Your Customers Care About Design, Even if They Don't - <AUTHOR> http://www.voltagecreative.com/blog/2008/04/your-customers-care-about-design-even-if-they-dont/ Trying my hand at some corporate blogging for my new company. (Design/SEM House) This is my first article.<p>Excerpt: "So, why is such a silly mistake so common? It has to do with vocabulary. Even people who don't care about design, care about it. They just think they don't care, because they don't know the language. They don't take note of poorly thought out ergonomics when they encounter them, but they sure recognize it when they've purchased a product the maker clearly never used for it's intended purpose. When they feel they've wasted money, they certainly do take note. And they tell their friends." <comment><USER2> I call myself an interface designer. But I don't consider what I do purely visual at all. I find that it's hard to describe. How do you describe to someone the feeling you get when you put your tongue on a lemon? Or how it feels to click the "next page" button on newspond.com?

Design is not how it looks, how it feels, or how it works. It's all of those things, together-- it's the experience. On the web, it's the way a layout makes you feel on a subconscious, visceral level and how the buttons and interactive elements literally feel when you click them. On a more tangible level, it's the way the volume knob on a stereo feels stiff when you change the volume, or how a nice doorknob makes a thump-click when you close it.

There's no way to "design" an amazing product if you don't consider everything at the very beginning. On the web, there are three things to consider: visual design, interface architecture, and underlying technology (an analogy would be the tires and color of the exterior, the safety features and interior design, and the engine of a car). If you skimp on any of these three things, your product will seriously suffer. Do you own a Chevy Nova or a Dodge Neon? Of course not. Both of those cars were built by sacrificing visual design and safety features for cheapness.

There's a philosophy of rapidly developing, rapidly releasing, and then rapidly iterating. I think a lot of companies take this too literally and rapidly build everything half-assed, rapidly release half-assed products, and then rapidly iterate half-assed features without ever going back and fixing their half-assed first revision. I think a better process is to design an easy to use, awesome version 1 with the simplest, most necessary features first, then iterate based on that level of quality. At that point, you've set a bar of quality that you simply have to achieve with every release.

To summarize, don't skimp on designers or hackers. Skimp on features. Features are free, and can always be added later.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen _When it comes to cost cutting, many times it's design or marketing that goes first. This is like an applicant ditching the cover letter on their resume when the job market is down: it's laughably bad timing._

I'm so, so sick of this kind of post. Some design guy thinks design guys are not well treated. OK, sure, maybe, why not. Then the guy goes on to say how design is everything. Sometimes the design guy disses the hacker for skimping for a few hundred on design. Other times the design guy insults the hacker's taste.

"Design" is not the only part of the business where you design things. In product development you design too. The "design" branch is the one concerned with the design of things that don't change the function of your product, just the appearance. It's makeup. Design, as a verb, is important, but what this guy is talking about, "design" as a branch of business, is really exactly the first place to skimp.

Not that skimping in this area will not have its costs. The reason you have to cut costs to begin with implies cutting something that you may need. If you have been running a tight ship, anything you cut will hurt somewhat. It's like starving. After a while, your body starts consuming parts of your organs. It consumes developed skeletal muscles preferentially. Sure they're important -- they wouldn't be there in the first place if they weren't -- but they aren't your liver. You won't die from having your muscles catabolized. People often talk about the other branches and go back and forth over which matters most. "The market is everything." "No, the product -- the product matters the most." I feel these discussions sometimes omit the fact that many areas can be necessary, just like you need several organs to survive. Is your liver more important than your heart? A moot point. You need a market, you need a product, you need to monetize eventually. You can argue that any one of these is essential, and you'd be right. But design? Design is the appendix of a startup. At best, it is the second kidney. Nobody cares what your logo looks like. Nobody cares about the favicon. The buttons don't need to be 2.0. None of these things are very important, and worse, they're not even that hard to do. Making a passable favicon is not that hard, and you can always pimp it if/when you have tons of VC money.

<comment><USER3> > The "design" branch is the one concerned with the design of things that > don't change the function of your product, just the appearance. It's makeup.

This is where you are pointing out a big problem in most organizations. Design in many organizations is treated as purely visual, when it really shouldn't be. If this is the role of design in your organization, then yes, absolutely, it is expendable. Lipstick.

But you don't want lipstick. There's also interaction design / product design. You want someone who can, BEFORE a person even puts a line of code down, understand what the user wants to do and make sure the user experience makes sense in that context, through real user testing and rapid iteration. It's just cheaper to think and change on paper or a whiteboard. Once it's implemented, it is very costly to change. This type of design is not lipstick. It is the process by which a product takes shape... and it is not expendable.

<comment> daniel-cussen We're talking about different things. The article talks about selling cereal boxes. That's expendable, or at least less vital than other things.

In a more general sense, design has its purpose, no question. How do you make something without designing it? Sure design is a big part of making a product, and is the heart of any business. But the article talks about lipstick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My design mantra is: make it easier for the user to go to the next step than it is to for the user to go goof off on reddit.

using this, i work from the bottom up. I find which part of the user experience is the most boring and try to improve that until it isn't the most boring part. then repeat.

</comment><comment><USER5> Design is function, at its base. Even no design, is a design choice.

</comment><comment><USER6> You can read about my own enlightenment on this issue here, starting with the 2nd paragraph:

<http://ourdoings.com/2008-02-12>

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd really like to see that Peer Insight study.

<comment><USER8> I'm extremely curious about the methodology, even more than the results. The kind of distinction they draw seems very difficult to capture in an objective study.

<comment><USER9> <http://www.tekes.fi/eng/publications/innovative_service.pdf>

i'm not sure if this is the paper, but this one explains what they mean by "customer experience design". the little table on page 12 mentions radical innovations like making something that your customers actually want, focusing on the "customer journey", talking about "brand attributes", and "storytelling." i think that all means "show your customer why they should want your product," and i'm not sure worrying about kerning is all that critical to it. can't hurt though.</comment></comment></comment>


'Most' People on Facebook May Have Had Their Accounts Scraped - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/most-people-on-facebook-may-have-had-their-accounts-scraped/557285/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> As someone who build a few apps with early Fb graph I can say this is without a doubt 100% true and it's weird that anyone even slightly thinks it's speculative. Homie who wrote "Cow Clicker" did so around the same time I was working with it and has a great writeup on it.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/my- co...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/my-cow-game- extracted-your-facebook-data/556214/)</comment>


Technology Change Not the Culprit in Wages Falling Behind US Productivity Gains - <AUTHOR> https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/02/technology-change-not-culprit-wages-falling-behind-us-productivity-gains.html <comment><USER3> This paper finds that the change in wage distribution in the US over the past 40 years has been more similar to China than France. This implies policy may be playing a large factor. How many times has the highest tax rate been cut in the past 40 years? How many states have enacted right-to-work laws? How have special tax rates for carried interest, long term capitals gains and dividends impacted business decisions?

[https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/2171710...](https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and- economics/21717102-why-chinese-citizens-seem-more-tolerant-rising-inequality- westerners-new)

France and Germany have works council that gives labor a voice in business decisions (a seat on the board). Maybe the solution is as easy as giving workers a voice.

<comment><USER4> > Maybe the solution is as easy as giving workers a voice.

Maybe you should give the guy you paid to paint your garage a voice in your management of your home.

<comment><USER5> On the face of it, your reductio ad absurdum is perfectly reasonable. Employees do their job, get their money, end of story. Right?

In continental Europe, nobody _expects_ it to work like that. It's a different mindset. If you work in a large firm, the works council has a say (to some degree) in management decisions. It's not always perfect – politics are everywhere – but it is completely normal and expected by bosses and workers alike that employment is a _relationship_ , not a transaction. And for the most part, it seems to be working.

To someone who grew up in that culture, your wild-west thinking seems a bit, well, primitive? Or uncivilized?

<comment><USER6> > In continental Europe, nobody expects it to work like that. ... To someone > who grew up in that culture, your wild-west thinking seems a bit, well, > primitive? Or uncivilized?

One should challenge that setup by asking the question: has contintental Europe's policies resulted in high wages?

France has far lower wages than the US, with 1/4 to 1/5 the wage growth rate of the US over the last two decades. Germany, Britain, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Austria, Belgium, all have considerably lower wages than the US.

Continental Europe also includes dozens of nations that are dramatically poorer than the US, both in terms of median income and median household net worth.

Wouldn't it be more primitive or uncivilized to be using the French approach, since it has resulted in _dramatically_ lower wage growth for decades now? Wage growth in France averaged 0.5% annually the prior two decades. In the US, 2.5% wage growth is considered very slow, with 3.5% to 4% being average in the 1999-2009 time frame. If their system works so well, where's the wage growth (and we're talking about the last 20 years, not a blip of time)?

<comment><USER7> But digging deeper, Europe has a bigger middle class than the US, and the US has the largest lower class and upper class, the latter which pulls up the overall average.

So is the average citizen is probably better off in Europe than in the US.

Data: [https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/euro-vs-american- middle...](https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/04/euro-vs-american-middle- class/524193/)

Also, Europe is catching up on the US average income too, which is really more relevant than what the past or current average is. It means that recent US policy is not working in favour of the average citizen.

<comment><USER6> > Europe is catching up on the US average income too ... It means that recent > US policy is not working in favour of the average citizen.

Western Europe isn't seeing faster wage growth than the US. Economically the US is pulling away from Germany, Britain, Italy and France. US income and GDP growth rates have been far higher the last 10 and 20 years than most of its peers.

Economically speaking, Germany's GDP hasn't net expanded since 2007, when it was $3.44 trillion (it was $3.46 trillion for 2016). France and Britain are similar. French GDP was $2.66 trillion in 2007, it was $2.46 trillion in 2016.

In that time, 2007 to 2016, the US added GDP larger than the entire German economy (about $4.5 trillion).

It's practically impossible to generate broad wage gains if you don't grow the whole economic pie. That's why French wages have been so stagnant for so long, despite all the supposedly labor friendly approaches there.

The US middle class has contracted because more people have moved up and out of the middle class and into the upper classes, than have moved down and out (that's true over 10, 20, 30 years of time):

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/is-the-middle- class-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/is-the-middle-class-moving- up/2016/06/24/214dc04a-3a28-11e6-8f7c-d4c723a2becb_story.html)

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/21/sure- the...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/06/21/sure-the-middle- class-is-shrinking-30-of-americans-are-too-rich-to-be-middle-class-now/)

The formerly extremely poor 1/2 of Europe in the East has seen dramatic improvement since the end of the USSR. You can see that dramatic improvement in several countries like Czech, Slovakia, Romania (more recently), etc. Many are still doing very poorly at growing their economies, including Bulgaria, Moldova, Hungary, Belarus, Macedonia, Albania, Ukraine, Croatia, Bosnia.

The median incomes of Latvia and Lithuania are still around 1/4 that of the US, Estonia is closer to 1/3 that of the US.

<comment><USER8> > The US middle class has contracted because more people have moved up and out > of the middle class and into the upper classes, than have moved down and out

The study cited directly in the Washington Post opinion piece (and indirectly, by way of a WSJ opinion piece, in the Forbes piece -- good effort there passing off the same underlying study as if it were two independent sources) _excludes adult children living with parents_ from the analysis, which makes it completely broken, since that's a living pattern that is known to be more common among adults with lower income relative to the cost of living, and which has been observed to increase over the time period the study addresses. [0]

So, yeah, if you ignore a growing share of young adults that are unable to afford to live independently, the share of the remaining population that is in higher economic strata by income is greater.

Clever spin, but not really a good representation of the reality.

[0] See, e.g., [http://www.fanniemae.com/resources/file/research/housingsurv...](http://www.fanniemae.com/resources/file/research/housingsurvey/pdf/nhsjuly2014presentation.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Would you go ahead and break out the the impact you're claiming as it pertains to adult children living with their parents? I disagree that it makes it completely broken, the effects shown in the study are _dramatic_ , rather than subtle. You'll need to show an equally dramatic impact from adult children living with their parents having a counter effect.

That study also makes adjustments for household size. Further, average household sizes are smaller today than they were in 1980, by about 10%. That trend has been persistent, with household sizes shrinking considerably since the 1950s/1960s.

The upper middle class expanding from 12.9% of households to 29.4% of households, cannot be explained by your premise.

The change in adult children living with their parents between 1994 and 2016, is a mere 4%. From 27.5% to about 31.5%. And most likely that figure is set to decline a bit from here given the very low unemployment rate.

That 4% change, for example, could explain _some_ of the drop in the poor and near poor, from 24.3% of households to 19.8%; and the lower middle class falling from 23.9% to 17.1% of households. However it very obviously fails to explain the change on those two combined. And it _entirely_ fails to explain the epic increase in the upper middle class.

<comment><USER8> > Would you go ahead and break out the the impact you're claiming as it > pertains to adult children living with their parents?

No, barring a grant to do so, I'm not going to dig into the paper's source data and rerun the analysis without the methodological errors, of which the treatment of the demographic noted is just the most glaring, should be obvious to even a layman at the time who had been basically attentive to the news, much less anyone seriously trying to do honest analysis. Among the other methodological errors (and this is not intended to be an exhaustive list):

(1) The paper commendably recognized that current money income is a different thing than class, which "knits together multiple factors such as income, wealth, education, prestige, and cultural sophistication", and then proceeded to use money income alone to measure class mobility on the assertion that it "current income is closely related to all the factors associated with social class and because data on current income are readily available." While prestige and cultural sophistication are clearly hard to get annual statistics for, education and wealth distribution are not; there is no excuse for not including these of the intent to is assess a feature which includes them.

(2) Related to #1, Rose does not justify his thresholds as meaningful class thresholds,

(3) Also related to the use of money income as a proxy for class, Rose justifies using fixed real income thresholds (which mean that changes in the median inflation-adjusted income with even with no distribution change within the non-excluded population will result in upward "class" mobility, which, even to the extent that money income correlates to class, doesn't seem to correlate with _how_ it usually correlated with that concept) with the only justification being that that's how the federal poverty line works (which is true, but it's worth noting that this is both a controversial thing about the federal poverty line, and dubious in relation to class generally even if it is appropriate to the purpose of the FPL; there's probably a good reason to think that what is right for the FPL corresponds in some ratio to the boundary for the lower class, but that with successively higher classes income mapping to the class is not simply a constant multiple of the poverty line.)

(4) No justification is given for the method of calculating "family of three equivalents" (using the square root of the ratio of the actual household size to 3 as an income divisor to get the "family of 3" equivalent income.) Note that if one views the FPL as having a reasonably constant relationship to class boundaries as Rose suggests in his justification of the use of constant real-income thresholds, this method of size adjustment is tolerably close for families _under_ 3 (though off in different directions for size 1 vs. size 2) but artificially pushes families _over_ three upward in "class" because it understates the additional income needed to stay at the same level with more family members.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _At the opposite end of the spectrum – which we call 'strong linkage' – it's possible that productivity growth translates fully into increases in typical workers' pay, but even as productivity growth has been acting to raise pay, other factors (orthogonal to productivity) have been acting to reduce it._

 _At the same time, non-purely technological hypotheses for rising mean-median inequality include the race between education and technology (Goldin and Katz 2007), declining unionisation (Freeman et al. 2016), globalisation (Autor et al. 2013), immigration (Borjas 2003), and the 'superstar effect' (Rosen 1981, Gabaix et al. 2016). Non-technological hypotheses for the falling labour share include labour market institutions (Levy and Temin 2007, Mishel and Bivens 2015), market structure and monopoly power (Autor et al. 2017, Barkai 2017), capital accumulation (Piketty 2014, Piketty and Zucman 2014), and the productivity slowdown itself (Grossman et al. 2017)._

All of the non-technological reasons, to me, boil down to globalization.

I'd love to see the productivity-wage divergence chart in China and other developing countries. I wouldn't be surprised if the divergence is inverted in those places that have seen unprecedented wage growth over the last forty years.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think productivity and wages have diverged as much as people think, it's just that a national analysis is insufficient in a global labor market.

<comment><USER10> I would add women entering the workforce en bulk, essentially doubling it. Between that and globalization it would seem the supply/demand ratio significantly changed to have downward pressure on salaries.

<comment><USER11> All those women spend their earnings, increasing demand. Essentially doubling it?

<comment><USER12> A two-parent household isn't going to double its consumption of everything if both parents start working. First, because wages will be depressed from the new labor supply, the total income of the household doesn't double. Second because their tax rate will increase. Third because many things we consume in fixed units with little control over the total cost, like "health insurance".

But they will increase their consumption of some things, particularly when it comes to the direct cost of working, so the family may spend more on things like transportation, clothing, child care, home care & maintenance services, food preparation, grocery delivery, etc.

<comment><USER13> It could be that housing costs are soaking up the bulk of the second earner's pay?

<comment><USER12> Home ownership rate is currently near averages maintained since the 70s. But it increased substantially in the 40s-70s (from ~45% to 65%). So to the extent that rise was enabled by dual income households you're absolutely right more demand for housing drives up housing prices and saps up the extra income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Because it was always about class warfare, and as W Buffett said, the rich are winning. Just how they promised us the industrial revolution would, but instead the rich gobbled up all the profits while starting the workers which led to the Era of robber barons. Anyone who thinks the information or automation revolution isn't going to result in the same thing unless we change fundamental business practice is in for a rough surprise.

<comment><USER15> Is this true? I think the average worker is much better off now than in the past. It's not that long ago that many people in the US didn't have electricity. I think what's happening is as we get richer our definition of what's necessary to have a middle class life gets continually revised upwards. Most people have a car, several electronic devices, eat out relatively often, etc. What used to be a luxury or aspirational becomes commonplace.

That's not to say there aren't problems, but exaggerating how bad things are makes any argument to fix them less credible.

<comment> wu-ikkyu Bread and circuses[1] satifies only the most base of human needs[2]. Perhaps that is why stress, anxiety, depression, and mental health issues have been on the rise for quite some time now.

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

[2][https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_need...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs)

<comment><USER16> I think there's a lot to be said for how helpless the average worker is in the modern economy. Part of it isn't just the absolute conditions of modern people, but the knowledge and zeitgeist that people have now. The concept of the "American Dream" isn't dead, but it's becoming increasingly reserved for only a small subset of people with specific backgrounds and skills. People that aren't, for lack of a better word, special simply aren't going to make it big; more importantly, even if this has always been the case, people now _know_ that about themselves.

People born in poverty look to lottery tickets, both literally and in the form of risky activities like gang activities and becoming professional sports players (which is risky relative to what else you could accomplish given the same amount of effort). They typically don't have access to education, or benefit from stable households, enough to break out. Middle class people don't realistically have a chance of becoming wealthy unless they're unusually smart or socially skilled. Neither group has the means to fix this situation politically or culturally because very wealthy people control politics and culture (or at the very least, all the important parts). Most modern success stories are essentially an upper-middle class person rising to the lower-upper class.

I think we need a new frontier. Maybe that's just a substitute for a lottery ticket, but it's a lottery ticket with much better odds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wealth inequality is the result of a debt bubble that's been growing for several decades, not technology. High household debt to GDP and wealth inequality probably coincide today for the same reason they coincided during the Great Depression. The ways these debts have to be restructured or dealt with distort the economy, in a way that tends to massively benefit some while hurting everyone else. If you own stock in or work for a health insurance company, the last decade has been fantastic. On the other hand, the government will soon find that it's having trouble keeping up with the debt from its healthcare programs. If you started a company in Silicon Valley, you benefitted from enormous pools of VC money that might have been in treasury bonds if the Federal Reserve hadn't already been buying trillions of them. If we look back historically, wealth inequality began to normalize by the 1950s only after the US's debt was erased. The story that runaway technology is creating massive inequality is unlikely be true in a country where GDP growth is only 2%.

</comment><comment><USER18> This touches on something I've been thinking about but don't have a word to look into further; maybe someone can help me out.

I would think that the productivity of a worker (as defined here) would put an _upper bound_ on wages, but not that wages would necessarily rise to that. That would depend on supply and demand of labor.

The concept I've been toying with is this: suppose there are 100 software jobs and 90 software developers. In that regime, the wages will rise to the value created by the software developers, since there will be a bidding war among the companies that need them, and they'll be willing to pay up to what the developer is worth to them. On the other hand, suppose there are 100 software jobs and 110 software developers. Now the wages will _fall_ to the minimum amount the developers will take, based on cost of living or switching careers or whatever, since companies will now offer as little as they can get away with.

IOW, I think that there are two discontinuous "wage regimes" depending on if there are more workers than jobs, or more jobs than workers. Is there a term or concept for this that I can read about more?

<comment><USER19> You've pretty much precisely nailed this.

If you go to the classical economists (Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Marx), you'll find that they tend to discuss both specific classes of goods, and specific factors to the wages of labour.

Of the first, from Smith, generally: commodities, wages, rents, interest, assets (gold and silver), capital (stock), and public goods ("expenses of the sovereign"). These are somewhat scattered about the book, the first six largely in Books 1 & 2, and Book 5 devoted solely to the latter.

I'll turn it over to Smith for the factors in compensation of labour, as he's uncharacteristically direct and brief:

"The five following are the principal circumstances which, so far as I have been able to observe, make up for a small pecuniary gain in some employments, and counterbalance a great one in others: first, the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves; secondly, the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them; thirdly, the constancy or inconstancy of employment in them; fourthly, the small or great trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them; and, fifthly, the probability or improbability of success in them."

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_10)

(An expansion of each of the five elements follows.)

From Ricardo we get the Law of Rent and Iron Law of Wages (Lasalle, Marx, and Engles also discuss this). The first notes that for any productive input _whose quantity is fixed_ , the price will rise to capture _all_ of the generated value. The second notes that wages fall to _or below_ the level of bare subsistence.

The second factor is _most_ distinct for _nondifferentiated_ labour, that is, unskilled, and in particular, in a stagnant or declining economy. Smith describes the circumstances of the latter in terrifying detail in Book 1 Chapter 8, which I strongly recommend reading in full, though the relevant detail begins at: "But it would be otherwise in a country where the funds destined for the maintenance of labour were sensibly decaying..."

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/Chapter_8)

Smith, _et al_ , are _classical_ economists, and their observations were given mathematical rigour and explanation by the _marginalists_. Effectively, goods producing rents have _zero price elasticity_ , public goods have _zero marginal cost_ , and in the case of wages, there are generally distinct short- term and long-term cost components, a phenomenon which can produce a _backwards-bending supply curve_. That is, if you reduce a wage rate _below_ subsistence, on a time-worked or piece-work basis, you will get _more_ productivity _as labourers work more hours to simply meet their minimum survival requirements._ This comes, however, at the cost of long-term capacity: raising of families, rest and recuperation, education, and the like.

Much of the conflict of modern economic life, from a worker-renter's point of view, can be explained by the squeeze of falling wages against rising rents, via numerous mechanisms.

Your observation on who has rightful claim to the _surplus value_ generated by labour (and the role of increased productivity in setting an upper bound to the possible wage component) is the matter explored by Thorstein Veblen, though I need to revisit just exactly where.

<comment><USER20> Amazing summary of the text, would you recommend any modern books on the above subjects?

<comment><USER19> Apologies for the late response, though I've been thinking this over.

I'll stand by my earlier comment: _read the classic economists themselves, directly, if at all possible._ Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marx, Mill (both John Stuart and David), Carlisle, Toynbee, Marshall.

You don't need to read _all_ of them or the works in full, but each of these addresses at least in some depth and detail the question of goods and their pricing behaviours, in ways that are not generally addressed today.

There are overviews and histories of economic thought and its development which should be useful. I've read Heilbroner ( _The Worldly Philosophers_ ) and Backhouse ( _The Ordinary Business of Life_ ), both of which provide a broad overview. Ha-Joon Chang has _Economics: The User 's Guide_, which is a pretty good overview of various schools of thought.

I'm particularly impressed currently by Steve Keen, whose most recent book is _Debunking Economics_. He's been developing his ideas at a rapid pace and to an extent has overrun what's in the book. He's good to watch though.

John Kenneth Galbraith tends generally to discuss economics more-or-less in the terms I've been mentioning here, with _The Affluent Society_ and _Age of Uncertainty_ probably being good starting points.

I'm not much impressed by and generally strongly discount most Libertarian thinking, though if you'd like a sense of what I consider to be bad/poor economic theory, Howard Hazlitt's _Economics in One Lesson_ and Murray Rothbard's _Libertarian Manifesto_ might be considerations.

Hope that helps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> That's an awful article. The author is trying to infer too much from data that summarizes the entire economy. There's far more detailed data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You can look at technology and productivity by industry sector, which is more useful.

This guy was Secretary of the Treasury and a professor of economics at Harvard. He has to know better. This looks like starting from a desired result and working backwards to support that argument.

</comment><comment><USER22> I first read the comments page on nakedcapitalism.com before browsing these comments. It is interesting that these articles are discussed on HN as a proxy for using the comment section of the actual site, but I guess that is the norm these days. I would kind of expect the discussion at the actual site to be more informed as only more dedicated people to the topic would have membership at the smaller site. But I feel like, more or less, the discussion here mirrors the one on nakedcapitalism. It would be interesting to bucket all the arguments that are more or less the same. I see the following: (in answer to why have wages stagnated)

* 'its because the rich are greedy assholes who have corrupted government'

* its due to globalization or cannot be explained without factoring this in

* its because of some complex unorthodox economic theory (insert here)

I can tolerate the comments on HN more than on reddit where I can only anticipate the ratio would tilt so heavily in favour of just emotional outbursts against rich greedy assholes that get upvoted by online pitchforked mobs ready for the revolution. These main lines of thought spawn mini threads that swirl like like pools of attention suckage in a steady stream of water. What I think would be interesting would be for some kind of automatic moderation that parses out the main arguments, prevents de-railments, crushes duplication, and forces the true competing arguments to face each other head on in the rational arena.

</comment><comment> wu-ikkyu So the basic question is: why are wages stagnating in the face of increased productivity?

What is wrong with a simple, non-technical answer like: _because the people at the top don 't want to share_?

<comment><USER23> Even if this is true, you're limiting your options by not trying to understand the technicalities behind it. Why don't the people at the top want to share? What are we even sharing? How does sharing happen? By what means does sharing occur?

The only reason you believe the people at the top don't want to share is because of centuries of thinking that has lead you to see the structure of the world in a way that this is useful. Summing up centuries of thought into a single phrase, and then throwing out the data and ideas that got you there is...risk at best.

<comment><USER24> > Why don't the people at the top want to share?

There are people like that in every wealth bracket. The difference is, the people at the top are uniquely empowered to make it happen.

As Dana Meadows warned us over 40 years ago, the numerous "[more] success to the successful" feedback loops in our society have overcome the wealth- equalizing negative feedback loops, with the (predictable) result being runaway exponential wealth concentration.[1] _Limits to Growth_ , despite its convenient "debunking" in the popular zeitgeist, is tracking well with real- world data.[2]

[1] 1h long, worth it: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMmChiLZZHg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMmChiLZZHg)

[2] [http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/M...](http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/MSSI- ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf), via [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits- to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse)

<comment><USER24> (too late to edit)

[1] timecode link [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMmChiLZZHg&t=3m55s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMmChiLZZHg&t=3m55s)

direct link to the part on "success to the successful" loops [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMmChiLZZHg&t=18m48s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMmChiLZZHg&t=18m48s)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Original source: [https://voxeu.org/article/link-between-us-pay-and- productivi...](https://voxeu.org/article/link-between-us-pay-and-productivity)

</comment><comment><USER26> What about the disconnecting of currency from the gold standard (1971/1973). Productivity gains that rippled through the economy based on a capped unit of accounting were now more likely to end up in the banking vaults of the institutions overseeing the money issuance and those close to the source - while the rest of the workforce sat on inflating paper.

<comment><USER27> Not sure why this comment wasn't upvoted higher. Inflation has effectively been a slow-moving tax increase to the middle class, as tax brackets don't change with the decreasing value of the US dollar. A $100,000 salary in 2018 was equivalent to a $65,000 salary in 2000, meaning much more of one's 2018 income is pushed into the higher 25% bracket rather than the lower 15% bracket.

<comment><USER26> Also coincides nicely with the demand on families to go from one partner working and able to sustain a family of 4-5 (lots more kids in the 50s/60s) to both parents having to work and smaller family size over the past 50 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Technology makes a convenient scapegoat though.

<comment><USER29> Especially because technology drives automation, and automation pushes us ever closer to a very difficult question: What, exactly, will happen when all jobs which can be automated, are automated?

<comment><USER30> The automators are automated.

<comment><USER31> But who will automate the automator automators?

<comment> murph-almighty _Alan Moore scribbles furiously_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Duh. The real answer is greed.

</comment><comment> taw-an There is no competition for wages, only a cartel effect. It's pretty simple.

</comment><comment><USER33> Why are we still doing this in 2018! The jury isn't out on this one - <USER2> voodoo tricke-down economic experiment is over and the results are in - it is nothing more than a sensationalized way for the rich to piss on the poor. If you don't believe me try this: Go on google.com - type "rich piss on the poor" \- the click "I'm feeling lucky". I rest my case lol

A more constructive debate should focus on how to first mitigate, reverse and then prevent.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is the kind of content I like to see on HN: An approachable blog post explaining research in a field I'm not intimately familiar with.

</comment><comment><USER35> There was just a post on a related topic, technological unemployment, on SlateStarCodex. Quoting the conclusion below:

Here are some tentative conclusions:

1\. Technological unemployment is not happening right now, at least not more so than previous eras. The official statistics are confusing, but they show no signs of increases in this phenomenon. (70% confidence)

2\. On the other hand, there are signs of technological underemployment – robots taking middle-skill jobs and then pushing people into other jobs. Although some people will be "pushed" into higher-skill jobs, many will be pushed into lower-skill jobs. This seems to be what happened to the manufacturing industry recently. (70% confidence)

3\. This sort of thing has been happening for centuries and in theory everyone should eventually adjust, but there are some signs that they aren't. This may have as much to do with changes to the educational, political, and economic system as with the nature of robots per se. (60% confidence)

4\. Economists are genuinely divided on how this is going to end up, and whether this will just be a temporary blip while people develop new skills, or the new normal. (~100% confidence)

5\. Technology seems poised to disrupt lots of new industries very soon, and could replace humans entirely sometime within the next hundred years. (???)

This is a very depressing conclusion. If technology didn't cause problems, that would be great. If technology made lots of people unemployed, that would be hard to miss, and the government might eventually be willing to subsidize something like a universal basic income. But we won't get that. We'll just get people being pushed into worse and worse jobs, in a way that does not inspire widespread sympathy or collective action. The prospect of educational, social, or political intervention remains murky.

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/19/technological- unemploym...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/19/technological-unemployment- much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/)

<comment><USER36> > 2\. On the other hand, there are signs of technological underemployment – > robots taking middle-skill jobs and then pushing people into other jobs. > Although some people will be "pushed" into higher-skill jobs, many will be > pushed into lower-skill jobs. This seems to be what happened to the > manufacturing industry recently. (70% confidence)

There's a couple research papers from the NBER that I think show this has been happening since the early 90's.

[http://www.nber.org/papers/w18334.pdf](http://www.nber.org/papers/w18334.pdf)

The graphs of for the jobless recoveries are particularly telling. One thing the authors suggest is that before the 90's after a recession we recovered the jobs that were lost due to the slowdown, but after the 90's companies could outsource or automate during the recession to deal with the economic pressures, so when the economy recovered those jobs weren't around to come back to.

[http://www.nber.org/papers/w18901.pdf](http://www.nber.org/papers/w18901.pdf) From the conclusion

> In particular, we have argued that after two decades of growth in the demand > for occupations high in cognitive tasks, the US economy reversed and > experienced a decline in the demand for such skills. The demand for > cognitive tasks was to a large extent the motor of the US labor market prior > to 2000. Once this motor reversed, the employment rate in the US economy > started to contract. As we have emphasized, while this demand for cognitive > tasks directly effects mainly high skilled workers, we have provided > evidence that it has indirectly affected lower skill workers by pushing them > out of jobs that have been taken up by higher skilled worker displaced from > cognitive occupations. This has resulted in high growth in employment in low > skilled manual jobs with declining wages in those occupations, and has > pushed many low skill individual's out of the labor market.

Moreover, the early 90's are about the same time we see a rise in disability benefits, especially for children. There's a big increase that starts in the early 90's. Some of this is probably from the welfare reform that happened around that time, but [http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for- work/](http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/) has some pretty interesting insights and that was written in 2011. They end the article with

> Somewhere around 30 years ago, the economy started changing in some > fundamental ways. There are now millions of Americans who do not have the > skills or education to make it in this country.

And as you mentioned, we don't have any programs to bridge that gap between low and high skilled jobs. It used to be that you could work your way up, training on the job and gaining new skills. Instead we turn to formal training or education, but those have capital costs that create a barrier of entry into the higher paid labor market. If you're already working one or more low income jobs then it's not just the monetary but also the time capital required to retrain. Either you spend most of your time working and training/studying or you take the opportunity cost of quitting your job in the hopes of improving your skills to find a new one. It seems many are taking a third route of going to a doctor and getting on disability benefits, and while I can't find it I read an article a while ago where one of the doctors straight up said that they include education in the decision, seeing some people as unemployable with their level of education. I think doctors making that judgement call is it's own discussion, but just furthers the point.

Then you've got companies like Dollar General betting on America having a "permanent underclass", their own words: [https://www.google.com/search?q=dollar+general+permanent+und...](https://www.google.com/search?q=dollar+general+permanent+underclass)

I think we're only just realizing this now, but I pretty much agree with your sentiment that we're not ready to handle this. Even if we could fix the issues with cheap foreign and domestic labor that's not going to stop automation and IMO we're already in the post-automation future, just with globalization providing a similar effect.

> might eventually be willing to subsidize something like a universal basic > income.

I'm kinda interested if there's any studies that use disability benefits as a kind of natural experiment for basic income since in a way it's already a form of UBI. There's some obvious differences, but one of the assumptions of SSDI is that you're incapable of working and that's similar to one of the criticisms of UBI that it would incentivize people not to work, which could have negative social consequences. I'm sure there's something we could learn from looking at people on disability benefits about that.

<comment><USER37> > Then you've got companies like Dollar General betting on America having a > "permanent underclass", their own words

Interesting quote, thanks for that. However it's not "in their own words". The quote comes from Garrick Brown, director for retail research at a commercial real estate company. Here's the original source:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-11/dollar- ge...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-11/dollar-general-hits- a-gold-mine-in-rural-america)

<comment><USER36> Ah, my bad. I misread the article. Still interesting that someone would choose to say that publicly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Where does this idea come from that if a worker is granted a novel piece of technology which makes him/her more productive, he/she is entitled to a raise, without necessarily demonstrating any personal improvement or additional contribution to the company?

This attitude reeks of entitlement, to me.

Edit: to clarify, I believe that articles like these, which do not differentiate between what I would call intrinsic and extrinsic productivity. If a worker picks up a new language and automates away a portion of his job, his intrinsic productivity has increased, making him more valuable on the market.

If I retool a station on an automotive assembly line and extrinsically increase the productivity of a worker, it doesn't make sense to presume that he is deserving in a share of that increased profit, because his value has not changed.

I think there is a certain hesitation in polite [non business] society regarding this kind of measurement of human value, and so we find ourselves with what is only a puzzle in appearance. The bottom line is that a worker's compensation on average is determined by how useful he is with a certain set of tools, not how useful his tools are.

<comment><USER39> So let's say that you and I go into business together making artificial flowers. Initially we are both sewing them entirely by hand and selling them. We're barely making enough to scrape by, working twelve hours a day. It kind of sucks.

One day, I win a thousand bucks in the lottery and buy a couple of sewing machines for us to use. We can now make, oh, fifty flowers in the time it took us to make one.

Let's assume that the demand for artificial flowers is _far_ higher than we can fulfill. We could work as many hours as we used to and start selling fifty times as many flowers. But instead we work a little less and sell thirty times as many. We're still we're making a lot more money than we used to.

Now. Since I bought the sewing machines with my own money, _clearly_ I should be the one reaping all of the benefits of this new order. I'll take all the money and pay you exactly the same amount of money you were making when we were both sewing flowers by hand. So I'm getting about _fifty-nine times as much as you are_.

"Hey, Egypt," you say. "Thanks to those sewing machines, I'm creating a lot more value than I used to. Maybe I should be getting, I dunno, twice what I used to get? Or a hell of a lot more?"

And I sneer down at you from atop my golden toilet. "Your attitude _reeks_ of entitlement," I say. "Get back to your sewing machine, Thenews."

Three weeks later, you're fired, and replaced by a guy living in a tent under the Interstate who'll make flowers for _half_ of what you were paying. It's my sewing machines, after all.

<comment><USER40> > It's my sewing machines, after all.

that you've also got to maintain, insure, save funds to replace at the end of their life, etc. all while not earning 7% on the original $1000 by letting it sit in the stock market long term.

<comment><USER39> Yes! Clearly these considerations are worth the _entirety_ of the profits generated by Flowr, Inc's new equipment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I wonder how much of this stagnation can be attributed to fewer people performing "real work"... that is producing something that actually adds value. Just thinking of the sheer number of people and resources used in advertising, movie CGI, useless chat apps, etc. that are basically a net negative to real economic output, it makes me think that maybe these people are the ones getting paid with the productivity gains of those who produce real output.

Not trying to put anyone down here, it's just I can't see a lot of economic benefit in a team of 10 engineers modeling the hair of the next Assassin's Creed character... and where do you think this money comes from?

<comment><USER42> "Not trying to put anyone down here, it's just I can't see a lot of economic benefit in a team of 10 engineers modeling the hair of the next Assassin's Creed character... and where do you think this money comes from?"

Errr - doesn't it come from the people buying the Assassin's Creed games? That particularly series earns hundreds of millions of dollars each game, and at least some of that value is created by the engineers modeling the character's hair.

<comment><USER43> The money earned from Assassin's Creed isn't by creating value, it's given by others who are creating value. I'm genuinely surprised I'm getting so many people disagreeing with this idea.

<comment><USER4> The game purchases believe it has enough value to be worth exchanging their dollars for it.

Do you also believe the Rolling Stones didn't create any real value?

<comment><USER41> Does getting people addicted to heroin add value? Because people will exchange their dollars for that too.

Just because people pay money for something doesn't mean it adds value or creates wealth. Rolling Stones is a tough case, some entertainment is necessary, but at what level and cost is up for debate, it's not like I have all the answers.

<comment><USER44> Necessities is a fixed amount, wants are (nearly) boundless. As we are able to afford things beyond bare necessities, pretty much all value create and consumed isn't 'necessary' \- it's one or other kind of comfort, desire, status, entertainment, etc. Those things do add value and do create wealth - if getting enough nutrients and bare minimum of shelter takes just 10% of my resources, then 90% of my wealth is something that's not necessary.

If people prefer hearing a song over getting an (extra) loaf of bread, then hearing that song is by definition more valuable (more valued by that person) as that loaf of bread. There's not much debate needed about Rolling Stones - millions of people have expressed their values, and their choices illustrate that the music of Rolling Stones is literally more valuable than a billion loaves of bread; people have intentionally allocated a billion bread-loaves worth resources towards Rolling Stones because they valued Rolling Stones more than other alternatives.

People paying money for something doesn't _necessarily_ mean it adds value or creates wealth, there are all kinds of edge cases like fraud, exploitation, addiction, etc, but in general, in the vast majority of cases it _does_ mean exactly that - if people genuinely freely _wanted_ to pay money for something and did so, then that's very informative about what they actually value; this is far more informative and truthful than, for example, what they _claim_ they value.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using John Varney's rhythm wheel to differentiate 3/4 and 6/8 time signatures - <AUTHOR> https://megan-vo.github.io/basic-beats/ <comment><USER2> Bug: rapid calls to 3/4 get parsed as 6/8

1\. Take the 3/4 example and convince yourself you fully understand the difference between 3/4 time and 6/8 time.

2\. Let your ostensible understanding lead you to listen to a waltz.

3\. Get familiar enough with the waltz that you can sing along with the melody.

4\. Now ask yourself: does the melody sound like it divide up into _groups_ of measures, or is the melody just freely moving around in no discernible pattern?

5\. Realize very quickly that the melody divides up into groups of measures.

6\. Realize that the melody _very likely_ divides up into groups of _two_ measures to build larger phrases.

7\. Realize that many waltzes move at a rapid _tempo_ so that each measure of 3/4 moves by quite quickly.

8\. Realize that regularly recurring fast 3/4 measures which divide up perceptually into two-measure groups sounds exactly like... 6/8.

This bug affects all CPUs.

The only currently known workarounds are genre literacy and knowledge of notational convention.

<comment><USER3> My understanding is rudimentary compared to yours, but I learned (perhaps incorrectly) long ago that for 3/4 time (waltz time) you can count:

ONE two three TWO two three ONE two three TWO two three

and that indeed sounds more similar to the article's 6/8 example than its 3/4 example.

<comment><USER4> That's a common thing to hear when trying to follow the steps for a waltz (counting out RIGHT left right LEFT right left can only be correct for one partner at a time).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While being a marching band nerd, we always thought of 3/8 as 6/8 for the simple fact that one is always the left foot. Counting in 3/8 would alternate one to be on the right every other measure. It's hard enough to get new members to march to the right beat, but having 3/8 time was just never going to work even for experienced members

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm a pretty non-musical person, and time signatures have always confused me. Unfortunately, this explanation left me just as confused. I can hear the difference between the two sample beats but I cannot figure out how to generalize this to other time signatures beyond the 3/4 and 6/8 described here.

<comment><USER7> May or may not be helpful, but the way I learned it:

numerator = beats per measure

denominator = which note "gets the beat"

3/4 time has 3 beats per measure, where quarter (1/4) notes get the beat.

6/8 time has 6 beats per measure, where eighth notes get the beat.

etc...

<comment><USER8> Not quite. It is correct to say that the numerator is the count and the denominator is what is counted. So 3/4 is 3 quarter notes, and 6/8 is 6 eighth notes. However which notes get the beat is a bit more fuzzy. 6/8 is usually but not always two beats per measure, with three eighths per beat (counted 1-tee-ta 2-tee-ta)

That gets to the concept of simple and compound meter. In simple meter the the beat gets divided in two and in compound the beat gets divided in three. (Complex is a mix, like 7/8 may be divided 1-and 2-and 3-tee-ta).

Ultimately, the beat can be more interpretive. The 2nd movement of Beethoven's 9th symphony is in (mostly) 3/4 but it is so fast, no conductor beats it in three, they beat in in one.

<comment><USER9> "... two beats per measure, with three eighths per beat (counted 1-tee-ta 2-tee-ta)"

I've never heard this. I've only ever heard it as " _1_ 2 3 _4_ 5 6"

<comment><USER10> or _1 and a 2 and a.._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is no difference between 3/4 and 6/8 unless you are trying to decide on which one makes your score easier to read. It's just different ways of conceptualizing the phrase. Mathematically (and therefore rhythmically) they are the same, of course. Maybe the site is trying to make some other differentiation but it didn't work at all in Firefox.

(Source: I am a professional drummer)

<comment><USER12> You may be a professional drummer, but you are of some sort of mindset that has you in denial of the concept of _convention_. You also certainly _feel_ rhythm but do not intellectually understand it.

Rhythm is a cognitive/perceptual/psychological process whereby we _relate_ events to one another. It is not mere timing. When you impose in your mind a structure on a timing by giving extra attention to certain events, _then_ you are experiencing rhythm. taDA and TAda are different rhythms even if the timing is the same and the sounds even are the same but you treat them as having those accent patterns (either at-will or through other things that draw your attention such as a their timing in relation to a meter that has gotten set in your mind or even visual cues as to which should be accented).

The 3/4 vs 6/8 distinction is a historic convention, not something in the math. By convention, 6/8 is divided into 2 sets of 3. And yes, these get fuzzy in various real-world concepts like the whole idea of hemiola which is the overlaying of these two meters.

<comment><USER11> (1) 2 3 | (1) 2 3

and

(1) 2 3 (4) 5 6

are rhythmically identical. You're only conceptualizing them differently.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to write this myopic and extremely condescending explanation of my area of study. I will be sure to return the favor someday.

<comment><USER13> They have different hierarchies. In typical 3/4, the first beat of each measure is given equal weight. In typical 6/8, the first beat is given a bit more weight than the fourth beat.

Same reason why we treat 2/4 and 4/4 differently.

<comment><USER11> Who's we?

Your decision to give certain beats more or less emphasis is a subjective one. You can glean absolutely no information about a piece from the way the rhythm is subdivided, except maybe the intended tempo.

<comment><USER12> Perhaps you work in an idiom that has no connection to the conventions of the notation system…?

So, for example, lots of pop/rock music gets notated rather arbitrarily in practice because it's mostly about the feel from recordings anyway. It's common in that world to see what classical convention would call incorrect notation. And since the core notes all work still and you can go by the feel from the sound you know, it doesn't really matter.

But the classical conventions include ideas that the _subjective_ accents you describe _are_ in fact implied by certain time-signatures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hm, not sure I like the example for 6/8 time. It's so much slower tempo than 3/4 time example that it's very hard to compare the two for me.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. The differences are much clearer at equal BPM (or even equal measures per minute).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It would have been nice with a negative example, e.g being able to play the 6/8th on top of the 3/4th piece, in a suitable tempo.

</comment><comment><USER17> A lot of work into visualization and media on that page. Impressive.

But a minor nit... I wish the publisher had done a more apples-to-apples comparison between 6/8 and 6/4.

3/4 is universally accepted to be a Waltz by composers and performers.

However, there's not much consensus in the 6 and 7 beat signatures whether the notes should be quarter or eighth notes.

</comment><comment><USER18> Site doesn't work for shit on mobile.

<comment><USER15> Works fine for me on Firefox for Android (surprisingly, since a lot of these sorts of things tend to only work on Chrome). You just have to tap the things instead of hovering over them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Side note: If you're on Chrome and you check the JS console, you'll see that the audio for this page will stop working in October when Chrome reinstates the ill-considered audio policy they rolled out in May and then removed because it broke a bunch of sites.

The audio policy in question:

[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay- policy-changes#webaudio)

HN discussion when the policy was instated/removed:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079724](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17079724)

</comment><comment><USER20> The way I understood it was that 3/4 is used to notate waltzes and other music where you are supposed to "feel" all three beats per bar, and 6/8 is used to notate music where you only "feel" the downbeats. Things like swung rhythms. Though (again as I understand it) actual swing music is often notated in common or cut time, but played as though the first eighth note of each beat is about twice as long as the second.

Just to pick two of my favorite songs: per my understanding, the opening theme to Vision of Escaflowne would be notated in 3/4, while "Flagpole Sitta" by Harvey Danger might be notated in 6/8.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think a lot of the confusion/misunderstanding around here has to do with how folks are defining "beat"; seems like folks are defining the "beat" to be each eighth-note, when (in my experience) it's actually each quarter note, whether plain (for 3/4) or dotted (for 6/8).

That is: 6/8 is approximated not by 3/4, but rather by a very-triplet-heavy 2/4.

The article explains this somewhat ("one and two and three and" v. "one and ah two and ah"), but the comparisons/examples don't really do a good job of demonstrating it in practice.

</comment><comment><USER21> Site's trying to imply that any slower 2/4 rhythm subdivided into triplets can be re-written as 6/8, whereas 3/4 does not have more rhythmic subdivisions in the three beats.

<comment><USER5> When I think of 6/8 time, I think of triplets as well. Not saying triplets don't play out in standard 4/4, but I remember thinking about how many triplets were going to be in the music whenever we were handed new music in 6/8 time. I just assumed it was me making that assumption rather than it being an actual thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wish I could use that to better understand the beat of Pink Floyd hit "Money" that was composed in 7 / 8 ...

<comment><USER23> If that hurts your brain, try counting [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKDXe0FP2wc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKDXe0FP2wc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Oh now I see.

6/8, _in typical musical theory fashion_ , is an awful name for something like (3/4)/2

It is technically precise and in practice misses the point completely.

(And don't get me started on mode names. Just don't)

<comment><USER25> More like 6/4 = 2×(3/8) but 3/8 is not a scalar because it also carries division and subdivision information, and × is a new operator that is barely similar to multiplication.

________

A time signature N/B is actually a tuple...:

        (division-of-N, subdivision-of-N, B)

...with units:

        (beats/measure, base_notes/beat, base_notes/whole_note)

...where division-of-N and subdivision-of-N are inferred from N (see explanation at [0] and table at [1]).

E.g. 3/4 is actually a tuple:

        (3 beats/measure, 2 base_notes/beat, 4 base_notes/whole_note).

________

The × operator works like...:

          A × (N/B) =
        = A × (D, S, B) =
        = (A * 1 division, D * 1 subdivision/division, B / 2)

...where X is a unitless scalar.

E.g.

          2×(3/8) =
        = 2×([division-of-N-3, subdivision-of-N-3, 8 base_notes/whole_note]) =
        = 2×([3 beats/measure, 2 base_notes/beat, 8 base_notes/whole_note]) =
        = [2 beats/measure, 3 base_notes/beat, 8 base_notes/whole_note / 2] =
        = [2 beats/measure, 3 base_notes/beat, 4 base_notes/whole_note]
        = [division-of-N-6, subdivision-of-N-6, 4 base_notes/whole_note]
        = 6/4

________

_UNINTENTIONALLY BURIED THE LEDE, IT'S HERE_

But honestly this just works only with traditional time signatures which follow this neat table-simple-compound-duple-triple-quadruple nonsense; for other compound N like 5/4, 7/4 etc. it won't work.

E.g. 5/4 is either (2/4 + 3/4) or (3/4 + 2/4) depending on the song (can't think any of the former off the top of my head, but Mission:Impossible's theme and Take Five are representatives of the latter). It can even be (1/4 + 3/4 + 1/4).

Or, like Gorillaz's 5/4 which sounds like (2.5/4 + 2.5/4) (which I'd argue is actually not 5/4 but 10/8 and the guitar definitely sounds like it). Also the lyrics+drums are actually in 4/4 so it's just a polyrhythm and both rhythms synchronize every LCM(5, 4) = 20 beats (4 guitar bars, 5 lyrics+drums bars) and in fact the macro song structure changes every 20 beats instead of 16 like in traditional 4/4 so maybe it is 5/4... or 10/8\. Or 4/4 with 5 measures per hypermeasure? Or both? Or neither?

It's all just implicit. It's on your ears. Listen for the subdivisions.

This IMHO is the right way to look at time signatures.

[0] [https://www.musictheory.net/lessons/15](https://www.musictheory.net/lessons/15)

[1]

        - N=2 simple duple        - 2 beats/measure * 2 base_notes/beat = 4  base_notes/measure
        - N=3 simple triple       - 3 beats/measure * 2 base_notes/beat = 6  base_notes/measure
        - N=4 simple quadruple    - 4 beats/measure * 2 base_notes/beat = 8  base_notes/measure

        - N=6 compound duple      - 2 beats/measure * 3 base_notes/beat = 6  base_notes/measure
        - N=9 compound triple     - 3 beats/measure * 3 base_notes/beat = 9  base_notes/measure
        - N=12 compound quadruple - 4 beats/measure * 3 base_notes/beat = 12 base_notes/measure

Notice how N=3 and N=6 share the same base_notes/measure hence the confusion.</comment></comment>


Why do you need a graph database if MySQL is faster? - <AUTHOR> http://istc-bigdata.org/index.php/benchmarking-graph-databases/

<comment><USER2> Why do you need Python if C is faster?</comment>


Ask HN: What do you use to backup your data / family photos? - <AUTHOR> I have a ton of videos of my family, pictures I would regret losing. I also have a lot of books and documents on my desktop.
What do you use to manage backups? I'm looking for something that backs up everything, and also let's me browse the backed up data in a browser or something.
Dropbox seems nice, but $100 is a little steep if I can find something a bit more inexpensive.
What do you use? <comment><USER2> Google Photos is great for unlimited videos/pictures, but it doesn't support documents.

You could buy an external hard drive and hook it up to Lima ([https://meetlima.com/index.php?lang=en](https://meetlima.com/index.php?lang=en)). That way, you can access your data from anywhere via a browser.</comment>


Ask HN: Good license for public academic notes? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a physics graduate student at a large US university somewhere. I'm planning to post on the web publicly a number of examples and walk-throughs of textbooks (like working out equations in between the steps) just for my sake and for anyone's sake. What would be a good license for something like this?<p>I essentially want it to be open source-ish, in that anyone can copy, redistribute, modify, adapt, etc, it, but all I want is that they grant others the same rights and that I get attribution, in some form, as well as anyone who makes changes. What would be the best license for something that is in between creative and technical like this? <comment><USER2> Creative commons BY-SA: [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- sa/4.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)</comment>


Letter from Steve Jobs: No Apple Giftcards for iPads - <AUTHOR> http://www.firstadopter.com/forums/showthread.php?p=9991#post9991

<comment><USER3> is this legal? per the department of consumer affairs, "Any gift certificate sold after January 1, 1997, is redeemable in cash for its cash value, or subject to replacement with a new gift certificate at no cost to the purchaser or holder.3 Effective January 1, 2008, any gift certificate with a cash value of less than $10 is redeemable in cash, which includes currency or check, for its cash value."

<http://www.dca.ca.gov/publications/legal_guides/s-11.shtml>

<comment><USER4> They could give him cash and they could still refuse to sell it to him. It's legal to not accept cash.

[http://www.ustreas.gov/education/faq/currency/legal- tender.s...](http://www.ustreas.gov/education/faq/currency/legal-tender.shtml)

<comment><USER5> Why would they do that?

<comment><USER4> For the same reason they're not accepting gift certificates... To limit the number of iPads purchased by an individual while supplies are still tight and limited to the US market. Did you not read the email? Steve Jobs is quite terse and easy to read.

<comment><USER6> I think we all read his email and understood it. The point is that this is not reasonable. The gift card was purchased in good faith that it could be used to purchase whatever products Apple sells, on demand. I have some gift cards that I'd like to sell you, but you can only use them when I say so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone really believe anymore that S.J. himself writes all the letters / messages which are so popular lately? I sometimes don't have time to respond to everyone, even though I'm just a developer. I know many managers who could spend the whole day writing and answering emails and they're not even that high in the hierarchy. I can't even imagine how many emails must Steve get from inside the company -- and these are the emails he has to actually handle himself.

I remember an article about Bill Gates a couple of years ago saying that there was a team of ~10 people handling his mail, but can't google it now :/ I don't believe S.J. would answer himself, if the question can be handled by any assistant with access to some internal knowledge-base. (just like this one)

Edit: not what I saw originally, but: [http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/30/news/newsmakers/gates_howiwo...](http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/30/news/newsmakers/gates_howiwork_fortune/) <\- in 2006 B.G. got only ~100 emails a day from people worth his attention - the rest got filtered out / handled by assistant. And there was already some time after Vista. S.J. probably gets more right now since the iPad release.

<comment><USER4> It's Steve. He's a control freak and would never allow other people to pretend to speak for him. The replies are classic Steve Jobs too so unless they hired Fake Steve Jobs to do a bunch of email correspondence it's almost certainly him.

If a personal anecdote helps, a friend of mine emailed him a few years back and immediately received a quick reply asking for his phone number. A few minutes later a blocked call came in and it was him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ridiculous, if you have gift cards then you should honour them. You can't just retro-actively undo the possibility of using gift cards already bought for the purpose of gifting someone _any_ apple device, including the iPad.

I'm betting they'll be redeeming a lot of gift cards for their cash value because of this stupidity.

I never really realized just how much of a control freak Jobs really is, imagine the CEO of a big company second guessing his entire marketing department by sending out email directly to customers.

Talk about delegation skills...

This also explains to me why Jobs' health is monitored like it is of prime importance by major Apple stock holders, it probably _is_ of prime importance, if Jobs believes that stuff like this should be decided by him then Apple is pretty fragile.

<comment><USER9> Apple is a big company and Steve Jobs is the CEO and he is doing this - <USER2> need to imagine. And Apple seem to be doing ok with it, particularly compared to the last time they didn't have him as the boss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The fact that he spends time answering a customer complaint 8:43AM on a > SATURDAY MORNING speaks volumes about his commitment to customer experience > and service. Thank you Steve.

</comment><comment><USER11> Viral customer service. By answering one (or maybe a few to make sure it gets out) customers who have a general issue, he lets them take care of getting the word out, which is so leveraged nowadays it's very easy for them.

Jobs spends a few minutes crafting an email and the crowd takes it from there. A new form of disintermediation.

People should also be more tolerant of his changing his mind in a later email vs. an Official Company Policy.

</comment><comment><USER12> I ran in to this the other day as well. The weird thing is that prior to this email no one in the retail stores or the Apple customer relations line would say anything beyond "it's Apple's policy" and couldn't point to anywhere on Apple's site where it's in writing. Eventually I found Apple's Retail Store purchase policies: <http://www.apple.com/legal/sales_policies/retail_us.html> which say that you can't buy an iPad with a gift card. The store reps seemed annoyed when I pressed for information, saying things like "I don't know, I'm just an employee. It's Apple policy." while the corporate customer relations rep offered to enter my concerns in some database.

The gift cards themselves say that "Apple reserves the right in its sole discretion to determine whether gift cards may be applied to purchases of particular products or services." So, while they technically tell you that you may not be able to buy anything with the card, it's still a pretty weird situation. Especially because you can still use a gift card to buy an iPad on the online Apple store.

</comment><comment><USER13> It is funny how Apple manages to simply punish everyone for the bad behavior of a few. This would really frustrated me because the poor guy was not evening buying the entire thing using a gift card. He was only using it to cover a portion.

<comment><USER14> Which he can now get back in cash. No biggie IMO. In the world of Apple's many issues, this is a small one solving a "real problem" as much as you view shortages of popular consumer devices a "Real problem"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> First of all, this is only in effect for like a month. It wouldn't kill anyone to wait it out until the ban is lifted. It sounds like Apple put in place a number of systems to keep people from gaming the rules (they caught that guy who was buying iPads and shipping them overseas).

If it really is a huge deal, you can sell your cards on Cardpool. It looks like they are paying $340, so it would cost $60 for the convenience of having cash that you can use right now...

</comment><comment><USER16> I must be missing something ...How does banning gift cards have anything to do with people buying craploads if iPads and shipping them overseas?

<comment><USER4> They're requiring you to use a credit card and that's pretty simple to track (only 2 per card).

<comment><USER8> Of course nobody has more than one card, and of course nobody could ever have a shipping address different from their home address on some of their cards for their business... and then there are all those people that have no friends that would allow them to go and buy an iPad because they're not going to. And so on.

The weird thing about stuff like this is that those that want to get their hands on as many ipads as they want are likely not going to be deterred by this, the majority of the people this will bite are just regular guys and girls that want to buy a product.

<comment><USER7> Apple - bringing BRM (Buyer's Rights Management) to your shops since 2010. Strangely - just like DRM - it affects normal customers more than "evil" ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The moral of this recent flux of letters and e-mails: Steve Jobs needs to start a blog or get on Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER18> So they'll soon also stop accepting cash? I don't see how this can actually have the effect they want. The people overseas doing this are super motivated and aren't married to gift cards.

</comment><comment><USER19> Was it sent from his Macbook?

<comment><USER20> I guess he decided it would be kind of rubbing it in if he included the usual "sent from my ipad" sig line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Only someone who had "bought 5 iPods, 5 Macs, iPhone, etc" could possibly take Jobs' rhetoric and allow it as justification for a ridiculous policy.</comment>


Ask HN: A Windows 7 system isn't updating automatically. How can I force it to? - <AUTHOR> I've had to revert to an older laptop (yay, SV vehicle break-ins) running Windows 7.
I had expected it to download a lot of updates  (the big recent security updates triggered multiple gigabyte updates on a recent-manufacture Windows 10 laptop), but ... nothing.
My Installed Updates page shows NO updates in the past 16 months.  I've used this machine on the Internet at least a few times a month in that span.
I've tried triggering updates manually using Control Panel-> Windows Update -> Check for Updates, but all I get is a moving "Checking for updates" progress bar... with no visible progress and no indication of downloads.
The final indignity is that clicking on "Updates: Frequently Asked Questions" gives me only the "Windows Media Player DRM: frequently asked questions" popup.  Urgh.
What next to try? <comment><USER2> I wouldn't expect there to be a ton of required updates for Windows 7 in the past 16 months.

Apparently there's a "Fix problems with Windows Update" that shows up under "System and Security" if you search the Control Panel for "Troubleshooting."

There are a bunch of updates available for download here. No idea how kosher this is, but I found it via the MSFT website. [http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Faq.aspx](http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Faq.aspx)

Worst case scenario, you can try reinstalling: [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/software-download/windows7](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software- download/windows7)

Do you really need the machine to be updated for your purposes? If it ain't broke, don't fix it...

</comment><comment><USER3> I had the same problem a few months back with my machine. I had to manually install a couple updates, which fixed the issue. Search for "windows 7 won't update" via Bing or Google. I'm sorry I can't be more specific....

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://stackexchange.com/](https://stackexchange.com/)</comment>


Why China's Economy Will Be Hard to Fix - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-changing-chinese-economy/ <comment><USER3> One theory here is that it is easy to predict basic needs for a population, and thus let the government control the production of those - food, shelter, medicine, etc. For an extremely simplified example, you have 1 billion people in China, so you need to build 1 billion housing units. That is going to keep a lot of people very busy for 20+ years.

Once the general population's needs move beyond basic necessities, it becomes much harder for a central authority to predict what will be needed by it's citizens. Services, entertainment, and consumer goods are all highly dependent on many more variables than shelter and food are.

<comment><USER4> That perspective was Hayek's primary contribution to economics. Markets are not just short-term allocation systems. In the medium and long term, their primary function is to collect, compute, and communicate granular information about what is wanted where.

Bureaucrats can compile reports on the broad strokes in static systems, and by doing it without wastes like marketing, or redundant infrastructure they could maybe even do those parts more efficiently than markets. But nothing beats a market for realtime servicing of rapidly moving demand (unless you ask the techno-utopian communists).

<comment><USER5> "The Use of Knowledge in Society" [0], Hayek's famous essay on the subject, is an enjoyable 12-page read. I first read it as an undergraduate economics major, and it remains one of my favorite economics papers for its clear and simple insight into the role of markets as basic mechanisms of social organization.

If you want to get a feel for what the other side of things was like in Hayek's era, I recommend a curious book written a few years ago by Francis Spufford called _Red Plenty_ [1], which illustrates (partly in fact, partly in fiction) the immense ambition of economists at Gosplan, and the even bigger task they faced, as they tried to modernize the Soviet economy of the 1950s and '60s.

0\. [https://www.aeaweb.org/aer/top20/35.4.519-530.pdf](https://www.aeaweb.org/aer/top20/35.4.519-530.pdf)

1\. [http://www.redplenty.com/Front_page.html](http://www.redplenty.com/Front_page.html)

<comment><USER3> I'm a big fan of Hayek, however I don't think he ever discussed what I feel is the strongest argument against state-sponsored central planning - <USER2> planning. When the government decides it needs to be responsible for some basic human need because it is too important to be left up to the free market, such as food security or healthcare, it crowds out alternatives that actually behave as valuable insurance/backups to a primary provider of a given good or service. If/when the government fails at providing something as vital as food or water, there isn't much you can do when the government controls the means of production. If a natural monopoly exists, people are at least free to find alternatives on their own, and thus profit from them, should those managing that natural monopoly fail at their jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This page contains many pleasantly-made visualizations, which I always like. The editorial content is a little slim to my tastes. For instance, I have a slightly hard time looking at a graph indicating a mere 7% GDP growth and concluding that an economy is in need of fixing.

In a related fashion, I'm a bit surprised that there is not a dedicated graphic to some sort of private debt. Perhaps this information is simply not known well enough. But it's my [admittedly quite limited] understanding that one of the problems the Chinese economy will soon have to face is rising reliance on individual debt for wealth generation.

<comment><USER7> While China has a lot of corporate debt, household debt is actually far less than in the US or Canada.

[http://www.tradingeconomics.com/china/households-debt-to- gdp](http://www.tradingeconomics.com/china/households-debt-to-gdp) [http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/households- deb...](http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/households-debt-to-gdp) [http://www.tradingeconomics.com/canada/households-debt-to- gd...](http://www.tradingeconomics.com/canada/households-debt-to-gdp)

<comment><AUTHOR> They don't just have a lot of corporate debt, they have a vast amount of muni debt and shadow debt. Their total debt to GDP ratio exceeds that of the US [1], and it's still expanding rapidly. Their non-financial corporate + financial institution debt is now roughly twice that of the US.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-08/china-s- ve...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-08/china-s-very-high- mountain-of-debt)

<comment><USER7> So, according to your link, Chinese 'total' debt is about on par with the rest of the world? And this is cause for extra concern? Despite the fact they have very low household and relatively low government debt, in a fast-growing economy?

South Korea's 'total' debt is higher with slower growth. Yet no one is predicting their collapse...

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason it's cause for extra concern is two fold.

First, their accumulation has been extraordinarily rapid. A pace the likes of which the world has never seen before.

Second, it's still climbing rapidly.

If you combine these elements with: the command economy approach; the likelihood that their debt is even higher due to shadow debt; that the government is making the wrong choice and is propping up the mess ala Japan's mistake with zombies; and that all of their other economic data is heading south as they're continuing the debt accumulation (including a rapid bleed-off of foreign reserves, half of which they can't use anyway) - the sum picture you get is economically frightening and very unstable compared to the debt picture in eg Australia, the US, or Germany.

Finally, to make matters a lot worse, China still has a billion very poor people and almost no social safety net. How is China going to deal with their rapidly aging population (which will demand far greater total care expense with each passing year), while already being more in debt than other developed nations?

<comment><USER8> You don't seem to realize that the companies' debts are the people's assets. There are two ways to invest in a company, directly holding shares or lending it money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Latest News: China to lay off five to six million state workers

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-layoffs- excl...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-layoffs-exclusive- idUSKCN0W33DS)

<comment> rm_-rf_slash The report comes from anonymous Chinese government officials and cannot be accepted at face value as fact.

However it is unlikely that China can rebalance from massive overproduction without massive layoffs. The quoted government official, Yin Weimin put the number closer to 1-2 million.

<comment><USER9> So the western world should just take the Chinese government media at face value? since the foreign media now needs a 'permit' to publish online in China. This is a government that cheats, lies, and steals. Oh, and kidnaps foreign citizens and forces them to tell lies on state TV

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/jnylander/2016/01/07/swedens- for...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jnylander/2016/01/07/swedens-former-pm-is- china-starting-to-kidnap-individuals-in-hong-kong/#32ebe05aea44)

<comment> rm_-rf_slash We both agree. Anonymous Chinese government official statements are two layers of bullshit. Quoted officials are one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "hard to fix" : "business opportunity"

</comment><comment><USER11> Answer Demographics, China's Working Age Population peaked 4 years ago. Since then the working age population of China has been losing over a million people a year.

Long Story Short, it is too late for China, they just don't know it yet.

<comment><USER12> I'm guaranteeing you supply of labor is not the dominant factor in China's economic climate. The rigged economics of their core competencies has a much larger impact than the availability of cheap workers - labor markets can adjust seamlessly and effectively to less available labor by having the most valuable work done and less valuable work gets delayed. To some degree you have a cutoff valuation where less valuable work is not worth doing - in the west we call it minimum wage. I highly doubt China's economy is anywhere near that threshold yet.

<comment><USER13> I think parent wasn't saying that supply of labor is the problem now, but that it will be in the future. If thinks are looking bad now, imagine when dependency ratio increases significantly.

It's not just about absolute supply of labor, but also about how much of that labor is being used towards supporting old and young people.

<comment><USER11> Thanks, I'm often amazed how many people like zanny are incapable of seeing the likely future for societies who's economic and social models are dependent upon constant expansion. At this point in time it is simply too late for most of the EU and Asian nations, it is not a question of if but how the population will react when things begin to unravel. The Demographics of said nation's give us a very good idea of when.

<comment><USER14> They already are heavily investing in robots to counteract this.

<comment><USER13> You're still misunderstanding this point. It ins't about labor availability, but dependency ratio (people working vs. people not working).

<comment><USER12> This ratio is increasing regardless of mean population age. Automation is making even 20 year old prime-of-their-life human labor gradually obsolete.

<comment><USER13> I wasn't clear. Dependency ratio doesn't depend on unemployment, but on people who CAN work vs. people who CAN'T work (elderly, young, sick, disabled, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Historically, growth from agrarian to factory based economies is massive and fast once the political and capital elements are put into place. We saw this with the USSR, North Korea, China, etc. The problem is that the move past factory economies is tricky. The pre-reqs to be successful here are just much more complex. Service based economies are special and they can't be successful in a political vaccuum like factory work can. You need a lot of western ideals to make this actually work: free speech, open markets, powerful banking, strong monetary policies, anti-isolationism, free trade, employee protections, anti-corruption, capital protection, pro immigration policies, multi-party government, non-corrupt judiciary, etc.

This is why Russia stuggles now. It ignored almost all of the above and has been held up solely by its state-owned petrochemical industry and petrochemical derived reserves. I think there's a reckoning coming for the autocratic BRIC states soon. Either they'll liberalize and migrate to a US/EU model or become economic sob stories. Russia is looking at 1% contraction this year and its oil slump has moved into a real estate slump. China has a chance to fight this I suppose, but I doubt it has the political will to move away from autocracy and political oppression.

The next decade will be interesting for BRIC economies. The low hanging economic fruit in many of these countries has already been snatched up. What happens now is the big question.

<comment><USER16> > You need a lot of western ideals to make this actually work: free speech, > open markets, powerful banking, strong monetary policies, anti-isolationism, > free trade, employee protections, anti-corruption, capital protection, > strong pro immigration policies, multi-party government, non-corrupt > judiciary, etc.

That is an interesting point, I wonder how all the points you have listed are intertwined.

Do you need free speech because it is a prerequisite to have a low level of corruption ? Or could you in some systems have the low corruption without the free speech ? (I don't really believe that but it seems that is what is the PRC is trying to achieve) What would be the more and less important factor if you had to "implement" one first ? And so on.

<comment><USER17> As a single data-point, Singapore managed low corruption without free speech (and indeed, economic development without much attendant political freedom).

<comment><USER18> I think a problem with Singapore style solutions is that it is so dependent on having one very wise leader. Democracy is more robust I think in that it can weather even bad leaders. Bad decisions will happen sooner or later. The problem is that a country like Singapore or China has no good way of dealing with that.

Especially with China over a billion people are all dependent on the decision made by one single very centralized government.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Safe & Simple Amazon Glacier for everyone - only 4 weeks after the Icebox fiasco - <AUTHOR> http://bit-chest.com/?icebox=true

<comment><USER2> Why the ?icebox=true parameter? I can't see any reference to it anywhere else, so it makes me wonder if this is targeting - that, and what exactly is the "Icebox fiasco" (I know of the client, but never heard of a fiasco).

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest, that's a tracking parameter, so I know where the clicks come from. You'd be surprised where HN percolates to! Maybe I should do a write-up on that.

The Icebox fiasco is the fact that for a pretty long time, Ice Box Pro allowed watching every user's complete credentials (including Amazon keys) via a simple change in the URL parameter.

You can read the details of the vulnerability here: [http://blog.ryankearney.com/2012/10/never-give-your- informat...](http://blog.ryankearney.com/2012/10/never-give-your-information- to-10-minute-old-startups/)

However, much more telling is the story in the comments of the original IceBoxPro thread here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4619411></comment></comment>