Why life is absurd - <AUTHOR> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/why-life-is-absurd <comment><USER2> I couldn't agree more that our humanity places truly absurd limits on our existence. You get, if you're lucky 30-40 years of solid productivity after 20-30 years of training. Maybe enough time to create one or two solid accomplishments before your capacity for thought, and soon enough your capacity for life is extinguished.

Also consider the economic argument. On the one hand, the level of investment experts make in becoming so is squandered by death. And yet, this also levels the playing field for newborns, since you don't have to compete against the guy with 8,000 years of experience.

I think human intelligence hits an asymptote due to mortality. There's only so deep an individual can go, and a limit on how much you can replace depth with breadth.

We enter and exit this world as babes. 100 years is in many ways a pathetic excuse for an existence. Obviously extending that would have to focus on quality not quantity, and has supremely disruptive economic effects (on par with strong AI) but I do not doubt there are great leaps we will take toward this end over the next 500 years.

One nice side-effect of a millennial-scale existence would hopefully be a more macro and less cyclical approach to "current affairs".

<comment><USER3> But why do you think productivity is any less absurd than non-productivity? And why is intelligence relevant to absurdity? Is a butterfly's life any more absurd than a human's?

Humans and humanity don't have goals. The universe is indifferent to us being around or extinct. And it is certainly not our goal to be creative, productive, efficient. We make up goals for ourselves to give subjective meaning to our lives, and that can be plenty. The hard part of anyone's life is to find the existence that gives their life meaning in their eyes. You think extending our lifespan or making society more efficient are worthy goals? So dedicate your life to those goals. But make sure that's really meaningful to you, because, frankly, the universe doesn't give a damn.

<comment><USER4> >The universe is indifferent to us being around or extinct.

So what? I fail to understand how this supposedly renders our lives more or less meaningful.

<comment><USER3> It makes the meaning of "meaning" self-referential. Usually, when we say that something has meaning, we mean it is significant to something external to it. If the most external thing at all does not consider our existence significant, then "meaning" becomes entirely subjective: something is defined to have meaning if we convince ourselves it does. Some may think that's not much. Others think that if that's as far as we can go, then that is everything.

<comment><USER4> Nothing can be infinitely recursive, every chain of reference must bottom out somewhere. So why not in us?

<comment><USER3> I am not sure I understand what it is you're saying, but sure, for many people something is meaningful if it is significant to other people, or even themselves. Others find that less satisfying, requiring a more absolute meaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We long for permanence, but death comes anyway.

We long for a real basis for morals, but if all we are is matter obeying the laws of physics, morals cannot be anything more than arbitrarily-made-up rules.

We long for meaning, but that's hard to come by too. It usually comes down to randomly picking something and assigning meaning to it, and claiming that now you have meaning. But if all you are is a machine made of atoms that is headed for death, what kind of real meaning is possible?

Here is a deeper level of absurdity. Humans have randomly evolved to have these aspirations (immortality, morals, meaning), but those aspirations can't be fulfilled because all we are is collections of atoms randomly evolved by an uncaring universe. This is a sick cosmic joke. If the materialist starting point is correct, then our persistent aspirations cannot be fulfilled in the universe that exists.

Or else the materialist view of the universe is incorrect. Then our aspirations are not a sick cosmic joke - they are _evidence_ that we are more than the materialist view says we are.

<comment><USER6> > morals cannot be anything more than arbitrarily-made-up rules.

One could argue morals should be based on the survival of mankind. Because that's the only positive goal of it, to survive as long as possible,though, ultimately mankind will come to an end,that's inevitable. On the other hand, as long as there is energy,artificial intelligence could outlast us.It would be mankind's testament and ultimate legacy. I always thought that, if we were to find another alien civilization,it would be through the AI they designed or in form of pure data. And it's probable that it would be available as binary data too.

<comment><USER7> No, AnimalMuppet is correct. We are unable to value the survival of mankind as objectively good, as we have no empirical evidence to do so (more accurately: we cannot infer an Ought from an Is).

See this for more on why: [http://liamk.org/is-love- real/](http://liamk.org/is-love-real/)

Our options are Nihilism/Zen/Absurdity or Theism. And if the former is true, it doesn't matter if we hold the latter. As CS Lewis put it, if the Theists are wrong after all they would have merely paid the universe a compliment it would not have deserved.

<comment><USER8> > Our options are Nihilism/Zen/Absurdity or Theism.

Utilitarianism -- and many others -- are equally possible. You can assume any set of moral axioms (including those of utilitarianism) without assuming God (the defining assumption of Theism) -- and, in fact, Theism in and of itself gets you nothing, except that it usually is coupled with assumptions about what God wills and the moral axiom that what God wills is what we ought to seek.

<comment><USER7> > Utilitarianism -- and many others -- are equally possible.

You misunderstand the dichotomy. This is not about what we can do, humans can delude themselves all the time. The question is about what is logically consistent.

"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence" applies in a purely natural universe, which means that if there is no God, we can dismiss Utilitarianism (and all the others) as there is no evidence for it. Only if the universe is supernatural (if God exists) do things change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Life is absurd because of our imminent death. For some reason, we have the greatest troubles in accepting that everything is transient. After pleasure comes eventually pain, after relaxation comes work, after life comes death... We live here as if our lives on Earth are eternal, while all evidence has shown that it is not.

Even more absurd is the unfairness of the whole joke of life. I'm lucky with an education and a good job giving me a chance to focus on experiencing nuanced pleasures instead of fighting to survive. Being mentally ill does give me share of anguish, but mine is nothing compare to the poor, unfed and terminally sick. Their life is even more absurd: a passage through a brief but painful passage through anguish, suffering and hopelessness.

As an ex-Muslim, I have trouble adjusting to this: meaning is just a human construct. Things don't have meaning on their own, we assign them a purpose ourselves. Religion gave me re-assurance of eternal afterlife where I get a second chance to live a life without the evil and suffering of this existence. However, it did have a fatal flaw: it was false hope.

Now, life went from a short journey into another realm to a serious emergency. Now, I have to make of what I was lucky to own; but it can all go away in a single accident. After being a pattern-seeking religionist, everything is just starting to seem so random...

</comment><comment><USER10> The logic behind the author's central thesis seems to be:

1\. Humans live about 100 years. 2\. The highest human ambitions, like writing a great novel, can only be reasonably accomplished in a well-balanced life if that life lasts more than 1000 years. 3\. By definition, our life is absurd because we don't have enough time to reasonably accomplish our highest ambitions.

She concludes that human life could be made less absurd by extending life to 1000 years -- this I disagree with.

The problem I have with this thesis is that I think the phrase "highest human ambitions" is really a shifting goal. It's a goal that is set by the accomplishment of a person of extraordinary talent who dedicates her entire life to that one pursuit.

We think today that a brilliant novel on the order of Tolstoy is a high human ambition, only because it's the limit of what a human can do. Instead, consider if humans lived much shorter lives, reaching their cognitive peak at age 15. In such a world, few people would have time to learn calculus, and so solving a differential equation might be within the highest order of a human's mathematical ambitions.

Conversely, let me suggest that if the average person were to live to 1000 years, the definition of human ambition would scale accordingly. Imagine the absolute masterpiece symphony that Beethoven could write if he were alive today. He would have hundreds of years of experience. He would have seen the evolution of music and integrate all these advances in his repertoire. He could afford to spend 50 years writing his mater symphony. This level of music will be now our new target of ambition.

The central problem reduces down to this fact. The high water mark for an ambitious goal is always defined by people in that field who are unreasonably talented and dedicates an unreasonable fraction of their lives to the field. If these experts lives the same number of years as I do, since I'm a generalist of average talent dabbling in their field, I will never be able to accomplish anywhere near their level.

The absurdity here then seems to stem from the intrinsic human desire to always compare ourselves to the best, even when we realize we don't want to commit to the field (with good reason) as the best do.

</comment><comment><USER11> The absurdity of life is the absurdity of existence: that there is anything at all is completely absurd and it's doubtful that this will ever be explained satisfactorily.

<comment><USER12> You can even split that into steps and levels. Absurdity progresses from the entire universe right down into details like the existence of coffee or oil. Two black liquids that just happen to exist and fuel the world. Can you imagine modern society without them?

But what bugs me most is that a universe without an entity to perceive and observe it is just such a waste of ... energy? It's almost like the existence of the universe implies the existence of an observer. That the formation of intelligent life is an expected result of the universe existing.

<comment><USER13> In a universe without an observer there would be no-one to note how absurd that is.

<comment><USER14> ... yet here we are managing that much quite nicely. Others, meanwhile, seem to be taking it all a little too seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In [The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant]([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLecJrXpOEU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLecJrXpOEU)), Nick Bostrom explores the fact that we refuse to see the massive crime being perpetuated against every human being simply because of the enormity of it. That we have our health ripped from us without consent is monstrous. Yes, yes, [Calico]([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_(company)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_\(company\))) exists. 100 million in the face of death is a joke. A single sports stadium can cost more than that. Why are our priorities so badly misplaced?

<comment><USER16> Richard Hamming has a talk titled "You and Your Research", in which he discusses what sorts of things you should be working on. The summary is that you should be working on important problems. He then lists three of the most important problems that no one should actually work on, time travel, teleportation, and something else that I can't remember off the top of my head.

The thing Hamming understood, but which Bostrom, et al. don't is that sometimes even if something is extremely important or significant the lack of any reasonable approach to it makes it an unattractive thing to expend effort on. At least until a solution is more tractable.

Further, the idea that everyone dying is some great tragedy is only true in the philosophy Bostrom and others have adopted. It is one of massive egoism and human-centrism that I think is misplaced. These same people then reject any philosophies that lessen the devastation of death on the grounds that they are the fictions of lesser minds attempting to placate themselves over their impending death. But there is no objectively true philosophy. The whole point of philosophy is to invent a fiction that lets you cope with reality in a productive way.

<comment><USER5> > The whole point of philosophy is to invent a fiction that lets you cope with > reality in a productive way.

I think that if there's one thing that philosophers agree on, after arguing with each other for a couple of millennia, it's that the point of philosophy is _not_ to find a clever way to lie to ourselves - it's to find out something _true_.

<comment><USER16> I think people are getting a bit hung up on my (admittedly poor) phrasing and less on the substance of my comment. Yes, philosophy wants to find out something "true", but reality as a whole is to complex to think about head on. Any philosophy with the goal of being completely factually true has to deal with a lot of information that isn't really relevant, e.g. physical (meaning atoms, etc.) interactions.

Since that is too much information to deal with you have to selectively ignore parts of it. A useful philosophy lets you get rid of essentially all the irrelevant information while keeping and fitting into a mental framework what is relevant. So in a sense it is a lie, but it is one that hopefully preserves the important parts. My argument was that Bostrom's philosophy ignores too many of the important parts by dismissing his critics' viewpoints as unfounded. Hopefully that clears things up a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> the assumption the author makes is that longevity will only bring us more time and that pretty much everything about the human condition will remain the same.

It is tedious to be human. The amount of time dedicated to maintaining one's body even when young and healthy can feel tiresome.

Longevity is not about extending our misery but about finding a way out of these limited meat bags.

Perhaps there is a meaning and the universe is not absurd, maybe our minds are simply too stupid to figure it out. Maybe if we extended our brains, increased our intelligence...

Only time will tell. That's why we need more of it. That's why it's worth putting up with the daily bullshit called living until it reaches the breaking point.

<comment><USER18> What makes life so interesting and great in my opinion, are the limitations --and the boundaries of those limitations that people push further and further-- of these meat bags we carry eveywhere with us.

<comment><USER19> I feel like this is just "best of all worlds" thinking rather than an actual love of physical limitation. If it were the latter, why wouldn't we just start cutting off limbs and _really_ get some interesting limitations?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Humans have had about 10,000 years of interesting & productive history. At best, a human lifespan is about 100 years. That's one hundred 100-year lives back-to-back. That's...not much at all.

<comment><USER21> An average generation was probably about 40 years for most of that. So I'd say about 200-300 generations. It's not much, but I still kind of feel that as a species we haven't done very much at all in that time. Personally I prefer to think we're in our teenage years as a species.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Life is meaningless if you live a finite life because no matter what you do it will be washed out in time. Life is meaningless if you live an infinite life because any finite portion of time in your life approaches 0% of your total life time and by definition has no value. And yet, meaning can only be defined by life, because there is no such thing as inherent meaning.

If I created life I would almost certainly make it finite but endow it with a sense of hope that life goes beyond a single life span.

<comment><USER23> > ... a sense of hope that life goes beyond a single life span.

That is one of the conjectures propounded by the Upanishads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> As someone who believes in Islam this is an extremely thought provoking piece and I love it. It makes you think and question existence. It makes you wonder about what we're doing here and how life would be different if we existing at a different point in time and space. Just such interesting topics for conversation. Life and the universe.

<comment><USER25> Maybe one can see religion as simply a rational response to the absurdity of life as described in the article. Life is patently absurd and yet we are rational. Why is that? We don't need to be. The answer for many is that there must be something more. For others the something more is itself absurd. But it doesn't mean that it is an irrational response. Its quite the opposite. It's an attempt to make sense of something that, from a broad perspective, is an assault to our rationality

<comment><USER6> > Maybe one can see religion as simply a rational response to the absurdity of > life

The problem is that religion doesn't answer anything(or gives absurd answers,backed by nothing but faith and fishy philosophy),isn't rational because it is not fasifiable.

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

What is clearly absurd is religion.

<comment><USER26> There are _tons_ of things that are falsifiable about the Bible and Christianity in particular. The Bible - unlike most other religious texts - gives many historic accounts of events, cities, places, timelines, people, kingdoms, lineages, etc. that are all quite easily verifiable.

[http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2013/07/christianity-t...](http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2013/07/christianity- the-worlds-most-falsifiable-religion/)

<comment><USER6> You misunderstand the concept of Falsifiability. It.It isn't about whether something is verifiable or not. But what it would take for a fact to be dismissed or not. It's not about whether a fact is true or not. For instance, the "fact" that Mohammed talked to angel Gabriel,which would imply angels therefore god exists according to Mohammed isn't falsifiable. You can't test that, or experience that.

It isn't about the holy books being full of inaccuracies, historians know they totally are full of shit already,from an historical point of view.

<comment><USER26> This is not unique to religion. We can't test or falsify the multiverse theory, time paradoxes, any naturalistic explanation of the origin of life, or any number of other scientific theories either.

<comment><USER6> Sure,that's why they are not scientific facts. But merely philosophy IE pure reasoning which doesn't produce any useful result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> She doesn't seem to discuss the cause I see, which is that life emerges from the random set of deterministic rules that define the universe. There's no crucial reason life as we know it looks one way over any other - if some portion of the universe had developed different emergent patterns then life could easily be defined according to those patterns instead of the ones we use in our portion, and it would still be absurd. Humans didn't have to evolve from apes; they may have been in the right position to develop more advanced intellects but had giraffes been in the right position then giraffe-ancestors would be arguing about life's absurdity right now instead. Each moment's state depends entirely on the previous moment, and states are not globally optimized at each moment, so they build up into complicated weird-looking systems over time. There's not much we can do about that.

<comment><USER28> Still it's kind of absurd that we are humans, and not, say, mosquitos, for the a-priori probability of finding yourself in the body of a mosquito is quite a bit higher.

<comment><USER27> If you developed as a mosquito you wouldn't have your mind, you would have the mosquito's mind - you would _be_ the mosquito, not a human as a mosquito. You can't be and cannot have been anything other than what you are, which is a liberating thought. Alternatively, you are everything because if you had developed from the exact same initial conditions as something else you would have developed into that thing as it is exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't think that life is absurd. There are, however, some absurd aspects to it:

\- why would anybody waste their time, given that life is so short? The problem I guess is that "waste" is relative. Who wasted their time? Me in school, or my buddies partying?

\- it's absurd that your luck is pretty much determined by where and when you were born. It's absurd that some people think they are so accomplished and scored many runs but without realizing they were born on third base

\- it's absurd that the probability is high there is no God. why would something so mathematically amazing as the universe generate something so brutally absurd as conscious life?

\- I think it is absurd that I just wasted 5 minutes of my life thinking about this instead of tucking my kids to bed or reading them a story for bed time.

Well, I guess life is in fact absurd. My original premise is invalid.

</comment><comment><USER30> Is it really any more absurd than _not living_? The whole article – an enjoyable read – seems written with the assumption that there exists a universal constant: human life. Everything that does not match our needs and ever changing desires is absurd. I say that a perfect world would be even more absurd!

Let's not forget that _meaning_ – or the lack of thereof – may as well be a human construct. Life is not meaningful nor meaningless. It only _is_.

<comment><USER31> If we didn't had this absurdity we might just have a more absurd life than we have currently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is a western individualistic philosophy that ignores the amazing accomplishments of the human species. In other more collective cultures bringing shame to your tribe is a moral reason to kill yourself because the individual is not the end all be all. We are ants in a giant, unimaginably successful ant colony. Focusing on the life of an individual ant is what is absurd.

</comment><comment><USER33> Absurdism [1] is one of three philosophical doctrines (along with existentialism [2] and nihilism [3]) that try to reconcile the fact that we live in a meaningless universe when our human tendency is to seek value and meaning in life.

Existentialism argues that we create our own meaning by living life and exercising our free will. Nihilism counters that there is no meaning and so nothing matters. Absurdism is the acceptance that life is ridiculous and by defiantly laughing at it we can live authentically.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism) [3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism)

</comment><comment><USER34> If the poets taught us anything it's that you cannot quantify that which you cannot count and you can't rationalize that which is irrational. We are wholly absurd in this regard; able and enfeebled at the same time. Perfectly capable of realizing that we're trapped in these meat-bags sailing through time to an inescapable doom.

And what do we do about it? Science and engineering life-extending technologies. Write about our memories and discoveries. Make music and art. It's absurd and it seems to work for us.

</comment><comment><USER35> The only absurd thing about life, is that through the process, something was created that understood the absurdity of it all.

<comment><USER36> We only understand the absurdity of it because absurdity is a concept created by humanity - which if you think about it is quite absurd in itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> i think she's wrong that time is the only absurd thing:

i've often wished i could hibernate; there's a ton of victorian art that shows a clear obsession with humans flying like birds; i spent many childhood afternoons trying to hold my breath longer (so i could stay underwater); there's been tons of fiction, philosophy, science and engineering put into talking to animals...

however, most of all, i agree with all the comments above suggesting that the notion of permanence itself is absurd, our insistence on a hard-nosed materialist viewpoint is absurd, our insistence that we're smart enough to understand the universe is absurd (we're little smarter than our dogs and cats, who we're sure can't possibly understand the universe)

</comment><comment><USER38> The explanation of this and the question contradicts each other. Life is absurd, but if you really believe that then you should also know that you can't tell WHY!

Every human must experience and keep on experiencing or otherwise taking your life might be more less painful than living it.

</comment><comment><USER39> TL;DR: In the context of our existence, only the brevity of our lives strikes us as absurd.

</comment><comment><USER40> "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it feels like an hour. Sit next to a pretty girl for an hour and it feels like a minute. _That 's_ relativity." \--Einstein, attributed

</comment><comment><USER41> The thing that people often over extrapolate based on Special Relativity (SR) and other things like Quantum Mechanics (QM) is they think that "relative" (or for QM, "probabilistic") means arbitrary. No, in fact while time is not "absolute", certain things about time for all observers are constrained. For example, the time between events depends on the observer, but use that time separation multiplied by the speed of light--the distance a light ray travels in that time--and take the square of that distance and subtract the square of the distance between said events' locations, this quantity is the same for all observers. This IS a constraint on the "distance" between events in SR.

This really isn't the relativity that the author alludes to, but I have something to say about this too. As physicists, we term this "relativity" the author deals with as "dealing with units." Having a concept of time is meaningless without a given scale. For example, for the ultraintense-plasma interactions that I am discussing in the paper I'm writing today, a picosecond is a long time given that the electro-magnetic dynamics I care about happen on the femtosecond scale. For the hydrodynamic simulations my groupmate will work on, picoseconds are the timescales of significance. Of course, when heating the coffee in the cup next to me, the barista measures timescales much larger than this, of the order of seconds, exponentially longer than both of the former scales.

Life is a complicated phenomenon which captures dynamics at many scales. Thinking about life can be just as complicated, if you let it. An issue I often see is equating parts of life with other parts and thus, using the same scales for both. This often leads us into trouble. Why does it take my friend an hour to shower while it only takes me ten minutes? If I can write a python script in one day, why the hell does it take this junior dev two weeks to make his? Of course, the same issue here is a novice physicist comparing the fs physics I deal with to the ps my friend does, the comparison isn't valid just because they are both "times."

This is why even though life seems short for some people it can seem long for others. Just because 80 years is a year and people are people, any given individual has their own experiences and opinions that shapes their vantage point, and it can be hard to really compare the two. Of course, just like the "real" relativity SR, there are certain constraints we can make on time in this context, many people might prefer longer lives even if we lived 1000 years if millennial* olds are as selfish as us 80-year-ers are. But the diversity in context must be taken into account as it should be for me when I model ultra-intense laser plasma interactions. Context always matters.

Thinking about the context for each person's scales makes our look on life a little less absurd. I think that more often than not, people's motivations (for desiring longevity, for instance) have good reasoning in them, especially when you consider their context.

[*] It's funny that millennial here means people who are 1000 years old as opposed to people in their late teens to early twenties.

</comment><comment><USER42> Looks like author just watched newest Adam Sandler movie.

</comment><comment><USER43> Absurdity is a relative state. When philosophy starts trying to bullshit with semantics, I completely loose interest. That's this article.

<comment><USER44> Yes, but the author explicitly explores the semantics she pushes in regard to other limitations: our size relative to the universe, our inability to fly, etc. With everything taken into account, it is indeed odd that the thing that seems uniquely absurd is our longevity. Why aren't we perturbed by our lack of gills or our inability to walk to the moon? The point of the article is to explore this absurdity. You knew the game before you clicked the link ('absurd' is right there, in the title). So you can hardly be surprised that you were dealt a relativistic sludge.

<comment><USER45> I was surprised, because this was on the HN front page.

> The point of the article is to explore this absurdity.

I think the point of the article was just to sound smart. It doesn't really explore anything, nor provoke thoughts or insights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Life's too short to read this comment thread.

</comment><comment><USER47> Did a ctrl+f for "Jerry" and no results were found. Not sure ift his article should be trusted.

</comment><comment><USER48> Life is perfectly balanced in this regard, I would say.

Only those without a clear focus on their goal may ask a question 'why am I here?'. If you've ever achieved something in your life that others will admire or build upon - it was not in vain. That's why we are here: being its members, to advance humanity as a whole.

That's also exactly why we should never achieve immortality (so that we have motivation to do something in out limited time) and if we do so, it would be one of the worst events humanity has ever encountered.

Sadly, this day most people look at this world through prism of financial wealth, but trading things (often completely useless things, I might) back and forth can hardly be considered an achievement future generations can benefit from. All in all, in the modern world, realization of one's potential has stepped back to give way to greed and that cannot be called progress in any way.

EDIT: Well isn't that a knee-jerk reaction. People always reject this argument for some reason and always fail to come up with the solid reason for this. Is this what we've come to as a humanity?</comment>


NHS Operation Waiting Times Reach 10 Year High - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jul/13/nhs-operation-waiting-lists-reach-10-year-high-at-43m-patients <comment><AUTHOR> I've seen numerous past comments on HN about horrible state of healthcare in the USA and how it would be better if it was more like the NHS. Then saw this recent report. I've only experienced the USA healthcare system and only read about the NHS experience so can't really compare them directly. Seems surprising to see some writers hold up the USA system as superior, ala [https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-16/it-time-give- brita...](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-16/it-time-give-britains- national-health-service)</comment>


Hillbillies Need No Elegy - <AUTHOR> https://bittersoutherner.com/hillbillies-need-no-elegy-appalachian-reckoning <comment> temp-dude-87844 These sorts of elaborate rebuttals, like the article or the art project it references, aren't that different from the works of outsiders that they seek to prove wrong. It seemingly is the case that Appalachia attracts a kind of journalist-meets-artist who finds plenty of material for a culture-tinged exposé of somewhat-thoughtful poverty and hardship porn, but a curated photoset of Sides of Appalachia You May Not Know is aimed at the level of The New Yorker, and not something relatable to everyday folk in the suburbs or the Midwest. It does little to dissuade the notion that Appalachia still has an odd mystique, which is a disservice to region.

The fact is, Appalachia is largely "just" economically depressed region like Northwest Kansas or the Mississippi Floodplain or the drive from Tucson to El Paso, where most jobs are retail and government and the best jobs are in mineral extraction or transportation or industry, but far fewer than in times past. Transportation is a pain but yet it's crisscrossed by critical routes, and life there is pretty normal for rural America. Really, there's only a handful of areas in the US where you can ride the a boom if you time it right, everywhere else things are just okay. In some places you have fewer options. People try to get by, or try to leave. It's odd how much Appalachia has gripped the popular imagination, and how outsiders and a few well-positioned insiders perpetuate it.

<comment><USER2> Sure, but Vance is more "wrong" than his detractors are. He's the one who sees all poor people, and all poor people alike.

<comment><USER3> Wrong in what regard? I found nothing wrong with Vance's book. Having a similar family background to Vance, I think he has a great outlook on the matter.

<comment><USER4> I think his biggest miss was failing to connect the region to the rest of the country. He could have easily compared Appalachia to Rust Belt cities facing urban decay but never made the connection. It could have made the story of the region more approachable to more people. It seemed so obvious to me how the areas are linked by economic circumstances, environmental degradation, poor education levels, distinct culture and problems with drug addiction.

<comment><USER3> > He could have easily compared Appalachia to Rust Belt cities facing urban > decay but never made the connection.

Did you and I read the same book? Most of this story is occurring in the Rust Belt[0], in Middletown, Ohio[1]. He discusses the mass Appalachian flight into Rust Belt towns and the mixing and clashing of culture.

If anything, I'm glad the author kept things largely, as the subtitle would imply, a memoir of sorts. He focuses on his family history and his life to give a face to the problem, but makes you aware that these are major problems in that community. From there you can draw your own comparison based on your experiences.

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Belt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_Belt)

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middletown,_Ohio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middletown,_Ohio)

<comment><USER4> I think we read the same book. I don't really think of Middletown as a Rust Belt city. It's a town of 50,000 people. I am talking about big cities like Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland and smaller ones like Youngstown and Erie.

As someone who lives in one of those cities, it seemed like a clear correlation could have been made. It was chance to unite a rural and an urban problem across race and I thought it was a missed opportunity. I still enjoyed the book, but think it is even more powerful when read in tandem with a book like Evicted [1] that views the problem from another perspective.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Evicted-Poverty-Profit-American- City/...](https://www.amazon.com/Evicted-Poverty-Profit-American- City/dp/0553447459)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The perception that mountain folk like to be poor serves someone — but it's not the poor mountain folk. The representation of Appalachia as all white is not only inaccurate, but it preserves a false and destructive ideal of imaginary "pure white stock." Images of decay and absence allow those in power to turn away from a place that has been forgotten, but has not disappeared. The narrow ideas that circulate about this broad place do active harm."

Brilliant.

<comment><USER6> I'm assuming the commentary is about this book: [https://www.amazon.com/Hillbilly-Elegy-Memoir-Family- Culture...](https://www.amazon.com/Hillbilly-Elegy-Memoir-Family- Culture/dp/0062300555)

This book is specifically written from one (white guy's) point of view -- somebody who grew up in the area.

I'm not sure how the ideas that circulate about this place do active harm. Most (if not all) accounts I've heard about this place are personal accounts. The truth from people who have lived or traveled there.

Sometimes the truth hurts. Denying it's truthful isn't helping anybody.

<comment><USER7> It's right in the first lines of the article.

"In the new book "Appalachian Reckoning," dozens of mountain voices combine to talk back to J.D. Vance's best-selling "Hillbilly Elegy." Today, an exclusive story from its co-editor and a powerful essay (which involves Granny, her .38 pistol, and some coal trucks) excerpted from the book."

Part of the point of the article (which was very good) was that there is not singular truth about a place a vast and varied as Appalachia. This new book seems to be much more than a commentary on Hillbilly Elegy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've got to tell you: every subculture of humans has fractal complexity that is not captured by any representation. We're reduced to using blind men's descriptions of elephants. Nothing can be adequately explained in any book, not Appalachia and not the subculture of people in a semi-urban locality outside of Kandy.

This is natural, so we use shortcuts as heuristic predictive tools: so the Russians throw numbers at war, the Chinese steal your secrets, the Appalachians are poor, the New Yorkers rude, the Japanese clean and neat. And the San Frannigans bristle at that demonym while they shit themselves in the street.

So, no, the fact that there is complexity and uniqueness in culture is normal. It is not interesting. The only value is what you extract as the weak trendline. Imagine a scatterplot with loads of overlapping red and blue dots, but there are more blue dots above some line than red dots, by a considerable number. Most of them will interact, some red dot may even be higher than any blue dots, but you will be reduced to the fact that blue is higher than red on the graph. It is a weak decisioning tool because the complexity is both incompressible and useless for prediction.

<comment><USER9> > every subculture of humans has fractal complexity that is not captured by > any representation

Yes, and the facile reduction of that complexity is the source for much of the political stupidity making us miserable. Also, thank you, Internet, for spreading it around so prolifically.

<comment><USER10> Counterpoint: "fuck nuance".

[https://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/fuck- nuance.pdf](https://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/fuck-nuance.pdf)

"I do claim that the more we tend to value nuance as such—that is, as a virtue to be cultivated, or as the first thing to look for when assessing arguments—the more we will tend to slide toward one or more of three nuance traps. First is the ever more detailed, merely empirical description of the world. This is the _nuance of the fine-grain_. It is a rejection of theory masquerading as increased accuracy...."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Morgantown, West Virginia [...] We were in the heart of Appalachia"

BS! Morgantown is definitely not the heart of Appalachia:

\- It's only 9 mi into WV!

\- has population that doubles during the school semester

\- has three or four federal agencies (FBI, NETL, NIOSH)

\- showered with federal and state largess (thank you senator Byrd)

\- has traffic jams worthy of a city with 10x it's population

\- has one of my favorite restaurants in the US

\- has a significant private sector economy (Mylan, for one)

-if I recall, technically it didn't have a recession in '08.

I've lived in Morgantown for a while. And while I certainly caught a glimpse of Appalachia, it certainly isn't the heart. Maybe it's about as redneck as the president of WVU dares to venture.

<comment><USER12> I agree. I'm originally from Charleston and have always said that it's not like the rest of WV.

I'd say the real heart of Appalachia is Pikeville KY.

<comment><USER13> Well, Hillbilly Bear is the representative picture for Pikeville on Google Maps which is a vote in your favor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > _The room was packed with intellectuals, artists, donors, students, the > president of West Virginia University and the dean of its law school._

Nary a coal miner, nor axeman to be found in this ivory tower meeting.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, that was the point of the sentence. A man who wasn't Appalachian was telling a room full of educated Appalachian intellectuals that Appalachians are happy making 24k a year because they don't "need to show off".

Also, it wasn't an "ivory tower" (such a limp, worn-out descriptor) meeting, it was a book launch, and it was literally open to the public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The best way to understand what makes Appalachia what it is culturally, is to read _Albion's Seed_. The people who ended up there came from parts of Britain that required extreme self-sufficiency and had no real functional government.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed)

[https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions- se...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/)

<comment><USER17> I'd argue the best way would be to travel there and read actual histories from local sources. While it's nice to imagine a simple root cause to everything - it's not enough. When my great-grandparents settled in Appalachia about 100 years ago, they did it to find opportunity and escape the terrible working conditions of cotton mills. That side of the family are religious democrats who support unions and new-deal style economic reform and public education. They and their kids integrated culturally, most of them never left and never plan to. Their story is not an uncommon one, their desire for better government support is not out of the norm, and it does nobody any good to propagate a myth saying their culture of self-sufficency was decided 300 years ago when it was actually developed as a necessity after continuously being ignored. Cultures grow and Appalachian culture is no exception - we need to get past this shallow type of categorization based on original settlers.

<comment><USER18> Yes, but don't travel to Asheville or Morgantown ... go to Elkhorn City or Ashland, Ky ... or Nitro, WV. Bring your own water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's really bizarre the lengths to which the author goes to weave the "criticism by outsiders" motif into a critique which ostensibly targets a born-and-bred Appalacian. Three full introductory paragraphs about the guy who says "The thing I like about Appalachians is that they don't need much to be happy. They're content with making $24,000 year. They're not showing off..." A massive full-screen width "When outsiders tell the story" Two long paragraphs introducing Vance without mentioning where he's from. A criticism of the Netflix adaption as "filmmakers from elsewhere will put[ting] their visual stamp on the region." 2 long paragraphs complaining about outsiders defining its territorial extent. 2 paragraphs explaining how politicians and outside media represent it. It goes on to promote it's own take on the region, unsurprisingly dominated by artists, activists and academics. But the force and worth of Vance's take would be ZERO if he was an outsider. They don't, of course, lie at any point about Vance's background, but it's a flagrantly dishonest critique nonetheless.

If the other commenter here is correct about Morganstown being only kind of half-Appalacian, as opposed to their claim of hailing from the heart of Appalacia, that really just puts the cherry on top.

<comment><USER2> _But the force and worth of Vance 's take would be ZERO if he was an outsider._

JD Vance was born and raised in Middletown OH. This is far SW Ohio, on the border with Indiana. (It was something of a surprise to me that _any_ part of Ohio is considered Appalachian, but then I've spent most of my Ohio time in Toledo. [0]) There are hills, but those hills are not the Appalachians. JD Vance is from the Midwest. Has he actually claimed to be Appalachian? As far as I can tell he has claimed to be a "hillbilly", which is fine but hardly limited to Ohio or the Appalachians. My neighbors and I in the Ozarks have at least as strong a claim to the term, but we don't seem to get as uptight about this stuff as the folks back East get.

[0] [https://lookingatappalachia.org/region](https://lookingatappalachia.org/region)

<comment><USER18> Vance' detailed the large migration of Eastern Kentucky folks moving to Ohio / Indiana for jobs in the generations before he was born ... and noting how they all maintained a lifeline and frequented remaining Eastern Kentucky family. His claim is solid IMO.

<comment><USER2> It's cool that he identifies with another region where he never lived and his parents never lived. Lots of humans feel a special connection to places from their family histories. The fact that his family hasn't lived there in several generations (he was raised by grandparents in western Ohio) makes his broad statements about the region and about his own family history with respect to the region problematic. There's no need (besides a psychological one, perhaps) to invoke something about eastern Kentucky to explain his mother's addictions. There are addicts all over the world, including (especially, if reports in other media are believed) in Ohio. If a similar book had been written attributing family and personal dysfunction to a distant descent from any other region or nation, it would have received a different reception. Why are the Appalachians different?

<comment><USER18> Technically, according to the book, his parents grew up there and he spent summers there. I would say that is "lived". And as you surely know, a larger percentage of the population is addicted to opiates in Appalachia than in most other areas. I would say that is "problematic".

<comment><USER2> Citation sorely needed. Every time we read about the "opiate catastrophe", Ohio or Indiana features prominently. You know, where he actually was born and also graduated high school and university. I can't believe I'm having this argument with a greenbean account. Why are you embarrassed to denigrate the Appalachian region using a permanent pseudonym?

And this _is_ denigration, which would be accepted for no other region or nation. In the first place, because it defies logic that some lawyer with no particular sociological training would be accepted as some sort of authority about a region he visited as a child during some summers when his hectic home life allowed. Second, because blaming culture for the misfortunes of any particular group of people is the oldest trick of racists, trickle-down economists, and other awful people. This book is full of corny anecdotes proving Vance is one of those awful people; he judged this person for showing up to work late and that person for smoking too many cigarettes. Third, because ITT we've seen _Morgantown WV_ questioned as "authentically Appalachian"; this is serious double standards.

<comment><USER18> My "pseudonym" or green account is not an issue. Google for any map of opioid crisis ... you'll see the same thing: KY, WV OH lead the way. Just pointing out you seem to have misspoke about his family and how "appalachiany" they were. BTW: You haven't worked with that guy he was describing, the smoker that shows up late (if at all) and takes breaks all the time? I've worked with several of those types. His judgement is on target. [https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/25/opioid-deaths- map/](https://www.statnews.com/2017/04/25/opioid-deaths-map/)

<comment><USER2> Your link is interesting, Mr. Vance. It indicates that "drug overdose mortality" has changed over time in various regions of USA. Apparently in 1999 all the Appalachian hillbillies lived in California and the Southwest. For some reason they gradually moved East? Yours is a confusing worldview, to say the least.

It's one thing to dislike a particular person, for whatever reason. It's quite another to see that person as an exemplar of the negative attributes of all the residents of another region where you have never lived. It's another yet when the exemplary person you dislike is _also_ not from that region...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is important, not because of Appalachia but because of art itself.

As a history buff, I have a difficult time watching many "based on a true story" movies or movies claiming to represent some important person or event in history. It's for the same reason: people consume information through narrative, and narrative forces reality into predefined tracks. This means that any art form claiming to represent a people, region, person, or event must necessarily be lying to you. The better the art the more likely the lies are big ones.

And so storytellers are forced to lie, both by drastically-reducing scope and by smoothing out the edges. Then they consolidate characters, generalize over things that are not part of the narrative. They find a hero. They bump the contrast up a bit to make the narrative consumption more enjoyable.

I love this, I love art and storytelling, but it means that there are great masses of people who don't know jack squat about a ton of topics that they think they do.

I grew up here. I've traveled all over, spending quite a bit of time in SF and other very cosmopolitan places, but this is home. If I were forced to scope it down, I'd probably start with the mountains, then the coal mines, then the Scots-Irish cultural backdrop. The writer made an astute point when they mentioned all the outsiders passing through and screwing us over in various ways for their own selfish reasons. That's been a persistent theme, but it is slowly dying off. There's also the tent revival culture, but that's also going away.

The only other generality I'd add if I were scoping down a story about this place is the stereotype of the ornery eccentric. This character has been played up for comic relief over the years, many times making them out to be simpletons. Instead, there are a lot of PhD-level folks who just don't give a damn about society and don't want to. They're nice enough. They just want to be left alone. You find that plenty of other places as well, but Appalachia has a long history of those folks and we tend to cherish them, even if we're making fun of them.

Andrew Jackson almost beat a man to death with his cane after he tried to assassinate him (His gun misfired. He grabbed a backup. It also misfired. Jackson commenced to beating on him and had to be pulled off). After the Civil War, Ewell went back to his home, picked back up his law practice, and started writing books about what a bunch of jackasses all those people who misunderstood the war were. We always wave at people here: the best way to tell if people are from far away is when they don't wave. Had a neighbor once that when I waved at him he would make various obscene gestures and curse. He just wanted to be left alone.

I wouldn't live anywhere else, and it's not because I haven't tried out a bunch of other places. There's something about the mountains that keep calling me back. I don't know what.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for sharing your experiences. I've never visited Appalachia, and I'm afraid my views are filtered through popular media. But even if a TV show like "Justified" (I've seen the first 3 seasons) bends to narrative constraints, I felt it took its setting and the people living there seriously. I'm sure I'm missing a lot though.

Another piece of media that I felt was a strong statement about Appalachia is Ever South[1] by Drive-by Truckers.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwM2yd2QZ2Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwM2yd2QZ2Q) \- live rendition at KEXP

<comment><USER20> Thanks. It's an interesting place.

I think the saddest thing about Appalachia is the fact that much of the really interesting parts are disappearing. Everything in the country, including Appalachia, is WalMart-i-fied. It's all strip malls and chain stores. Everybody listens to the same music, surfs the same sites, and buys the same swag. As a species we are homogenizing everything.

I have fond memories of walking into a country store in Grundy, Virginia where I bought a coke. The guy behind the counter spoke in a language I couldn't understand at first. Then I realized it was English. I have another fond memory of walking into a startup where they were on their way to making billions. These memories happened only several dozen miles from each other. There's a lot of cool stuff going on here. I can guarantee that whatever media you've consumed about it misled you in many ways.

<comment><USER18> I had a eerily similar experience in the Pikeville, KY WalMart: Stopped in to pick up some last minute groceries for a weekend excursion to the Russell Fork. While walking around I heard a voice over the intercom that I literally could not understand a word that was said. I looked at my wife (both of us born and raised in KY) and said, "What was that?". She also had no idea what was said. It was a different language, not really English.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I understand where the author is coming from with wanting to depict a more diverse/nuanced view of Appalachia.

However, I think that Hillbilly Elegy has been influential based specifically on insight it gives into why the region supported someone like Trump. The author may be correct that Hillbilly Elegy is incorrect; however, since the article doesn't present an alternative explanation I'm not sure that it is very useful.

</comment><comment><USER23> 47 entries in uMatrix, a banner shows, no visible content. Today's web is garbage.

</comment><comment><USER18> Seriously, if "Appalachia" is doing so great let's stop taking from wealthier states and redirecting to these poor ones. Let them clean up their broken down coal mines and polluted water resources. They can handle all the opium addicts and disability deadbeats. They should be able to prop up their own economies without handouts and programs from wealthier parts of the country. Let them continue their war against the "War on Coal". Maybe they can eat their coal. And don't get me started on the litter pretty much everywhere and trash dumped in every river of my home state (KY). I'm sure they will eventually handle that too.

<comment><USER24> Regional flamewar isn't ok here, just like nationalistic flamewar or race flamewar or other flamewars. Could you please not post like this to HN?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER18> Isn't this what the article "Hillbillies Need No Elegy" is about? Isn't this about their response to a book about the region? I grew up in the region and this is my experience.

<comment><USER24> Your experience is welcome, but you need to actually share your experience. That's very different from posting a putdown rant about a region and the people who live there.

The fact that you grew up there is relevant to what you're saying, of course. But it's not relevant to whether your comment broke the site guidelines. Internet forums can't handle that level of nuance, and a comment like this is going to lead to a big old flamewar by default.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


"I dream of another recession" guy not quite a hoax - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilylambert/2011/09/27/trader-or-prankster-we-called-alessio-rastani-and-asked/

<comment><USER2> Here's his Facebook www.facebook.com/alessiorastani definitely not a fake trader.</comment>


Quantum Man - Richard Feynman's Life in Science - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/books/review/book-review-quantum-man-richard-feynmans-life-in-science-by-lawrence-m-krauss.html?_r=1&ref=books <comment><USER2> Interview with the author here: <http://www.pointofinquiry.org/lawrence_krauss_quantum_man/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I thought this was a play on the recently released transcendent man. I would love a Feynman documentary so much.

<comment><USER4> Check NOVA/YouTube. There are several, ranging from interviews to his search for Tuva. There are UK analogues for Nova, but I forget its name.</comment></comment>


Do psychopaths make good CEOs? - <AUTHOR> http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/10/26/wisdom-psychopaths-dutton/ <comment><USER2> No. Why? Because they are psychopaths.</comment>


Role Oriented Programming - <AUTHOR> http://use.perl.org/~Ovid/journal/38662

<comment><USER2> I see things like this coming up in the literature from time to time, since the mid-90s or so when OO started becoming all the rage.

Even back then, though, I could never convince myself that it was a good model, until Perl5 came along and I started using objects _without_ inheritance. Perl5 allowed inheritance, but it made has-a relationships just as easy and convenient to use as is-a relationships, and didn't push the is-a (inheritance) ideology at me, so I didn't bother because _it wasn't useful_ as far as I could see.

I'm still convinced that the disadvantages of is-a OO (using a lot of inheritance) far outweigh the advantages, and that it is a misguided model for programming. has-a (containers without inheritance), on the other hand, is comfortable for me.</comment>


Do your tools support production or complexity? - <AUTHOR> http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2011/04/do-your-tools-support-production-or-complexity/

<comment><USER2> "Complexity vs production" is a false dichotomy.

Abstraction, which is fundamental to programming, is a means of managing complexity. The complexity isn't eliminated; irrelevant parts of the problem are just swept under the rug.

Mount's gripe about automated build systems is essentially that if and when the system does something wrong or inefficient, the users have no way to cope with it. System correction is a vendor burden, not a user burden. One needn't be a compiler/builder/etc. expert to compile a program; non-engineers drive cars all the time.

Suppose the vendor did its job and optimized the build process.

The example of how if one isn't around, one can't automate that GUI-driven build process is weak. A network/clock-listening macro fixes it. Writing that program/macro is probably "building a shelf," but it's the path of least resistance. Dropping the GUI to learn the make stack is also "shelf building," because it's extrinsic to your problem (shipping). The resultant shelf is more generally useful, but you've made a time trade-off.

In cases where one's stuck with that type of IDE, it's a good trade. (I'm aware this may be somewhat begging the question, as the thrust of the article is to avoid adopting that development environment to begin with.)

"Do not reward building shelves unless building shelves is your actual business." There're cases where one can't avoid shaving a couple yaks. Not everything can be done in one step. Incremental reward systems aren't weren't shown hazardous by the article. Some of those shelves may help you not only on the current project, but may be useful in the next. (E.g., having learned the make stack or building that GUI automator.) Why should that work be unrewarded?</comment>


Emissions of banned, ozone-depleting chemical CFC-11 have climbed 25% since 2012 - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2018/05/16/someone-somewhere-is-making-a-banned-chemical-that-destroys-the-ozone-layer-scientists-suspect/ <comment><USER2> As an engine mechanic, Hanlons Razor comes to mind.

We once had a "thief" in our garage who was stealing expensive welding gasses and getting away with it. Sometimes she would steal whole tanks, other times she would siphon tanks until they were almost dry. We took to naming her Shirley.

After about a month we caught the culprits. The tank theft was due to a manager in another location who was greedily stealing our gas bottles without filing the correct paperwork, to use at his location. The other thief was a gas safety relief system that measures tank temperature and pressure, and preemptively vents the contents if theres an irregularity. One of its 2 post sensors had died and the alarm for it was just being silenced by our cleaning crew.

<comment><USER3> That's the most insidious thing about theft. Your mind starts blaming the innocent people you know (friends or colleagues) and you convince yourself someone is doing it and start treating them differently.

I have to constantly remind myself that it's probably lost or I misplaced it or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The overall, just-worrying-factor of this aside, I think it's rather surprising that _" someone, somewhere"_ is putting up CFC-11 in the atmosphere and somehow the only way people got a hold of this was by looking at the ozone layer. If that's indeed the case, that would be a reminder that though there's a lot of information about a lot of stuff nowadays, much of what matters to us can still be going on on completely in the dark.

EDIT: Alternatively, and more innocently, this could be due to the end of the life-cycle of several appliances in Second/Third World countries -- or maybe even First World (do you know anyone with an aging fridge?). While a lot of people might have done away with their old fridges a long while ago, those that didn't might be seeing them all fail nearly at the same time.

<comment><USER5> > Alternatively, and more innocently, this could be due to the end of the > life-cycle of several appliances in Second/Third World countries -- or maybe > even First World (do you know anyone with an aging fridge?).

I don't think this can be overstated. True or not, the common belief held by most people in the US is that older Freon based systems are better than modern systems. This is due in part to the high cost and lower efficiency of those systems when they started showing up in the early 90s. As such many people chose to hold on to their older systems and maintain them.

The last two houses I have owned each had HVAC systems dating back to the 70s and early 80s and each had slow leaks that required refilling each year. The cost to refill a system has steadily increased but it is still under $500.

Modern chillers are not compatible with older furnaces so replacing your AC unit requires replacing your entire HVAC system. Prices start at around $4000 and many homes in the United States are multi system. We were quoted $12000-18000 to replace the two systems in our home last year.

Given the cost disparity between maintaining a 40 year old system and replacing it, what do you think most people would choose?

<comment><USER6> Older Freon based systems are much less picky about system condition than systems with newer refrigerant and in practice that makes them much more reliable because you can just top them up and keep going. They're also much more easily user serviceable so anyone doing their own service just keep repairing them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Now I know I'm old, because the headline refers to CFCs by symptom than by name...

(Wikipedia article about the guy behind them, no one-trick pony: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.))

<comment><USER8> >In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted poliomyelitis, which left him severely disabled. This led him to devise an elaborate system of strings and pulleys to help others lift him from bed. This was the eventual cause of his own death when he was entangled in the ropes of this device and died of strangulation at the age of 55

Wow.

<comment><USER9> Environmental historian J. R. McNeill opined that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history",[19] and Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny".[20]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> China? Pertinent parallels with this part of Chai Jing's censored talk "Under the Dome"[1] (worth watching the whole thing actually).

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6X2uwlQGQM&t=42m23s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6X2uwlQGQM&t=42m23s)

</comment><comment><USER11> Link to paper: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0106-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0106-2)

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone have an idea of how difficult it would be to create a sensor network to monitor for CFCs?

What would the PPM at source be? Quick googling suggests that there are sensors that can detect down to 1000PPM [1], but I'd guess you'd need something substantially lower than that.

[1] [https://docs-apac.rs- online.com/webdocs/15a6/0900766b815a66d...](https://docs-apac.rs- online.com/webdocs/15a6/0900766b815a66db.pdf)

<comment><USER13> Around 200 parts per trillion in the atmosphere in general. [https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/it-seems-someone- is-...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/it-seems-someone-is-producing- a-banned-ozone-depleting-chemical-again/) At the source it might be high enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > also because alternatives exist, making it hard to imagine what the market > for CFC-11 today would be.

Well I've heard of someone who was stockpiling and was planning to sell banned Freon. That was years ago. There is a black market for it because equipment that uses it doesn't simply work on newer approved stuff. If I randomly heard about it, chances are there are more insantces of it. And if there is demand someone probably spun up a factory to make it.

<comment><USER15> CFC-11 is cheaper then alternatives. If I'm a shady factory owner making cheap fridges for shady countries, who is gonna complain?

<comment><USER16> Shady countries? Those are people and regular families...

<comment><USER17> I live in one of those "shady" countries and I wish that I was never born.

<comment><USER18> Please get help to realize your value and the opportunities you have to contribute positively to your area and the world. You can be a force for good if you choose.

This assumes you're not just trolling, but actually, it applies if you are trolling as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How big a factory would you need to do this? I mean that sounds like some pretty low hanging fruit right there for the evil scientists out there, who wants to destroy human kind.

<comment><USER20> Not many people really want to destroy all human kind including themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Related: Shrinking Ozone layer: [https://qz.com/1199846/earths-ozone-layer-is- still-shrinking...](https://qz.com/1199846/earths-ozone-layer-is-still- shrinking-and-scientists-dont-know-why/) dichloromethane: [https://www.earth.com/news/dangerous-threat-ozone- layer/](https://www.earth.com/news/dangerous-threat-ozone-layer/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Back of the envelope calc says this is about the weight of say a dozen passenger cars or say 1 passenger car (weight) per month over a year? Doesn't sound like a major industrial operation to me and how many tons are STILL out there in old air conditioners and refrigerators that could be leaking?

<comment><USER23> You're out by a factor of 1000.

<comment><USER22> Yeah you're right - sorry about that - need to buy a much bigger slide rule :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> China, obviously.

</comment><comment><USER25> Welcome to the long tail of hyper-optimizing Capitalism and the tragedy of the commons. If someone, somewhere, perceives an economic advantage in producing something banned or destroying something hard to replace, they will try it. Thinking through not only the regulatory regime but enforcement protocols necessary to maintain 100% bans on some activities, we're in for a mess in the long haul.

<comment><USER26> What in particular has the production of CFC gas got to do with capitalism?

In the 1980's, the Soviet Union had an estimated growth-rate of CFC production at 18% annually (estimated because they couldn't be bothered to measure it themselves accurately) which by 1990 would've accounted for 50% of global CFC production.

<comment><USER25> Maybe I am using capitalism in too broad a sense: I meant to express that if the use of CFC gives one competitor an advantage over another, they may go right ahead and do it, regardless of the consequences. Capitalism constantly prides itself on how great competition is, but competition actually makes this problem worse, not better.

<comment><USER27> If by "too broad a sense" you mean "incorrectly," then sure.

<comment><USER25> "An economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state."

\--Oxford

Did you have a different definition in mind?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Then someone, somewhere needs to make ozone.

<comment><USER29> And get it up to the ozone layer, because at ground level it's a pollutant which causes lung damage.

<comment><USER5> Falcon 9s?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What about rockets like SpaceX etc. and volcano's erupting like in Hawaii? What effect do those have on the ozone?

<comment><USER31> What does that have to do with a nation violating an international accord to stop producing CFC emissions?

<comment><USER30> I was actually just curious.

<comment><USER31> My apologies!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've got a shiny dollar that says they're in the northern hemisphere.

<comment><USER32> There seem to be some trails pointing towards SE asia. From the article:

"The scientists don't know exactly who, or where, that person would be. A U.S. observatory in Hawaii found CFC-11 mixed in with other gases that were characteristic of a source coming from somewhere in eastern Asia, but scientists could not narrow the area down any further"

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> If this is true and we found the place where it was being produced, could we be justified in destroying the facility by missile strike in order to save the world?

<comment><USER34> How about just having police visit? They're more likely to apprehend the owners of the facility (you know, the actual culprits) and to preserve evidence of exactly what has occurred. Also in many nations they are less likely than a "missile strike" to kill everyone present.

<comment><USER33> Sure, but what if the corruption goes very high up, and the police do nothing? Or it's an uncooperative rogue state?

Do we just let the ozone burn?

<comment><USER34> Sometimes it's quite difficult to remind oneself that those with inexplicably martial attitudes are more likely to be deluded victims of the war media than actual employees of the military-industrial complex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Everybody's saying China, and, well, maybe. But what about North Korea? Despite China having a reputation for shady business practices, the Chinese government at least often gives the environment a higher priority than the US does. Also, North Korea probably has tons of outdated hardware, I would guess, and little respect for the outside world.

God help us if it is North Korea. Things are delicate enough as it is, with the peace treaty and the nuclear situation.

<comment><USER36> Heck it could be South Africa - it has a larger economy and population than NK AFAIK. (Or at least equal economy)

My father here in SA had a tank of CFC gas when he was an air conditioner repairman.

<comment><USER35> The data suggested southeast Asia

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Ozone production is tied to solar activity disproportionately, and the 11 year cycle between the solar maximum and the solar minimum effect ozone measurements. We are currently at solar minimum, and we are also possibly headed into a grand solar minimum (an extended period of low solar activity).

Zaelke also does not seem to have published a paper on his findings, and all of his quotes in this article are largely political-oriented fluff. The latest thing I can find with anything that has his name on it is from 2009, and only discusses the Montreal Protocol in relation to lowering CO2 emissions.

So, the article just tells us CFC-11 detectors detected something (which may or may not be CFC-11), but cannot tell us how much, where, or how it effected climate activity during a time of natural low ozone production.

Also, this does not discuss if this was _production_ , or just older appliances breaking down or being taken apart for recycling improperly. Without a paper, we cannot tell how they accounted for this.

<comment><USER25> > how it effected climate activity during a time of natural low ozone > production.

The article I read didn't discuss anything about the effect on the climate. AFAIK the primary concern isn't about direct effects on climate, but the loss of the ozone layer lets through vastly more UV light, which has a sterilizing effect on the oceans and is extremely harmful to human health. The fact that this did not have a big economic impact (the way action on climate change could) also means that it's been less controversial to actually do something about it.

<comment><USER38> Crops don't like it much either. Same with trees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Can someone summarize how CFCs achieve the result of depleting the ozone layer?

When I was a kid someone pointed out that CFCs were quite heavy and it was not possible to make it up to the ozone layer. Also, my kid logic considered the science experiment where the teacher showed us a basketball with a light shining through a peg-board onto. At the polls the circles were elongated, thus demonstrating how less light (therefore less radiation) hits the poles.

The fact that the hole in the ozone layer is only at the poles, and according Wikipedia [0], the ozone layer absorbs "97 to 99 percent of the Sun's medium- frequency ultraviolet light" [0]. And that I have never heard of any prevailing wind patterns [1] that would send _all_ of the CFCs in the world to one or two locations, means I have questions...

Two facts seem to make me think there's a flaw in blaming CFCs for the ozone hole.

1) It may simply be a naturally occurring phenomenon because there simply is less ultra violet radiation there. (ie, ozone may exist in part because of ultraviolet radiation, not in spite of it)

2) If CFCs are causing the hole, then shouldn't there be holes right above the factories that make the stuff? (or some similar localized affect first before a distant one?)

Another science experiment from 7th grade, our teacher sprayed a scented mist in the corner of the room. And described the process that eventually (because of entropy) the mist would disperse evenly throughout the room. Claiming a gas would collect in one spot is to claim that the scented mist would disperse and then regather, which is a similar claim to the CFCs. Sure pollution air can gather, but it's in valleys, not the sky.

Consider all the pollution from really polluted cities and factories all over the world, I've never once heard a distant affect claimed from some of these cesspools, yet, somehow CFCs pollute unlike any other gas/chemical known to man?

I don't believe in magic, so there has to be an experiment done to show how CFCs get to the south pole and fly straight up thousands of feet, and then, and only then, do they react with the ozone... something is amiss.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_layer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_layer)

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

<comment><USER23> CFCs don't concentrate at the poles.

The reason they have the strongest effect there, and not locally where they're produced or globally in the stratosphere, is because the stratosphere is very dry and only in the extreme cold of a polar winter can stratospheric clouds form. The particles in these clouds catalyse the reactions that allow a each free chlorine molecule to destroy many ozone molecules.

That's also why the hole is worse in the Antarctic. It is colder and has more polar stratospheric clouds.

<comment><USER39> That seems like a valid explanation for the "start" of a hole if there was a continuous stream of _only_ CFCs and chlorine.

Doesn't the ozone gas itself get blown around in the wind also? Wouldn't this mean that ozone would eventually fill the hole back up unless there was a steady stream of CFCs/chlorine to that one spot?

<comment><USER40> CFCs effectively function as a catalyzer and aren't consumed by the process, hence the hole is more of a Ozone sink. Wikipedia explains the effect of large-scale transport in the stratosphere well: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_layer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_layer)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


UK developer working on replacing heavy aircraft windows with smartscreen panels - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/26/innovations-windowless-plane?CMP=twt_gu

<comment><USER2> Seems to me a saving of 0.75% in fuel is hardly worth striking fear into the hearts of nervous travellers like me. I am nervous enough as it is. At least currently I can choose not to look out the window, but being in a plane that uses HD panels that look like you can see through the plane will cause me to have a panic attack.

Somewhat cool idea, but I can not see this ever being a thing on this scale. Panels will introduce new challenges like providing adequate power and what about the cost of replacing them? How often do airplane windows need to be replaced in comparison to an OLED screen?

And then there are the security implications. Have you ever wondered why you are asked to raise the window shade for takeoff and landing? It is part procedure and part security. It allows on the ground personnel to assess a dangerous situation or see into the plane for other reasons.

My hands are sweating just thinking about it.

<comment><USER3> >My hands are sweating just thinking about it.

You have a phobia of flying. The solution isn't aircraft manufacturers accommodating that, but you seeking the right mental health services to treat your mental illness.

<comment><USER2> I have a phobia of flying, but I do not have a mental illness. That is a little rough. The rudeness was uncalled for there, Nether. Please be a bit more respectful next time, thanks.

In-fact, I am currently in Seattle and travelled from Australia, 13 hours on a plane to LA and then 2.5 hours on a plane from LA to Seattle (with rough turbulence).

A few months ago I travelled from Australia to San Francisco on a 13.5 hour plane ride, on the way back it was close to 15 hours.

Last Christmas I took about 9 plane rides, connecting flights and a couple long distance flights. Australia to South Korea, South Korea to London, London to Paris, Paris to Rome, Rome to Poland, Poland to Germany , Germany back to London and then London back to South Korea, and South Korea back to Australia.

The reason I can fly even though I have a fear of flying is because I can choose to not see outside. A plane of panelled walls that makes it appear see through would not only freak me out, but what about others with actual mental illnesses? I think it is a foolish idea. I know people who are not afraid of flying who would be freaked out by this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love staring out plane windows. On a flight over interesting areas, I can spend a lot of time watching the ground scroll past. I love watching sunrises and sunsets, and observing different cloud patterns. Anything that reduced that experience would be bad, if you ask me.

Plus, as has already been mentioned, they are an important security measure for passenger flights, especially in emergency situations. That's why they ask you to lift the blinds for takeoff/landing. Fire crews are able to see inside the plane and look for smoke/flames/trapped people.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if they even tested it out at small scale yet. Screens will give the wrong parallax–it won't look like the view out a window. (It might be fine for a view displayed on a distant forward bulkhead or maybe even on seat backs, but the large views on walls they portrayed would look quite odd.)

Also, even if they got it to work decently, I wonder how long it would take for the screens to be covered by ads or sitcom reruns.

</comment><comment><USER6> I appreciate that it's an artists impression and thus over-selling the possible reality, but I can't help but imagine most people, myself included, would not feel very comfortable flying in something that, from the inside, barely felt like it had any kind of solid structure.

People have an expectation of a certain robustness around them, and I don't believe it would be easily overcome.

<comment><USER7> Without some currently-nonexisting 3D technology, a 2D display trivially can't give you a view remotely similar to what a window offers, so you'd just see a flat wall with pixels in it.

<comment><USER8> With head tracking it can look quite good. Though that only works for one person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Who gets to control the "window"?

Digitised systems are amenable to networking, which increases the number of options for who or what controls them. The answer is increasingly "not the user", or a gilded cage which gives the impression of user control.

As it is, a manual window provides the passenger with some control of their environment. If the airline seizes control of the window, won't this feed into a feeling of lack of control and increased anxiety in passengers?

<comment><USER10> > As it is, a manual window provides the passenger with some control of their > environment. If the airline seizes control of the window, won't this feed > into a feeling of lack of control and increased anxiety in passengers?

The 787 already allows this. Flight attendants can change the window "shades" of the entire plane from a single control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Considering that people like to sleep on planes and the flight attendants / cabin crew will get people to close the blinds / dim the cabin lights as quickly as they can, this will never take off.

</comment><comment><USER12> A big problem with OLED displays is the lifespan of the blue leds that are used (~10k hours to half brightness). When you're in the skies there's a lot of blue you need to show.

</comment><comment><USER13> But this is not a new news! I've been hearing about such 'concept' ideas by aircraft manufacturers for months, if not for years now.

What I take issue with is the wording of the sub-heading of this story, "UK developer working on replacing heavy aircraft windows with uber-light smartscreen panels to cut fuel consumption and slash air fares".

How is the inception of this idea related to some artist/developer sitting in UK? With all due credit to the UK peoples for contribution to the field of engineering, this sub-heading is a mis-representation of facts and it seems like theguardian is simply trying to push some sort of agenda to the rest of the world.

<comment><USER14> It's not at all clear to me what your objection is. You don't like that the developer is in the UK ? Doesn't seem very rational. You think there are lots of development teams working on this, not just one in the UK ? Okay but the article is about the one in the UK.

<comment><USER13> The article tends to suggest as if some uber-cool team mentioned in this article came up with this idea; while that is clearly not the case. It's media coverage for some random company without any attempt to identify who started this first.

<comment><USER14> Thanks, makes more sense now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Just wait until you're sitting on a ten hour flight next to one of those screens. How many hours of advertising do you reckon it'll broadcast to you?

<comment><USER16> btw, adblocker-AR for the occulus reality browser blocks those.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why do we need the screens? If window weight is a problem, why not just remove them and be done.

<comment><USER18> Note that windows do serve an important safety function in the event of a crash. They allow assessing the conditions outside before opening doors, for example so that passengers don't try to evacuate into a fire. They also allow light inside, which is another reason why window shades are required to be up during takeoff and landing.

Stats including phase of flight [http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm](http://www.planecrashinfo.com/cause.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> They should add an app for tablets and mobile phones to watch multiple cameras from outside.

<comment><USER20> Occulus Rift slaved to multiple camera's would make the entire plane "vanish" (much like current military systems allow pilots to look "through" the plane).

Now _that_ I would pay for :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> All of the top level comments in this thread dismiss this (intriguing) idea. What is it about the hacker community that makes us so quick to find fault with new ideas? My guess: We are people who are struggling with difficult problems all day, so the first thing we do is spot potential problems.

<comment><USER21> It is, plainly, a fairly stupid gimmick.

Hackers, engineers, and those of like mind should (and do) think about things honestly, not positively. Nearly every breakthrough you read about in the news is simply bunk.

If you didn't have this attitude, you'd be fairly disappointed because dozens of times every year cancer is cured, batteries increase capacity by 50%, cheap fusion is almost here, somebody's figured out a free-energy machine... on and on and on.

The world is full of scams, gimmicks, and overexcited news outlets (and self promoting individuals) touting breakthroughs in every field. If you get excited about each one you start to look foolish really quickly.

Some truly exciting things _do_ happen from time to time, but we're pessimistic (nay, realistic) about so many things because that's just how the world is.

<comment><USER14> I agree that healthy skepticism is sensible, but it's easy to let that drift into a "things are going to stay pretty much as they are" bias. Things aren't, not in the medium to long term. Yet I perceive evidence of that bias on Hacker News.

In this particular case, I'd judge some disruption in this area is at least plausible. Adding windows is really difficult from a material science perspective, it creates structural weaknesses that must be compensated for, and making sure those windows never blow out to some 9 sigma safety threshold must be a nightmare. In short the windows impose enormous complications and costs. Last week I flew in an Emirates A380, equipped with a variety of outboard cameras. I got by far the most interesting and beautiful views I've ever seen from an airliner, via both a big screen and the seatback screen. Not by peering out a tiny, awkwardly angled window. It's not implausible to me that this might signal a possible trend for future development.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What now after learning JavaScript? - <AUTHOR> I feel like I have a good idea of Web development HTML/CSS/JS and jQuery but what now?<p>How do I go about getting an entry level job. <comment><USER2> Network with people, apply for jobs. Make sure you have a portfolio of work you can show people.</comment>


Make something and sell it - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/01/22/make-something-and-sell-it/ <comment><USER2> I think this article presents an interesting argument, even though much of it is anecdotal. Some of the author's points are very interesting:

> He says he's an empiricist and that data have convinced him he was dead > wrong. He now says that the idea of giving away intellectual property as > advertising bait is unsustainable and will have dire consequences.

It's too bad the author doesn't go into more detail about this. I'm curious to see his "data".

>It's OK for a potter to sell pots, but a musician should not sell music.

I think I agree with the author - why should a musician not be able to sell their music if they choose. Those who choose to give their music away for free can do so, but suggesting that it's morally wrong to sell music seems, ironically, morally wrong itself.

Not that I necessarily agree, but just to play the devil's advocate - there a really easy solution to the fact that it's so easy to copy intellectual property. The solution is for our governments to disallow it. I'm willing to bet that if the government began criminally prosecuting those who pirated music, movies, and software the problem would significantly decrease.

I'd argue that the real problem isn't that it's too easy to copy intellectual property, but that it's too easy to copy intellectual property over the internet. Intellectual property has been copied for thousands of years, it's only very recently that it became _so_ easy to do it though. 15 years ago there would have been a lot more effort required to copy music than there is today. The problem is that today anyone can copy intellectual property from everyone else on the planet in a matter of seconds. In the past copying intellectual property would have required a much more physical connection to the source: For example exchanging cassette tapes with a friend, or going to the library to checkout a book and photocopy it. These barriers were enough to prevent casual piracy. The barriers today are so insignificant though that casual piracy has become a real problem. I don't think piracy by those who are motivated enough will ever be stopped (just like crime by those who are sufficiently motivated will never be stopped), but I think that curtailing this casual piracy would be enough to solve the problem.

After reading that article I'm very interested in checking out Jaron Lanier's book. Has anyone read it yet - is it a worthwhile read?

<comment><USER3> Pirating music, movies, and software is already illegal, and people do get prosecuted for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Physical objects that are handmade or manufactured have the advantage of not being easily reproducible. Rights management is easy in the physical world; I own an object if I posses it. The object can only be in one place at a time, because it is unique.

Digital goods are inherently more difficult to sell because it is so cheap to copy and distribute them. "Information wants to be free" has a kernel of truth in it; "free" is the most natural state for information. It can be copied easy, quickly, and cheaply.

DRM technologies feel draconian, but probably only because they restrict legitimate fair-use in addition to protecting information from unauthorized distribution. Ultimately, I think more DRM is going to be necessary to protect IP. Fairly soon, all IP is probably going to be distributed online (books, music, movies, etc). If piracy isn't kept to a minimum, it will eventually cannibalize the IP market.

<comment><USER5> "If piracy isn't kept to a minimum, it will eventually cannibalize the IP market"

meh, smart people will find a way to make money, even when economies shift.

<comment><USER2> If that's the case then why haven't smart people figured out a way for game developers to make money while releasing their software as open source? Point me to an example that illustrates how this is possible and I will concede that you're right.

<comment><USER6> I made a little bit of money writing open source game.

Some people, like Jason Rohrer, made his living based on donation from the public and patronage. <http://libregamewiki.org/Jason_Rohrer>

Also, lot of people are probably buying Wesnoth on the iphone judging by tons of iphone reviews that I have spotted using google alert. <http://wesnoth.repositoryhosting.com/trac/wesnoth_wesnoth/>

Game developers DOES make money while releasing open source software. I just hope you don't move the goalpost in your next comment.

<comment><USER2> Can you provide a link to your games or more info? I'd be curious to see.

I'm still not entirely convinced. In both of your examples it's not clear that it's possible to make a sustainable income, 10k is not imo a sustainable income, admittedly that's partly my fault though for not making my original question clear. I upvoted you for your examples though, since you did technically meet the requirements I asked for.

<comment><USER6> * <http://wiki.kibabase.com/Codename_Subnem> \- a game development research project. Still ongoing. Second job.

* <http://wiki.kibabase.com/Ruby-Warrior> \- outfit the game with a graphical front-end. First job.

They are only small jobs with very little pay. However, I am just a high- schooler with only a few years of programming experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _There's an anti-intellectual thread running through these arguments. It's a primitive way of thinking, valuing only tangible artifacts and not ideas. It's OK for a potter to sell pots, but a musician should not sell musics._

It's a poor ad hominem that this thinking is "primitive" and "anti- intellectual".

People like the economist, Mike Masnic explains and then build on freeminum business model and the nature of non-scarce goods for years

* <http://www.techdirt.com/rtb.php>

Two economists wrote an entire book on why intellectual property is flawed. It's also quite a history lesson in itself since it cover century of IP history.

*[http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...](http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm)

</comment><comment><USER7> _Musicians should give away their music and make money off concerts and T-shirts._

Why not give away the music onlne and also sell CDs?

 _Authors should give away their books and make money on the lecture circuit._

Or do like Doctorow and give away the actual contents of the books as well as selling printed versions.

 _Programmers should give away their software and make money from consulting._

Alternatively, open source the software and charge for a hosted solution. At this point you're not charging for the software, you're charging for the server resources and bandwidth that a user consumes.

I'm not a fan of creating atificial scarcity, as in DRM on bits that cost nothing to duplicate, but if you're also making available formats that cost to produce, then why not charge for those? They're not artificially scarce.

<comment><USER8> _I'm not a fan of creating atificial scarcity, as in DRM on bits that cost nothing to duplicate_

I'm a fan of creating artificial scarcity, if it is what the seller prefers. I'm disturbed by the number of Hackers who would prefer to strip individuals of their rights to do business as they please, selling products on their on terms.

The marginal costs couldn't be more irrelevant to the discussion.</comment></comment>


NY explorers find 1872 shipwreck of rare Great Lakes vessel - <AUTHOR> http://www.ksby.com/story/33791574/ny-explorers-find-1872-shipwreck-of-rare-great-lakes-vessel <comment><USER2> In hull design and purpose, this ship sounds to be similar to, though smaller than, the scow schooner Alma that sails San Francisco Bay from the maritime museum.</comment>


IPhone M7 chip counts your steps even after the battery dies - <AUTHOR> http://www.iphonehacks.com/2014/03/iphone-5s-m7-chip-battery.html

<comment><USER2> When the M7 chip was first announced, there was much speculation as to why it was a separate chip rather than part of the main CPU.

A fair number of people were reasoning it could suggest it would be used in some other unannounced device (such as a watch etc).

While that's still possible of course, this is a much simpler explanation for the decision to have it as a standalone chip.</comment>


Wired Magazine's Editor Serves Up Nonsense on "Demise" of Scientific Method - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/07/wired-magazines.html <comment><USER2> Cool article, but I wish they got the point at the beginning, instead of the end:

"It's only possible to advance when you understand the whys behind the what happened - how can you get to the moon armed only with the knowledge that things don't go up? Just observing patterns and saying you're done is what came BEFORE science."</comment>


Ancestral home of modern humans is in Botswana, study finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/oct/28/ancestral-home-of-modern-humans-is-in-botswana-study-finds <comment><USER2> _"It is not possible to make inferences about the geographical origin of modern humans in Africa based solely on patterns of variation in modern populations. This is because humans migrate over long distances. They migrated out of Africa and across the globe within the past 80,000 years and they have migrated across Africa in the recent and ancient past."_

</comment><comment><USER3> Hmm, according to this [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170523083548.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170523083548.htm)

it seems that is not the case, or at least it is not clear where we all started ?</comment>