Where has all the money in the world gone? - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/finance/comments/utf5u/where_has_all_the_money_in_the_world_gone/ <comment><USER2> If you have fun reading crazy whack conspiratorial blogs, this thread lead to a couple great ones:

\- [http://www.divinecosmos.com/start-here/davids- blog/995-lawsu...](http://www.divinecosmos.com/start-here/davids- blog/995-lawsuit-end-tyranny)

\- <http://benjaminfulford.net/>

I liked the two whackos interviewing one another:

        BF: They offered me at one point the job of Finance Minister of Japan.
        DW: Finance minister of Japan. Right.
        BF: They also, believe it or not, offered me General Electric and General Motors.
        DW: Like you would be the CEO, or something?
        BF: Yeah, and I guess the chief shareholder. The problem, of course,
            is I had to go along with their plan to kill four billion people.
            It's the classic "sell your soul to the devil" situation.

</comment><comment><USER3> The fundamental problem is that the monetary systems of the modern world are all designed on the Wile E. Coyote principle. As long as you never look down, the system works.

In the U.S. there is ~$14 trillion in government debt. There exists tens of trillion more in private debt. But only $2 trillion exists in bonafide, actual, real honest-to-goodness dollars (I'm including in that count accounts at the federal reserve, not just paper money).

How is this system sustainable? How can any of this debt ever be repaid? Well, since everyone knows the government can print money, most people do not worry about the government being insolvent. A dollar T-Bill is as good as a dollar green bill, both are backed by the full faith and credit of the USG. If the government needs to, it can always print money to redeem mature treasury debt. Since no one worries about insolvency, most people would rather have treasury bills (or a deposit account or CD backed by TBills) because they pay interest. So the $14 trillion rolls over in perpetuity. In reality, $14 trillion is not really debt, since it is nonsensical to speak of debt that one owes oneself and can negate by printing paper. The $14 trillion _is the money supply_ \- T-Bills are just a dividend paying form of money.

However, the situation in Europe is much more sticky. Europe runs the same type of monetary system. There are tens of trillions in Euro denominated debt, but only $1.3 trillion in actual bonafide Euros. However - unlike with the dollar - the countries that created this debt do not have the power to create Euros. So as suddenly as markets lose confidence in the debt, it becomes impossible to roll over the debt and pay it off. There simply are not enough Euros in the world to pay off even a small amount of debt. Every single country in Europe would be insolvent if investors look down and lose confidence. Even Germany could not pay its debt if investors demanded redemption at maturity The European Union government could order the european central bank to print money to buy out the debt, but this creates all sorts of political conflict as it results in transferring real wealth from country A to country B.

So that's why Europe is stuck. It adopted a monetary system that works when the government controls the currency, and adopted it in a situation where governments cannot print money. No one in Europe has the brains or authority to actually refactor and re-architect the system, so they are just muddling around, following the path of least resistance and putting in stop-gap measures.

My own pet solution is on my blog: <http://intellectual-detox.com/europes- crisis/> If anybody from the ECB reads Hacker News, I am available for hire as a consultant at the low, low fee of 1 ounce of gold an hour :-)

<comment><USER4> You ask how any of this debt can ever be repaid. But is this really what we want to achieve? Repay the debt? If money is, like in the reddit post, an IOU (or a certain unit of debt), then the idea is to balance out the amount of money (debt) with the growth of the economy. Too much and we got inflation. Too little and we cripple the economy.

I'm very curious why debt should be repaid at all, care to explain?

(Note: I think one's own debt is different than the debt in an economic scale)

<comment><USER5> Here is the catch in the 21st century - we are creating debt in exchange for things that can create goods without human intervention.

The entire monetary system is built off the idea of trading goods and services that are the products of human labor. Things like automated assembly lines are a precursor - when we had 3d printing, you remove all human factors in the creation of goods besides the raw resource acquisition, and sufficiently advanced printers can also decompose trash into reusable pieces so you don't even need raw materials any more besides power.

All our financial woes and economic malnourishment is the product of this system, beneath government welfare overspending the budget, it is why corporations post record profits while laying off thousands and why all that money goes to the top of the management. When the actual consumable and usable goods are not produced by people, the sale of individual units breaks down.

Look no further than media. Media is an upfront cost of creation, but reproduction is free. The current system is so broken because it tries to charge per unit as if unit production has an associated cost, where the cost is the funding, not the distribution. That problem only gets worse as we automate everything more and more (automated cars replace drivers, 3d printers replace small scale manufacturing...).

That leads to a big one. Automated mining and farming. Fully, with no human intervention, where you can set off a robot with some pre-programmed track of land to till or dig and it will extract all the resources from that area for you. Once that happens everything goes out the window, because a single point of sale unit of production (plus maintinance, which then gets ursurped by the singularity making machines improve themselves) where once one of these machines is available, resources are no longer scarce.

And then money breaks down. Because when human effort is no longer involved in the day to day operations of goods production, there is no continuous "cost" involved anymore, in the terms the Reddit thread describes, or how most people interpret goods and labor.

<comment><USER6> Once you make movie A, the next million copies of movie A are essentially free. So we divide the cost of A by the number of units we expect to sell, rather than charging the full price of it to the first viewer, and giving it away to the others.

Crucially, and this is where the whole utopian post-scarcity dream falls apart, the cost of making movie B doesn't significantly depend on the cost of movie A. Because a movie isn't a "thing". Movie B is a different thing than movie A.

<comment><USER7> And then we apply the same principle to a song. Once you record the first song, the next million copies of it distributed via internet is basically free. Or is it. It would be nearly free if there were no fat cats in the middle.

<comment><USER6> Distribution is free - but shouldn't the band be paid what they would have gotten with no record label in the way? That may mean songs on iTMS being 10p instead of 99p - don't creators of products you want deserve paying?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I just finished David Graeber's "Debt", and it really enlightened me on this subject more than anything in that reddit thread. It's one of the most scholarly, informative, provocative books I've read in a very long time. I'm actually reading it a second time through, just to make sure I understand it all.

<comment><USER9> I've been reading large chunks of that and it's both good and bad. The good parts are where he sticks to his core strength of anthropology -- it's filled with fascinating descriptions of how commerce and law worked in various societies, ancient and modern, from the Irish monks who sat down and figured out the precise compensation that you need to pay if one of your bee stings another man [the regular price of the sting minus the cost of the bee] to the spear/cloth bartering festival slash orgies of some Aboriginal tribe. Lots of fascinating stuff there.

He is on much shakier territory when he starts to enter into the economists' domain. He's probably correct when he declares that the inefficient pre-money "barter economy" has never actually existed, but then he breaks his arm patting himself on the back to say he's smarter than all the economists who always use this as an example when explaining why we have money.

When it comes time to actually try to explain debt itself, he's really lost. He starts the book by posing a question: how is it that the language of debt got so wound up in the language of morality; by extension, why do we think it's immoral to not pay our debts? He never seems to come around to the obvious answer: that a debt is a promise, a promise of money later in exchange for money now, and that breaking your promises is seen as immoral because it breaks the reciprocity that underlies almost all human interactions. He seems to have a mental image of "debt" as something that a loan shark puts you in so that he can break your legs afterwards, rather than the vast majority of the world's responsible debt arrangements which wind up beneficial to both parties.

Anyway, I'd say Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years" has some interesting bits but a bunch of flaws. And this comment is only this long because I don't have an account on Amazon.

<comment><USER10> The point that the morality of debt is based on the fact that it's a promise already appears on page 4. Similarly the very last paragraph, begins "What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence..."

And so on. Might want to read more than "chunks" of a book before lecturing the world on what's not in it.

<comment><USER9> Dave, Dave, don't be so defensive! I mean, I spend time googling for my name too, but I manage to resist the temptation to throw myself into any discussion of my work, it just comes across badly. I mean, I did go and buy a copy of your book, hardback too, and I did just go and give you a semi-positive review in which I heartily recommended large chunks of it. I really did enjoy quite a lot of it.

You're right, page 4 does mention the idea that a debt is a promise. But it's immediately pooh-poohed as an idea that's "dangerous because it's self- evident". And the last paragraph does call a debt a "promise corrupted by both math and violence", but it's not clear how anything is "corrupted" here. So yeah, you _acknowledge_ this self-evident idea, but only to dismiss it without a proper argument.

Also while you're here (actually yours is _exactly_ the kind of book that I read while wishing that I could argue with the author about certain points, so it really is a privilege to have you here and I hope that doesn't sound like a backhanded compliment), the _other_ point I think you dismiss without enough of a fight is the idea that all human interactions are based on reciprocity. There is of course _one_ counter-example, the child-parent relationship in which the parent is generally happy to give selflessly, but that's a special case which seems to be more-or-less hard-coded into our genes; our minds are programmed to give selflessly to our children since from our genes' point of view they're nearly equivalent to ourselves. Once we step _outside_ the parent-child relationship, however, your other examples of non-reciprocal human behaviour (apart from outright theft, extortion and other forms of behaviour where one party isn't consenting) don't ring true. Two labourers working on the same project will, of course, pass each other hammers, but there _is_ an expectation of reciprocity even in group work, as anyone who has ever worked in a group with someone not pulling their weight will know.

In conclusion, you've written an interesting history of debt, but I think you've started off with some kind of antipathy towards debt which has stopped you from really gaining a good perspective on it. I still don't understand the objection to the basic concept of debt: that if Alice has something and Bob needs it then Alice can lend Bob that thing and get it back in the future, for mutual benefit. I find that to be a glorious example of human interaction at its best. But then again, I've already paid off my mortgage.

<comment><USER11> Hopefully "Dave, Dave" will ignore this (maybe unwitting) trolling.

There's many ways where those with surplus wealth can give it to those with insufficient wealth. Anyone here on HN can name multiple forms of investment/subsidy (such as venture capital, or the goverment subsidy which led to computers and the internet), and some may even be at work at more advanced forms of credit unions (such as Mike Leung's work on participatory credit unions).

Furthermore, anyone who's skimmed the book's first chapter can see that this poster's original post was beyond uninformed, taking a point _Debt_ carefully discusses in the first few pages, and presents it as if the author never anticipated it. Same with the book's discussion of commercial reciprocity vs. mutual aid in chapter 5.

David just helpfully posted here to point out the obvious...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here is an answer from Quora that really resonated with me: [http://www.quora.com/In-recent-days-trillions-of-dollars- of-...](http://www.quora.com/In-recent-days-trillions-of-dollars-of-wealth- has-been-wiped-off-global-stock-markets-Where-has-it-all-gone/answer/Ben- Golub)

Basically, these wealth were expectations.

<comment><USER13> That guy is talking about stock value, not money itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The question is wrong - the assumption is that the quantity of money has decreased, while purchases ("Aggregate demand") are the same. If fact its exactly the other way around.

Anyone who misses this fact is very unlikely to give a correct explanation. And the explanation is in an Econ 101 course.

<comment><USER13> I agree with you technically speaking, but another way of thinking about it is that cashflow is really what we think of when we think "quantity of money" (Adam Smith, a gold piece that sits in a chest is realy not part of the money supply, yaddayadda). Cashflow (aka NGDP) is actually way down: [http://marketmonetarist.com/2012/06/19/guest-post- measuring-...](http://marketmonetarist.com/2012/06/19/guest-post-measuring- the-stance-of-monetary-policy-through-ngdp-and-prices-by-integral/)

...it looks like this is the distinction you're making when you say Aggregate demand, I'm really just adding this comment to help other people better understand your comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Khan Academy should hire that person.

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's my attempt, without talking about apples or anything:

Essentially, the 'money supply' is determined by the central bank, since they are the issuers of money. You can read on your US dollars that they are issued by the federal reserve. An excellent measure of the money supply is NGDP, since this is the number of dollars traded every year (that sort of quantifies how many dollars are available to be captured by working, trade, etc.). Unfortunately, in 2008, the US Fed decided to adopt an ultra-tight monetary policy, resulting in a severe drop-off in NGDP relative to previous trend (the worst since the Great Depression, graphs here: [http://marketmonetarist.com/2012/06/19/guest-post- measuring-...](http://marketmonetarist.com/2012/06/19/guest-post-measuring- the-stance-of-monetary-policy-through-ngdp-and-prices-by-integral/))

It does not look like it will ever recover to the previous trend, so the money supply is much smaller than people would have expected before 2008. In theory, the nominal value of money shouldn't matter in the long run. However, since people before 2008 signed contracts (read, 30-year mortgages) anticipating a much higher aggregate money supply, this has triggered a shortfall in demand ever since, which has left our economy in the tank.

<comment><USER16> _Essentially, the 'money supply' is determined by the central bank, since they are the issuers of money._

It's not as simple as that. The amount of money in public circulation is largely determined by banks, because every loan given increases the amount of (electronic) money in circulation. The central bank then adjusts the amount of central bank money (reserves) by open market operations, but it does so defensively, to defend its interest rate target. So yes, with an interest rate target of essentially 0%, they can increase the amount of reserves out there, but this does not translate to more money in public circulation.

Modern Monetary Theory contains probably the best summaries of how this works.

<comment><USER13> > So yes, with an interest rate target of essentially 0%, they can increase > the amount of reserves out there, but this does not translate to more money > in public circulation.

Sorry just noticed this. This is a common misperception. They have been using QE to create more money in public circulation now that interest rates are 0, and there's nothing ineffectual about that.

To see why this is possible, just consider the question, could the Fed create inflation at the 0-lower-bound by saying they will print money until they get it? The answer is clearly yes. Actually the Bank of Switzerland did that recently to set a Euro peg.

<comment><USER16> I guess it depends on what you mean by public circulation. QE was certainly effective in raising the amount of reserves, since that is what it is by definition. But reserves are only ever held by banks. The amount of money held by the non-bank public has not been changed significantly by QE.

As for targeting the money supply, you're right, they could do that, and in fact they did try it a few decades ago. The problem that was observed is that it created extreme volatility in the interest rate. The lesson learned from the experiment is that either the interest rate or the money supply has to be volatile, and there's general consensus that a volatile interest rate hurts the economy, whereas a volatile money supply has marginal effects at best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The answer by Redditor otherwiseyep is really, really good as a quick public forum answer.

Definitely worth reading for those of us five-year-old-equivalents in terms of knowledge of macroeconomics.

</comment><comment><USER18> A lot of the money essentially evaporated when borrowers defaulted on bank loans. Banks have the ability to temporarily create new money (subject to reserve requirements) by issuing a loan, and then that extra money is gradually retired as the borrower repays with interest. But when the borrower defaults the created money goes away all at once and reduces the bank's capital reserves, which in turn reduces the amount the bank can lend in the future.

</comment><comment><USER19> Very interesting explanation, but unless I missed something, the concluding statement is simply incorrect, which makes the whole thing _wrong_.

> _So now you're still growing apples, but instead of trading them for deer- > haunches and shoes, you trade them for Loddars. So far, so good. Once again, > you want some meat, except harvest time hasn't come yet so you don't have > any Loddars to buy meat with. You call me up (cellphones have been invented > in this newly-efficient economy), "Hey otherwiseyep, any chance you could > kill me a deer and I'll give you ten Loddars for it at harvest-time?" I say, > "Jeez, I'd love to, but I really need all the cash I can get for every deer > right now: my kid is out-growing shoes like crazy. Tell you what: if you can > write me a promise to pay twelve Loddars in October, I can give that to the > shoe-maker." You groan about the "interest rate" but agree.

Did a lightbulb just go off? You and I have once again created Money. Twelve loddars now exist in the town economy that have not been printed by the central bank. Counting all the money trading hands in the village, there are now (a) all the loddars that have ever been printed, plus (b) twelve more that you have promised to produce._

"Loddars" are essentially dollars, a physical form of currency. The apple farmer does not have any loddars, but he promises to give twelve loddars to the hunter at harvest-time. The loddars come from people purchasing his apples, which have already been printed, thus are already in the system. Since loddars have been standardized by the central bank by this point, an apple farmer cannot simply 'create loddars' out of thin air. He can promise loddars, but that's very different than actually creating loddars. New money has not entered the economy.

<comment><USER20> You wouldn't have been able to create Loddars if you said "Well the value of an IOU from the apple farmer has been established at this point so you can't just create a Loddar". But Loddars were created because money is an IOU for anything. And so you can create new money by creating a new IOU even though Loddars exist.

<comment><USER21> I keep wondering:

When you create this new IOU you basically start to repeat the process that resulted in Loddars in the first place; you could theoretically repeat it with the new IOU. Isn't it getting recursive? :).

<comment><USER22> Yes, and in fact this happens many times over:

Greg gets a loan from the Bank for $5000. Greg gives Stacey the $5000 to buy her car. Stacey deposits the $5000 in the bank. Bob gets a loan from the Bank for $4500. Bob deposits this $4500 in his bank account to spend. Mark gets a loan from the Bank for $4000. And it goes on.

In the United States: Of less than $11.5 million have no minimum reserve requirement; Between $11.5 million and $71.0 million must have a liquidity ratio of 3%; Exceeding $71.0 million must have a liquidity ratio of 10%.

That means mosts Banks only have to retain 10% of their money as cash and can continue to recursively loan out the rest of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One of the best explanations about all of this is in the book _How an Economy Grows and Why it Doesn't_ by Irwin Schiff <http://freedom- school.com/money/how-an-economy-grows.pdf>

It seems this explanation is somewhat of a rehash of that book. The book is relatively short and well worth your time if you found this reddit answer interesting.

</comment><comment><USER24> Can I just ask a question

we produce money as a form of IOU against the future production of the economy, (apples).

This debt is really an increase in the money supply

each year the government borrows some more - increasing the supply by hopefully an accurate guess of future production

if it's a bridge I get it. Gov borrows 1 bn, builds a bridge, there is a new billion dollars worth of value in the economy

but apples? If I eat an apple and throw away the core do we then have to reduce the money supply by the price of an apple? When and how is this done?

I can see some of the value of the IOU I used to buy the apple hanging around in forms of greengrocer shops, farm worker jobs etc. But some of it really is now, gone

maybe I should have listened more carefully in economics lectures.

<comment><USER25> I think the apple was only ever valuable in the sense that it had some calories and could keep you alive a bit longer, long enough to keep on working a bit more and generating other forms of value for others.

Value is a very strange concept, if there were no people then apples would be of no value. If there were people but they all agreed they didn't want apples and weren't prepared to work for them then they wouldn't have any value. They value of apples is defined by how many other people want them and how hard they are prepared to work in return for them. When you eat an apple you stay alive and thereby increase the value of all future apples.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It is mathematically impossible for all of the debt in the world to be repaid (without more debt, and it's this way by design).

Money is debt, and debt is slavery. Shhh! You're not supposed to look behind the curtain.

<comment><USER27> If you red the reddit answer carefully, you would know that there never was enough money to pay the dept in the first place. That is the whole point of dept. You don't have enough money for something _at the moment_ , so you borrow it and pay it back when you have accumulated the money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I recommend watching Money as Debt (<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2550156453790090544>). This fascinating video explains the roots and consequences of the crisis in the very visual way. For a more scientific approach take a look at The Debt Deflation Theory (<http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/docs/meltzer/fisdeb33.pdf>).

</comment><comment><USER29> A possibly relevant, interesting wiki I ran across recently: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_money>

</comment><comment><USER30> Money is debt, but on a more fundamental level it's a combination of trust and confidence. Those things are necessary for doing business, and they can be destroyed.

</comment><comment><USER31> this is essentially described in "Money as debt" <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2550156453790090544> If you ignore really low production value, it's a really informative piece on how modern money works.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's been a long time since I read it, but the top reply on Reddit reminds me of _Human Action_ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Action> (the wiki synopsis doesn't remind me at all of the book I read) by Ludwig von Mises <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_von_Mises>. Once somewhat influential I think the book has fallen into obscurity. My memory is von Mises constructed a rational economic system using a _bottom up_ approach starting with _human action_ , rather like the the Reddit poster attempts.

</comment><comment><USER33> The so-called "fiat money" (i.e., money not backed by a commodity) used by modern economies is controlled by a central bank whose overriding goal is maintaining monetary and financial stability. Only the central bank can issue new money or take it out of circulation.

Note that this is just a _political_ arrangement that prevents the parts of a government that spend money from conjuring it out of thin air. For example, in the U.S., President Obama can't just call Ben Bernanke and demand that the Federal Reserve issue more money to pay for the federal government's expenditures; instead, the federal government must either collect additional taxes or borrow funds from investors, and the Federal Reserve _independently_ gets to decide if, how, and when to issue new money (or take it out of circulation) to fulfill its dual objectives of monetary and financial stability.

Typically, central banks like the Federal Reserve issue money (or take it out of circulation) via two mechanisms:

(1) The central bank can buy and sell government bonds to expand or contract the amount of money in circulation and/or push interest rates up or down. When a central bank buys such bonds, it pays with newly issued money, thereby replacing one government obligation (bonds) with another (money) of equal present value; and when the central bank sells any government bonds it holds, the money it receives is taken out of circulation (i.e., destroyed).

(2) Certain private-sector financial firms can borrow directly from the central bank, which lends them newly issued money, thus acquiring a new financial instrument (a loan to a private-sector entity) and issuing a new obligation (money) of equal magnitude; when the loan is repaid, the central bank takes the money out of circulation, reducing government claims and obligations by the same magnitude.

The money issued by a central bank, which is held only by depositary institutions like banks, is called "reserves." The aggregate of all bank reserves (plus all paper currency in circulation, to be precise) is called the "monetary base."

In normal times, whenever bank reserves grow beyond required legal minimums, banks supposedly make more loans, thereby increasing the amount of money flowing through the economy and promoting economic growth. In other words, an increase in the monetary base is supposed to result in an increase in the money supply.

However, at present, for whatever reasons (and there is much debate among professional economists as to what those reasons might be), the monetary base has grown immensely[1], but banks are _not_ making the expected additional loans, so the amount of money flowing through the economy is not growing as economists would expect in normal times.[2] "Money velocity" (a measure of the number of times money gets turned over in the economy) has collapsed.[3]

So, that's the answer to the question, "where has all the money gone?"

\--

[1] You can see the incredible growth in the U.S. monetary base here: <http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BASE/>

[2] You can see the incredible growth in excess reserves in the U.S. banking system here: <http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/EXCRESNS?cid=123>

[3] You can see the dramatic drop in U.S. money velocity here: <http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M2V?cid=32242>

<comment><USER34> And you can read a fairly technical description (written in 1999) of the current situation here:

Thinking about the liquidity trap: <http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/trioshrt.html>

<comment><USER33> Yup.

The source material on liquidity traps (written in 1936): <http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/keynes/john_maynard/k44g/>

An alternative explanation on why they happen (written in 1933) here: <http://fraser.stlouisfed.org/docs/meltzer/fisdeb33.pdf>

And yet another alternative explanation here: <http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp74.pdf>

All three explanations written by people who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930's. All three worth reading IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35>

</comment><comment><USER36> Watch Zeitgeist Moving Forward and you'd understand.

<comment><USER37> It is so easy to find just plain wrong information on the internet these days. The problem is people don't know what they can and cannot trust, so it continues to perpetuate itself even amongst more intelligent people.

<comment><USER38> Why don't you address the points in the movie instead of starting a personal attack?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The money-go-round slowed down a bit.

</comment><comment><USER40> Swiss Banks....

</comment><comment><USER41> When you learn how money really works, you begin to understand just how diabolical our entire socio-economic system is. Inflation, recessions, boom- bust, the stock market, fractional reserve banking, interest rates... it's all rigged, a giant shell game, and it boils down to an invisible whip that the rich use to keep people working for things they don't really need and to pay taxes for the sole purpose of perpetuating a perverted economic system.

<comment><USER42> I don't know about you, but I have had down periods in my life, when I wasn't actually producing anything of value. If we actually used a barter economy then I would starve, or be reduced to sweating in a field growing plants. But since we live in a world where money is transferrable and credit is obtainable, I can weather those periods just fine and live in a decent house with air conditioning in the summer and heating in the winter.

The best evidence that people really like to have transferrable currencies is that they develop independently in just about every market in the world. For example, ancient Africans used Cowry shells. Players of the videogame Diablo 2 used a particular ring, the Stone of Jordan.

While there's certainly fraud and even systemic failure at times, it's hard not to appreciate all that liberal economics has done for our quality of life.

<comment><USER11> It actually turns out that barter is one of the founding myths of modern economics. Notice that economics books always have these invented stories of quaint towns (or savage tribes) of people in the same community bartering; they don't actually offer historical evidence. Turns out there is none. When people trade in a community, credit systems predate currencies, which predates barter. This is the opposite of the usual myth (where everyone barters like fools, then they use currency, then they tech up to credit).

And they also make the strange assumption they'd be engaging in the "spot trade," which also is ahistorical. It's not like you'd come to me with shoes and I'd hand over a sack of potatoes. If we're neighbors, our relationship wouldn't be about market transactions (unless I suppose we're hostile and untrusting, so we'd better trade simultaneously so we don't rip each other off).

I think Graeber's _Debt: The First 5,000 Years_ is the most illuminating source on the subject. (<http://www.amazon.com/Debt-The- First-000-Years/dp/1933633867>)

<comment><USER43> I was reading some artist biographies from the 1800s recently. What amazed me was the credit system that allowed them to work and travel nearly as freely a the modern hacker would do. Instead of credit cards you had a network of IOUs, which enabled the economy to keep going.

Of course much of that network got wiped out in the 30s recession.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Corral everyone into centralized monetary dictatorships, and this is what happens. What did you expect?

It doesn't matter how you design the monetary system, what matters is that it's centralized -- a mandated system backed by SWAT teams. Create that, and you've just created a system that will inevitably result in sweeping financial destruction throughout the economy.

What we need is the diversification a free market money system would provide.

<comment><USER45> _It doesn't matter how you design the monetary system, what matters is that it's centralized -- a mandated system backed by SWAT teams. Create that, and you've just created a system that will inevitably result in sweeping financial destruction throughout the economy._

I don't follow. Can you elucidate how the first sentence leads to the second?

<comment><USER44> [https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByyIBJqJ0pDBZDAyY2FhODUtYTY0...](https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByyIBJqJ0pDBZDAyY2FhODUtYTY0NC00ODk5LTg5ODctMjA2OGUxOWRiZjRm/edit?pli=1)

<comment><USER45> That entire article is moot because (a) we're not on the gold standard and (b) it fails to account for risk. But I'll humor you and prove the article illogical two different ways.

Assume we _were_ on the gold standard. The amount of gold in the world is limited. Most importantly, it does not grow exponentially with our economy (which is in fact the product of two exponentials -- population growth and technology growth). A gold standard is therefore deflationary in nature, meaning that the value of 1 oz of gold grows over time. This means that on the gold standard, interest rates would be FAR lower (probably even 0%) due to the inherent "interest" built into gold. However the article assumes both a gold standard (in the first paragraph), and moderate interest rates (5%). Therefore the article is inconsistent and illogical.

Let us instead limit our scope to risk-free loans (e.g. T-bonds). Take risk out of the equation and interest rates simply counteract inflation, meaning that the buying power of your loaned money remains constant. However, the article assumes both risk-free loans (since it does not account for losses due to defaults), and that one can purchase absurd quantities of goods with interest compounded over several years (which is not true if buying power remains constant). Therefore the article is inconsistent and illogical.

Furthermore, you did not state how this relates to the _first_ half of what I quoted -- something about SWAT-team enforced standards. I am still utterly in the dark about the relevance of this to monetary policy. (Wouldn't any policy, e.g. gold standard, require some form of law enforcement to _keep people from robbing each other_?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> "E.g., a new farmer with no track-record might have to promise me twice as many potatoes in exchange for a deer haunch, due to the risk that I might never see any potatoes at all."

This part of our system doesn't make any sense to me. What makes you think someone's gonna have more incentive to "pay up" if they now have to work twice as hard?

<comment><USER30> It's set by supply and demand, not by logical inference. Low risk investments are more in demand, driving their price up and thus lessening their return. High risk investments are in less demand, so their price falls, making the return higher.</comment></comment>


Never Fight a Land War in Asia - <AUTHOR> http://forrestkyle.blogspot.com/2012/08/never-fight-land-war-in-asia.html

<comment><USER2> You haven't seen the lightning bolts, yet!</comment>


Diagnosing a Linux-only unit test failure - <AUTHOR> https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2017/10/08/diagnosing-a-linux-only-unit-test-failure/ <comment><USER2> > Tests that only fail in CI are really annoying. I've had this a couple of > times, and it's always taken hours to sort out, because the "try something, > get results, think about what they mean" cycle is so slow.

To address this, CircleCI has an interesting feature where you can enable SSH access to the build, so one can investigate locally (relative to the build) instead of repeatedly throwing code over the wall and waiting for something remotely meaningful to come back in logs.

<comment><USER3> Travis actually has this[1], too, if you ask their support to have the feature beta enabled for your repo. A while back, I was having a CI only test failure that was a massive pain to try and debug, and this helped enormously as I could explore the build state and try alternatives without waiting on the typical build time.

[1][https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/running-build-in-debug- mode/](https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/running-build-in-debug-mode/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I ran into a similar issue years ago. Our tests, written on macos, were failing on linux, because pdftotext was producing different output.

I traced down the logic, added some debugging print statements, and it magically fixed itself.

Eventually, I figured out the issue that they were comparing floats with == and intel processors have a few extra internal bits that disappear when stored. Macos, which uses floats in its UI layer, defaults to adding -ffloat- store to the compile flags to get around similar issues.

I ended up just adding -ffloat-store to our Linux build of pdftotext. (I briefly thought about fixing the comparisons, but it turned out the code was full of them.)

</comment><comment><USER5> > My next step is definitely to try to find some history of this issue

Well, you know exactly how to reproduce the issue, so git bisect it to find the exact commit that fixed it and how. Granted, it may take a very long time, given the size of .Net Core.

</comment><comment><USER6> Comparing doubles with == ?

<comment><USER7> That's absolutely fine if they are set with explicit values or were assigned with the same double. The main issues used to be with the old x86 80 bit wide floating point registers which meant you could sometimes find x != x depending on whether the number went to memory and back.

<comment><USER8> There's also oddity around NaN - if x is NaN, then, on a compliant chip, x != x regardless of whether it's ever visited main memory.

If you find some reason to use a NaN inside one of these GeoPoints (at one of the poles, perhaps), and the equality of them depends on the equality of doubles, then you may give your users a bit of a surprise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Read this, thought it was well written and thought out, look up at the headline... "Oh man, Jon Skeet!"

Fun problem.

</comment><comment><USER10> Not directly related to the article, but string interpolation in code samples in step 6 looks somewhat unreadable without proper syntax coloring:

      Console.WriteLine($"lhs=({lhs.x}, {lhs.y}); rhs=({rhs.x}, {rhs.y})");
      Console.WriteLine($"{lhs.x == rhs.x}, {lhs.y == rhs.y}");

<comment><USER11> They look fine to me, but I guess it helps that both Python and Rust use the same interpolation style.

<comment><USER12> Err... do either python or rust allow this style, in both languages I've always used

        ("lhs=({}, {}); rhs=({}, {})", lhs.x, lhs.y, rhs.x, rhs.y)

<comment><USER13> Python added "f strings" recently (read: in 2015)[1], which look like

        f"{some_var}"

which evaluates "some_var" in the local scope. Sort of like Ruby's "#{...}" (if I'm remembering that syntax correctly). Rust supports named parameters in format strings[2] but that's not quite the same.

[1]: [https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0498/](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0498/) [2]: [https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/fmt/#named-parameters](https://doc.rust- lang.org/std/fmt/#named-parameters)

<comment><USER14> Note that you can do this in old version of Python, too, using the "format- locals" idiom:

        some_var = ...

        "{some_var}".format(**locals())

Although this does have some limitations regarding variables to strictly being in the local scope, this is a fine idiom if you need to be compatible with older Python versions.

<comment><USER13> That is a bit of a hack though ;). You could also do it with %-style formatting as well:

      some_var = ...
      "%(some_var)s" % locals()

If you want to do both locals and globals you can do:

      some_var = ...
      "%(some_var)s" % dict(globals(), **locals())

New Python versions (>=3.5) have this syntax:

      "%(some_var)s" % {**globals(), **locals()}

But those versions also have f-strings so that's sort of moot.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Adversarial Policies: Attacking Deep Reinforcement Learning - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10615 <comment><USER2> This article is not good, I encourage reading the paper its based on instead: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.10615.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.10615.pdf)

"In some ways, adversarial policies are more worrying than attacks on supervised learning models, because reinforcement learning policies govern an AI's overall behavior.If a driverless car misclassifies input from its camera, it could fall back on other sensors, for example." TIL fail-safe components are 1) ubiquitous 2) work 3) only an option for supervised learning components.

"A supervised learning model, trained to classify images, say, is tested on a different data set from the one it was trained on to ensure that it has not simply memorized a particular bunch of images. But with reinforcement learning, models are typically trained and tested in the same environment." First, a RL environment is not equivalent to a supervised learning data set. Second, the train validate test paradigm is not thrown out in RL research, its why OpenAI put their Starcraft agent on public ladders.

"The good news is that adversarial policies may be easier to defend against than other adversarial attacks." This sentence refers to Graves et al. adversarially training their agents. Adversarial training is, of course, also conducted frequently in supervised learning.

<comment><USER3> Ok, we've changed to the paper from [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615299/reinforcement- lear...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615299/reinforcement-learning- adversarial-attack-gaming-ai-deepmind-alphazero-selfdriving-cars/). Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The actual paper seems to be this: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10615](https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10615)

PDF: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.10615.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.10615.pdf)

Website with videos: [https://adversarialpolicies.github.io/](https://adversarialpolicies.github.io/) (that would make a better submission imho)

Github: [https://github.com/HumanCompatibleAI/adversarial- policies](https://github.com/HumanCompatibleAI/adversarial-policies)

You have to stretch the definition of "new" somewhat to come up with the title TR chose, adversarial effects in all kinds of learning settings certainly aren't, the paper itself seems to contain quite interesting thoughts on how to assess them though (as opposed to just using them to steer the training process).

</comment><comment><USER5> Could we say the adversary agent is hypnotizing the victim?

<comment><USER6> It's not too different from shiny bezels reflecting light and the glimmer stunning the onlooker. I was surprised how brightly lit a jewelry shop I walked into was. The light reflection from a certain watch stunned me and I felt almost lightheaded. Are shiny objects the most primitive form of hypnosis? The cheapest watch was 9k...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Non paywalled version: [https://outline.com/ekbXnD](https://outline.com/ekbXnD)

<comment><USER8> Doesn't matter. It's Technology Review, a company that paid MIT for use of its name to get "appeal to authority" credibility for its bad articles.</comment></comment>


I worked in an Amazon warehouse. Bernie Sanders is right to target them - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/17/amazon-warehouse-bernie-sanders <comment><USER4> IMO, it is _never_ proper for the legislature to target an individual or individual company. It's perfectly fine for enforcement agencies (OSHA, FDA, IRS, FAA, FTC, SEC, etc) to enforce policy/law on individuals/companies who have been found in violation, but to originally target individuals with the force of government lawmaking is a dramatic overreach of power, IMO.

If Senator Sanders et al want to target all companies who pay below a certain wage or offer/don't offer a certain benefit or whatever broad category of social/economic ill that the legislature wants to end, have at it. Just so long as you don't torture a combination of such factors that, low and behold, it happens to only apply to the individual / company that you have it in for.

When you come up with a bill with an acronym "STOP BEZOS", I am pretty certain you've left the path of light and reason.

<comment><USER5> >it is never proper for the legislature to target an individual or individual company.

In general what you are talking about is a Bill of Attainder and it is unconstitutional.

Notwithstanding the - not so clever - name of the Bill, it doesn't exactly sound like anyone is being targeting so much as a legal framework is being proposed for recipients of corporate welfare to have to reimburse the government, based on corporate financials. Sure if it ONLY applies to Amazon there is a problem, but that isn't likely.

Seems to me when you have employers like Walmart who rely on taxpayers to subsidize their employees benefits and simultaneously are the beneficiary of 20% (or $14B) in taxpayer funded food stamps annually there is a problem. Basically you have a single low paying employer who has dug a $14B taxpayer moat around any potential competition which would potentially drive up wages.

Shouldn't lawmakers be able to look at employers as a whole and say...wow certain companies are really taking advantage and benefiting from corporate welfare and we need to take action to close the unwanted and unforeseen loopholes? I don't think anyone is looking at Bezos and the Waltons and saying how do we target these rich people, they are saying these welfare programs are not fulfilling their intended purpose and the program needs to be re- evaluated.

<comment><USER6> The idea of employees receiving food stamps seems like a clear case of manipulating the system. But I think there is more nuance than the 20%/$14B numbers describe.

Imagine a single mom who wants to be home when her kids get home from school. She's working part time, and not making enough to feed her family. Who is responsible for her shortfall?

In a community where Walmart is a big employer, many people may work part time and one consequence of that is that more people have jobs. Walmart benefits from that but so do those employees, even when they don't make enough to eat well.

Sure, the system can obviously be manipulated. Yes, people (and company leaders) make bad choices. Who decides who pays?

<comment><USER7> I woukd also add that it's hardly reasonable or desirable to dump on employers the responsibility of providing wellfare assistance. If the people, collectively, don't want to provide that service through state institutions, why should they dump that responsibility on someone who thought it would be a good idea to creatr jobs in a town?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A company as big as Amazon doesn't make as much as it does by treating workers fairly. They are the modern day version of old industrial factories. They take down and out people who they know they can exploit and push them to their limits. I've seen a few places in the poorer section of states where most of the locals are forced to work in a small number of factories/plants. Even in these cases though, they are at least treated like humans. The atmosphere at some of these Amazon warehouses serves to dehumanize the workers. You are not a person, you are an object that is expected to obey very strict rules like a dog. The management at these warehouses is even worse, because it's often very abusive people who wind up in those positions.

<comment><USER9> So the question we have to ask is do we want to live in a society where this treatment is legal?

Obviously Amazon make a lot of profit... if we forced them to treat their workers better surely they'd still make a lot of profit... just slightly less.

<comment><USER10> As a society we've decided that we do, because we are. The shoddy treatment of Amazon's employees has been publicized repeatedly for years.

The issue is that while the average person is lead to believe the notion that they can work hard and make enough to have a comfortable living, they can only afford it at the expense of others. The wealthy will not let that be at their expense - they want it to be at the expense of other poor people.

Pitting middle class people against lower class people is a proven tactic, and that's what's happening here.

Most products and services provided by companies are subsidized by providing poor working conditions or wages for their employees, in an attempt to maximize profits.

If all of those subsidies were to vanish, the standard of living for most lower to middle class people would drop substantially - while the upper class would be unaffected.

<comment><USER9> > _If all of those subsidies were to vanish, the standard of living for most > lower to middle class people would drop substantially_

I see so many discussions in US politics that go around and around and bend over backwards to never, _ever_ propose the extremely simple and obvious solution....

(...drum roll...)

Companies simply lower profits.

Conditions for the workers go up with better conditions & higher pay. The prices of products and services need not change, so consumers are not worse off.

It appears that what I'm saying is tantamount to blasphemy in the US, nobody is even willing to suggest lowering corporate profits as one possible option with associated pros and cons.

<comment><USER10> Lowering profits means reduced shareholder value and a lower market capitalization. Every company is interested in providing as much value to shareholders as possible.

I don't know all the ins and outs, but I believe public trading and shareholders are to blame here.

And again - the middle to upper middle class people who rely on returns from their investments in companies to support their standard of living think the company-shareholder relationship is entirely healthy.

A shareholder provides no value to the good or service being delivered, they exist only to make profit off a transaction they have no stake in.

My views here could be totally off. I welcome discussion on the topic.

<comment><USER11> It's not that they are interested in providing as much value possible - <USER2> are legally mandated. [1]

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co).

<comment><USER12> That case doesn't mean what most people who bring it up want it to mean, particularly as has been interpreted by 100 years of intervening case law. In that case, Henry Ford had more or less admitted that he was attempting to screw over specific shareholders.

As it is applied in modern practice, a corporate officer merely has to articulate a rationale of why his/her actions benefit the shareholders. For example, deciding to double every worker's salary, on the basis that it would improve morale and productivity, could be seen as ultimately benefiting shareholders, even if it tanks profits and dividends in the short-term.

Pretty much the only way you could actually get the Dodge v Ford case invoked in precedent is to have someone on the stand admit that he/she was trying to screw over shareholders (which is basically what Henry Ford did, and why he lost the case), which should be impossible if that person has competent representation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That kind of misbehavior is why I usually try to stay away from Amazon. It might not be a huge dent in their bottom line, but maybe one day it becomes big enough for a change of policy.

<comment><USER10> Why is this downvoted? The only way to make this change is for people to boycott the service.

<comment><USER14> I'm not even sure why people work there. The warehouses are universally known to be shitty places but people sign up anyway.

Surely if its terrible and no one will work there they will have to improve or pay more? Or am i misunderstanding basic economics?

<comment><USER15> A lot of people don't have other options so they take whatever they can get in order to survive. Why don't victims of domestic abuse leave immediately but stay for years?

<comment><USER14> > Why don't victims of domestic abuse leave immediately but stay for years?

Yeah never understood that one either if i'm honest.

<comment><USER16> When Kanye West publicly wondered if slaves in the United States made a "choice" to stay in slavery for hundreds of years, he was rightly mocked for being a moron.

It's pretty depressing to see the same lack of empathy and critical thinking on hn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Sanders has introduced a bill designed to force companies such as Amazon to pay their workers higher wages."

Instead of picking on Amazon perhaps politicians should look at the actual root cause here.

If there are minimum wages laws (and there are) and people paid minimum wage still need food stamps then perhaps the problem lies with minimum wages and those who set them... Politicians.

<comment><USER18> Unpopular alternative interpretation: the market is distorted by food stamps.

Imagine if the government announced it will pay for lightbulbs for workers whose workplaces don't provide lightbulbs. Inevitably, certain workplaces would stop providing lightbulbs. Would you really blame them?

This will sound unintuitive, but what if one of the requirements for welfare was that the recipient NOT work? Suddenly, companies would be forced to make jobs more desirable than welfare. In this age of automation, where it's less and less true that everyone ought to work, maybe this would be a better way to do welfare.

<comment><USER19> > Suddenly, companies would be forced to make jobs more desirable than food > stamps.

Revised:

Suddenly, companies would be forced to make jobs more desirable than food stamps without housing.

In order for the not working stipulation to work, the social safety net would actually have to be expanded to cover housing as well, since I would much rather have a job where I can have housing and ramen every single meal than slightly better food but homeless.

<comment><USER18> Thanks, I edited my last paragraph to say "welfare" instead of "food stamps"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The people who work in these warehouses should unionize. They have a strong case and their roles can not be outsourced. These things have to be local for it to work - it needs people for it to work. Automation may come eventually but it's not as close as people think.

This is the perfect environment for a union to operate in.

<comment><USER21> Amazon can afford to close warehouses where workers are trying to unionize. Walmart does the same:

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores- ove...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-over-labor- activism/)

<comment><USER22> How are the conditions through Europe? I know they went on strike or were about to in Spain, any news from other countries?

<comment><USER23> Germany did as well. I wish Bezos the best of luck if he thinks the EU unions are as easy to beat as the American ones.

<comment><USER24> That's why Amazon already operates a handful, and opening new warehouses in Poland. Amazon doesn't even sell in Poland, everything sorted and packed in Poland is shipped back to Germany. Beating EU unions is very easy, you simply move to the next town over the border.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There are two main points of information here that make Amazon the target.

One is its abuse of workers: limiting breaks, to the point of penalizing bathroom breaks, and setting unreasonably high performance demands. The latter, I think, being attributed as the source of the former. Setting a wage floor here does not seem to be intuitively helpful, as Amazon will still fire employees who fail to meet their performance metrics and hire new at the same wage. If they have no problem doing this at the current wage level, at a higher wage level it will be even easier to find new people willing to meet their strenuous performance demands. Here it seems like unionizing or passing worker protection laws would be necessary to improve working conditions.

The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not sure how to interpret it.

Is it that Amazon is more willing to employ marginally-skilled workers, or is there a bias in which individuals actually receive SNAP as a subset of those who would be eligible to receive the benefits? Closest thing to a primary source for the data about food stamps appears to be this [1], with this [2] chart representing the breakdown in five of the six states that they were able to get information for.

Quotes like "Amazon was the 28th largest employer in Arizona last year, but it ranked fifth for the number of employees enrolled in SNAP" are also ambiguous, because this could be seen as Amazon willing to give jobs to the lowest strata, with the other 27 employers not willing to even give them a job. Or even that well-intentioned policies of the other top employers to ensure that their workers are well-paid means that they hire fewer workers for the same total spend.

[1] [https://newfoodeconomy.org/amazon-snap-employees-five- states...](https://newfoodeconomy.org/amazon-snap-employees-five-states/)

[2] [https://newfoodeconomy.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/04/SNAP-e...](https://newfoodeconomy.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/04/SNAP-enrollees-647x1024.png)

<comment><USER26> > The other is the issue of Amazon employees receiving food stamps (now called > SNAP, apparently). This one seems particularly odd to me, because I'm not > sure how to interpret it.

You should interpret it as sign that even among much of what passes for the left in America, corporate feudalism is deeply entrenched in consciousness. Instead of meeting basic needs being seen as a responsibility of public authority, to be addressed out of tax revenue, it is seen as the duty of the feudal lord (employer) to whom peasants (employees) are bound.

<comment><USER25> > corporate feudalism is deeply entrenched in consciousness

Is there anything about Amazon being a corporation that really touches on this, as opposed to their simply being an employer? I feel like an analogy like this is of limited utility anyway. It's too easy to point out all the myriad ways that the existing system is different from feudalism, and it's unclear whether the negative aspects of feudalism continue to apply after having undergone such a radical transition.

> Instead of meeting basic needs being seen as a responsibility of public > authority, to be addressed out of tax revenue, it is seen as the duty of the > employer to whom employees are bound.

I mean, isn't the point of feudalism actually the former -- that the public authority (the feudal lords) address the basic needs? It is much easier to switch to a different employer than it is to switch to a different public authority. So it seems like what you are advocating is a return to feudalism, rather than trying to remove it.

<comment><USER27> I'm not exactly sure what you're saying, but it sounds like you're saying the modern welfare state is feudalism.

<comment><USER25> I think comparing anything in this conversation to feudalism is an empty rhetorical device. A metaphor or analogy can be useful when it motivates a proposed solution or underlying cause, but in this case it's being used as a vacuous claim in order to create a sense of guilt by association -- "hey, this thing is like feudalism, and therefore bad, because feudalism is bad".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If you have a business in a country and cannot afford to pay your workers high enough wages that they can afford to live without society subsidizing them. Then you cannot afford to run your business and are stealing money from the society you are in.

This concept that people are welfare bums when they are working is incorrect. Their employers are the welfare bums.

If you want to use the infrastructure to run a business pay your people enough to live.

<comment><USER29> It isn't the businesses fault that people don't have high margin skills. There effort should be on improving workforce skill and productive. Not villianising those who employ them.

<comment><USER30> You are assuming they don't have the skills and that hiring is a perfect, fair process. This is not so.

There is clear evidence that even something as simple as being black might prevent someone being rejected over a less skilled white applicant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The problem is caused by society/government, due to the lack of universal basic income, or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't provide an equivalent payment.

If everyone had access to the basic necessities of life without having to work, then nobody would accept jobs like those, and Amazon would be forced to either automate everything or substantially improve working conditions (much less hours, higher pay, ways to make the work more fun).

Even if you were to force Amazon and the like to "treat workers better", what about those who can't find work?

<comment><USER32> >or alternatively a ban on having children if the parents can't provide an equivalent payment.

Yours is the stuff dystopian literature is made of. You want to severely limit freedom for the greater good, a tactic which never works.

<comment><USER31> I don't think people should be entitled to the freedom of having children no matter what, since having children forces significant externalities on society, especially if there's an agreement that everyone should have a good standard of living (as implied by this article) or even just that there's a right to healthcare; and even without those, since the children may become criminals and harm others.

The root causes of poverty and violent crime are people who have children but are not able or willing to properly educate them and support them financially, so the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have an abortion).

That said, an alternate solution is for the state to step in if parents can't or unconditionally, although some sort of population control might be required anyway.

<comment><USER32> >the simplest fix is to prevent that from happening (by forcing them to have an abortion

Simple doesn't mean best or even acceptible. The simplest solution for stopping many forms of crime is to institute martial law, yet we do not do so because we view it as an extreme form of oppression and tyranny. I don't see any positive outcome from a government telling people under which circumstances they are allowed to procreate unless we are in dire straights (e.g. massive, world wide, irrecoverable famine. We're not there and we're not going to be there any time soon.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> My guess is Amazon is working as fast as possible to automate the warehouses. Then people will complain they lost their jobs...

<comment><USER34> Full automation is likely impossible. Ask Elon Musk about his problems with trying to fully automate Tesla production.

<comment> y-c-o-m-b Full automation is not necessary. That's one of the easiest oversights I've ever seen in the business world.

I was part of a team once that desperately needed to do quality assurance testing as quickly as possible on a massive influx of software product. They were about to outsource quality assurance testing - and for a 6 figure amount - because we couldn't fully automate it in house. When I pointed out that we could automate 75% and split the remaining work among our staff of 5 people, they treated that idea like it was ground-breaking when in reality it's just common sense. We ended up not spending a dime on testing, accomplished the goals with the 75% automation, and completed it with only 2 of our people doing manual work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why does everyone ignore the fact that employment at Amazon is voluntary? When the employee was hired, they made an agreement that the payment was a fair trade for the work to be done. If it turns out that the pay was not fair after all, which it sounds like it isn't, then the employee should simply stop working there, because Amazon isn't holding up their end of the bargain.

The reason this continues to be an issue is that the government is stepping in and saying "$7.25 per hour is what's fair, plus we'll provide food stamps, etc."

Amazon says, "this work isn't actually worth $7.25 to us, so we'll have to cut corners to keep growing since we're a publicly traded company."

So Amazon cuts out lunch breaks and whatever else to try to make the $7.25 back, and the employee is able to just barely scrape by with this crappy job because they're making $7.25 plus food stamps.

<comment><USER36> "Why does everyone ignore the fact that <selling your kidneys> is voluntary?"

Some business arrangements are exploitative by their incentives, even if they are "fair".

<comment><USER37> I'll take that bait.

What exactly is immoral about selling one's kidneys? Do individuals not own themselves? Are they capable of using or disposing of their own property as they see fit?

If your argument is that people who are forced into such decisions by economic necessity are not capable of making rational decisions, then what criteria do you use to determine if someone is able to make such decisions for themselves? If they fail to meet that bar... who makes those decisions for them?

<comment><USER38> Why do you think it matters if a _forced_ decision is _rational_ or not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Umm... None of his complaints are about pay, which is what Stop BEZOS act's largest piece.

The article is a massive non-sequitor.

</comment><comment><USER39> You get the society that your systems incentivize. There may very well be a perfect version of capitalism and a free market that allows for free movement of employees between firms and a virtuous circle. Instead, we see a vicious spiral of incentivizing externalities (including treating workers like a never-ending powerless resource you can run into the ground and break and then find new ones) and a person with more money than most of his laborers put together.

Until we can talk frankly about how capitalism actually works instead of having arguments about how it "should" work, until we can admit what it does really well (allowing a dynamism and technology growth that raises the global standard of living) while also talking about what it does poorly, especially when combined with our current models of corporations and governance, I don't think we'll solve this.

(Basic income could be and end run around many of these things if people could opt-out of the labor force and still be able to live)

<comment><USER40> What's funny is that the system encourages this society and those who are able to take full advantage of it become so rich they are able to completely opt out. The goal of capitalism, of supply and demand, labour and capital, is to have so much that all goods and services are within your grasp for no effort or time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41>
        Illness was punished as a misdemeanour by the company. I took
        a day off sick and was given a point for it – despite
        notifying Amazon several hours before the start of my shift
        that I was ill and offering to provide a note from the
        doctor. When I returned to work I asked an Amazon manager how
        they could justify such a policy, which effectively punished
        people for being ill. "It's what Amazon have always done," he
        replied blandly.

</comment><comment><USER42> A few unrelated points-

1\. This is an article to sell a book. "I took the job as part of the research for my book" This isn't unbiased factual research. The author is obviously going to cherry-pick the the craziest things he saw- with 1200 people over six months you are going to see crazy things. If the author didn't do this is would be bad marketing for a boring book.

2\. The nice thing about low paying jobs is they are normally easy to replace. These workers didn't spend a ton of money going to school to specialize in Amazon warehouse work. If Amazon is that horrible work at McDonalds, Walmart, etc.

3\. The nice thing about low paying jobs should be low bills. If you only make $1600 per month your bills should only be ~$1400 per month. Big houses, lots of kids, debt, etc should not be part of a formula to figure pay.

4\. This reminds me of the Trump travel ban. Can judges now say based on Bernie's intentions (using the bill's name) any legislation he now tries to pass regarding this is obviously mean spirited and targeting Amazon? This isn't a factual point looking for legal analysis, a similarity just struck me.

5\. I worked in a WH where a guy crapped his pants and kept working. This isn't because the company forced him- people do weird things.

Points 2 and 3 are personal- not trying to force my views onto others. I am not trying to tell people that work at Amazon they need to be happy and satisfied because from my view it looks like they should be. My point is that I always liked the idea that if my main career fails I can pay all my bills with a 35 hour week at minimum wage. Outside the urban centers this is not too hard. My grand total monthly bills including food, netflix, housing, car insurance, cell phone, food, etc is about ~$1400. (no, my parents do not pay any of my bills or give me an allowance.)

$1600 per monthly is a perfectly "ok" wage. Sure it isn't great but you can live happily on it in many locations. A single parent with 5 kids and a ton of debt can't, but I don't think laws should target a company based on the worst scenario.

</comment><comment><USER43> FAPP, a company is a bunch of people (mostly a bunch of managers who make the decissions) so at some point some manager decided to squeeze his workers beyond reason - this would be bottom up opression. Or perhaps a higher manager wrote the inhumane procedure and a lower level manager implemented it - <USER3> down opression.

<comment><USER44> From all the stories I've heard, it seems to be a combination of the two: most of the really inhumane stuff comes from local managers rather than global policy. However, those managers are just acting to meet unrealistic targets of their own, and when they're reported, nobody above them in the hierarchy seems to care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I guess people just realized that blue collar jobs were horrible? Guess what it is same for many other of those jobs , construction, healthcare, army,...

<comment><USER37> It's significantly more difficult in some cases.

I grew up (and have moved back to) a very poor area. I've always been a nerd, but had some mental health issues after high school that led to the loss of my college scholarship and I spent several years afterward working traditional blue collar jobs - stocking, loading and unloading trucks, farm labor, construction, electrical, etc.

It was a rough time in my life, but I can honestly say I'm thankful for it. It played a big part in making me who I am, and it's always somewhat shocking to see how much the perception of those around me now who have never experienced such things differs from the reality of most of the country.

I can only assume that my own conception of how things are elsewhere in the world is similarly incorrect. I look forward to getting to the point in my my family and financial life where I can spend some time traveling and seeing how others live first-hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> How can anyone be so naive as to believe the bill would target a single company.

</comment><comment><USER47> TFA is written by a guy who took the job to collect anecdotes to write a book to show how miserable life is for low wage earners and now it is time to market the book. Sorry but I am skeptic about this article and think it is an exaggeration. At the same time if it is true why are folks not simply resigning and going to a better job? It is a free country isn't it? Why is minimum wage still so low and why are all political parties not coming together to raise it?

<comment><USER48> Just because you don't like it it does not mean this is not true.

<comment><USER49> That's just a jab with zero informational content.

It is reasonable to be skeptical if TFA is an advert for the author's book on low-wage jobs. Since the whole article reduces to an anecdote, doubly so.

I really want trustworthy primary source reporting on conditions in the warehouses, but it's really hard to find a neutral source who doesn't either have a job they want to keep or an axe to grind.

I strongly suspect the working conditions are much harsher than they should be, but I also strongly suspect this is becoming a meme and people are dog- piling or even virtue signaling to some extent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Do you want to pay more for Amazon products? Because that's what you'll get if Mr. Socialist Sanders has his way.

</comment><comment><USER51> "Stop Bezos Act"...are you kidding me? If you support a bill dedicated to targeting a single company...please get out of government.</comment>


Ask HN: What note taking software do you use? - <AUTHOR>

What features do you think a note-taking web/phone/tablet app should have? Do you use one already, if so what do you love about it? What would you change. What would be your perfect note taking program? <comment><USER2> I use Simplenote on my iPod and iA Writer on my Mac, both changing the same database through Dropbox. This system works for me but I wish the Simplenote app had tighter Markdown support. I write all my notes in Markdown and it's a pain to look at them in Simplenote on iOS (there's a Markdown viewer on the web version, but it doesn't always work).

tl;dr My ideal note-taking app has Markdown support across all its supported devices and apps, not just a few.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use Evernote for all my note taking purposes. It's one central hub to dump everything I can imagine. It's generous in it's search feature as well as platform availability (there is an Evernote app for it). Even though a lot can be improved in terms of performance and in terms of usability I'm still sticking to Evernote for most of my note taking needs.

Having said that I gave SpringPad a shot lately and it's dramatically impressive. It has more feature set than Evernote but the only gripe I had was the inconvenient flow of notes and the performance of their mobile apps. Of course, since I was deep into Evernote I was a bit lazy to move all my notes into SpringPad as well. But if I have to give it a shot I'll go with SpringPad if Evernote continues to lag in terms of performance on their mobile apps.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use Evernote for everything from notes and todo lists on my various projects to grocery lists, medical info tracking, plugins I want to try with vim, and daily task lists. I've tried it multiple times in the past and gradually stopped using it. For some reason it just clicked the most recent time. I have a default "Drafts" notebook that all new notes go into (which also serves as a rough to-do list). If the notes need to be organized (they're going to be there for a while), I will move them to specific notebooks. I've essentially stopped bookmarking sites, as I can just put the links or snip the content into notes specifically for the project I'm working on.

Oh, and their mobile apps are actually nice to work with. Keeping photos of my receipts in Evernote has saved me a few times.

</comment><comment><USER5> First Encryption. Encryption is so important since I wouldnt want to save my financial informations into a cloud service. I know that evernote doesn't use an integrated solution for this. (You just need to encrypt your notes one by one)

Second: Encryption (again)

Third: Third way to access my files if one forgets email/password. Sometimes people might lose access to their emails. This way, If I forgot the evernote's password, then I cant get access back to evernote.

4th: Might be ligher than evernote. The software should be as light as "notepad". I can open 100 notepad windows and doesnt consume much memory. And most important notepad never crushes..

</comment><comment><USER6> Before I switched my Tablet PC over to Linux I loved OneNote; now I use Xournal (and prefer it since it has a more minimal interface and provides more note-taking space, plus allows some other customizations that I like that aren't offered by OneNote--or at least that I couldn't figure out how to customize in OneNote).

I also like Emacs' Org-mode, but haven't figured out how to use it really effectively for my needs yet. (Everything ends up kind of jammed together and it's very difficult for me to find specific things afterwards; I am hoping that there are additional things that I simply have not figured out yet that will enable me to address this)

</comment><comment><USER7> I've used the generic notepad, classroom, several text editors, but still go back to google docs. I know it's not an actual app, but the no need to save feature is really a bonus for me. I always tend to multi-task quite a bit on the ipad, so it becomes annoying when I get a Save or Cancel prompt everytime i switch over to another app and then back.

I realize the generic notepad does this on the ipad- but google docs offers font formatting such as bullet points and number lists which keeps me organized even if it's just for note taking.

</comment><comment><USER8> I generally use a text file - the most important thing for me is being able to store notes quickly and hierarchically, without worrying about whether I'm logged in or how to insert an item between two other items.

I think my perfect program would be something that lets me edit notes as a plain-text document (any time, not just initially), and then automatically versions it, timestamps rows, and adds whatever markup it wants.

I guess I'd just want a gui wrapped around a VCS.

<comment><USER9> That sounds a lot like etherpad... but I'm not too sure how the offline editing would work.

On second thought, maybe dropbox and a text editor would work better...

<comment><USER8> I'm looking at EtherPad, and it doesn't seem to offer a huge benefit. I'm not really concerned with WYSIWYG features, or whole-file versioning, rather, I'd like to see when I last added or modified a line, and possibly have it auto- convert dashes to checkboxes (I use - to indicate a new item, and x to indicate a finished item).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >> What would be your perfect note taking program?

This is something I've been working on for a long time, based on a data structure I created called an infocard (see <http://www.InfoML.org>). If you're working on something similar or are interested in my work, please get in touch: greggw AT infoml DOT org. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm apparently the first Windows user to respond so I'll say OneNote. Love it - can't imagine a better tool. I've tried several trials/freebies for others and nothing beats OneNote. The only improvement I could make with it is online sync across multiple computers.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm a big fan of being able to use a stylus with my iPad. The biggest issue is that the app won't let me rest my palm on the screen when I'm writing.

</comment><comment><USER13> Macjournal. It's alright, although I wish the hierarchical folder structure was more customizable.</comment>


The right way to deal with frozen processes on Unix - <AUTHOR> http://blog.phusion.nl/2012/09/21/the-right-way-to-deal-with-frozen-processes-on-unix/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure if that's darwin terminology, but calling a process that's blocking on io or in a tight loop "frozen" certainly isn't tradition in UNIX - you're much more likely to use hung or stuck. In linux specifically the term has a completely different meaning - "freezing" a process is intentional and involves putting the process into a cgroup and then removing all cpu shares to prevent it from executing - suspending the process and allowing for sleep/hibernation/etc.

<comment><USER3> The "frozen" terminology is amusing to me since I would normally say that processes in tight loops are "burning CPU".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't mean to disparage other Ruby application servers, but this is why I use Passenger. It's not that I believe other Ruby application servers aren't good, or that their authors don't understand Unix as well as the guys at Phusion, but there's a real dedication to stability and predictability inside Phusion that I don't see elsewhere.

You can acheive the same results with other app servers, but you're going to have to do a lot of the heavy lifting yourself. I'm not ashamed to admit that I have a lot more confidence in Passenger's solution than I do my own.

</comment><comment><USER5> OK, total noob question here. Could we achieve the same thing with something like pgrphack from daemontools?

        pgrphack sh -c "processes"

Kill the pid for the sh ("agent") and you thereby kill all the processes?

Again, sorry for the noob question. I'm still learning and making mistakes.

<comment><USER6> No. To instruct kill() to kill a process group, you have to specified the PID of the process group leader as a negative number. Otherwise kill() will kill only a single process.

<comment><USER5> But won't all the processes in my example have the PGID of sh?

<comment><USER6> Yes they do, but that is irrelevant. kill(pid) kills the _process_ specified by 'pid'. kill(-pid) kills the _process group_ specified by 'pid'.

<comment><USER5> What if I just use userland kill(1) utility? Is it possible to kill all processes under a PGID using kill(1)?

Say the PGID I get for sh is 321. If I do

        kill [signal] 321

that will not kill all the processes having PGID 321?

If it would not kill them, then couldn't we modify kill(1) to be able to call kill() with a negative integer as you describe?

Sorry for the noob questions. I am still learning and making mistakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> isn't frozen in usual unix terminology any SIGSTOPped process?

<comment><USER8> That's suspended to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Its nice to see traditional debugging made easy, this is stuff that you try to teach people as a sysadmin/opsguy and they never pay attention. Yay!

</comment><comment> X-Istence The page is unfortunately not loading, and there doesn't seem to be a Google cache for the page.

<comment><USER6> There was a slight interruption of service, but the blog has been restored now. Our apologies for the inconvenience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The server is not responding right now and Google Cache is empty. Any one got a copy of this?

</comment><comment><USER11> In related news, Hongli Lai has solved the halting problem.

<comment><USER12> You do realize that it's quite easy to solve the halting problem in most cases, right?

The halting problem is unsolvable because _very particular_ (and pathological) cases are unsolvable. If a process is in a loop between the same instructions at the same states, it's very easy to tell that it's not going to halt -- the only challenge is that you can't make this determination for all processes all the time.

Mathematically, note that the concept of an oracle for the halting problem is well-defined (and a useful concept).

<comment><USER11> I was mostly making a jibe at the notion that there is a single, correct, and reliable method for identifying stuck/hung processes.

There are in fact fairly reliable heuristics for noting when things are going pear-shaped. The edge cases get sticky though.</comment></comment></comment>


Chinese Hackers Target Universities in Pursuit of Maritime Military Secrets - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-hackers-target-universities-in-pursuit-of-maritime-military-secrets-11551781800 <comment><USER2> Why is US pretending to be friend with an enemy that is out to steal anything in US that isn't locked down? Least of which, an enemy that is a dictatorship that has oppressed religion, democracy, free speech, and free will in its domain?

<comment><USER3> See I could never comprehend this attitude, how is it that we throw the word "enemy" around so lightly at countries that steal our technology or are dictatorships but we get so appalled and shocked when middle eastern countries that we _bomb_ call us the enemy?

We should probably raise the bar as to what constitutes an enemy if we want to remain on our moral high horse, because otherwise we're hypocrites. Just my two cents.

<comment><USER4> People use the word "enemy" when they speak about protecting themselves, because they sense that they are vulnerable or becoming more vulnerable.

When others talk about protecting themselves _from you_, yes, that's uncomfortable. But saying "we get so appalled and shocked" kind of points at a straw-man "we" here. That's not "us" in every case. It might just be those reactionaries over here or there. It also points at the shock of diving into a culture as the US did in the middle east: Wow, it's diverse, not just one opinion--shocking. That's how education happens.

Raising the bar as to what constitutes an enemy carries a very clear risk, too: Underestimating your enemy. People know a lot about that nowadays.

However I think we can develop our cultural vocabulary here. There's an opportunity for that and it's very clear when discussions about "enemy" and how it's awkward even arise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Off topic but relevant: I posted this story today morning at around 9 am EST. It was flagged within 5 minutes and never got any visibility. This is a repost because that submission is effectively dead.

<comment><USER5> Why are you posting link to pay to view articles? Referral bonus?

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh you caught my little scam! /s

There is no rule against posting a paywalled article on HN when there is a workaround. FWIW I had posted an outline link in the comment on that posting.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The US is going to be in a hot war with China within 10-15 years. The only way to avoid this is to crush the Chinese economy through trade wars, forcible containment of Chinese expansion (e.g. Huawei ban, undermine belt and road), and covert ops - and that may not work. China is clearly an enemy of the US and is on the cusp of becoming an existential threat. Forget about breaking up big tech, is it time to start thinking about breaking up China?

This is clearly an extreme position, but how extreme do you think it will be in 5 years?

<comment><USER7> Why can't we live in peace bro

<comment><USER6> Because while you're living in peace, the other guy will come for you in the night. It's unfortunate but that's how it's been throughout human history. The only societies which have enjoyed peace are those that have the overwhelming means to destroy their enemies.

<comment><USER7> I guess that's why we are trying so hard to have those overwhelming means (I'm Chinese)

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I understand your position. It's too bad, and quite scary that geopolitics may force us to pick sides one day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In hindsight, I think US having good or even decent relations with China will be seen as a historic strategic mistake. The Sino-Soviet split seemed like a brilliant move at the time but birthed a monster. Giving even one ounce of legitimacy to the CCP was clearly a long term miscalculation. The soviet union would have fallen eventually anyways, there was no need to court demons.

We used to cut these countries off and isolate them, now we do business with them while they steal our tech and manipulate our population. Now it looks like we have a vehemently anti-western authoritarian superpower in the making.

</comment><comment><USER4> We are pretty open here in the US, sure. I mean I'd never expect things like [0] from China, let alone (what I'd expect to be) comparatively loud work coming from academia.

I say let them keep trying, with some security tweaks here and there as needed/justified. But redouble our connections with academia. We need to harness massive growth in the face of such a conservative opponent, not more excuses to slow things down and stabilize around security so soon.

0\. [https://madsciblog.tradoc.army.mil](https://madsciblog.tradoc.army.mil)

<comment><USER9> > let alone (what I'd expect to be) comparatively loud work coming from > academia.

The US was able to use their lead in computers to design stealth aircraft based on Soviet mathematics: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petr_Ufimtsev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petr_Ufimtsev)

<comment><USER10> This would prove the OP's point, wouldn't it ? Soviet Russians had interesting discoveries in semiconductors also [1]. However, they were never able to parlay it to economic success as US and other western powers were able to

[1] [https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/6367/did-russia- have...](https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/6367/did-russia-have-their- own-discoveries-in-the-development-of-semiconductors-and-t)

<comment><USER9> I wasn't trying to correct anyone, I just thought it was an interesting factoid

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Non-Paywall version: [https://outline.com/s9tgAF](https://outline.com/s9tgAF)</comment>


Show HN: Can you help me do some science? - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1d5QEBcQXaqo6oIYdst1gcxjUCGjoDuKgzvyJCProfwg/viewform <comment><AUTHOR> During a recent Hacker News comment thread ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10952335](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10952335)), I used a "toy" machine learning model, designed to guess a person's age based on any fictional characters they can list in one sitting, to correctly predict the submitter's age. Later in the same thread, the same model guessed another user's age - 20 years too old! It got a lot of upvote activity, and it got me excited to revisit this side project.

I'm preparing to write up a post about the model, and would like to do some rewrites to improve its accuracy. I need your help!</comment>


Samsung Profit Drops as New iPhones Win Sales, Won Gains - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-23/samsung-profit-misses-estimates-as-new-iphones-win-share.html

<comment><USER2> As Google continues its refinement of Android and mobile hardware is further commoditized Samsungs profits are destined to fall.

Apple on the other hand has a cyclical money printing machine by just releasing new versions of hardware design that fits the margins they would like.</comment>


Haskell to JavaScript: Introduction to monads - <AUTHOR> https://blog.jcoglan.com/2011/03/05/translation-from-haskell-to-javascript-of-selected-portions-of-the-best-introduction-to-monads-ive-ever-read/

<comment><USER2> All I'm getting is the animated GIF of a squid: "nope nope nope"...?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, just noticed. Sent a message to the author, meanwhile you can read the post here:

[https://blog.jcoglan.com/page/6/](https://blog.jcoglan.com/page/6/)</comment></comment>


The speech prepared for Nixon had Armstrong & Aldrin been stranded on the moon - <AUTHOR> http://dvice.com/archives/2012/08/heres-nixons-sp.php

<comment><USER2> I have to disagree with the last line. The only way we'll never have to face this is if we stop going into space, which would be sad. Otherwise, sooner or later there will be an accident that strands someone.</comment>


Yahoo!, Zillow, Trulia, and others agree to adopt a common data standard for real estate listings - <AUTHOR> http://www.geekestateblog.com/yahoo-zillow-trulia-and-other-leading-companies-agree-to-adopt-a-common-data-standard-for-real-estate-listings/ <comment><USER2> MLS is dead, long live MLS!</comment>