight gain. Now perhaps there is some truth that estrogen may make it more difficult for women to keep off weight but its not the reason they are fat

Fatness in the this century is due to an abundance of processed food that is readily available and has simple storage needs. Combine that with an abundance of idle time, especially urban poor, and its not a good mix. I love going through photo archives and the one thing that stood out is the lack of obesity, its like the people taking photos went out of their way to not show it.

Welcome to the world of Wall-E. People are going to have to adapt, those selling packaged food will need to adapt, so that we don't end up there.

<comment><USER13> This is the widely accepted theory but it doesn't explain everything. For example, lab animals have actually gotten fatter over time as well, and they are eating carefully measured diets and living in controlled conditions.

Diets are also not effective at losing weight. People rarely stay on them, and a fat person must eat significantly fewer calories, not just the same amount, than a normal person to maintain a healthy weight. Their metabolisms resemble those of starving people, the body desperately trying to return itself to it's "normal" weight.

Likewise normal people fed lots of food to become fat, quickly return to their previous weight after they stop. Genetic studies find obesity is more heritable than nearly any other condition including mental illness, breast cancer, and heart disease. It also appears to be affected by epigenetics. If your grandmother was starving you have a higher probability of becoming obese.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _The question thus turns to our modern Western society and why this process is not as coarsely observable, with the rates approaching parody [sic] as national gross domestic product increases._

Rogue spellchecker, typo, or Freudian slip?</comment>


The Walt Disney model of sustained growth - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/disney-2.jpeg <comment><USER2> Lobby governments to increase copyright terms into perpetuity?</comment>


Raymond Chen: "Everybody knows that Apple does everything right." - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2010/06/01/10017950.aspx <comment><USER2> Please refrain from posting link-bait titles. That's neither the actual title nor the theme of that blog post.</comment>


Freemium Isn't A Business Model, It's A Marketing And Trust Strategy - <AUTHOR> http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/freemium-isnt-a-business-model-its-a-marketing-and-trust-strategy/ <comment><USER2> The overall point-of-view here is much better than the original "freemium is not a business model" article. Our company views free accounts as a marketing tool and lead generator; It is a great way to generate some trust and excitement into potential customers that may convert into paying customers at some point down the road.

I would say most companies fail with freemium because its an afterthought. I've seen a few start-ups build out an entire featureset, get a ton of people to use it, and then think, "Well gee whiz, how are we going to make money off of this?". Then they will attempt to monetize their product off of some non- core features. This just won't work.

<comment><AUTHOR> _build out an entire featureset, get a ton of people to use it_

Bingo - if you can't identify an appealing, useful _subset_ of your features that is too small for enough paying customers, then you should _not_ do freemium. You can't unring "free" once you've taught it to your customers.</comment></comment>


Internet's DNS infrastructure been under attack for days. Anyone else noticed? - <AUTHOR>

This is an email I received from my DNS hosting provider after reporting an unusual spike in number of queries for one of my zones that has been being hit steadily by nearly 140k queries per day since November 29th.
Since November 29th, 2011, about 150,000 domains in [DNS hosting provider name] management have been under an ongoing DNS attack.
This is not an attack on [DNS hosting provider name], but actually attack on specific domains. We have confirmed this since we have moved many of these domains to different providers and the attack traffic has moved with it.
These attacks represent about 15% of all domains under [DNS hosting provider name]. These attacks tend to come for a few hours and then go away; but they do come back, and they are everyday. These DNS attacks are actual queries to live domains that [DNS hosting provider name] is authoritative for. Once again, these are an attack against the specific domain and not against [DNS hosting provider name].
The queries are coming from the Asia / Europe region and from multiple networks / peers / locations. Because of the location of the attack it is hitting many of our nodes. This traffic is hitting our name servers in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Frankfurt, and London.
[DNS hosting provider name] is not alone in noticing these attack. This same attack has been affecting many networks that host name servers worldwide.
You can read more about these attacks and how they are affecting other networks at:
https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2011-December/thread.html#7852
starts at: https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2011-December/007852.html
http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2011-November/thread.html#42449
starts at: http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2011-November/042449.html
http://seclists.org/nanog/2011/Dec/57
Once again, this is not an attack on [DNS hosting provider name]. This is an attack on hundreds of thousands of domains worldwide. As such, this attack is hitting all major providers and networks. The larger the provider, the larger the attack. Most providers are getting hit by about 100Mpbs to 200Mbps. In our case it is several Gbps at a time due to the vast number of domains we are authoritative for.
These attacks are legitimate queries to valid domain names on our systems.
You can think of this attack just like any other resource intensive attack. If someone requested your website millions of times, they would be using resources of your web host as well. <comment><USER2> Is [DNS Hosting Provider] DNSMadeEasy?

4 of my domains seem to be part of this attack. The DNS query spike started on the date mentioned in your links and I really didn't know what was going on. Daily hits went from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.

To avoid going over my monthly quota at DME I was forced to move DNS for those 4 domains off my account and to my web hosting company.

I wish I had seen your post here earlier!</comment>


A Guide to Java IDEs - <AUTHOR> https://able.bio/DavidLandup/a-guide-to-java-ides-my-own-setup--81xt3v4 <comment><USER2> writing code in java in an ide of reminds me of filling in credit card forms or something. when you are totally dependent on having tooling around your language to be productive in it, that signals something is wrong with the language.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good guide</comment>


Ask YC: Are there any white label community news sites like HN? - <AUTHOR>

I am a member of various communities and currently we share a lot of our news via email lists. A site like Hacker News seems a great alternative. I really want a community specific version of Digg/HN/reddit/etc to do for community news what Ning did for social networking. This would definitely help my inbox as well! Is anyone is doing this? <comment><USER2> <http://www.slinkset.com> \- I think it was started by someone from HN.

<comment><USER3> I'm one of the cofounders. Please feel free to get in touch: brett at slinkset

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.pligg.com/></comment>


Microsoft will donate $1B in cloud services to nonprofits and universities - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/01/19/how-were-putting-the-microsoft-cloud-to-work-for-the-public-good/ <comment><USER2> Never entirely sure how to take some of these announcements. Prima facie it sounds great and laudable ... but I'm old, and my memory is full of stories of similar-sounding attempts to get youth mindshare with dubious subsidies of gear into schools, and the old classic of $100m to fund HIV research, $400m to fund ways to destroy GNU/Linux. [1] I know - people tell me - it's a whole new Microsoft these days.

[1] [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/13/gates_gives_100m_to_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/11/13/gates_gives_100m_to_fight/)

<comment><USER3> They do a lot of things like most big companies, and some people seem to concentrate only the bad.

For example, they started funding OpenSSL and other core infrastructure[1] projects of the Linux foundation after the Heartbleed fiasco. But you don't find that kind of news on here.

By the way "$400m to fund ways to destroy GNU/Linux" seems to be quite hyperbolic, especially coming from 'The Register'. The link in the article goes to a 404 page, do you have any real details of the so called campaign?

[1] [https://threatpost.com/group-backed-by-google-microsoft- to-h...](https://threatpost.com/group-backed-by-google-microsoft-to-help-fund- openssl-and-other-open-source-projects/105672/)

<comment><USER2> TheReg link works fine here. You're right about Reg style, though I have no reason to doubt substance of the story.

Agreed on range of perception of deeds of any large company. Microsoft has long form on this front (baiting the education market), though they're certainly not the only organisation to have done this. Unlike other student discounts - say for movie tickets, public transport, etc - there's a clear and obvious future payback for providing free or heavily discounted software & services to that demographic, as opposed to just charging less to customers who can't afford full price.

Also, IIRC it's a requirement in the USA that public (and not-NFP) companies must always act to 'increase shareholder value', so the giving away of products or services could be considered a legal exposure. The obvious way to work around this concern is to label it marketing, which brings us back to where we came in.

EDIT: Sorry - misread your 404 question -- try these:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20030604185301/http://economicti...](https://web.archive.org/web/20030604185301/http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=28059762)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20030604185306/http://economicti...](https://web.archive.org/web/20030604185306/http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=28055647)

<comment><USER3> >Also, IIRC it's a requirement in the USA that public (and not-NFP) companies must always act to 'increase shareholder value', so the giving away of products or services could be considered a legal exposure. The obvious way to work around this concern is to label it marketing, which brings us back to where we came in.

There is no such requirement.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson- the-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-myth-of- maximizing-shareholder- value/2014/02/11/00cdfb14-9336-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html)

[http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are- cor...](http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations- obligations-to-shareholders/corporations-dont-have-to-maximize-profits)

>EDIT: Sorry - misread your 404 question -- try these:

I read those and I don't find anything to justify OPs "$400m to fund ways to destroy GNU/Linux" or The Register's characterization of '$421m to fight Linux".

<comment><USER2> Happy to be disabused on the shareholder value front. In AU we're obliged to consider shareholder interests, but with no constraint to prioritise short- term gains. No idea how far this has been tested by case law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the same old strategy of giving students discounts which get them accustomed to proprietary products, then marketing to those same students when they graduate.

Now it's just adapted for remotely-hosted software.

<comment><USER5> How many successful startups have actually been built on top on Microsoft software. I know Plenty of Fish is one example, but you just don't hear of that many examples of successful startups built on top of Microsoft's stack. The reason being that paying Microsoft's tax as you scale eats into your profits and your growth.

<comment><USER6> I'm sure a few here have run across Stack Overflow.

edit: [http://highscalability.com/stack-overflow- architecture](http://highscalability.com/stack-overflow-architecture)

<comment><USER7> The article confirms:

 _It 's hard to separate out the Microsoft stack and the scale up approach because for licensing reasons they tend to go together. If you find yourself in the position of transitioning from scale up to scale out by adding dozens of cores, MS licensing will bite you._

<comment><USER6> You know what else is crazy? If you find yourself in the position of scaling your dev team because your business is successful, salaries will bite you. If you thought MS licensing was expensive, try hiring senior developers! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Between this and the ChakraCore news item on the front page I've been wondering whether Microsoft really has been changed its behavior since the 90s, or whether this is just how they play the game when they're not in a position of strength as they are with node.js and cloud services.

It's pretty telling from the ChakraCore thread not entirely being "They're obviously trying to embrace, extend, extinguish node.js like they did Java" that people have either forgotten their modus operandi, or that I'm too much of a cynic and they've genuinely changed.

Sometimes I think I'm being too cynical and they're now just as "nice" as some other companies which have a mostly healthy relationship with open source & open architectures.

But then again all the news where they're being more open these days have to do with areas where they don't have established lock-in, including projects like .Net & ChakraCore which formed the basis of some of the major projects where they lost the lock-in wars.

Are they just trying to lure users they've lost back into their sphere of influence so they can tighten the noose again, or are they genuinely doing business differently now?

I don't know, but it's hard to place any trust in them when you've been burned so many times, and even though they have a new CEO middle management & their business model has a lot of inertia.

<comment><USER9> Posts like this remind me of the quote in N.N.Taleb's Antifragile book, The mind fights yesterday's war, but the body fights tomorrow's war (in the context of biological systems under stress).

Some minds here are fighting a decade old war and no good deed goes unpunished in HN comments.

<comment><USER5> Look they released their Javascript engine with no JIT compiler for Linux. It's the same Microsoft because they are in it for money and dominance. A leopard can't change its spots. Microsoft will always be the same, no matter what they say. They are simply changing themselves to be more like Google because they know their old strategy does not work in the new world.

If anything it's Microsoft which is fighting yesterday's war with today's strategy.

<comment><USER10> To be fair we don't know that they won't port the JIT over eventually. I can't imagine it's a high priority.

<comment><USER5> And that's all you have to do, just keep saying we're working on it, and turn to the next question. All ways of getting people to use your operating system and your eco-system while keeping the rhetoric of we're open now. And they can't be it's not in their nature. They have a whole lot of business interests which will keep them the same old, same old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So they are giving away, to educational institutions, a limited amount of a consumable resource which is amenable to lock-in effects (i.e. addictive), and problematic for privacy (i.e. harmful to users). In effect, they are standing outside schools giving away cigarettes.

<comment><USER12> What cloud service would not have those issues?

I think it's a great thing. People already use Azure or some other provider at these institutes (I know my uni does). If Microsoft wants to trade free services for market share, everyone partaking benefits from it -- unlike cigarrets at schools. If you or your institution don't want to partake, don't. I know I won't.

<comment><USER13> Every cloud service would have, indeed.

But there is no reason the support has to be "free" access to cloud resources at all. Why not just donate the money and let the nonprofits choose which cloud to use (or whether to use a cloud at all)?

<comment><USER14> Because if you give 1 billion dollars away, you are 1 billion less wealthy. If you give away 1 billion dollars worth of Azure credits, you are some much smaller percentage of 1 billion less wealthy, and the recipient is still receiving 1 billion in value.

<comment><USER15> > you are some much smaller percentage of 1 billion less wealthy, and the > recipient is still receiving 1 billion in value.

Would you mind explaining how one can create value merely by donating?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So without knowing more details, without some special effort on the nonprofits side, I'm guessing this will lock them into an Azure architecture. That could be OK if MS continues the donations after the initial $1B runs out, otherwise it could end up costing the nonprofits/.edu's more in the long run than if they went with a more open path now.

<comment><USER17> You can use only open source software in Azure if you like. I don't really understand your complaint. You could even migrate your VMs elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I suspect this move _is_ somewhat motivated by the "first hit is free" strategy as other commentators have speculated. This is probably secondary, however, to the fact that Azure has been temporarily overbuilt (or, somewhat equivalently, over-contracted). That is, they bought all of this equipment, fewer people than expected are using it, so instead of just dropping the price for their services this seemed more interesting. It also happens to be easier to construe as "evil" than dropping the price would have been, so I'm not sure they'll come out ahead in terms of PR...

</comment><comment><USER19> The criticisms here remind me of The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics[1]:

> The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or > interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very > least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don't make the > problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of > the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you > interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster. I > don't subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular.

Microsoft is giving away _a billion dollars_ worth of services, yet people are criticizing them for it. There are several reasons why that's unwarranted.

First, universities and non-profits don't _have_ to choose Microsoft. If they think the risks of lock-in or later expenses will outweigh the donated services, they won't pick it. These organizations aren't populated by idiots, and Microsoft makes the terms of their deals clear before any contracts are entered. There's no coercion or trickery.

Second, when it comes to these sorts of discounts, Microsoft is late to the party. AWS gives free stuff to schools and non-profits. Apple has education discounts. People would be outraged if these companies ended these discounts. Yet people are outraged at Microsoft for offering similar discounts. You can't have it both ways.

Third, I seriously doubt that Microsoft is doing this as a purely cynical, profit-seeking move. I can't find any mention of a time limit on the free services. Not in Nadella's announcement. Not in responses to Q&A. Nowhere. There's also the fact that, for the past couple of years, Microsoft has been giving Office 365 away to non-profits and schools. Once they validate your organization (to make sure you're not trying to scam them), they give it away, for free, forever. What's the ulterior motive there? That people might use it, like it, and pay for it at home or at a different job? That's completely unobjectionable.

One last point: People like to accuse companies of predatory discounts, but nobody brings up the opposite. What about the countless free-loaders who use as much of a service as they can without paying, then move on to something else? I've seen people brag about using free servers from Rackspace, AWS, and Azure, with no intention of paying those companies a cent. As soon as the discount runs out, they move on. There is little condemnation of these tactics. If anything, many social circles celebrate them. This is a clear double-standard.

1\. [http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of- ethi...](http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/)

<comment><USER2> You make some great points, and I'm genuinely torn on how I _should_ feel about the announcement.

I'll comment on only one of your points, though:

      > Microsoft is giving away a billion dollars worth of services,
      > yet people are criticizing them for it.

1\. I don't think people are criticising the _act_ of giving something away. It's the questioning of the motivations behind that.

2\. The billion dollars is a retail value -- and the retail pricing is defined by Microsoft. I know these kinds of announcements (from everyone) always use retail value, but it's a disingenuous way of determining actual value.

<comment><USER20> Doesn't really matter it's like saying that donations are worth less because you can get tax credit for them.

If you donate a milion dollars for disaster relief do you think people should care if you are going to deduct it from your taxable revenue or not?

<comment><USER15> (a) It would actually indeed be more accurate to quote the difference in assets the donation is causing for you--anything beyond that is arguably being paid by other tax payers.

(b) Your analogy isn't actually analogous. If I take a rock from my back yard and attach a price tag of "ten trillion USD" to it, and then donate it to you, would you accept my claim that I donated assets worth ten trillion USD to you? A price that has only been declared by the seller says nothing about the value of the thing the price is attached to. Only a price at which a transaction happened says anything about the value--that is, a price at which someone actually bought what you offered. Now, if they are giving something away for free, that transaction arguably indicates that the value is zero USD.

<comment><USER20> >It would actually indeed be more accurate to quote the difference in assets the donation is causing for you--anything beyond that is arguably being paid by other tax payers.

For tax purposes yes I'm not an accountant but MSFT isn't doing this for a tax break and they'll get credit for the actual financial value of their donation based most likely on their operational costs.

>Your analogy isn't actually analogous. If I take a rock from my back yard and attach a price tag of "ten trillion USD" to it, and then donate it to you, would you accept my claim that I donated assets worth ten trillion USD to you?

My analogy was pretty much correct this isn't an sole actor attributing an arbitrary price, Azure pricing is set by the market not by MSFT. You can assign a defined discrete value for each "resource credit" for Azure, AWS, DigitalOcean, any other IAAS/PAAS service provider out there based on it's market price as these are defacto commodity resources.

If you give me a rock which is worth a trillion dollars by your account its really not the same thing unless the market agrees that this rock is worth a trillion dollars either in direct value (e.g. you can sell/buy a rock for that sum) or indirect value (e.g. the amount of resources I would need to spend to find a substitute rock).

<comment><USER15> > For tax purposes yes I'm not an accountant but MSFT isn't doing this for a > tax break and they'll get credit for the actual financial value of their > donation based most likely on their operational costs.

(a) You were talking abstractly about "donations", not about Microsoft, (b) no, not for tax purposes. If you give someone a million dollars and then are reimbursed, say, a quarter of that by someone else, it's simply dishonest to publicly claim that you donated a million dollars, as (ba) your assets have only decreased by 750000 USD due to the donation, and (bb) because you are taking credit for the quarter million that that other person/entity paid for.

> My analogy was pretty much correct this isn't an sole actor attributing an > arbitrary price, Azure pricing is set by the market not by MSFT. You can > assign a defined discrete value for each "resource credit" for Azure, AWS, > DigitalOcean, any other IAAS/PAAS service provider out there based on it's > market price as these are defacto commodity resources.

Except that you choose to simply ignore one giant transaction in this market that happened only once they selectively reduced the price to zero (or rather, might happen, if people don't still consider that to be too expensive). If they were giving away a hundred dollars worth of services, sure, I'd be willing to accept that as a reasonable method of valuating the donation, but if it's in the same order of magnitude as their total yearly revenue in this area, not so much.

Also, it's actually not quite as much a commodity as you make it out to be, because of proprietary interfaces--the different providers certainly are in competition to one another, but one's product is not necessarily a direct substitute for the other's.

> If you give me a rock which is worth a trillion dollars by your account its > really not the same thing unless the market agrees that this rock is worth a > trillion dollars either in direct value (e.g. you can sell/buy a rock for > that sum) or indirect value (e.g. the amount of resources I would need to > spend to find a substitute rock).

A better measure in this case would be how much you could get others to buy it from you for. If your rock massively increases the supply of rocks, that is going to considerably drop the price.

<comment><USER20> >(a) You were talking abstractly about "donations", not about Microsoft, (b) no, not for tax purposes. If you give someone a million dollars and then are reimbursed, say, a quarter of that by someone else, it's simply dishonest to publicly claim that you donated a million dollars, as (ba) your assets have only decreased by 750000 USD due to the donation, and (bb) because you are taking credit for the quarter million that that other person/entity paid for.

I'm not sure you understand how tax deductions work.

Donating to charity allows you to claim a portion of that donation as a deductible, this can vary depending circumstances but in most cases you have a limit for the deductibles for gross income and the amount it self is usually not deducted in full regardless of limits when it comes to non-cash property (this is also gets more complicated because you have carrybacks, other losses, expenses etc.).

When Microsoft donates X amount of what ever to some one no one pays MSFT that money back, they might get some tax relief for it that's all this doesn't mean that you as an individual lose money in fact direct donation in many cases is more efficient than indirect funding through taxation.

>Except that you choose to simply ignore one giant transaction in this market that happened only once they selectively reduced the price to zero (or rather, might happen, if people don't still consider that to be too expensive). If they were giving away a hundred dollars worth of services, sure, I'd be willing to accept that as a reasonable method of valuating the donation, but if it's in the same order of magnitude as their total yearly revenue in this area, not so much.

It doesn't affect the price of the service in any way regardless of what portion of the global XAAS market or MSFT's own XAAS business it is. This simply allows for organizations that would not afford access to these resources at this scale before to have the opportunity to do so. It's also spread across 3 years and includes all MSFT cloud services so Office 365, Skype for Business/Lync, OneDrive etc. which makes is about 1/8th of their currently yearly revenue from cloud products which means overall it's about 1/24th of it's yearly cloud related revenue over the duration of the program.

>because of proprietary interfaces--the different providers certainly are in competition to one another, but one's product is not necessarily a direct substitute for the other's.

This holds true even if you build your infrastructure and platform in house it's not like MSFT can donate universal credits

>A better measure in this case would be how much you could get others to buy it from you for. If your rock massively increases the supply of rocks, that is going to considerably drop the price.

I am a non-profit or a school I don't sell rocks but I do need one, not everyone operates a tradable commodity exchange... You don't value the price of donated food at the local homeless soup kitchen by how much you could sell it to some one on the street you value it based on how much you will have to pay to make it on your own. And the people who actually receive the food tend to value it based on how hungry they are....

<comment><USER15> > When Microsoft donates X amount of what ever to some one no one pays MSFT > that money back, they might get some tax relief for it that's all

I am not sure you understand how accounting works. You have a tax liability. Now, you donate a million dollars (let's assume money for the sake of simplicity). How is this donation reflected in your balance sheet? Well, your bank owes you a million dollars less, and at the same time, you owe the state 250000 dollars (or whatever it is) less. Now, if the fact that your bank owes you a million dollars less means that you paid the donation, then the fact that you owe the state 250000 dollars less also means that the state has paid you a quarter of a million dollars of your donation back. Or in other words: That part of the donation is paid for by other tax payers.

> It doesn't affect the price of the service in any way regardless of what > portion of the global XAAS market or MSFT's own XAAS business it is.

You have it all backwards. This is not about whether the donation changes the price in other sales of the same service. This is about how you determine what the price of a product is. You determine the price by figuring out what people are paying for the product. Now, when _you_ do this, you simply discard one giant transaction that happens in this market, for no good reason. This giant transaction happens to be one where the price is zero.

> This holds true even if you build your infrastructure and platform in house > it's not like MSFT can donate universal credits

(a) How does that change the fact that it's not a commodity?

(b) Actually, they could. People commonly call this "universal credit" "money".

> You don't value the price of donated food at the local homeless soup kitchen > by how much you could sell it to some one on the street you value it based > on how much you will have to pay to make it on your own. And the people who > actually receive the food tend to value it based on how hungry they are....

Which should all result in the same value, unless you are making a mistake.

<comment><USER20> >I am not sure you understand how accounting works. You have a tax liability. Now, you donate a million dollars (let's assume money for the sake of simplicity). How is this donation reflected in your balance sheet? Well, your bank owes you a million dollars less, and at the same time, you owe the state 250000 dollars (or whatever it is) less. Now, if the fact that your bank owes you a million dollars less means that you paid the donation, then the fact that you owe the state 250000 dollars less also means that the state has paid you a quarter of a million dollars of your donation back. Or in other words: That part of the donation is paid for by other tax payers.

If you donate money you donate actual money, the deductibles are for potential profits from your revenue.

Say I donated 1M to charity these 1M are gone they aren't mine any more, this means that my buying power has been reduced by at least 1M and considering credit even more, and I've just lost any potential ROI on that money. What I can potentially get in return is the ability to deduct some of that amount from my tax future tax liability this means that if I make enough money to pay tax I could deduct a portion of the tax I would have to pay based on that donation.

No one in this scenario gave me money, I've gave out 1M, I might get some of it back however this isn't additional money that the tax payer has to pay that just money that is gone from the tax system.

By this logic a company that operates at an operational loss or an individual that their assets have resulted in a capital loss some how increase your tax liability which is simply not the case.

Now you might say that if people lose money all the time and not pay taxes eventually the Government will have to balance it out by taxing you more but this doesn't really happen that often as organization will not exist in operational loss which defers any tax liability on their account indefinitely same goes for people which their assets continuously lose value.

And while you might say but hold on a second Charity allows you to get some tax deduction and you can do that indefinitely well no no amount of charity will cancel out your tax liability, the cap ensures that the amount which can be deducted will always be considerably.

But you also need to remember that charity means that money goes to causes that in most cases would be funded by public funds (with Religious institutions being the only exception in some countries) this means that if you donate 1M and get 250K in deductibles the banks owes you 1M less, you have much less credit, you owe the state 250K less potentially but the state just got 1M in surplus because it doesn't need to allocate funding.

Charity (when people actually donate money, goods or labor) in most cases works exceptionally well when you actually donate to decent causes and not to some Kony2012 BS (and before you complain about remember that to pass the budget they US government ends up spending 100's of millions on nonsense like investigating the effects of beavers on moose mating calls and the economical implication of anti trust investigations against ice cream cartels in Guatemala on US foreign interests) to the point where some countries either do not put caps on charitable donations or are looking into removing them.

You need to understand that charity isn't a tax loop hole even with 100% deductible. If I earned 2M paid 50% of that in taxes in a given year (n) I now have 1M$, if I donate all of that to charity the government has technically received 2M from me instead of 1M as it now doesn't have to pay out additional 1M to fund various project because I have done so in their place.

Not only that but technically depending on what I've donated too I've actually increased their tax revenue potentially even more since some of my donation could end up paying for goods (VAT/Sales tax), salaries, microloans for businesses etc, housing (deed stamp tax (not sure if you have that in the US) etc.

Now I'm out of 1M$ and i get it as a deductible and I carryback this deductible to the next year to get my money back I need to make just as much as I did last year while paying no taxes, so if I make 2M again I will have 2M which is exactly the amount of money I would've have if i donated 0 to charity and paid the full tax for each year (if i do not donate to charity I could potentially have more money from capital gains).

This is pretty much the definition of a zero sum game or well to more accurately put it equivalency - Charity is pretty much paying more "taxes" if your deductibles are capped (especially at a percentage rather than a flat sum) or extending credit / giving a tax free loan to society if you can deduct the full amount (given you can make sufficient revenue or carryback the deductible over subsequent years).

There is no case in which when Money Inc LLC or Richie Rich give 1M to charity Johnny Bluecollar ends up paying more tax to in order to cover for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> There seems to be a lot of concern these days about platform lock in with Microsoft's new found philanthropic initiatives.

If one were to stick to IaaS, using only Azure hosted Linux VMs and not get involved in any special Azure PaaS offerings, then any project hosted under this model could easily avoid platform lock in and be transported to another service provider at any time.

</comment><comment><USER22> $1B * COGS / Retail Price

A $200M donation?

</comment><comment><USER23> As a student, I prefer Google. The integration or multi-platform services of Google is better. I got free Microsoft services from my school but I never use it.

</comment><comment><USER24> MS knows that computing habits for "work" start mainly in university, so this is really just marketing not charity.

</comment><comment><USER25> My favorite part is this piece: "Cloud services can unlock the secrets held by data in ways that create new insights and lead to breakthroughs"

How's that? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER26> Big Data Processing? Machine Learning on that data?

I can think of lots of ways the cloud can help.

<comment><USER25> Cloud services alone don't make what is said possible. Perhaps they'll be able to afford specialists to build what you are thinking of with the money saved from the Microsoft granted credits? Won't the university or non-profit need to hire a 'big data engineer' to build something using the services? Also analysts to know what to look for? The statement makes it sound as if the cloud can unlock it, but it's really people trained to know how to use the cloud to unlock it that make it possible, in my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Title should change to: "Microsoft is donating several Billion dollars worth of lock-in into their proprietary technologies".

<comment><USER28> Would you feel the way if Apple donated $1B worth of iPads and iPhones? I feel like most people wouldn't, yet it also lock-in into their proprietary technology.

<comment><USER29> >Would you feel the way if Apple donated $1B worth of iPads and iPhones?

Yeah

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> "First one's free."

</comment><comment><USER31> Seeing what Microsoft has done recently with privacy on their newest operating system, I would not have high hopes for their cloud services. Of course the organizations should be weighing all the pros and cons but I share the sentiment that once the freebie well dries up, terms might be re-evalutaed or services held hostage. Also, and I know the OneDrive plan shakeup fiasco is not apples to apples[0], but I'm sure these free plans could suffer a similar fate. With this, it's not necessarily as easy as moving mom's photo album back to your desktop.

I know the Univeristy of Wisconsin used to roll its own email, but recently started using Outlook acounts for everything and I'm definitely not a fan. Migration was painful or it at least seemed so. If orgs are able to isolate their architecture from the cloud and services, it might work out. Unfortunately, a lot of companies and organizations treat aggregate privacy like a preference instead of a requirement. Bartering chips.

My cynicism may be unfounded, but a company by the same name helped write the book on fostering lock-in not too long ago.

[0] [http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/3/9662414/microsoft- reduces-...](http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/3/9662414/microsoft-reduces-free- onedrive-storage-15-to-5-gb-removes-unlimited)</comment>


The Socialism America Needs Now - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/144492/socialism-america-needs-now <comment><USER2> Except that socialism will always fail due to the lack of information problem. Mises explained this logically and consistently in 1922 in his book "Socialism". He further predicted that all socialist systems will end with totalitarianism. The idea that "the people" should vote and have a say on how a business should be run (one where they have no vested interest) is ridiculous. Democratic socialism is bankrupting every country where people can vote themselves benefits.</comment>


Rubrication Design Examples - <AUTHOR> https://www.gwern.net/Red <comment><USER2> Halfway down there page there are some historic example alphabets. They looked very normal to me at first, but when I looked closer, I got confused.

The capitals in the "Lombardic Alphabet" start off looking like a modern English alphabet, but I found a lot of the letters to be hard to differentiate. Capital C and capital E both have an "extra" vertical stroke on the right that closes them. The difference between a capital A and a capital F seems to be solely that the A has double horizontal strokes. Was this standard?

The Lombardic lower case letters are closer to current typography (with an additional long-s) but I was surprised that some letters seem to exist only in lower case. Were there simply no words that used capital J, capital X, or capital Z?

In the next image (Plate 67, Tymns) there are also differences between the capital and lower-case letters. But they seem to be different omissions than the first example: no capital U, V, W or X, but there is a capital Z. And the capital I (or at least, whichever letter that is between H and L) looks very odd. What's happening here?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd think that a person with this attention to typography would ditch justified text in a blink. Looking at justified text from a distance: nice blocks of ink. Reading justified text: what are these huge spaces, where's carefully adjusted rhythm of word spacing? Even with hyphenation, it's plainly noticeable, especially on a phone.

<comment><USER4> Why are people so bothered by justification when reading on a screen, while it's clearly preferred when it comes to books?

Is it just because the automated justification algorithms are so terrible?

<comment><USER3> Afaik specifically browsers' hyphenation algorithms aren't made for optimal output. Software like InDesign or TeX spends some time juggling the text to find the best layout for an entire page or several of them, taking a bunch of factors into account. Meanwhile, a browser has to slap a paragraph together in a few milliseconds.

<comment><USER5> I don't think speed is the main problem. People have reimplemented the TeX algorithm in JS and it's fine. After all, Knuth was doing pages per second back in the 1970s, and it's 2019. But the problem there is that it breaks some sort of CSS property and so the browsers adamantly refuse to use it and the devs say that not much can be done to improve things.

<comment><USER3> Ah, yes, I've heard about this: proper justification with even spacing is incompatible with the CSS spec, as iirc the spec pretty much says a paragraph must take minimum vertical space. Alas exact details elude me, as well as why a spec change wouldn't fix this.

<comment><USER5> Yes, something like that. Greedy layout is required. As for a spec change - changing the standard? And who knows what it would break at this point? Might as well wish for a pony.

<comment><USER3> Eh, from the level of discussion on such issues it seems that every detail of rendering is figured out even outside browser teams. And since afaik it's browser implementors who are defining the spec nowadays, I have some hope that they'll see the light.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Darpa stops trying not to be terrifying. - <AUTHOR> http://www.switched.com/2009/07/09/the-matrix-fulfilled-eatr-military-robots-to-use-biomatter-a/

<comment><USER2> Article describes a DARPA robot that powers itself by gathering and fueling itself from biomass. This is apparently an approach to energy-autonomous recon robots (harvest grasses and plants where it goes) that has amusingly terrifying connotations when you consider the mental image of a chainsaw- wielding robot capturing and devouring, say, people.

It seems that DARPA, which once built things that seemed like the fevered imaginations of a 14 year old boy, is now building things that seem like the fevered imaginations of a 7 year old boy.

<comment><USER3> <sarcasm> Surely any robot built by the U.S. government will be bound by Asimov's three laws of robotics. </sarcasm>

<comment><USER4> From the RTI website, a presentation they supposedly gave to the Army War College Strategic Studies Institute in April:

 _A code of moral behavior for intelligent robots will be developed. Isaac Asimov's Three Laws are insufficient (especially for military)._

<comment><USER3> I understand that. My sarcasm was apparently a failed attempt at being somewhat humorous after a long week.

<comment><USER4> Both of our posts would be funnier if the project was anything other than vaporware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This massively improves my opinion of what DARPA is spending my money on.

</comment><comment><USER6> Getting worked up over the potential of a DARPA research project is like getting yourself worked up over a popular girl when you were in high school. There's almost no chance those ideas will come to fruition, and on the slim chance something does, it will be in the far off future and nothing like you initially thought.

</comment><comment><USER7> And this my friends is why government research is awesome. DARPA and crackpot scientists--coming to a future near you.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is linkbait. Biomass can mean plant matter. I've worked on DARPA funded robots.

</comment><comment><USER9> From The Register... I'm not holding my breath.

<comment><USER4> They cite their sources - just follow the trail a few more steps.

<http://www.robotictechnologyinc.com/index.php/EATR>:

 _At the sixth (System of Systems) level, which has not yet been implemented, the 4D/RCS serves as an overarching intelligent control and decision system for (all or part of) a manifold of distributed unmanned and manned platforms, unattended sensors and weapons, and control centers._

Ambitious!

<comment><USER10> SkyNet, here we come.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> is there any non-military research left in the US?

<comment><USER6> There's plenty, but in pales in both breadth and depth (number of sources and amount of money offered) compared to DOD funding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I thought DARPA ceased to exist when they moved the island.

</comment><comment> onreact-com Seems to be inspired by the latest Terminator movie. Why do we need more killer machines, are the people in charge afraid that some day humans will refuse to fight for the "just causes" they are presented?</comment>