What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money? - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/universal-basic-income/ <comment><USER2> I was thinking about this issue when I attended a meet up for independent game developers. I was shocked at the number of people I had met that just develop games full time. I met an entire team of 4 people that have been working full time over the last year designing and developing a mobile game. They have a playable prototype and it's fairly entertaining but nothing ground-breaking in my opinion. Running the numbers in my head, I thought that this game would have to clear over a million dollars for it to even be considered a break-even for 4 well educated, hard working young people working over a year on the venture. I didn't know their personal financial situations, but I couldn't help but be both envious and terrified.

I met another person who worked on indie game development for two years and now works for a company designs games for others for money up front. He told me he hadn't made any money in the years working for himself.

It's incredible how many young people devote their time to passion projects with the very limited social safety net of the US. Surely a basic income will increase the allure. The question is, does the world need more indie mobile game developers?

<comment><USER3> These people are the exception not the rule, for every person like this there are many times more of those who would take the dole and do nothing with themselves. Basic income might increase the allure of risky proposition, I think in most cases these groups of people estimated some risk/reward function of their endeavours, considering the reward more so than the risk, but there is a healthy combination of the carrot and the stick. Basic income is to do away with the stick, most people need the stick to get out of bed in the morning, admittedly myself included, at least to some extent.

<comment><USER4> Depending on the level of basic income, you keep the stick. You just don't beat people to death with it. I don't know about you, but (let's say) $20k/yr wouldn't keep me sitting on the couch. I'd continue to get out bed. That amount, however, might allow someone otherwise unable to do so to go to school, to pursue other interests, to spend more time with their family, and so on. All things that could be long-term more positive than languishing in poverty.

<comment><USER3> Frugal lifestyles at a modest UBI payout will never know the stick, if the payout is high enough no one will ever know the stick. My point is merely that if the payout allows for a 'basic' income and does as is advertised then there really isn't much of a stick to fear, by some definitions of the 'stick' the 'stick' is eliminated in a scenario where everyone has basic income. Not everyone runs on merely carrots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've spent some time thinking about basic income. At times arguing for it, other times arguing against it.

Unfortunately we cannot resolve the scarcity problem, particularly when it comes to real estate, i.e. the location one chooses to reside. There is a simple physical constraint: only one thing can occupy a specific space at a time. Cities in general are popular places to live because of their proximity to "things", the Arts and that interesting stuff happens where more people can collaborate in the real world. (Consider the demand to be close to your child's school or near a dog park.)

Given this (assumption if you will), let's consider a few rounds of economic cause/effect. Round 1: if everyone were given a basic income, many more people will be able to afford to live in a city. Round 2: not all people, but some, will seek housing (rent or buy) in this city. Round 3: owners will need to choose between [1] renting/selling at current price for which there is suddenly higher demand or [2] increasing their price until there is less demand. Round 4: most owners choose option [2] and excess income begins to be sucked up by higher and higher prices.

The issue is basic income increases the demand (perhaps good for today's global economic ailments) while supply of goods/housing will take time to adjust. Of course, given the opportunity to sell apartments in a city at higher margins will cause developers to build new supply, but this takes years.

One way to deal with the supply/demand issue is having a basic income that starts low ($100 a month?) and increases to a basic living wage over the course of 5 years. This way, investments can be planned ahead of time so supply increases with demand.

<comment><USER6> This is the basic flaw that everyone seems to be missing. Cost of living will just rise to meet the increase in demand resulting in no one except private landowners being any better off. Henry George identified the solution over 100 years ago. Basic income requires something like the Henry George land-value tax to be successful. At the same time, a land-value tax would also be the best way to raise funds for a universal basic income.

<comment><USER5> I had not heard of Henry James and his book "Progress & Poverty" (1879). More info for anyone interested [0]

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I bet China does it first. The opportunity to control the population by putting everyone on the take is very attractive to power structures.

Also it furthers the long-term social engineering regarding "if the gov does it (theft in this case) then it's OK".

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm less worried about the economic aspects (western countries can afford this) than the social ones, namely the new forms of resentment this will encourage when taxpayers see all the things 'their' money is buying people.

<comment><USER9> The key is to culturally shift from a scarcity-rooted value system to an abundance-roots one. Call it "The New American Dream".

<comment><USER6> As long as there are greedy people and a limited supply of earth and its resources there will always need to be an accounting system for it. But that's not to say the system can't be improved. A full land-value tax would give the inherent value of land and natural resources back to the public and compensate those who use less of our limited resources from those who use too much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A great idea, however I doubt in practice it would work as well as everyone thinks.

What may work for a school leaver may not work for a guy with a family of 6/debts/drug or alcohol problems/medical needs/etc. that person may be much better off with housing benefits/family benefits/medicare etc than an equal slice of the pie.

Anyway I dont know but I am in favour of doing the experiment and hope it works, but I seriously doubt it will be as cut and dried as people think.

</comment><comment><USER11> How do the economics of providing Basic Income work?

I guess you would have increase taxes or provide lesser services? e.g., expect that basic income will cover some parts of the medical costs and provide a lesser health care for the average person. I'm guessing an implementation will be somewhere in between.

Money has gotta come from somewhere.

<comment><USER12> The article discusses this. Basically you take the current set of services, and by removing the means testing and eliminating all the separate departments that facilitate them you save money and repurpose it towards this single program.

<comment><USER13> In addition, most western countries are sitting on a sea of wasted talent. About 40% of graduates in the USA never get jobs in their field[1], and it's similar world-wide. It's lower in the engineering fields, but that still leaves a lot of smart people with formal education experience doing things like staffing the reception counter at the local gym.

Graduates take these jobs because the alternative is the hell that is student debt collection, but these are jobs that could easily be done by less educated people. The more educated people have the capacity to explore the kind of home-grown science, arts and social projects that brought us to discover electricity, progress to giving women the vote.

We're sitting on top of a new renaissance because of short sightedness, but the potential boon of having that much home grown R&D could dramatically increase global wealth.

[1] [http://www.mlive.com/jobs/index.ssf/2011/05/40_percent_of_co...](http://www.mlive.com/jobs/index.ssf/2011/05/40_percent_of_college_grads_end_up_settl.html) or just google that phrase, it makes for depressing reading

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> it would loosen the chains of capitalism for the 90% who haven't, aren't and won't get lucky. that's even most of us around here.

"we" can afford it. wall street is creating money every second. with a proper tax structure there'll be no problem. but that's politics-land and shit will happen until sheep are casting apt votes.

long story short: things will stay the way they are.</comment>


Exotic Atom - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_atom <comment><USER2> The header of the wikipedia article mentions that because the resulting particles are usually unstable, the exotic atoms typically have short lifetimes.

If someone has the time to point to the research, the article would be massively improved by mentioning the typical lifetimes of each of the listed exotic atoms.

A "short lifetime" could be nanoseconds or could be years when you compare it to the traditional lifetime of the non-exotic version of the atom and knowing what is typical for each exotic atom would be good information to have at a glance.

<comment><USER3> The half-life of approximately 15 minutes for free neutrons is considered _long_. It's actually the longest for any sub-atomic particle if I recall correctly.

<comment><USER4> I think protons would like to have a word with you.

<comment><USER3> Proton decay has never been observed, afaik.

Edit: that's still the case. Since protons can not decay in the standard model, actually observing it would be huge.

<comment><USER5> _Free protons_ (protons outside of an atom) have never been observed to decay. Protons inside a nucleus can of course decay, see: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand what that Wikipedia entry is supposed to describe. Are those proposed, or already predicted composite atoms, or have they been already found?

<comment><USER7> The article only mentions Muonium in passing -- I guess it's only somewhat exotic? -- but I can assure you that it's very real. Chemically it acts as a light isotope of hydrogen, and the interaction of the (anti)muon spin makes it useful for probing reactions in otherwise problematic environments -- for example, supercritical water, where the pressure chamber needed for hundreds of atmospheres of pressure gets in the way of most sensors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I legitimately thought this was going to be an "exotic skin" for the atom text editor.

<comment><USER9> Hey, same! Wasn't disappointed though</comment></comment>


MEGA require source code of Applications using their API - <AUTHOR>

Section 1.1 of the Mega API Blurb states that:

  The cryptographic integrity of MEGA's user data is important
  to us. We can therefore not allow you to distribute or make
  available your client application without going through us.
  We will perform a code audit of your product and promote/distribute
  it on our site. You will also receive a share of the revenue that
  your application generates.
 What do you think the reaction of your average developer would be to using the MEGA API, knowing that they'd require access to all of your applications source code?
Do you think it's feasible for EVERY application to be examined by the MEGA Staff? <comment><USER2> This may actually be yet another way they are protecting users privacy.

For anyone that hasn't read the news: mega is securing users uploaded files from Mega itself by forcing users to encrypt the uploads. This encryption prevents mega from policing the content that their users upload and thus they can't be held accountable.

If they are really on the users side, Then this might be a way for mega to police copyrighters and DMCA people from creating scripts and application that publicly crawl mega.com looking for infringers.

</comment><comment><USER3> just like Google requires a lot of informations(including source code) when applying for AdWords API</comment>


CVE-2019-11043 PHuiP-FPizdaM exploit [Nginx and PHP-fpm] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/neex/phuip-fpizdam/ <comment><USER2> FYI... this does not affect people who use NGINX as a reverse proxy to Apache. This ONLY affect people who call PHP-FPM directly from NGINX.</comment>


A sociologist on the international wealth-management profession - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/elite-wealth-management/410842/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I really dislike the title, tone and dramatic quality of this piece.

I went to law school and got a job as a tax attorney. I don't consider my work or world particularly secretive. The barriers to entry are not peculiarly high and lawyers as a profession are a little too happy to talk about themselves.

There's a great comment on the Atlantic that states this better than I can

 _" If by secret, you mean extraordinarily complex, then yes. But... that's not the definition of secret._

 _It 's not secret. There are many classes on this (albeit from professional- level degrees) and it's all based on public statutes and court cases. All of which are freely available to any person._

 _A large part of it being "secret" has to do with people's willingness to listen and understand. I'm a tax attorney, I understand these deals, and I can explain them rather well so even someone unfamiliar with tax law will understand it. However, it still does take a bit of active listening on behalf of an unfamiliar (as in, unfamiliar with tax law) listener to actually understand what I'm talking about, regardless of how much I simplify it."_

The most disappointing thing about international tax is how little even professional journalists understand it, or care to. It is simply easier to assert that international tax is a scam and since the general public can barely count to 10 using both hands, there's no way to disprove them.

<comment><USER3> The title is, as usual, editorialized by the newspaper. The original title, as per the title tag, is "How Wealthy People Protect Their Money".

There's a pretty big difference between being a tax attorney and being an offshore consultant where secrecy is one of the selling points. It's not a coincidence that voluntary corrections of tax statements go up significantly when new information sharing agreements are made.

And again she's not a journalist, she has a PhD in Sociology from Harvard and is an associate professor of economic sociology.

<comment><USER4> Secrecy isn't necessarily an indicator that there is law-breaking involved. Sometimes secrecy is desired for someone who has had negative attention focused on them by the general public for no other reason than they present a fat, juicy target for lawsuits.

Many people I know who have significant assets bemoan the challenges that present themselves when trying to engage in anything resembling a negotiation involving finance. If one side KNOWS you have the capability to pay more, then you're at a disadvantage.

And don't get me started with the lawsuits. People who have money seem to attract lawsuits the same way that children catch colds from kindergarten. As they say: "You know you're rich when you're finally sued frivolously."

<comment><USER5> > Secrecy isn't necessarily an indicator that there is law-breaking involved.

So? Abusing loopholes in the law is also by definition perfectly legal, but still dubious practice. In fact, that's exactly what this sentence from the article alludes to:

> _By the same token, when Oxfam estimates that just 1 percent of the world's > population will own more than 50 percent of the world's wealth by 2016, it's > important to realize that such a state of affairs doesn't just happen by > itself, or even through the actions of individual wealthy people. For the > most part, the wealthy are busy enjoying their wealth or making more of it; > keeping those personal fortunes out of the hands of governments (along with > creditors, litigants, divorced spouses, and disgruntled heirs) is the job of > wealth managers._

> _Given the little that is known about the profession and its role in global > inequality, it seemed imperative to learn more about how wealth managers > pull off this sleight of hand: Without breaking any laws (for the most > part), they enable their clients to sidestep many laws and > policies—especially those designed to prevent the kind of neo-feudal > concentrations of wealth emerging now._

You're right on all other points of course.

<comment><USER4> I'll make you a deal: let's stop using tax policy to try and create certain social outcomes. That way, you can get rid of all of the loopholes that everyone hates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find myself looking forward to reading the article that this author describes. But then it never appears.

The author spends several pages telling us how clever and interesting he is, with his unique method of infiltrating this secret world, putting him in such company as [some important famous journalist we would be familiar with were we as educated and worldly as the author] and gaining the insight and ability to write this masterful piece of journalism that you, Reader, are about to witness.

And then he spends a paragraph or two saying "it's secretive, and offshore". And we're done.

I want my ten minutes back.

<comment><USER7> I suspect the authors hope is that you'll buy their upcoming book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well there's various degrees of tax optimization. Here's some things I've come across:

\- In most countries you can set yourself up as a company. This means you can write off certain things and adjust the proportion of revenue that ends up as salary, which has implications for various types of tax. For instance in the UK NHS contributions are dependent on salary, so you can give yourself a minimal salary and lots of dividends. This is a pretty standard play, probably done by everyone in the country who has a business, eg. doctors and plumbers. I don't think there's anything wrong with this.

\- At some point a guy will phone you. He finds your name on lists of likely people. He shows up at your office draws you a box diagram of corporations, with lots of little arrows. He quotes tax legal terms you won't understand, but they are always some sort of loophole. In one case I was offered to do a company with P Diddy (or whatever he's called now) in which I was to critique his new music. I had to produce evidence that I'd spent at least 10 hours a week or so on this. Now keep in mind I can't even read sheet music, have zero appreciation of Diddy's genre, and generally have no interest in him as a musician. I suppose this was mutual, as I've never heard of him being associated with quantitative developers either.

\- A friend told me about what he'd been offered. Along similar lines, he'd been told there was an opening in poetry. Another box diagram with arrows, and it boils down to that you can get a tax benefit if you publish your own book of poetry. The guy in question was an old school Essex local (shoutey trader). I doubt he'd spent much time reading Sylvia Plath. So anyway, the organisers had all their City connections write crappy (who am I to judge?) poetry, print up a few hundred books, and distribute it to everyone.

\- I never did any of these last two schemes. If something sounds ridiculous, you know it's a tax dodge. They tend to end up in court, where they are decided on arcane points if tax law, eating up the productive time of many people. If it goes wrong, you lose the money, a long while after you thought you had it. If it goes right, you are abusing the law in some sense. The other way you can tell is there are some plays every accountant in the whole country will tell you. Other will require a somewhat more entrepreneurial accountant, one that requires a sales operation.

<comment><USER9> Why do you think that there is nothing wrong with the first example?

<comment> saiya-jin It's considered OK by system in most, if not all european countries. Some rules apply, some places are more restrictive than others, but at the end, this is all legal and supported by law. So yes, there is legally nothing dodgy or wrong there. Quite large parts of populations are employed in this way. More work, more reward.

Now why people need to resort to these practices to get more fair share of their brutto income is completely different topic, something around "voting with your taxes" about how public cash is spent (usually pretty badly). FYI, I don't do it anymore, got a perm job, but when I was doing consulting this way, I had all the possible support of my local tax office when something was unclear.

<comment><USER10> Some European countries handle this by allowing it to be legal, but designing the tax rates so that you pay the same tax either way, so it's not really a tax dodge. In Denmark, for example: marginal income tax rate on salary/wages for higher earners is around 55% (including all the payroll taxes and such). Marginal rate if you pay yourself dividends instead: 23.5% corporate income tax up front, plus 42% personal dividend tax on the paid-out amount, or effectively... 55% again. In fact I believe the dividend tax level was chosen precisely to make it come out the same overall. (The story comes out similarly if you look at effective instead of marginal tax rates, e.g. for $100k income, it's about 40% effective tax either way.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sharing this in case anyone is interested.

[http://taxodus.net](http://taxodus.net)

It's a game that let's you play out the role of a company engaging in tax avoidance. The tax dodges in-game are meant to mirror those available in the current business world.

<comment><USER12> Thank you so much for posting this comment; I actually posted an Ask HN a while back to get that url, but I couldn't find it for the life of me.

<comment><USER11> You're welcome. I found it after watching this documentary:

Taxodus - Playing The Global Tax Avoidance Game

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvlLO_pTmeY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvlLO_pTmeY)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Also, see UK non-domiciled status.

\- Suppose someone has significant assets in, say, Canada.

\- They move to the UK and claim non-domiciled status on their taxes, which means they only need to pay taxes on income which is moved into the UK.

\- They stay in the UK for 7 years, leaving their assets in Canada.

\- They then move back to Canada

Because the assets were never moved into the UK, there is no need to pay UK taxes on the capital gains/income, under the non-domiciled rules of the UK.

Because they were non-Canadian residents, there is no need to pay Canadian taxes on the capital gains/income. (Only the US taxes non-resident citizens)

In other words, they get 7 years of gains/income which get 0 taxes.

I use Canada in this example, but this works for a large number of source countries. No wonder certain neighborhoods in London are filled with Russian oligarchs...

<comment><USER14> I'm not sure that will work, at least in Canada. In Canada, if you have sizable assets, you will still be considered resident even if you leave the country for many years. To be considered non resident in Canada, you need to sell everything. Even having a storage locker could trigger you as a resident because it means you are not leaving for real.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Additional detail can be found in the author's 2012 paper in _Sociological Forum_ , "Trust and Estate Planning: The Emergence of a Profession and Its Contribution to Socioeconomic Inequality" (pdf).

[http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&co...](http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=brooke_harrington)

 _"... when knights of medieval Europe departed for the Crusades, leaving their lands vulnerable to seizure by the church, the state, or rival noblemen—some adopted the practice of putting their assets in trust. This involved transferring legal ownership of the property to a trusted kinsman or friend for the benefit of a third party: usually the wife and children of the original owner, who had no legal standing to own property themselves and were thus left vulnerable to dispossession."_

</comment><comment><USER16> Do you try to hold on to the money you make legally as against giving an even higher proportion of it to an organization that's managed (in one case) to run up a debt of $16 trillion rising.

</comment><comment><USER17> Governments all over could circumvent this issue provided they are willing to not use the tax code in a punitive means. By that I mean that so much of the code is written to benefit and penalize that it begs abuse by both those writing the code and those subject to it. Considering the number of pages of the US tax code how can anyone reasonably be expected to adhere to it let alone not circumvent parts of it even accidentally?

If you want the "rich" to pay their fair share; they already pay the bulk of all taxes; then the tax system has to be fair. That means it has to minimalist as possible so that everyone with standard education can comprehend it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Drastic simplification should be the answer. I like Colorados one-rate, five- line tax returns for all classes of income. Takes all of ten minutes to file most years.

Legislatures like complex tax codes for political and social reasons. Lawyers and computers can manage the complexity fairly OK so far at a cost.

I skimmed the Oct 27 new budget bill and it contains about 100 pages of mysterious tax code changes. The language is very opaque with referring to line changes in previous laws. I can gleen that farmers, drug makers, hospitals, and hedge funds are the recipients of these changes. But lack the time to figure them out.

</comment><comment><USER19> The fundamental premise is flawed: inequality is not created by helping some people aggregate more wealth, since wealth is not a zero-sum game. New wealth is continually being created through economic activity.

</comment><comment><USER20> This happens on a smaller scale all the time with most professionals without having to resort ot offshoring.

Anyone who works for a hedge fund will have their own company that will get paid thier bonus. Companies have two nice traits.

1) Their end of year can be any month

2) They have a lower tax rate than most high net-worth individuals do.

So consider 2 fictional employee's.

The first one gets paid a bonus of $500,000 at the end of the year(2014). His tax rate is 40% so he ends up with $300,000. He reinvests the $300,00 at his hedge fund that returns 20% in the year 2015. As of December 31st 2015 he has a net-worth of $360,000.

Individual 2 gets the same $500,000 bonus at the end of 2014 but she has a company that gets the bonus. Now the companies year end is November so the tax year on on that bonus isn't until November 2015.

That hedge fund also returns 20% so as of December 2015 she has $600,000 ($500,000 * 1.2) and then owes tax of $120,00 (the corporate tax rate is 20% on her $500,000 bonus) so she ends up with $480,000.

Now when she pulls the money out of her corporation to spend she'll have to pay the dividend tax rate of %20. But she can let this money ride tax sheltered for any number of years.

To recap, she essentially shelters her money in two ways:

1) her bonus is sheltered for 1 year from taxes allowing the full amount to grow

2) she pays the corporate rate at the end of the year allowing her to hang onto an additional %20 until she pulls it out for her own use.

Any one can do this, the only preconditions you need to make it worth while are

1) a large bonus

2) a way to make the bonus money grow at a decent rate.

Among Doctors, lawyers, etc this is a common practice.

Now if you want t up the ante, you move your hedge fund to the Cayman Islands where you don't pay any tax on the gains until you repatriate the money back to the North America.

When Renaissance Technologies finally has a tell all book written about then, their brilliance will be acknowledged but I'm going to guess that a very large portion of their returns comes from not paying tax.

See: [http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-07-08/irs- mo...](http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-07-08/irs-moves- against-hedge-fund-maneuver-once-used-by-renaissance)

people worry about paying fees as a drag on their retirement earnings but paying tax is the single largest drag on creating wealth that the wealthy have. The above corporation sheltering is legal well tested under law and used in a very pervasive manner in the North American and the UK, I don't know anything about the rest of Europe but I'd imagine its the same.

<comment><USER21> In your example, Individual 2 gets paid $500k and manages to take out $320k ($500k goes into the corp, $100k is paid as income tax and then $320k comes out after dividend taxes).

Assuming a 35% gross tax rate rather than 40% (I think that's the top marginal rate), Individual 1 gets to keep $325k.

tl;dr; You aren't avoiding a lot of taxes.

 _Now if you want t up the ante, you move your hedge fund to the Cayman Islands where you don 't pay any tax on the gains until you repatriate the money back to the North America._

In other news, the Old Monk corporation (sellers of delicious Indian rum, mostly within India) don't pay American taxes either. There is a whole world out there that isn't paying US taxes, oh noes!

<comment><USER20> I either didn't explain things well or you didn't bother to read what I wrote:)

You get tax sheltering two ways.

1) you get to collect gains on the amount you would have paid tax on originally, so if you shelter $120,000 for a year, you get the 20% in gains on that amount.

2) you don't pay the dividend rate until you pull out the money from the corp. So you can leave it in the corporation for 20 years, allowing it to grow at our imaginary 20% rate per year.

working through the example again individual 1 is still $360,000 his $500,000 - $200,000 from taxes(I'm Canadian), plus the 20% gains on his $300,000.

Individual 2 gets to shelter the entire $500,000 for the year allowing her to get gains on the whole amount so she has $600,000(with 20% growth, we are a hedge fund after all). She then has to pay the %20 corp tax on her original $500,000($100,000) leaving her with $500,000.

She is then free to let that amount grow until she wants to take it out, at which point its taxed at the 20% dividend rate.

If you compare the person who leaves their money in the tax sheltering corp for 10 years vs the person who takes their bonus as income you'll find that the corp comes out substantially ahead.

I've done the math and seen it play out in the real world:)

<comment><USER21> You are making a calculation mistake. If interest rates are 20%, then $1.20 next year = $1.00 this year.

In reality, the person who invests the money actually comes out worse. If his investment had either profit or capital gains, he paid even more taxes. I.e., instead of getting $1.20 next year for every $1.00 he put in this year, he's getting something less than that.

With the current taxation regime, the _only_ benefit to investment is shifting consumption into the future. But you actually pay pretty dearly for that. You can see a more detailed explanation here: [http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=28842](http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=28842)

<comment><USER20> :) The interest rate isn't mentioned, but its probably around 1%. The funds capital gains were 20%.

I'll let you re-read my above posts to figure out where you went wrong. My email is in my profile if you need help:)

<comment><USER21> The average investment will achieve average returns (== the interest rate to use for this calculation) and as a result one loses NPV(consumption) by investing.

Only a tiny fraction of Individual 2's actually manage to do what you are describing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I used to hear "we're talking about equality of _opportunity_ not of _outcome_" when it sounded like people were trying to equalize incomes. Seems like all pretense has been dropped now.

</comment><comment><USER23> "it's important to realize that such a state of affairs doesn't just happen by itself, or even through the actions of individual wealthy people"

Wait, wasn't that the biggest conclusion from Piketty's book? That inequality will happen by itself due to difference between returns on capital and economic growth?

<comment><USER21> Differences between returns on capital and economic growth _alone_ will not result in any increase in inequality. If everyone achieves the same rate of return, inequality can only remain flat - bignum x exp(rt) / smallnum x exp(rt) = bignum / smallnum = const.

If some people have income and save it inequality will go down: bignum x exp(rt) / smallnum x exp(rt) < (bignum x exp(rt) + k) / (smallnum x exp(rt) + k).

All r > g directly implies is that the ratio of capital stock to income will increase. I.e., we'll move from a situation with one factory (worth $1M) producing $1000/month in income to a situation with two factories (worth $2M) producing $1500/month in income. In this case, r=100% but g = 50%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Of course, the United States contributes to this, too, by having the most complicated tax code, and the highest corporate income tax rate in the world.

Combine this with a 30% ex-patriation tax* (yes, they tax you for giving up your citizenship), it's no wonder people create and keep wealth overseas.

[https://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International- Taxpayers/Expa...](https://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International- Taxpayers/Expatriation-Tax)

<comment><USER25> Highest corporate rate, but far from the highest effective corporate tax, Where much of Europe, Australia, Japan, etc. have higher rates.

[http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.TAX.TOTL.CP.ZS?order=...](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.TAX.TOTL.CP.ZS?order=wbapi_data_value_2014%20wbapi_data_value%20wbapi_data_value- last&sort=asc&display=default)

<comment><USER26> That's the point. USA "advertises" high corp tax so it sounds like government is big and evil and taking all poor corporations profits. But the tax law is so complex and full of holes. Corps actually pay very little. Rich people pay little. The brunt is borne by the masses who don't have the assets/wealth to take advantage of all the loopholes.

It's really rather ingenious.

<comment><USER24> For every additional dollar I earn, I am taxed at a rate (Federal and State combined) of 52.9%. "Rich" people do pay taxes. In fact, they pay most of the taxes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dolphins recorded having a conversation 'just like two people' for first time - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/09/11/dolphins-recorded-having-a-conversation-for-first-time/ <comment><USER2> "That's it for us monkeys."

[http://www.theonion.com/article/dolphins-evolve-opposable- th...](http://www.theonion.com/article/dolphins-evolve-opposable-thumbs-284)</comment>


Effect of disabling third-party cookies on publisher revenue [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/disabling_third-party_cookies_publisher_revenue.pdf <comment><USER2> I'd love to see some discussion on this from people more knowledgable about ads tech than me</comment>


Don't settle: Get what you want, right now - <AUTHOR> http://bart.whahay.net/2008/06/08/dont-settle-get-what-you-want-right-now/

<comment><USER2> Folks dreams are constantly muddled by the daily grind. It's easier to focus on how much you hate your boss than how sure you are that you are going to get a killer job at the start-up everyone is talking about.</comment>


Show HN: Python library for near 100 extra higher-level functional tools - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/chuanconggao/extratools/ <comment><USER2> Nice looking library with good documentation. Why haven't we heard about this before?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the support.

I created this library only three weeks ago. It started for my personal projects, to avoid rewriting the same logic again and again.

Right now, it has grown to a quite complete library. I am consistently adding new tools and refactoring every a few days.</comment></comment>


No. 1 paid utility in Mac App Store steals browser history - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2018/09/07/adware-doctor/ <comment><AUTHOR> Not all paid apps are better than free apps :-/</comment>


Ask HN: Is G+ profitable for Google? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Because Google has a magic fountain that shoots out a cubic foot of liquid gold per second (ads), it can work on things which only tangentially benefit the business.

Most Google products are operating at a loss.

</comment><comment><USER3> Directly? Nope. Indirectly? I guess.

Google stores information about you to make the ads more relevant to you. If someone is using/have used g+ and have liked a few profile/pages(not sure what they're called) then google surely is more confident about this data than other data, so it might help google drive more business by targeting better.

Again, as someone else pointed out, most of the google products are operating at a loss only at individual product level. You can think of it as another example for 80-20 Principle.

</comment><comment><USER4> Does Google+ even drive direct revenue for Google?

At quick glance, I don't see premium membership or display ads. I assume the product operates at a loss but helps (read: tries to help) the ad products.

</comment><comment><USER5> It might help them get some data. Data is the new money, right?

<comment><USER6> Data is the new oil, albeit unstructured data that is not machine readable and can only live inside a Google data center.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I guess its about 80-20 principle..</comment>


Why learning Haskell/Python makes you a worse programmer - <AUTHOR> http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-learning-haskell-python-makes-you-a-worse-programmer/ <comment><USER2> Since RiderOfGiraffes is not around any more, I'll point out that this has been on HN a couple of times before, with some interesting discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1883663>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=407796>

I'm still sympathetic to the author's plight because my experiences have been similar. After learning Python and Haskell (and Clojure) and then returning to Java, I find myself missing features like first class functions and list comprehensions and so on. It's hard coming to terms with the fact that you're back in Blub and having to cram your thinking back into that box. It isn't so much becoming a _worse_ programmer as becoming a more _frustrated_ programmer.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very linkbaity title. First sentence gets to the real point of the article:

        >>I've found, contrary to what you sometimes read,
          that learning Python and Haskell has not improved
          my programming using other languages.

This is more about his personal experience than any hard facts about Haskell or Python making the general population a worse programmer.

<comment><USER4> And the second

>I find I think in Python, and even in Haskell to some extent, even though I have used Haskell very little.

demotivates you to read the rest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a post from 2006. The example problem with C# no longer exists; it can currently be written much like the author desired:

string.Join("\n", mylist.Select(x => x.Description).Where(description => description != ""));

</comment><comment><USER6> This post is 5 years old... C# is now at version 4 and has a boatload of functional features.

</comment><comment><USER7> If I understand this well, the writer is just being extremely sarcastic, and is looking for a job where he can write in something else than C#.

<comment><USER8> Also note that it is from 2006. My first thought at his attempt to functionally program in C# was "Were is the LINQ?" but the article is older than that.

He may be being sarcastic but in so far as Haskell idioms don't work in imperative languages he is right, especially as it applies to the large framework languages. The whole standard library (and as he calls out the ASP.net framework) expects a certain kind of mentality that isn't FP centric. The amount of FPisms that you can bring to an ASP.net app are few and far between. On a low level, C# (at least at that time) had very poor FP support. On the High level design side ASP.net dictates part of your design and does it in a somewhat FP hostile way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh no, do we have to listen to a new generation of frustrated developers rehashing the tired old arguments made by frustrated Lispers?

<comment><USER10> "Those who do not learn from history, are doomed to repeat it."-- misappropriated from George Santayana.

Without a solitary shred of evidence to support my conjecture, I claim that the problem is that programmers are given a smattering of information about how to use some tools, but are not taught about the progression of tools over time. The history of programming languages is a history of attempts to solve various problems and a history of various design trade-offs.

Deprived of this basic grounding, young programmers are constantly rediscovering the good and the bad, and the Internet gives us a constant stream of their revelatory essays, all of which can be summarized as "Babies vs. Bathwater: Fight!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ignorance is bliss.</comment>


Best Resources to Learn Russian? German? Etc.? - <AUTHOR> Has anyone here taught themselves Russian? What was it like? What Russian-specific resources do you recommend? (For instance, what's the best Russian dictionary? Best textbook?) Did you have a particular routine or language learning hack that really worked for you?
I'm interested studying Russian or Spanish someday soon, but I think that if you have an answer for a different language (French, German, Korean, etc.), you should reply anyway, someone else might be able to use it!
I know there are answers for this kind question out there on the internet already (and have already read some of them, myself), but I thought HN might have some interesting input. Especially for "hacker" minded people that want to optimize their learning, and especially in this time of grandiose New Year's resolutions to learn new languages. <comment><USER2> The problem with language learning is that without a good reason for learning you are unlikely to stick at it.

I used to be that guy that wanted to learn a ton of foreign languages. I'd start enthusiastically, buy the learning materials and then it would dawn on me. "When am I going to get to China or Russia? How will these help me in the near future or even the long term?"

These days I've realised that I'm only going to learn a language if it's in my best interest to do so. I'm focused on Thai (my wife's native language) and French because I'm moving to Canada.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've use Pimsleur as a starting point for Japanese, Italian, French, Mandarin, and Brazilian Portuguese. They have 3 levels of 30 lessons each typically, and getting through level 1 before going to a country has been more than enough to get by conversationally and impress the natives. If I go back to a country a second or third time or I have friends here that speak that language, I'll try to get through levels 2 and 3, but so far I've only done that with Japanese and Italian.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, that's impressive! I'll have to check Pimsleur out. What do you do for language maintenance? Did you ever get the languages mixed up?

<comment><USER3> I live in Los Angeles, so there are usually native speakers of every language around for practice. For Japanese (which I learned a decade ago back in college), I watched a lot of anime, dated Japanese girls, and ate at Japanese restaurants before spending a few months in Japan. For Italian, a have a few Italian friends so I tortured them with my terrible accent for practice, and listed to opera. French was easy because both my parents speak it, so I practiced on them, plus watched a lot of French movies. Mandarin I practice with my coworker (although as a Cantonese Malaysian, Mandarin is not his native dialect so he has an accent just like me), and whenever I go to a Chinese restaurant. My latest language is Brazilian Portuguese, which I am learning in anticipation of a trip to Brazil. I'm also learning Capoeira and learning to cook Brazilian BBQ, so I practice a bit at my local churrascaria.

In addition to these languages, I also learned Spanish starting in pre-school, and I speak a little Tagalog (my wife is from the Philippines). In answer to your question about getting the languages mixed up, not really. I learned them at separate times, so I think they're stored in different places in my brain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had to learn Russian in school and for the life of me I can't understand why anyone would want to do this to themselves voluntarily. Russian looks weird, sounds weird, and nobody speaks it apart from movie villains (and that not even very well). But that's just my opinion. ;-)

I also had to learn French in school and it was beautiful. Hearing French and speaking French is just great. And it was tons easier to learn than Russian.

Later I taught myself English, first by watching Movies and later by reading books (novels). It helps with the pronunciation if you read it in the voice of a native speaker e.g. a well known actor. The English grammar I read up on some websites. I need English to provide support for my software products. In the first months it took ages to write an email and I had to use a dictionary for most of the words.

Having made quite a few trips to Spain in the last couple of years, Spanish would be the language I'd like to learn if I had the time. It sounds great and half the world speaks it.

And about that weird German language. Although being a native German speaker myself, I'm not sure I can recommend learning it. Nobody speaks it outside of Germany, Austria and parts of Switzerland and it's not great fun to learn something you can't use.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm natively russian. The best online dictionary is [http://slovari.yandex.ru/](http://slovari.yandex.ru/)

You may touch me in Skype if you want to speak with native tech guy :-) vladimir.ignatyev

<comment><AUTHOR> That dictionary is really good! Thanks!

Question: Where do interesting Russian speakers on the internet hang out? Is there a Russian HN?

<comment><USER5> Russian HN is [http://geektimes.ru/](http://geektimes.ru/) (ex. Habrahabr.ru) Also [http://toster.ru](http://toster.ru) is the kind of stackoverflow, but there are a lot of newbies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They don't have Russian available yet* but check out [https://www.duolingo.com](https://www.duolingo.com)

*though it will be coming soon according to [https://www.duolingo.com/comment/2175794](https://www.duolingo.com/comment/2175794)

<comment><USER7> I've been Duolingo for a week (so far) to learn basic German and I like the site. The initial lessons I am doing are in nice small bite-sized pieces, so you can do a section in like 15 minutes. It keeps track of your position and you can go back there later. It also sends you daily reminder emails. Useful, overall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've found Memrise to be a good way to learn languages, using just a few minutes twice a day. I've tried a few ways online and offline before this, and none have been anywhere near as successful.

</comment><comment><USER9> With both Russian and German I had a problem memorizing the vocabulary. German genders don't make sense - why is a table a strong, proud man, whereas a mangy, flea-infested feral tomcat a proper lady?

It helps me to compare books in translation - say a work of fiction written in English, and that same book translated into Russian.

It also helps a great deal to chat with native speakers. Around here their are many Mexicans and Ukrainians, so I've been learning Mexican Spanish - it's dialect is quite different from Castillian Spanish - as well as Ukrianian.

<comment><USER4> > German genders don't make sense - why is a table a strong, proud man, > whereas a mangy, flea-infested feral tomcat a proper lady?

This should be the least of your worries and - in fact - should be the last you should learn. Just pick one gender for all nouns. You'll be understood anyway.

<comment><USER9> That's not what I'm told by native German speakers. They tell me that using the wrong gender makes me sound illiterate.

However I readily agree that the emphasis placed on genders by American schoolteachers is misplaced. The problem is that I myself devoted far more effort to getting the genders right than to anything else.

In four years of junior high and high school study, we were never once so much as requested to practice extended conversations, however we often had written tests that we would fail were we to provide the wrong genders in our solutions.

The very first time in my life I ever had a conversation of any sort in German, was a ten minute chat with a German immigrant to the US, when he interviewed me for my MIT application.</comment></comment></comment>


Apache 2.4.3 released, fixes two security holes and over 50 other bugs - <AUTHOR> http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/CHANGES_2.4.3

<comment><AUTHOR> Download links <http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi#apache24></comment>


A Hacker News Post Got Us 30x Visitors: Numbers & Lessons Learned - <AUTHOR> https://signnow.com/blog/2011/07/18/hacker-news-post-got-us-30x-visitors-numbers-lessons-learned/

<comment><USER2> I did a similar study of traffic solely attributable to a single post on ReadWriteWeb. I wrote a technical paper with the results: <http://www.stinkyteddy.com/documents/SocialMediaResponse.pdf> The long tail traffic is well described by an exponential function with a "half life" of about 10 days. You should check your data to see if that number is universal.

</comment><comment><USER3> You serve all you content via HTTPS? Including most static files/images, even though you have some non HTTPS objects which are not encrypted (and the browser notifies users of this).

Perhaps there is some business reason you have for this but it seems like a lot of wasted cycles.

That is a very small amount of traffic to experience issues with. If you want to inform about how much load was put on your systems, you should show pageviews and also show/look at stats on the static content (if you are using one server to serve it all).

<comment><USER4> They are in the business of security with contracts [0].

[0] <https://signnow.com/index/about></comment></comment>


Google shares rise ~$30 since Amazon released its new Kindles - <AUTHOR> http://sg.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GOOG

<comment><USER2> A few things...

1) Pretty much everything is up significantly across the last 2 days on ECB news [1].

2) Anecdotally, traders love to speculate on pretty tenuous associations. "Oh, there's a story about X in the news? Who else makes X? I better buy some."

3) GOOG closed at a new high yesterday. There are surely plenty of traders seeing that as confirmation of a breakout and piling in today.

Amazon's announcement is part of the move, but I'd wager it's a small one.

1: [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044427370457763...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444273704577635122724449562.html?mod=googlenews_wsj)

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazon's stock is also up... and by a bigger margin. <http://sg.finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AMZN>

<comment><AUTHOR> the question is, why did google's stocks go up? also hi fellow singaporean :)

<comment><USER3> haha I just used your link

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What is the connection?

<comment><USER5> I doubt it's the main driving force, but the revelation that the new Kindles are ad-supported. It could be consumers have more faith in the Nexus 7 overtaking the Kindle Fire going forward. And at the same time, excitement for Amazon's new products.</comment></comment>


MGM Resorts lays off 18,000 previously furloughed employees - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/28/mgm-resorts-sends-separation-letters-to-18000-furloughed-employees.html <comment><USER2> That is a lot of people...

<comment><USER3> That's only the beginning. There will be massive layoffs in the airline industry too - 19,000 at American Airlines alone:

[https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/25/american-airlines-is- cutting...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/25/american-airlines-is- cutting-19000-jobs-when-federal-aid-expires-in-october.html)</comment></comment>


Red Hat Launches the Next Release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2013/10/red-hat-launches-the-next-release-of-red-hat-enterprise-linux-5

<comment><USER2> Welcome to 2006 Enterprise Users.</comment>


Itch.io – Marketplace for Indie Games - <AUTHOR> https://itch.io/ <comment><USER2> Itch is very cool. Their tools are dev friendly, even the download client got released as open source ([https://github.com/itchio](https://github.com/itchio)).

And on the publishing side, they allow anyone to publish on the site, for free, no hoops to jump through. And if it's a paid app, they charge much less than Steam / iTunes / etc. Too bad they're not as popular with players.

But I'm idly curious why Itch popped up now, since it's been around for years.

<comment><USER3> As a gamer, I haven't really dived into Itch even though I see it recommended all the time. This is despite being a Linux gamer, a fan of indie games, a supporter of open source and a believer in multiple marketplaces (although I feel like we need better aggregators and agnostic sync/update tools).

I think the problem may be that I have absolutely no idea where to start. With Steam I started with games that came with Steam that I wanted anyway (Portal, Left 4 Dead). With Humble I started with Overgrowth and their original bundles. GOG was a great place to get games that I had already played or wanted to play and now is a good place to get DLC free stuff.

So with Itch I think what is missing is a 'killer app'. Not a 'killer feature' (it has plenty of those), but more a draw that will give me enough drive and interest to overcome the initial cognitive energy barrier to entry.

Taking recommendations!

<comment><USER4> I don't have any personal recommendations, but next time you are looking at purchasing an indie game, you might consider checking if it's available on Itch first. That's how I got into it anyway. The developers I've talked to prefer that I buy on there as well because they take much less of a cut than others stores.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd love to support this service. They do everything right - they take 0% of the game and give the entire amount to the devs. In contrast Steam takes 25% (earlier 30%). The tools itch offers to devs to package/upload their game are considered to be best-in-class in the industry and they're all open source [0]. There's an excellent article that talks about the difficulties in creating a competitor to Steam, and the kicker is "the service you're thinking of already exists - it's called itch.io" [1].

And yet when I think of an indie game I want to buy, it's not there. Just today I saw an excellent review [2] for a game called Hollow Knight. I couldn't find it on itch, ended up buying it on Steam instead. FWIW, the game is also available on gog.com, the Humble store and all consoles, so it's not like the devs haven't taken the effort to make their game accessible.

[0] - [https://github.com/itchio](https://github.com/itchio)

[1] - [https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete- with-...](https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-steam/)

[2] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksexEs7FKf4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksexEs7FKf4)

<comment><USER6> > they take 0% of the game

Not exactly, they charge 10% or allow you to setup your own merchant gateways.

[https://itch.io/docs/creators/payments](https://itch.io/docs/creators/payments)

That 10% is well worth it for having them deal with the tax/VAT madness.

<comment><USER7> Well, not exactly too. They charge 10% by default, but allow you to set any percentage (including 0%) regardless of the chosen payment mode. The only fees still left are the payment processor ones.

Personally I have set 30%, because they deserve it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This year's 7-day roguelike challenge had all the entrants put their games on itch.io [0]. In the episode of Roguelike Radio [1] that covered the 7drl, they lauded itch for requiring a working download, since entrants are allowed to use any platform at all (some write in c with raw escape codes written to the terminal, some write PICO-8 games, etc), and in years pay the hardest part of judging has been getting some of the games to run at all.

It turns out people who like making roguelikes in a 7 day sprint don't tend to prioritize little things like making sure their work can actually be played.

[0] [https://itch.io/jam/7drl-challenge-2018](https://itch.io/jam/7drl- challenge-2018) [1] [http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2012/03/episode-26-how-to- make...](http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2012/03/episode-26-how-to- make-7drl.html?m=1)

<comment><USER9> This year's 7DRL starts in just over a month, on March 2! :) [https://itch.io/jam/7drl-challenge-2019](https://itch.io/jam/7drl- challenge-2019)

I can highly recommend the challenge. It's a great community, it's got an organized judging phase, and roguelikes are one of the easiest genres to get into, especially for programmers. You can do all systems and no graphics if you want.

Also, I think you meant to link to this episode (the one you linked came out the year before itch launched) [http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2018/05/episode-145-7drls-2018...](http://www.roguelikeradio.com/2018/05/episode-145-7drls-2018.html)

I was on this one and we talked about itch quite a bit. My submission last year also ranked #1 and I bet HN might find it interesting as it's got a hacking theme: [https://itch.io/jam/7drl- challenge-2018/rate/232187](https://itch.io/jam/7drl- challenge-2018/rate/232187)

<comment><USER8> Argh, thank you for those corrections. I had just listened to the RR episode, did a quick search for it, and copied the link for the first result assuming it was the right one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They also publish PDFs for table top games, which I think is cool, since the other big player in that space, DriveThruRPG, has a slow interface for both users and authors of role playing games.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was trying to explain Itch to a colleague recently and settled for "You know Bandcamp? It's that, for games." Two super-friendly platforms for independent creators.

On the other hand, I don't use either of them as a customer. Bandcamp because I prefer the way Spotify helps me discover music based on my listening history, and Itch because it feels like a bit too much visually when I'm browsing games there as opposed to Steam/GoG.

<comment><USER12> Just had a look and it feels very "designed by engineers". Clearly the idea was to put as much content on the landing page as possible instead of thinking about what they want people to see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> They also have the most dev friendly fees I've seen. You're only obligated to pay credit card fees, beyond that is a voluntary percent of sales you can give to Itch (set at 10% by default.

</comment><comment><USER14> True or not, itch has always been categorized in my head as "the place you put your game if you can't get on steam/GOG", like having your website hosted on geocities instead of your own domain.

I don't know what could be done to change that stigma, maybe a "killer app" as someone else in the comments said, because as has been pointed out, everything else about the platform seems favorable.

<comment><USER15> I think that's a common perception of the site, but the barrier to entry on Steam nowadays is a 100 dollar fee. Nowadays if you want your game on Steam, you can get it on Steam.

<comment><USER14> Agreed, and I think Steam's perception is eroding but still there. If a AAA dev released on itch, I think it would get instant elevation in status. But the way things are going, they're opening their own stores instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Shoutout to Leaf and Amos for building such a great community for indies and continuously adding more features to itch.io: [https://twitter.com/moonscript](https://twitter.com/moonscript) & [https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime](https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime)

</comment><comment><USER17> Interestingly enough, I first heard of Itch not because of the games they publish but because they've become quite popular in the transgender community as a platform for publishing light novels with transgender themes.

</comment><comment><USER18> check the HTML5 stuff for games you can play right now (most are free):

[https://itch.io/games/html5](https://itch.io/games/html5)

</comment><comment><USER19> Itch is great. Their search by tags system is broken, but everything else is wonderful.

Full disclosure: I publish on itch. Https://failrate.itch.io

<comment><USER20> how is it broken? (I do know our search results page isn't ideal, but if you search a tag there's a link that takes yo to that relevant page)

<comment><USER19> Well, in recent memory, I tried searching by tag, and it straight up didn't find a known result with that tag.

To be completely fair, I will regress the bug and see if it is still present. If so, I will submit a bug report.

<comment><USER19> Could not reproduce. It was maybe user error.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If only solving bullying was so easy... [https://ibb.co/q5Cy94Y](https://ibb.co/q5Cy94Y)

</comment><comment><USER22> Itch is awesome, been up for years!

I run a semi-competitor called [https://simmer.io](https://simmer.io). My focus is:

-WebGL Games (only, no downloads) -Youtube style presentation (and embedding) -Being the easiest place to upload a game, no rigamarole. Drag your webgl build onto the page and call it a day.

We have about 2500 games and developers signed up. It's currently mostly a place to show off your work, but working on more monetization options right now.

Feel free to reach out if you have any feedback or ideas for the site. email@example.com</comment>


WebRTC demo: Print your message live - <AUTHOR> https://www.webrtc2cdn.io/ <comment><USER2> keep it open in spare tab I wanna see if it works

</comment><comment><USER3> who will pay for the traffic now ?

</comment><comment><USER4> no one pays it :)</comment>


Dune: The Battle for Arrakis – Extended Reference (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://ledmeister.com/dunexref.htm <comment><USER2> Games that create a completely new genre (in this case, Real-Time Strategy) are rare. Dune II is the even-more rare case of a new genre being created at the same time as the game itself being quite excellent and popular at the same time.

I've fond childhood memories of playing this for many hours. Great game!

<comment><USER3> This is why I felt bad for the PUBG devs, who seemed to have successfully pushed the Battle Royale genre with a game that wasn't perfect but that they put a lot of effort into, only to be outsold in days by Fortnite upon its release.

<comment><USER4> Given that PUBG has apparently sold 50 million copies across PC and Xbox (as of two years ago!)[1], and the amount of time and effort that goes into Fortnite _continuously_ to keep it fresh and the people playing it happy, I'm not sure that PUBG hasn't payed a higher dividend on investment percentage- wise, even if it's of lower total amount.

Bottom line, I'm not really really feeling bad for PUBG at all. It's kind of like feeling bad for Minecraft because a lot of people are playing Fortnite now. Minecraft made most its money on the purchase. There's some loss in future revenue because of the network effect, but they probably made most the money they were going to make from you already (and to bring it back to PUBG, it's not for everyone. I didn't let my currently 10 year old son play it, but I let him play Fortnite, even a year ago when this was a discussion).

1: [https://www.polygon.com/2018/6/19/17478476/playerunknowns- ba...](https://www.polygon.com/2018/6/19/17478476/playerunknowns- battlegrounds-sales-pubg-number-of-players)

<comment><USER3> I see your point but Minecraft didn't get usurped in popularity by a game that ripped off it's core gameplay loop. As another commenter mentioned, I did forget about DayZ, so maybe Battle Royale wasn't an entirely original concept from the PUBG developers, but I think it's fair to say Epic Games saw the popularity of the genre, pivoted their lackluster game into the genre, and then undercut PUBG on price to rise in popularity. I guess that's just business, but I do hold sympathy for the PUBG devs.

<comment><USER4> Okay, but are we really considering the Battle Royale gameplay features all that innovative? If a large map you can find stuff on that eventually shrinks qualifies as something enough to differentiate it, doesn't Fortnite's building mechanic qualify enough to differentiate _it_?

I don't play either game (unfortunately my system needs a refresh), but from what I've seen of my son playing Fortnite the fights are like nothing I've seen in an FPS before. There's a mad dash to build fortifications right in front of people as quickly as possible as well as break through and navigate these fortifications while under fire. To outside eyes at least, the experience looks qualitatively different.

> I think it's fair to say Epic Games saw the popularity of the genre, pivoted > their lackluster game into the genre, and then undercut PUBG on price to > rise in popularity.

To my eyes, Fortnite differs in a few very important ways which makes it much more complex than one company copying another and undercutting them.

\- It's targetted at a wider range of ages. e.g. it's much more acceptable for parents to allow a younger set of kids to play.

\- It has a building mechanic, which changes both the strategy (pre-battle and route planning) and tactics (on-the-fly shielding during live fire) of a game.

\- They are constantly updating it. I'm not sure how many "seasons" they are in now, but not only are the changes they introduce often fairly large, the end of season events are quite the spectacle, from the one or two I've seen after the fact.

If you combine that with the fact that PUBG seems to have made at _least_ a few hundred million dollars on what I expect is a few million (or a couple tens of millions at most) investment, and I'm not really all that sorry for them. They had an idea, they executed on it and made a bundle of money, and then someone else iterated on it and happened to make a whole lot more money. What's the alternative, Epic not change Fortnite and all the people that play for free and all the younger players and all the people that like the building mechanic just lose out? I just don't see a situation where PUBG came out on top where more people are better off, and helping PUBG devs make billions instead of hundreds of millions isn't something I think we need to optimize for as a society, nor really care about.

<comment><USER3> > Okay, but are we really considering the Battle Royale gameplay features all > that innovative?

Yes. Either accidentally or on purpose, the Battle Royale genre is a near perfect game type for streaming, which it evolved along side with.

> If a large map you can find stuff on that eventually shrinks qualifies as > something enough to differentiate it, doesn't Fortnite's building mechanic > qualify enough to differentiate it?

Yes! I am in no way suggesting that devs of Fortnite didn't innovate on the core concept, or that Epic owe the devs of PUBG anything. You're also correct about the wider age appeal and constant updates, though PUBG also receives updates albeit at a slower pace.

But Epic has far far greater resources, and though I don't think game genre's should necessarily be patentable, I do think Fortnite's Battle Royale would not have existed without the success of PUBG, and the fact that they could work off of a skeleton they knew was already tested and successful, especially with the lucrative streaming community.

I don't know about optimizing for society or whatever, it's just games man. I like that both can exist and be successful, while also feeling some sympathy for what could have been for the PUBG devs. Both can be true.

<comment><USER4> > I like that both can exist and be successful, while also feeling some > sympathy for what could have been for the PUBG devs. Both can be true.

I accept most of what you said. I'm more just defining why I don't really feel sorry for them at all. If they were the inventors of the idea and they never were able to capitalize on it, sure. But they did capitalize on it, and it looks like extremely lucratively. It feels sort of like lamenting that Ford doesn't own more of the auto market given that they popularized (or invented in the modern era) the assembly line that all major automakers use. Ford's doing just fine, and we're all better off for the idea being spread.

It's okay if you don't agree, I just wanted to make sure I expressed myself accurately. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Off-topic, but I saw the 1984 Dune film in theaters. It remains the only film I've been to where the theater handed out a sheet of paper with a glossary.

How familiar with the books do you need to be to play this?

<comment><USER6> If you haven't read the book, do yourself a favour and read it. I envy you, you'll be able to read it for the first time.

Movie is also great. It's just not finished. :(

<comment><USER7> Jodorowsky's version?

<comment><USER8> Villeneuve's, hopefully...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(2020_film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_\(2020_film\))

<comment><USER9> I'm really excited for the movie and the casting looks incredible so far. I wonder how the 2 movie split is going to work narratively. The book itself has kind of a perfect 3 act setup but I'm not sure breaking the story at the end of the book's part 1 (or halfway through part 2) is going to feel very satisfying.

<comment><USER10> I think you could stop as a cliffhanger when Paul and Jessica escape from the worm, and are confronted by Stilgar. Then you start with a knife battle for the second movie, and who doesn't like a knife battle?

<comment><USER6> No, that would be like moving Luke vs Darth Vader fight to the beginning of episode VI.

This actually reminded me of a colossal mistake made by Hobbit pt.2 movie, when they ended the part with a dragon flying away to burn the city after the cringiest of chase scenes.

They could have _easily_ end the part with slaying a dragon, and then show it _again_ in part 3. All they needed was to find a different POV character!! One dragon kill, shown twice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What a coincidence, for the past week I have been looking for the author of the never published book "Dune II - Insider's Guide" which was allegedly based on the featured article.

Anybody has more information about it?

[https://twitter.com/fabynou/status/1280304687594397696](https://twitter.com/fabynou/status/1280304687594397696)

</comment><comment><USER12> Loved this game! If you want to play it in a slightly more modern version, the OpenRA folks have done made a pretty faithful version of it, which runs on their "clean-room implementation" of the original Command & Conquer engine: [https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA](https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA)

<comment><USER13> For DuneII or Dune 2000?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The text formatting of this document is great.

Reminds me of all the other gamefaqs which were just plain text, e.g.

[https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/197339-final-fantasy- tactic...](https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps/197339-final-fantasy- tactics/faqs/3849)

</comment><comment><USER15> > Saboteurs can pass over enemy walls, and may do so without slowing down.

What? I played through Dune 2 several times with every house and had no idea about that!

</comment><comment><USER16> They have an open source version of Dune here: [https://github.com/OpenDUNE/OpenDUNE](https://github.com/OpenDUNE/OpenDUNE)

For those who miss the Dune gameplay and don't want to pirate the Genesis ROM.

</comment><comment><USER17> I can remember my friend patiently explaining to me that House Harkonnen didn't actually have invincible troops just because the guy said "our invincible Harkonnen troops" in a cutscene. I was all like "we should play as those guys!"

</comment><comment><USER6> Dune 2 was great, but Dune 1 was even better. It will forever have a warm place in my heart. A completely different game, though.

<comment><USER18> Dune 1 is probably the most atmospheric 90s DOS game I've played. There are few games that will sweep you into a world like that.

<comment><USER19> The game was developed by Philip Ulrich, already behind the Ark of Captain Blood. The guy is a genius. This [1] is a short video of him explaining how the game was developed, alas in French only.

[1] [https://youtu.be/5nHX_74mjss](https://youtu.be/5nHX_74mjss)

<comment><USER6> What kind of person can block video titled "Dune : il faut sauver la planète des sables | Retrogaming Made in France | ARTE" from being viewed in certain countries?!

<comment><USER20> Arte itself, maybe? I hit this quite frequently in the opposite direction. Try invidio.us, or duckduckgo. A VPN as a last resort. Or other channels.. I'd have uploaded it, but my upload is _very_ slow today...

The documentary is nice, if a bit short. The target is a general audience, so you might not be missing out _that_ much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This game was released first for MS DOS in 1992. It was amazing experience - unlike many games of that time (most popular were side-scrollers like Prince of Persia), it required mouse.

</comment><comment><USER22> I couldn't even begin to guess how many hours I spent playing this game as a kid (and how much I dreaded hearing "Warning - missile approaching" in the last level).

</comment><comment><USER23> This was my first RTS game and I was hooked! So many fond memories of running over baddies with my spice harvester!

</comment><comment><USER24> Love this website. Wish more people made sites like this.

</comment><comment><USER25> I remember having to mess with memory settings in the DOS boot files in order to squeeze enough RAM out of my little PC to play Dune II. Fun times.

</comment><comment><USER26> I remember Dune 2 fit on two floppies (2x 1.44MB). That is impressive. It was compressed and decompressed itself on install, but still.

<comment><USER27> I think it was 4 floppies.

<comment><USER28> The Amiga-version was on 4 floppies, as most Amigas were equipped with drives for DD floppies (880k when formatted for the Amiga), while contemporary PC's had drives for HD floppies (1.44 MB formatted with FAT).

<comment><USER27> AFAIR, the PC version was 4 floppies too, and ebay seems to agree. [https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/ZKoAAOSwsrBcwbR8/s-l1600.png](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/ZKoAAOSwsrBcwbR8/s-l1600.png)

<comment><USER16> Some of the 3.5 inch floppies used on PC games were 720k DD disks because not everyone had HD drives.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Pomplamoose Problem: Artists Can't Survive as Saints and Martyrs - <AUTHOR> http://www.artistempathy.com/blog/the-pomplamoose-problem-artists-cant-survive-as-saints-and-martyrs <comment><USER2> _"We love your music," the public seems to be saying, "but we aren't going to pay for it anymore. "_

This is utterly and painfully familiar to me.

Before I dove into retraining as a programmer, I was a self-published tabletop roleplaying author.

Tabletop RPGs are an incredibly small space, and part of the reason they are a small space is that no one pays anyone for anything. I wasn't even self- published because I didn't have publisher interest in my work: I was self- published because when publishers approached me and I sent them quotes asking for less than a penny per word, they would still balk and tell me it was too much money or just stop responding to my emails.

And yet, when you talk about this publicly, when you discuss that maybe the reason so many of the industry's most legendary designers all leave and write for video games is because they literally weren't making enough to live, people react to you with hostility and derision. You may as well be spouting Marxist propaganda on the street corner, all for the crime of suggesting that someone actually be paid enough for their work to make it worth doing.

You hear new ideas, things like pay-what-you-want, or free-ebook schemes, which conveniently all seem to involve giving them something for free with the understanding that somehow this will magically turn into more sales.

It rarely does. IF you're big enough and visible enough, or when you first make a splash on the scene, some of these tricks can work for a short time. What actually happened in all but one occasion was that a whole hell of a lot of people just decided they were more happy to get something for nothing and my sales actually went down (though downloads of course, went up.)

Patreon is a great model, in theory, when it works. But it irritates me that this is what we've come to in the creative sphere of our society. Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero.

They're still all too happy to watch/read/play the hell out of it, and tell you how amazing your thing is.

Just don't ask them to give you any money for it.

<comment><USER3> _Patreon is a great model, in theory, when it works. But it irritates me that this is what we 've come to in the creative sphere of our society. Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero._

Quite. The big gain of copyright was to liberate artists from that to some degree and put them on an economic footing of productivity, where their work could be valued for its commercial potential, with the reasonable proviso that people who wanted to enjoy it would pay to purchase it in some form. Despite the flaws of the publishing industry this worked pretty well and there was a cultural explosion that paralleled the industrial revolution.

In HN debates on the subject, I've noticed a small but persistent core of resentment for professional artists, based around the idea that artists shouldn't be so greedy as to ask for money because being an artist is fun. And while it certainly can be, a lot of the time it's a tedious grind same as any other line of work. I find this analogous to saying software engineers shouldn't be paid because they like playing with computers.

I read the original Pomplamoose piece and while I respected the position of 'hey we're a startup, and while we haven't made it we are making it, plus being in a band is awesome' it nonetheless radiated an air of desperation. The cold hard reality is that you can do a 2 month tour, play to packed houses of paying fans, and still lose $10,000. Criticisms that they paid too much for the stage show are misplaced; it costs money to hire those things, and you need some of those things so that people say your show was fun and exciting rather than dull and boring. People go to a concert to be entertained, after all. Traditionally, bands signed deals with labels because labels have the capital and know-how to promote music, much as studios have the capital and know-how to put out films and so forth. It's very very hard to build up that capital organically, and it's also very hard to produce a marketable product without a capital investment.

<comment><USER4> > I find this analogous to saying software engineers shouldn't be paid because > they like playing with computers.

I really don't expect anyone to pay me for the open-source experimentation I put on github for free. But if you want me to write the boring line-of- business application for your company, then I want to get paid.

<comment><USER5> Yet the attitude you express here is used as a justification for the suppression of pay in this industry. Open source is a boon and a bane in that regard, because companies are unlikely to distinguish between the two contexts you note. And they have a large source of useful idiots who will happily play along.

<comment><USER6> Plus that's how we get shitty OpenSSL code and the like, that everybody uses, but nobody bothers improving...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing I'm really happy about regarding this article and the accompanying blog post from Pomplamoose is that it pretty much devastates the argument of "you shouldn't expect to make money from selling recordings; release your recordings for free because all the real money is from touring and merchandise!"

People can quibble about how much they spent on lights etc but none of it would have made an order of magnitude difference. Plus, Pomplamoose is comparatively _huge_ \- I've seen that touring/merch argument made against the indie that only has 1-2 CDs out and simply wants their cd/recordings sales to cover the production costs of recording the CDs.

I wish Pomplamoose had broken out their "merch" number - how much was from selling posters/t-shirts, and how much was from selling CDs? The fact that they were even bundled together almost as an afterthought is another indication of how devalued it has become.

<comment><USER8> At the same time, look at how we comics do the same. Their primary output is free/ad-supported and their main source of direct income from customers is side-projects, merch, and donations.

<comment><USER7> What do you mean by comics?

<comment><USER8> Bah, _web_ comics. Typo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Since we don't have a "Basic Income", to survive in society you have to provide value to others¹, i.e. make money. If you want to spend your time being an artist, you still have to make money.

The cost of any widely available item will trend towards its marginal cost. A non-rivalrous good with zero marginal cost will therefore trend towards a price of zero. Digital copies of things fall under this category. _Therefore_ , you cannot expect to be able to make money by having a profit margin on each item sold on these types of products. You cannot make money _this way_.

You may lament this fact, but it is the reality. You will have to make money _some other way_. There will probably never arise a perfect substitute. The worst case scenario is that the modern but pre-digital age was a golden age for production of these kinds of now-digitizeable things, just as ancient Egypt was a golden age for the production of pyramids.

But you can't put the genie back in the bottle, and you can't complain that there isn't any substitute business model to cover your situation. Reality is what it is.

① [http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make- yo...](http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better- person/)

<comment><USER2> Bluntly, this argument (which is tiresomely familiar to me at this point) strikes me as nothing so much as self-fulfilling justification.

Thing X doesn't pay, therefore I don't have to pay you for Thing X, you should've gone into something else if you wanted money.

Baloney. I can think of no other field where the kinds of man-hours involved are as devalued. Yes, supply is generous, but so is _demand_ , at unprecedented levels in human history. We are a culture grown fat and rich off its own cultural products, yet which routinely refuses to actually pay for any of them.

Labor isn't free in almost any other market, so why should you get to demand someone work 80+ hours a week for nothing? Explain to me how that fits any sane market theory.

<comment><USER9> If you want to get paid, then you'd better do something which makes money. It's as simple as that. In the current technological world, digital goods cannot make money by using the method which was, in the past, used to make money for the things which are now digital. (This is _not_ to say that they cannot make money _some other way_.)

You comment looks like a sweat-of-the-brow argument. Like, if I spend a lot of effort and time doing something, and then as a result have a product which the world doesn't value, why should I still get paid?

> _We are a culture grown fat and rich off its own cultural products, yet > which routinely refuses to actually pay for any of them._

If this could be shown and quantified, then we would have the data necessary to create some system to use this effect to national advantage. But we don't, so we can't.

Also, I think you are arguing disingenuously when you say that I " _demand someone work 80+ hours a week for nothing_ ". I do not. People are free to do whatever they want, and will get compensated according to what they can get paid from other people.

<comment><USER2> People have been refusing to pay artists for longer than there has been digital copying.

<comment><USER9> No more than people have been refusing to pay for work in general. With digital copying, the situation changes fundamentally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Welcome to every artistic endeavor ever. You go into a field for love, you have to pay for the privilege by competing against an overcrowded market because _everybody_ is making a labor of love.

To me, the real solution is not go pay more for labours of love, but to institute a shorter workweek so everybody can pursue their own labours of love on the side.

<comment><USER10> that makes it worse, because you'll increase the supply and drive the price down.

<comment><USER11> Are we trying to maximise the number of people creating good art, or the number of people making a living out of art? It's not the same thing.

<comment><USER7> That's really the heart of it. Everything has moved so fast that I don't think we understand the first principles of the system.

For a while I believed that all the new music production tools out there meant that the market is flooded with crappy music released by hobbyists giving it away for free. The system affects of that sort of thing is that the listeners are bombarded, they shut down, they don't have the opportunity to reliably discover "good" music, and that therefore people writing "good" music fall through the cracks, don't earn money, eventually stop writing, and culture is worse off.

But... I'm coming around to the view that the market is pretty much flooded now with "good" music. I'm being hand-wavy, defining it as merely music that deserves to exist alongside other "good" music. If that's true, then it's a different model. Great for the consumer, they can probably subsist on a healthy music diet received for free. There the only path through for a musician is to try and invite fans into the "family" and hope fans will pay a premium for that. But still, you're going to have artists that write good music fall through the cracks and stop writing - it's just that in those cases, culture isn't necessarily worse off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > "We love your music," the public seems to be saying, "but we aren't going to > pay for it anymore. Of course, please keep making it – but you'll have to > find another way to do it."

Ok, so this is going to be controversial, but...do we really _need_ people to keep making art? At least as a profitable venture?

There's already more art, music, movies, books existent than I could ever experience in a hundred lifetimes, and there's no reason to think that recently-created art is better or more interesting than older art. It's not like it's getting stale. Would it really be that bad if artists stopped making art? If people don't want to pay for it, maybe artists should stop? Eventually maybe society would want to pay for it again?

<comment><USER12> People do want new art. Just look at the most torrented works of art -- far more people download Game of Thrones than I Love Lucy. One major reason is that societies change and today's audiences are different from audiences of 30 years ago.

The reason people don't want to pay for art is not that they assign a value of zero to it; it's that they have figured out a way to get it without paying the artist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nobody explains the situation better than Corey Doctorow: [http://archive.dconstruct.org/culture/free](http://archive.dconstruct.org/culture/free)

Making a living as an artist is a dream only the tiniest fraction of privileged people have ever been able to do. Of all the economic injustices in the world, the fact that it's a lot of work to scrape by providing some awesome entertainment is not one that justifies a lot of sympathy and certainly not one that we should destroy cultural freedom and technological freedom over. It's nice to be transparent, and I don't mind Pomplamoose's original article. The artistempathy.com article is hyperbolic and out of touch.

</comment><comment><USER14> a response: [http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/574-op- ed/](http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/574-op-ed/)

</comment><comment><USER15> When we see a shortage of rock bands, then there's a problem. There isn't. At one point there were 13.5 million bands on Myspace. With Band-In-A-Box and AutoTune, anyone can make music now. All music worth hearing is on line, so anyone can listen to a band that's better than you.

The musician as star concept dates from the vinyl and radio era, when manufacturing and distribution of records, and getting airplay, created a mass market for rock stars. That was a brief historical anomaly. For centuries, almost all musicians were nobodies, outranked by bartenders. Now, with the tools for making and distributing music available to everyone, we're back there.

You are in a business where, unless you're really good and really well promoted, you don't matter. Deal with it.

Read:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_one_cares_about_yo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_one_cares_about_your_garage_band)

</comment><comment><USER6> That's the problem with lots of other professions, in an age where tons of skills become obsolete, either because tools, knowledge and opportunities to learn become too widespread (e.g. recording music, video making, photography, journalism -- millions enter a market that can only sustain 1/1000 of them because the barriers to entry are now much lower), or because they got automated / migrated to China, etc.

The usual BS about "being creative", "practicing hard" and getting a leg up the competition is also not really helpful. It's just advice for the individual, not a systemic solution to a problem (that might not even have one).

</comment><comment><USER16> Macroeconomics, supply and demand: the problem for artists is (1) that they are not the slightest bit scarce (2) amateurs can do it too, and do (3) the ensuing macroeconomic race to the bottom (4) the public mostly aren't aesthetes, they just want something good enough to fill their subcultural needs.

So art goes back to being for trust fund babies and people with day jobs. Successful artists need to find a _cultural_ niche and work it.

[http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about- aesthe...](http://rocknerd.co.uk/2013/09/13/culture-is-not-about-aesthetics- punk-rock-is-now-enforced-by-law/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I honestly don't get why they got that much flak over a few bill items. Would it have been any better for them to hide how much they paid for various parts of their show?

(So what if they paid X for lights? If they wanted _those_ lights... etc.)

<comment><USER18> _> I honestly don't get why they got that much flak over a few bill items_

Because it discredits them. It isn't far off from when Fox News dismisses the problems of poverty with "but they have refrigerators" or when people (often around here) yet to reorient reality so that the cause of poverty is buying $5 quality-of-life improvements instead of societal economic intent.

It helps folks sleep at night.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> _Artists literally have to beg publicly for money, to resort to what amounts to a medieval patronage scheme, just to survive at all, all because the audience has simply decided en masse that the value of all creative work is effectively zero._ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745759](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745759)

 _They are a business. If they didn 't make money, or even lost money, then they didn't take care of the financial side of things._ [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746405](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746405)

I have a problem with both of these ideas (from different comments here, and I did cite them). First of all, I think it is in the best interest of the world to make a lot of stuff freely available to the masses. I think the world is a better place when some things are readily available. It is a form of public education. I don't want culture to be something only rich people can afford.

Having said that, yeah, if you are doing something creative, it takes a lot of your time and you should be compensated but that doesn't mean business stuff comes naturally to creative types.

I have a done a lot of stuff over the years that I have reason to believe benefited other people. I don't feel I have gotten enough financially out of it. I don't think that is just a case of me being stupid and not business- savvy. I think some things are just hard to monetize and I also think some things are hard to accomplish at all and may be impossible to accomplish if you have to worry about how to also monetize it.

I am encouraged that we now have things like Patreon. I am encouraged that we are coming up with new alternatives like that. I still don't know how to effectively pull off the things I want to do and also monetize them. But one thing I am clear on is that I would like some things to be freely available because I don't want some things only available the The Haves. I think that increases the divide between The Haves and The Have Nots. And I think that is one reason monetizing art is a hard problem to solve: Because it shouldn't just be for the rich. It should enrich the lives of many. Yet, no, the artists should not all be starving artists either. I am not a fan of martyrdom.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is why virtually every small-time musician I ever spoke to called for some sort of unobtrusive, universal DRM -- and if you care about music, you should too.

<comment><USER21> And it's stupid. It won't stop your art from being pirated. It will only make the lives of your legitimate customers more difficult.

<comment><USER6> I don't know. I've seen DRM that has never been cracked for quite popular software. Propellerheads Reason for one.

<comment><USER20> Notator for Atari ST has never been cracked either. Its primary author, Dr. Gerhard Lengeling, is a multitalented genius who spent as much time on the copy protection scheme as he did on the software itself.

Some people really want to be paid for their work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The bands who know what they're doing, even small bands, do make money from tours:

[http://noisey.vice.com/blog/you-dont-have-to-lose-money- on-t...](http://noisey.vice.com/blog/you-dont-have-to-lose-money-on-tour)

The problem with Pomplamoose is that they spent a ridiculous amount of money on silly things. Their loss.

</comment><comment><USER4> I find a little bit telling that HN has basically no sympathy for cab drivers, whose job formerly paid a living wage (protected by that reliable bogeyman "government regulation") but whose livelihoods are now under assault from any number of "disruptive" startups.

But as soon as creative class workers are threatened, HN is falling all over itself defending copyright law (a government regulation!) as just and right and natural.</comment>


Bet everything on electric: Inside Volkswagen's radical strategy shift - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-volkswagen-electric-insight/bet-everything-on-electric-inside-volkswagens-radical-strategy-shift-idUSKCN1PV0K4 <comment><USER2> > _The German giant has staked its future, to the tune of 80 billion euros > ($91 billion), on being able to profitably mass-produce electric vehicles - > a feat no carmaker has come close to achieving._

This is an immense number. This is almost twice the current market cap of TSLA.

Ironically, I don't think this would have been possible without Dieselgate. There was just too much profit in the current business. Now, ICE are forever associated with €27bn in fines (so far).

Tesla may have the current lead in battery tech and in marketing, but on just about every other front, Volkswagen is just an immense force. It'll take them a while to perfect electric drivetrains, but once them have them, production (what has plagued Tesla) will be no issue.

Daimler, too, has committed $42 billion.

These are major forces.</comment>