Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://meltingasphalt.com/wealth-the-toxic-byproduct/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting to speculate on what would happen if some of these foundational assumptions of economics didn't hold. What if _money_ actually became more valued than _what you can buy with money_? What if supply didn't create its own demand? What if people didn't try to make money to satisfy their own wants, but to one-up their neighbors in the pissing match of life?

You'd see a lot of strange behavior. Instead of consumption or even investment, excess money would be put towards _speculation_ , trying to raise the dollar value of your holdings regardless of what you can buy (which you don't want anyway). Instead of circulating through the economy, money would pool at the people who already have their earthly wants satisfied and have no need to spend it. Instead of focusing their money on optimizing production, businesses would spend money on services or people that would _help them convince others to buy their product_. And instead of buying businesses for additional revenue, they would be more motivated to buy businesses that _threaten to destroy the revenues they already have_.

You might even get really crazy behavior, like people creating their own currencies that they then put lots of real money into, so that they can feel rich in their own little domain.

In short, it wouldn't look all that different from the world of today.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure I would use the word "interesting" it is more likely "illuminating" :-) But word selection aside, one of the problems that money brings is that it is a concrete number, and thus susceptible to being coerced into being a "score." This is particularly true when you have people who are insecure about their value, they might get it into their heads that the person with the highest "score" has the highest value. As the author points out that isn't a horrible place to be, it helps the economy, but it does become toxic when a person uses consumption to _advertise_ their score relative to other people. (It becomes tragic when someone borrows to spend consumptively in order to present the illusion of having a higher score).

One of the examples of how broken this can be, is that of creating a company (with some paperwork and about $1,500 you can do this easily in California), then issuing yourself 5 billion shares in the company (also easy to do, just register them with the SEC), and then "sell" 20 of your shares to a friend of yours (who is a qualified investor :-)) for $20 to establish a "market value" for your shares. And Poof! you are now "worth" $4,999,999,980 by virtue of the "value" of the shares you still hold, you are a billionaire! And you only need to pay the $850/year to maintain your corporation's status.

So who wants to be a billionaire right? And what does that mean? You have a high "score" but you don't have any real wealth. You can't really sell a billion shares for a billion dollars. That isn't going to happen right?

So now people play this game in the crypto coin market, creating a coin nobody will actually use, giving them selves a bunch of it, and selling some to speculators to establish a story about what that coin is "worth." What does it mean really? Not a thing.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if taxing stated wealth (even if at a miniscule percentage) would help avoid insane/gamed valuations.

<comment><USER2> You get other sorts of gaming. Property taxes function like this, and there's a whole industry around avoiding re-assessment, getting assessors to low-ball property, etc. right up until it comes time to actually sell the property, when you do a bunch of renovations, get it re-assessed, and try to get the highest valuation you can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The framing of this is all wrong. The problem isn't that developers are overpaid, it's that other industries' laborers have had their work systematically undervalued, all the way down to people performing essential services who can't afford to feed their families on full-time work.

However you want to argue about payment/wealth being a problem, ultimately, the idea that workers being compensated "too much" (when definitionally they aren't making as much as their labor's value creates) is the productive thing to focus on is very unhelpful.

<comment><USER6> >all the way down to people performing essential services who can't afford to feed their families on full-time work.

This is a feature of the system, not a bug. If these folks weren't barely making it, there'd be more free energy for rentiers to extract through various rent-seeking behavior, and since rentiers have significantly more political power, the system would get subtly worse for the everyman in whatever ways have the least-bad optics until they're barely making it again.

Like, this is why the SF Bay Area has the zoning-caused housing crisis: because it can afford to.

<comment><USER7> Can we strike at the root and try to reduce rent-seeking behavior? Even if we can't eliminate it, there was a time when 'usury' an ugly moral sin and Jubilee was an actual event, so at least we understood who the jerks were, instead of blaming ourselves for being indentured servants in a rigged system.

<comment><USER6> IMO it's gotten too sophisticated to tackle head-on. Back then, if you were getting screwed, at least you knew how and by whom. Now, the vast majority of people who really understand how any particular rent-seeking scheme works are the rentiers themselves, so any public policy debate quickly devolves into a mix of noise and actual malice.

<comment><USER8> I initially mistook your first comment for defending a broken system (don't know how I could have done that), but this is just beautifully cynical. I buy your reasoning, and the state of things is actually quite tragic.

Most people who understand how this works will think "okay, so this is broken, but how can I profit from this?" rather than focus their energies on how the system can be fixed. The former is much easier to accomplish.

<comment><USER9> > Most people who understand how this works will think "okay, so this is > broken, but how can I profit from this?" rather than focus their energies on > how the system can be fixed. The former is much easier to accomplish.

Taking that cynicism one step further: I don't think it is about ease or difficulty of either approach. Rather, those who understand the system also typically understand the human nature, particularly its lust for power, which prohibits any system from being truly fixed. Because any system is going to be gamed by someone to accumulate power for themselves (or their inner circles). So why not apply your insights for your own benefits?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The yacht is made of wood, metal, and plastic. Building it requires many > thousands of hours of effort. Workers have to find the trees, cut them down, > haul the lumber across vast distances, cut it, sand it, polish it, paint it, > etc., etc., etc. If you weren't commissioning the yacht, all of those > materials and man-hours could be put to other, better uses. For all the good > it does the Congolese people, you may as well pay them to build the yacht, > then burn it before their eyes. Taking it through the window, into your own > possession and for your own consumption, has the same effect.

Wow. A lot to unpack here. The author was doing just fine up until this paragraph.

What "other, better uses" does the author propose? Better yet, who defines what uses are better or worse? I'm sure those workers who chopped down the wood or built the yacht would much prefer I pay them than a different worker, even if I want to buy the yacht just to watch it burn.

The author fails to understand the fundamental principle of Utility[0]. It's intrinsically up to an individual to determine that which has utility for them.

> That's why wealth is toxic. As long as someone's money is tucked away in his > bank account, we're safe. But the minute it starts to leak out, via > consumption, we all become that much worse off.

What an outlandish claim. If consumption were to halt entirely, no money would exchange hands and we'd go back to fending for ourselves by foraging and hunting.

At some point, we have to stop listening to laymen. This is true of every field, but Economics for some reason seems to be the layman's favorite.

I'm not an Economist either, but at least I don't go around pontificating about things I _know_ not to know.

––––––––––

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

<comment><USER11> I think the author falls into the 'it's better to have cake than to eat it' camp. Of course wealth in this case is toxic - you miss the point of it.

<comment><USER12> So, you're saying that the worst possible thing someone can do is produce but never consume?

<comment><USER11> To follow the food analogy, I'm saying that you've gotta eat to have energy to be productive to make food to eat.

In other words, you have to produce in order to consume in order to produce in order to consume, and so on. The worst possible thing would be consumption sans production - that's cancer.

Can you think of examples where you would produce without consumption? I can't think of any. Even intellectual discoveries consume information. My answer to your question would be that it would be the most impossible thing someone could do to produce but never consume.

<comment><USER12> Needing to consume is a complication from the core insight. If necessary, replace with someone who consumes at subsistence level.

\- Person A works X amount, and consumes typically.

\- Person B works X amount, and consumes at subsistence.

Judging solely from the perspective of other people, which person is better to have?

Or, for another example, the sun produces without (economically-relevant, purchased) consumption.

What if someone were like the sun, and charged for sunlight, but never spent the money? They just left the money in the bank forever.

<comment><USER11> Between person A and B, the 'better' person to have would be the one who produces more valuable stuff. Better is a tricky way to talk about this though, because these two people might have different inherent capabilities. The most ideal answer would be that person A and person B should each find their ecological niche where their consumption and production of resources are in optimal balance. The 'better' person to have in this case would be the person most suited to your same niche.

If your statement had been 'produces X amount', and not 'works X amount', then my answer definitely changes. Less consumption for the same amount of production is always better, because in aggregate it means more resources for consumption, and production goes up. Or maybe not? I'd be interested to think about a good counterpoint.

Even the sun consumes - it consumes hydrogen, helium, lots of stuff. And that stuff is localized to the sun. Perhaps we'll figure out a way to add fuel from somewhere else to the sun one day, but as of right now, the sun consumes an ultimately limited amount of stuff. We have a pretty decent understanding now of the relationship between the sun's consumption and production of resources.

If someone were like the sun, and charged for sunlight, then they would HAVE to spend the money on acquiring more hydrogen. If they left the money in the bank, then they wouldn't be able to produce the sunlight that earns them money.

<comment><USER12> >If your statement had been 'produces X amount', and not 'works X amount', then my answer definitely changes. Less consumption for the same amount of production is always better, because in aggregate it means more resources for consumption, and production goes up.

Yes, this is what I meant, and what you get from interpreting it charitably.

>Even the sun consumes - it consumes hydrogen, helium, lots of stuff.

Which is why I, anticipating that remark, added the bit about "economically- relevant, purchased" \-- it does not consume _in the sense meant in economic discussions_. It does not purchase goods on the market that then deprive someone else of having them. The sun is not an actor in the economy that has to buy hydrogen to fuse together, so economically it's just like someone who throws off good things for free.

<comment><USER11> Burning hydrogen today deprives the market of 5 billion years from now. I'm not trying to be pedantic. Nothing throws off good things for free.

I think what we're both touching on here, and what the article touches on as well, is the question of what happens when the accumulation of wealth becomes so great, that it's utility becomes almost incomprehensible. We know the sun consumes matter, but to speak of the markets 5 billion years from now is so incomprehensible, that the energy produced today might as well be 'free'. The discussion stops being an economic one and turns into a religious one.

To bring it back to the article, what I understand you to be saying is, what if the Congolese Trading Window had opened into the living room of someone who could throw off good things for 'free'. They won't purchase goods that deprive someone else of having them. So basically, a never-ending flow of rice comes out of this window. This person, or even just the window if there's no person attached, literally becomes a god. It's why the sun has been worshiped. It's why feudal lords had the honorific 'lord'. The disparity in wealth between a parent and child is so great that religions have used the terms 'mother' and 'father' to describe nature and deities. A King's Divine Right. The Emperor's Mandate of Heaven. We could find others I think.

In all of these cases, there is still consumption of resources to produce something, just that the scale at which this happens is beyond the realm of understanding for the end-user. We have a decent idea that the sun will be burning in however many billion years, but will markets exist? No clue, so yeah, it's 'free'. Before we knew these facts, it was grounds for worship, but now, we just know it as physics.

You asked if I thought if to produce without consuming was the worst possible thing, and then mentioned that the need to consume was missing the core insight. What is your answer to your question?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "The point is, money spent on consumption is toxic — value-destroying"

This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. Surely when comparing inequality in societies, what we really care about is consumption. Singling out billionaires as an example of how unequal our society, I feel, is disingenuous. How much more does Bill Gates really consume than your 'average Joe'? Sure, he presumably eats good food, wears better clothing and has a big house, but his personal consumption levels are probably no more than an order of magnitude greater than ours.

What separates him then from us, considering he has a paper net worth many orders of magnitude greater than us? Well, mainly that wealth grants him an outsize influence on the economy. By virtue of his wealth and participation in the stock market he has access to some very big 'levers'. He can dictate what a large portion of the workforce choose to pursue as 'productive economic output'. He is, by means of increasing his net worth, incentivised to make prudent decisions in this regard. High performing participants in the stock market gain more influence in it. This is an optimising feedback loop for the economy and is less fair (but more effective) than simply giving everyone an equal say in the matter.

Is this a problem? Maybe. But does it really make our society more unequal? I would argue 'not as much as you might think'.

<comment><USER14> > High performing participants in the stock market gain more influence in it. > This is an optimising feedback loop for the economy and is less fair (but > more effective) than simply giving everyone an equal say in the matter.

This assumes _decisions which drive up the share price of Microsoft and /or the personal satisfaction of Bill Gates_ tends to yield better economic performance than _decisions which represent what the public want_. There's good reason to believe there are many situations where this isn't the case (the Gates Foundation's projects to help humanity are a thing, but so are battles for monopoly power). Wealth also tends to be much more heritable than entrepreneurial vision...

<comment><USER13> Your point about inheritance is a very good one and is a rather major flaw in the capitalist model. Inheritance tax goes some way to dampening the transfer of power from one generation to the next but isn't perfect. Hard to see how this would conceptually be solved without required a 'robin hood' style system that 'resets' everyone's economic status regardless of who their parents are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15>
      For one, you could simply hand the pile of cash out to the first person who comes by your window.
      Or you might hand small amounts of cash to a bunch of different people.
      Both of these seem like nice things to do. But then you wonder: what if the cash in your living room is counterfeit? More to the point — does it even matter?
      Wherever the money came from, if you dump it through the window, you'll be helping a few people, but at the same time causing inflation that will hurt everyone else.

The key issue with this entire blog post is that it ignores the _distribution_ of wealth within the hypothetical Congolese market. What if one person in the marketplace has 99% of the money, and everybody else has the rest evenly divided between them. Then under some moral/ethical frameworks it might be beneficial to distribute the money evenly to the rest of the population at the cost of inflating away some of the single rich person's wealth.

What you do with the money affects the distribution of wealth & goods within the society. What is a good distribution? You need a moral/ethical framework to decide. I won't make an assumption on which one we go with, but lets say we go with one.

Not spending or donating the money is making the choice that the distribution of wealth as it currently exists is the most optimal. Is this just? Depends on your moral/ethical framework.

Saying that earning is good and spending is bad is overly simplistic. You need an objective function on the distribution of wealth. Earning money in a way that warps the distribution away from the ideal can then be considered _bad_ (and thus should be 'corrected' via taxation and other methods) and spending money in a way that warps the distribution toward the ideal can be considered _good_ and should be rewarded (via tax credits etcetera).

</comment><comment><USER16> The article is contrived, but the part he gets right is that spending money is exercising power, and it matters how you spend it (or give it away). If you're wealthy then you should think carefully about what you encourage by how you spend your money, to avoid encouraging the wrong things.

Once you've spent the money, though, other people will have it, and _they_ have the power to spend it on their wishes. If you assume that people who did the work for you are basically good, this is a good thing. There's nothing wrong with a paycheck.

Maybe the problem isn't the money, it's the work? Are you creating bullshit jobs by spending your money on bullshit? But how do you evaluate that? What's honest work anyway? There are jobs are unpleasant and/or dangerous, but still jobs people are happy to have. Office work is comfortable, considering, and yet can be considered "soul-crushing" under some conditions. Maybe the yacht builders enjoy the work and live well?

This is all second-guessing other people's decisions at a distance. It's complicated enough that it's tempting to allow the market to hide all these issues under layers of abstraction. You usually don't get to review labor conditions anyway.

There are some attempts at breaking the abstractions by adding other abstractions, so we see labels like "fair trade" and so on. This supposedly lets you know what's going on at the other end of the supply chain. It's all fuzzy and reputation-based, though, which provides opportunities for cheating.

Maybe cut through the layers of abstraction? Directly hiring people makes you the boss and you get to decide what kind of boss you're going to be. But it's by no means certain you'll be a better boss than average, particularly if you're inexperienced.

<comment><USER10> > Maybe cut through the layers of abstraction? Directly hiring people makes > you the boss and you get to decide what kind of boss you're going to be.

In theory, yes, but then you can't diversify as much as you can by just consuming goods and services provided by different companies and workers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article is an interesting thought experiment, but I can't help but feel that the statements made are in such opposition to understood economic principle and call into question basic moral precepts. That doesn't mean it's wrong, it just feels alien to read.

As an example of what I mean, the idea of consumption being a net-negative destructive action goes against the economic concept of velocity of money and how that drives economic engines. On the other hand, I can understand because the net value is perhaps negative of a grossly consumptive action like buying a yacht, simply because of the natural resources consumed to produce it. Economics rarely accounts for the externalities.

<comment><USER18> I agree. I was in agreement with the article when it says that money we earn is a statement of the value we provide to society, so earning money is good, however, I don't agree with the statement that spending money and consumption is bad.

The example of the yacht is rather contrived as well. They talk about how all of the craftsmen and lumber workers had to chop down, dry, age, cut and polish the wood to make the yacht, however, it's somehow evil for us to buy it?

This seems rather ridiculous when you consider that the money used to buy that yacht paid the salaries and income of all the craftsmen and laborers that built it for you, compensating them for the value they provide to society. If there was nobody willing to consume or buy products, how would anyone make income?

This article seems to understand capitalism superficially, then demonstrates the authors know little about capitalism in the final paragraphs.

<comment><USER19> > the money used to buy that yacht paid the salaries and income of all the > craftsmen and laborers that built it for you, compensating them for the > value they provide to society.

The point he is making is that they are compensated but no net value is returned to society as a result of their labor and resource expenditure. The yacht "disappears" in your private marina where it will rot away providing you with a purely private satisfaction, whereby the same labor could create houses, a public parc or some other widely shared goods, whilst still compensating the workers the same and having the same overall economic effects.

Symbolic, money wealth, thus becomes a force that diverts social physical resources away from social needs and towards private needs of wealthy individuals, making everybody else worse off compared to an alternate more egalitarian social arrangement.

I would interpret it that as long as billionaires don't sink their fortunes into megalomaniac wasteful personal consumption, like say building pyramids, the results of capitalism and inequality are not very different from a more egalitarian society, the vast majority of resources are still employed to make most people better off. What's unequal is just the representation of wealth, who owns what and who works for whom.

For example, if Warren Buffet would start to liquidate his symbolic wealth to build a giant Warren Buffet statue, this would have a net negative effect on the wealth of the average citizen. Yes, it would provide jobs, but it would also extract available capital from the market that could be invested to create other jobs, so over all it's a wash. No saleable products are generated and a massive amount of resources is required, bidding the prices of these up without putting anything back. The consumption of everybody else would diminish to accommodate for the higher prices and lower overall quantity of products now available. Society has "decided" to shift production from cars and houses towards a giant statue that nobody really needs.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure I agree with this. The yacht could get very little use, but so could a house that you build for someone. If the argument is that we should only build public goods that will be widely used like parks, I disagree, because the concept of private property is very entrenched in our society, even in socialist countries.

I also disagree that the Warren Buffet statue would have a negative effect on the wealth of the average citizen. Warren Buffet would be taking capital that is locked up inside assets and spending it to build something, directly contributing significant income to the middle class (laborers) in the economy. This would have a positive beneficial effect on the economy in general.

Imagine a wealthy billionaire with all of his assets locked up in gold bars in a swiss vault. Outside of a few hired guards that protect the gold, nobody benefits. If he liquidated that gold and used the proceeds to build statues, quite a lot of people would benefit from the income generated.

<comment><USER19> Buffet owns stocks in productive companies. If he starts selling this stock and gets enough money for his statue, by definition he's absorbing market capital that would otherwise be invested in productive companies. So he's effectively shifting investment from jobs in companies to jobs in giant statue production. The effect on the middle class jobs is largely nil.

If a billionaire is entombed in a safe with his symbols of wealth forever, it's as if his symbolic wealth ceases to exist. Effectively, the symbols of everybody else become more valuable to reflect the total quantity of products and services available. It's just like burning money, no wealth is destroyed, just redistributed to everybody else who holds the same currency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This article really goes off the rails, so I'll just respond to the original point described in the first paragraph.

To the question: are coders worth it? The answer in my opinion is yes. Software engineering in general is a type of labor that is conducive to generating large profits.

Building robust software systems has large fixed cost, but once the system is out in the wild it has close to zero marginal cost. The cost of distributing one more app through the app store is pretty low (give or take App store fees). A share of the "profits" will go to the developers, and such developers are highly paid relative to other professions.

If you want to do good with your money: spend it. A high level overview by Ray Dialo really helped me understand the boom/bust cycle and how money flows through the economy [0]. Look at China, for years the economy was growing at almost 10% -- driven by the consumption of the new middle class. Now growth is slowing to about 6% and everyone is freaking out, this is because due to higher personal debts China is reducing it's spending. Your spending is someone else income, and a certain % of income is paid out to workers which results in higher wages.

I'd say smart (saving, investing) and "ethical" (to your personal beliefs) consumption, along w/ charity, is the best way to morally utilize your wealth. Support the arts by going to a show, support teachers by raising funds for school supplies, renovate your home, support a farmers market. Wealth intrinsically is neutral. It's all up to you.

0: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0)

</comment><comment><USER21> Ok, I read through sections I and II, and no further. Sticking my neck w-a-a- a-y out there, I would loan the francs on my table to Congolese who could convince me they can make a business, provide a product or service, grow the business and employ other Congolese.

Essentially, become a bank that makes only business loans. Perhaps charge interest, perhaps not. I'd recycle loan payments to make new loans to new entrepreneurs. I'd meet periodically with the borrowers to learn what is working for them and what is not so that I can select better candidates over time, hopefully before I run out of francs...

<comment><USER22> You can try out kiva.org

My problem with it was that most of the businesses were of the retail type (selling clothes on the streets). I'm not an economist but that seems to me to not have much potential for lifting many out of poverty.

<comment><USER23> The context would matter.

It's a very common refrain to describe how many hours are wasted each day acquiring some necessity like food, water or shelter (I roughly include clothes under shelter).

Opening a clothing shop in the central market of the largest town wouldn't move the needle.

Opening it in your village or the nearest crossroads could alter many lives.

<comment><USER22> That's a good point. Unfortunately kiva doesn't give you many tools to make those assessments. You get a picture of the person applying for the loan, and then about a paragraph describing what they will use it for. Very light on numbers and no follow up on how their business is doing post-loan. After a while it felt like the site was selling me the feeling of being a good person, above all else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This reminds me of the section "Money Is Not Wealth" from Paul Graham's How to Make Wealth [1]:

"The solution societies find, as they get more specialized, is to make the trade into a two-step process. Instead of trading violins directly for potatoes, you trade violins for, say, silver, which you can then trade again for anything else you need. The intermediate stuff-- the medium of exchange-- can be anything that's rare and portable. Historically metals have been the most common, but recently we've been using a medium of exchange, called the dollar, that doesn't physically exist. It works as a medium of exchange, however, because its rarity is guaranteed by the U.S. Government."

The "two-step process" part reminds me of pointers, strangely. The metaphor doesn't make much sense though. A dollar points to wealth? Dereferencing a dollar obtains the wealth it points to?

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html](http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html)

<comment><USER25> It's the atomic compare-and-store operation you're looking for.

violing <> dollar dollar <> potato

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This went off the rails for me at the end. If earning money is good for other, but spending money is bad, then the "best" thing I could do would be to earn money and hoard it under my mattress.

However, that would be the worst thing I could do for society, because I would be removing that resource (whether it has intrinsic value or not, it is still a resource) from society.

In order for me to earn money, someone else has to spend it. I don't see what labeling one of the sides of that transaction as good and and one as bad accomplishes.

<comment><USER27> It goes on to explain it in the following paragraphs:

> Don't get me wrong — this is far from the full picture. There are a ton of > second-order corrections we need to make. We'd want to inquire how the money > was earned, for example. If it's earned in free, honest, competitive > transactions, it's going to be a better measure of value-added than if it's > earned coercively, dishonestly, or in stifled markets. If it's earned in > positive-sum games (like farming), it's going to be a better measure of > value than if it's earned in zero- or negative-sum games (like spamming).

> On the spending side, we need to account for whether the goods we're > consuming are rivalrous or non-rivalrous, as well as all the externalities > from consumption, both positive and negative. If no one consumed anything > above basic subsistence, we'd have a lot less economic growth, fewer > innovations, and inferior technology (including medical technology).

<comment><USER10> > Don't get me wrong — this is far from the full picture. There are a ton of > second-order corrections we need to make.

I'm sorry, but the author makes a terribly weak argument and than hand-waves any criticism away preemptively. That's not how this should work. That "ton of second-order corrections" would immediately destroy his argument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Suppose you ruin the Congolese economy - bright young men and women who would have become doctors and engineers become grain farmers to get in on the magic window money train. A landlord who owns a building with a magic window on it becomes rich, runs for office, and implements disastrous social policy.

The point isn't that trade is actually bad, the point is that you've become an actor, moral or not, in the congolese economy. The attempt to find a single number that makes you good, and not bad, is simply Calvinism minus the theology. You can find out how good you for the world around your accounting statement as effectively as Anubis could find out by putting your heart on a scale.

</comment><comment><USER29> You can trivialize almost any profession by stating it reductively. "All we do is put boxes on a page, or change the color of the boxes." OK, well all a farmer does is dig some dirt, and sometimes put some plant bits into it or pull some out. All most doctors do is talk to patients and sometimes give them some pills. All a soldier does is point guns and pull triggers. All a factory worker does is pretend to be a robot eight hours a day. Etc.

I don't admire the guy for failing to adequately state the value he's bringing to the table.

More to the point: most of society is by his estimation engaging in trivial bullshit. Faux intellectual software developers like to self-flagellate. Sure. We work on stupid stuff. But what do they think toy makers, the entire entertainment and financial industries, fashion, much of the auto industry, and even the majority of the housing industry are busy doing? They're all selling products that people don't need and probably won't make them much happier or better off. Don't like it? Go be a hermit. The story of the twentieth century was the pursuit of largely pointless (from a well-being perspective) excellence. That will probably remain the case for the rest of human history, since we already have almost everything we need for well-being built in, and the small remaining set is really cheap and no longer economically significant.

(I guess this is ultimately the point of the article . . . sort of . . . but I'm so over the trope in the first section that I just had to react to it.)

<comment><USER30> He lost me when he compared it to being a plumber.

If we didn't have plumbers, our infrastructure would collapse very quickly. Without sanitary waste disposal, disease would run rampant

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ahem - never thought I'd see a link on hackernews glorifying hoarding (the economics type), but here here are.

"Imagine a particular bag of grain that you bought at T1 for 200 francs, and then sold a month later, at T2, for 800 francs."

What about at 1600 francs? What about at 16000? The original argument was about morals, not math or some kind of utopian economy where every transaction is fair.

</comment><comment><USER32> > Suppose a genie offers to tweak the world in one of two ways. Either he will > (A) double everyone's bank account, or (B) double the amount of food in > existence. Which is better for society? Clearly the answer is B, doubling > the food. Option A (doubling the money) merely creates more placeholders, > more tokens — while option B creates more objects of intrinsic value. In > other words, A is a zero-sum change, while B is positive-sum.

This thought experiment is mistaken in almost every direction -- first of all it's not zero-sum to double every bank account given the unequal distribution of account balances. Second, and even worse for the point being made, it's wildly untrue to imagine that food is in such short supply that we need to double it. The problem with food is primarily one of distribution! This is where I gave up attempting to see his argument through. There's nothing to be gained by "reasoning" from such poor premises.

</comment><comment><USER33> There's a logical contradiction at the heart of this. If spending money destroys social value and receiving it represents the creation of social value, then every act has to be neutral. When you buy the yacht from the Congo at the end and light it on fire, you can't have destroyed value overall, because, well, the yacht builders got money so clearly they created as much value as you destroyed. (Represented in some weird hedonic sense as the pleasure you got from the burning yacht, perhaps.)

Slightly more technical translation of the above: this essay is a great illustration of the vacuity of the revealed preference theory of value, important in economics but widely shredded in every other discipline just because it entails silly consequences like whenever someone pays you to do something that indicates that you did something genuinely valuable for them, an idea that reduces the notion of "valuable" to nothing but observed behavior.

</comment><comment><USER34> >We earn money by providing value to other people. And consequently, >The money you've earned represents value you've contributed to society. >This holds across almost every asset class and profit-making strategy in the modern world.

if i extract 100 tons of carbon from the earth in the form of petroleum, then sell it to make a profit of $100, that profit does not take any externality into account. i could be making it such that $101 dollars of future economic activity is prevented by virtue of the extraction process or subsequent combustion and ruination of the environment. the petroleum "provided value" \-- positive short-term value, but with a stiff cost of net negative value in the future. the fact that i subsequently use those $100 that i made to consume some product isn't relevant. society would have been better off if i hadn't made the money in the first place.

this stuff isn't hard.

</comment><comment><USER35> Doesn't this argument break down fairly quickly when you take into consideration information asymmetry between actors.

Let's imagine you are providing future options to Congolese farmers, but you know you can poison the water supply and cause specific crops to fail. In this situation you, you sell the Congolese farmer a contract stating that he will sell his crop for a specific price while you know the constrained supply will increase the price to absurd levels.

Know you just got a bunch of money and yes you provided "value" to the farmer but at the cost of everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER36> You can't earn money if no one is spending it. That seems like an important fact that the author is missing.

<comment><USER37> What situation do you have in mind? As long as people have money, they're going to spend some of it on food and clothing and entertainment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > Wherever the money came from, if you dump it through the window, you'll be > helping a few people, but at the same time causing inflation that will hurt > everyone else.

On first read I thought that this was incorrect, but on pondering a bit more, I think it's sound -- the observation is that in effect you're creating new Congolese money, and you've not actually produced any value to add into the economy, you've just increased the numerator in the <currency/value> equation.

(Taking the example further, if there's 100 CDF in circulation, and you add 100 CDF to the economy, then you'd have to reindex and make everything cost 2x. The only reason this isn't obvious is because it takes time/transactions for this price signal to equilibrate through the economy, and so it's impossible to measure on the scale that the example considers. Perhaps this is more obvious if we reconsider the thought experiment with X=(Congolese GDP).)

On the other hand, if you were to hand over some USD from your pocket, those have "inherent value" from a Congolese person's perspective, in that they are fungible with goods on the international market and don't remove value from someone else's currency.

Anyone with actual Economics theory know if my intuition here is correct or what model describes it?

<comment><USER14> You might not have produced anything, but you have given somebody else that produced something a reward, so now they can start making new things and buy new material right away. Also, they know there's a wealthy foreigner that keeps handing out Congoese Francs, so there's more incentive to do so. Where the additional money is spent it'll tend to drive up prices; where it's invested in additional production it won't.

In practice, on a national level it's unlikely any individual is going to drive up the general price level because the actual quantity of currency in circulation is driven by the banking system (which ha policies specifically designed to keep the supply and demand for money in balance). And an tourist handing out currency willy nilly is going to have a big impact on prices in a small village regardless of what currency they pay in, because there's not much choice or competition there.

In terms of theory, the basic intuition is described by the Quantity Theory of Money and the reasons why prices/wages tend to rise slower than wages is covered by (New) Keynesian economics; covering when, how and why the extra spend might lead to more growth or more inflation is pretty much the entire first year of undergrad macroeconomics (particularly with the USD added in as well; that introduces the dynamic of how a fall in the value of the Congoese Franc affects imports and exports and resulting effects on local production)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> >The point is, money doesn't have intrinsic value. You can't eat money or use it to plow a field, nor can money babysit your children. It's just a token we've all agreed to accept in exchange for giving up things that do have intrinsic value.

We are social animals, and our standing within the tribe is most certainly a resource to be extracted and utilized. How you utilize it is a different discussion, but influence and respect are undeniably parts of our software as human beings. Money is not a token we trade for things that have intrinsic value. We would have traded for these things before money was a thing, under a system of social credit. Everyone knows who's dependable and who sucks in the tribe, since you see and work with them everyday. Now that we're bigger than 200 tribe members, we need an abstraction to determine this: money.

The author comes to this conclusion about 4/5 of the way down:

>The money you've earned represents value you've contributed to society.

I agree with the author throughout most of the article until this thought:

>The point is, money spent on consumption is toxic — value-destroying.

It's like, yeah, if I eat my cake then of course I can't have it too, but I needed the calories, and the tribe is better off that I had the energy and means to be productive. The whole of section V is just weird to me. It would be like saying 'metabolism is toxic'. I mean, I guess it can be? There are waste products, and there's also energy. It's just a nonsensical conclusion that we get to in an otherwise well-written article.

>But as long as we're soul-searching, let's not forget to examine our spending habits as well.

Yeah, 100% agree. Thought-provoking read overall.

</comment><comment><USER39> Most transactions are broadly a win-win - I have something you want, you have something I want, so we're both better off if we trade. That's the core justification for a free-market economy, and it's a very important one.

Most, but by no means all. Some are outright fraudulent, because I'm lying about what I'm selling. Some are coerced, because I've used my economic, social or political power to rig the deal in my favour. Some have unpriced externalities - you need oil, I have a shale oil field, we're both better off but some other sucker ends up with flammable tap water.

If we aspire to be ethical capitalists, we need to think about transactions in a more nuanced way than simply "free markets best markets" or "production good, consumption bad". We need to seriously examine whether the transactions we're entering into are genuine win-win scenarios.

</comment><comment><USER40> TLDR; don't feel bad about making obscene money because if someone is paying you that obscene money then you must be delievering that much economic value.

An important missing point with author: Money you get _tend_ to represent the value you deliver, not always. In many cases value you delivere is way way off than money you get. For example, lottery winner and a CEO who bankrupts the company while getting golden parachute. This is the reason why the web dev in authors referenced post is wondering if he is being overpaid for drawing boxes on web page.

This is right now becoming universal questions for lot of people who live off of passive income or are in exec roles with as much as 1000X compensation. Economy and markets are not perfect. In aggregate and over a long term things might balance out.

</comment><comment><USER41> "Earning money (via production) is good for others. Spending it (via consumption) is bad."

In the buying-an-iPhone-is-consumption-and-bad spending example, if the iPhone is also used to increase the reach or efficiency of production, does that cancel it out? I like the yacht example better.

</comment><comment><USER42> If you find your job really easy, what's the best way to arbitrage it and get more value out of your brainwork? Do the same work in less time and gain more vacation/leisure time?

</comment><comment><USER43> The fundamental error in this article is the following inference:

Satisfying someone else's need is good, therefore having your need satisfied by someone else must be bad.

But the real world is not this way at all. Transactions are not zero-sum. It is entirely possible to satisfy someone else's need and have it not cost you as much as it benefits them. Once you realize this, the entire chain of logic falls down.

</comment><comment><USER44> The author of this article seems to fail at differentiating price and value, which seems to be a necessary premise for many of their conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER45> I generally categorize philosophy and ethics works into separate categories: profound, interesting but not particularly useful, and inane. This one falls squarely into the third category, especially when the author tries to play off spending money on yourself as wrong. To be fair, he seems to be entirely Utilitarian so I guess I can't blame him for suggesting self-flagellation.

<comment><USER46> I don't see the Utilitarian value of self-flagellation...

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Even worse if money spent on armaments, wars, soldiers and these are used to destroy things it's even more toxic economically - you're not just burning wealth, you're using it to destroy other wealth as well - foreign development aid carefully given benefits everyone far more

</comment><comment><USER48> You gotta take this with a huge dose of ceteris paribus. At best I will give the author 'perceived value' but it is naive to think that money earned == real value to society.

</comment><comment><USER49> Wealth accumulated by shrewd grain arbitrage represents the the noble reallocation of value to where it's most needed, but wealth accumulated by someone else by building and selling yachts to me represents selfish evil waste?

The wood etc. that goes into a yacht could be put to better uses, but the water, fertilizer and land that goes into a sack of grain could find no possible better use?

There is no axiom that reconciles these contradictions better than the obvious one: Transactions, and wealth, have no inherent morality. Make any claim beyond that, and you are going to have to resort to the hand-wavy fallaciousness of a disclaimer-ridden argument.

</comment><comment><USER50> People will go to great lengths to say "greed is good", but it still isn't.

<comment><USER51> People also go to great lengths to demonize the wealthy and also try to get some of their money. I can totally understand why rich people would want to build elysium.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> >you'll be helping a few people, but at the same time causing inflation that will hurt everyone else

This is immediately troubling and betrays a naive understanding of currency and human behavior.

This article essentially writes off and lumps together all kinds of toxic behavior we see in private markets.

</comment><comment><USER53> So, mercantilism all over again? Have we gone a full circle?

</comment><comment><USER54> This is such a bone-headed conclusion.

The system is an abstraction of money in -> goods out. It doesn't specify anything about amounts and it places restrictions on goods vary sparingly.

If you were to place restrictions on goods out some kind of ideology then where do you stop the restrictions?

No yachts, they're wasteful!

No luxury cars, they're wasteful!

You don't need a bigger TV, the one you have already works. Don't be wasteful!

You don't need luxury food. Regular food will do.

I mean... you just end up with some god-awful Marxist hell hole of a system that doesn't work very well.

No thanks. I'll let the occasional person who has earned just buy their wasteful yacht because in aggregate, over time that seems to accrue the highest benefit to me no matter who I am.

</comment><comment><USER55> I found this really frustrating. There isn't any evidence whatsoever presented here--the whole treatise is based on a single outrageously over-simplified hypothetical thought experiment, essentially a "Just-So" story. This is the crux of pseudoscience. It's always a gigantic red flag when an argument about complex real-world phenomena and systems is based entirely upon a work of fiction with no real rigorous observation involved--only anecdotal observation based on one's own personal life experiences. This doesn't work. It ends up like dream logic--you imagine something should work this way in a dream, it seems brilliant at the time, but when you wake up and try it in the real world it suddenly doesn't quite make sense anymore or mesh together properly. Ayn Rand is another big example of this pitfall. It's about as meaningful as making an economic theory based on how it works in Harry Potter.

This guy's a psychology and computer linguistics major. That's great, and I'm sure he's got plenty of great ideas, but we computer science people have a bit of an issue with buying our own hype. Society greatly values our skills, many people consider us to be exceptionally bright, so we end up believing ourselves to be general-purpose geniuses much like aging physicists do: [http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21](http://www.smbc- comics.com/comic/2012-03-21)

We are not general-purpose geniuses. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Intellectual arrogance has caused many an engineer to meddle in things we don't properly understand and it occasionally causes catastrophes, or more often it merely spreads misinformation because most laymen put great value on our thoughts and view tech people as some kind of oracle.

In the article he lampshades sophistry early on, but that doesn't magically save it from being sophistry. It is absolutely sophistry, a transparent attempt to assuage some kind of guilt and justify a moral quandary through inventive story telling and evidence-free faux truthseeking.

He also calls out late in the article the fact that this thought experiment he's made only covers a single currency and a single commodity, which is an unreasonably simplistic model. The parable doesn't consider bad faith, market manipulation, monopoly, corruption, unsustainable expectations of growth, asymmetrical information, pricing inefficiency, and all sorts of other issues that crop in real life and can't simply be ignored. With a little charisma and eloquence it's pretty easy to make a self-consistent mental model by weaving a fictional story and it _feels like truth,_ but in reality there are unanticipated complications and external interactions that screw things up and totally throw off your conclusions.

For instance, in real life there wouldn't be just one guy speculatively buying Congolese grain through a magic portal. There would be lots of speculators in wealthy nations, fueled by riches extracted from all over--including the Congo. What about when their speculative hoarding is actually the force which _creates the shortage?_ Are we being such benevolent, wealthy overlords if we cause a famine, drive up costs, then sell the same product back to them at exorbitant prices through these rent-seeking practices? And speaking about rent, that's when multiple commodities come into play. What happens when our speculative buying-up of resources causes scarcity and makes them spend all their money on food and miss rent? Rent, by the way, which is also being artificially driven up by speculation and is not in line with natural supply / demand-based pricing. Because it's not just being sold as housing, an intrinsically valuable use; it's also being hoarded in order to speculatively extract wealth. People buying houses not because they need shelter, but because they simply expect somebody else to buy it at a higher price later on. Price does not magically match intrinsic value 1:1 at all times, which is an assumption his parable is dependent on. And money being an abstraction does not mean that extracting enormous dollar amounts from a local economy and hoarding it does not hurt that local economy. The amount of money you charge people for goods and services does not directly translate to how much value you've blessed their lives with. Consider our healthcare system. We pay far, far more than any other country, and that wealth is hoarded en masse by insurance companies--essentially speculative, unnecessary middle-men who only add to the cost of utterly essential services which must be bought at any cost --yet the intrinsic value of our healthcare is far lower. We have a very low life expectancy for a first-world country, let alone a superpower: [https://ourworldindata.org/the-link-between-life- expectancy-...](https://ourworldindata.org/the-link-between-life-expectancy- and-health-spending-us-focus)

That money sitting in a bank is not proof of our intrinsic value going up. It doesn't always work out that way in reality. So we aren't off the hook yet in our own affairs.

Economics is hard. Ethics is hard. We can't handwave it using fairy tales with magic doors. I'm no economist, so I don't want to claim any expertise either. Take all I have just said with an enormous punch of salt, as if you're boiling pasta. I only go into these diatribes to point out when others undeservedly claim authority on a subject. People need to know to view this with appropriate skepticism. People shouldn't make authoritative think-pieces about subjects like this just because their job exposes them to a good amount of math and logical problem-solving, thus causing us to assume we can apply that to anything without significant subject-specific study and actual gathering of observational evidence. Even expert economists do very poorly at predicting and properly understanding the way this all works. This subject defies translation into a simple analogy, and balks at being explained to somebody as if they are five. People who try to do that are usually fooling you and themselves as well.

</comment><comment><USER56> > Suppose a genie offers to tweak the world in one of two ways. Either he will > (A) double everyone's bank account, or (B) double the amount of food in > existence. Which is better for society? Clearly the answer is B, doubling > the food. Option A (doubling the money) merely creates more placeholders, > more tokens — while option B creates more objects of intrinsic value. In > other words, A is a zero-sum change, while B is positive-sum.

This would be incorrect if it turned out that there just wasn't enough money out there to provide sufficient liquidity. This is the reason bitcoin is nearly infinitely subdivisible and the nominal reason why stocks are split.

The value of money in general is the convenience value of not having to barter. If the currency has deflated to the point where nobody can use even your smallest denominations, then people will devise an alternative means of exchange that is more down to earth. So it can easily be a not zero-sum action to double the account numbers. It can be worth more than food can in an illiquid environment, because while the demand for food is fixed to the number of people in the world at any given time and that it spoils, money does not spoil and injecting more of it into an economy is a tried and tested stimulus technique. Just doubling the food doesn't necessarily mean that the people that need it are going to get it, something foreign aid organizations are intensely familiar with.

> Imagine if, after years of speculating in the Congolese grain market and > accumulating millions of francs, you decide to cash out with one final act > of buying a yacht through your window (then nailing it shut). Nevermind the > logistics of passing a yacht into your living room. The point is it's an > incredibly selfish act, and almost perfectly cancels out all the good you > did through speculation.

Not at all, you're doing the equivalent of Pharaoh building his pyramid tomb, or more prosaically, retiring and spending the rest of your life making bad art. If Pharaoh _didn 't_ build his tomb, then Egyptians will think he's weak. The tomb is a symbol of Egypt's wealth and prominence, as is the yacht, and the bourgeois retirement. If you don't exercise the perks of your station, then you're basically saying that you're doing it all for nothing.

Capitalist society works precisely _because_ everyone has a selfish motive, it wouldn't work at all if people didn't. The author thinking that money is intrinsically worthless is the same mistake as thinking that yachts are worthless. Symbols, of paper or of success, are important motivators. They have intrinsic value as symbols. If you fail to understand this then you're missing an important piece about how markets reflect human nature.

There are areas of the economy where the symbol value of goods far exceeds the utility value of them. Numismatics, fashion, and art pop to mind immediately. These markets can be understood, but not if you don't think symbols can have value.</comment>


An open-source collection of interview questions - <AUTHOR> https://counter-interview.dev/ <comment><USER5> Perhaps drifting slightly OT, but this is a good example of why I'm not a fan of the current trend to make the "any questions for us?" section of interviews evaluative.

I get the theory, that good people ought to ask smart questions, but it feels trivially hackable the same way all those stupid brain teaser questions from '90s interview processes were. In other words, professional interviewees - <USER2> kind of people who memorise answer books, question lists, etc. - <USER4> outperform people who are smart and skilled but don't approach things in exactly the way the scoring checklist expects.

(Bonus points if you penalise people for not asking about something which was easily discoverable from Glassdoor, industry contacts or even your own company website.)

<comment><USER6> > the kind of people who memorise answer books, question lists, etc. - <USER4> > outperform people who are smart and skilled

If people who just memorize can outperform smart people, it just means that the one conducting the interview is not really smart, and so incapable of recognizing expertise.

<comment><USER7> As someone who has had far more failures at evaluating candidates than successes, I find it very hard to wade through the BS in a meeting that lasts an hour or two. The strangest people I've met seemed normal for that short of time. I usually have to work with someone for up to six months to get a real feeling of their ability to adjust to new situations, learn new technology, and strength of work ethic.

<comment><USER6> That's what I saw my whole life. People conducting interview don't know how to spot BS and fraud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Their very first example question is "Do you use source control?", taken from a year 2000 post of Joel on Software.

I think this is no longer a good question. (The answer will almost certainly be the affirmative, and the person asking it might sound unaware.)

<comment><USER9> You'd think that, but some legacy systems might not have it, I don't want to name and shame, but a lot of our code is on an IBM Series i (used to be called as400?) and the source control for it is basically manually adding a comment with the ticket number next to any changes - unsurprisingly they're a bit coy about the technologies used in interviews and target people fresh out of uni who don't know any better, my recruiter told me it was a Java role lol

<comment><USER10> We've got as400 at work, surprisingly a lot of companies still run it. Thankfully, I do 0 work on it and focus on other applications.

It is becoming a super niche market, once the dinosaurs die off, whoever can come in and work on it will make bank. In fact my company is getting pretty anxious about it, as the cost of even migrating from it is going to be high.

<comment><USER8> I've thought of doing a startup for that kind of problem: basically, we'd partner-ish with one enterprise customer as a kind of skunkworks attempt to migrate their legacy system to some other platform, at low cost, by leveraging the language development and DSL facilities of Racket. We could hire some top engineers _because_ we tell them we will pay them money to hack Racket. And we keep rights to the Racket part. That first solution is biased to the first customer -- the particular dialects/versions of language they use, other software/facilities they use, their programming conventions and internal libraries, and how they want to map to which new platform. The next enterprise customer we go to, we have a lot less tooling work to do. After a few iterations of that, we have either a semi-turnkey solution, or a proven approach for our team of highly-paid consultants.

As a bit of evidence in support of Racket being a secret sauce for this, I'd point to how ITA Software (before they were aquired by Google) leveraged Lisp to integrate a new, modern node with the IBM legacy airline reservation system network. They publicly stated that a Lisp was what made this effort viable.

(But doing a Web site or app is so much easier and less risky. VCs are set up to give a site/app dotcom wads of money, and want to see you go through the funding rounds and acquisition/IP. And the technical problems are usually well-understood from the start, and it's just a matter of execution. And you can pick a site/app idea that doesn't involve having to do difficult enterprise sales courtships. Also, personally, given that I started working young, so some of the dates on my resume cause my job applications to be deleted instantly, I'm not anxious to be adding showstopper keywords like AS/400 to my resume.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> To make it really open, would be better if the collection was stored as Github issues. Less shiny website but easier to add and no curation process (PRs may be refused, aka censored)

<comment><USER12> Not every open database should be on Github...

<comment><USER13> The content could be automatically mirrored to github issues or vice versa

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It seems odd to me to call this "open source" when I can't find a statement of license or copyright on the site (maybe I missed it?).

I would expect something like a Creative Commons license to make it clear what can be reused and under which conditions.

<comment><USER15> It's under MIT: [https://github.com/oleg-koval/counter- interview.dev/blob/mas...](https://github.com/oleg-koval/counter- interview.dev/blob/master/LICENSE.txt)

But yes, this should me more explicitly mentioned if they are advertising it as "open-source".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So now we have open source questions? Really? "open source" questions?

<comment><USER17> Yeah, source as in text form, not some binary that your brain compiles those letters into!

<comment><USER16> There's a difference between collaborative and open source. A collection of interview questions can be qualified as collaborative, not open source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow tone down the design. What's going on here.</comment>


Apple patents Roman-style scroll device with flexible OLED screen - <AUTHOR> https://thestack.com/world/2017/03/02/apple-patents-roman-style-scroll-device-with-flexible-oled-screen/ <comment><USER2> I love this idea for some reason</comment>


3D Printing Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/3dp <comment><USER3> The whole point of 3D printing is that you can create almost anything but they don't let you print your own files at Amazon?

<comment><USER4> That opens up potential copyright/patent issues, I fully understand why they wouldn't want to risk it.

<comment><USER3> Why don't they call their toys custom injection molding? it's a marketing ploy?

<comment><USER5> Because that would be completely wrong. It's not custom, and it's not injection molding.

What they're doing isn't custom, and they're not claiming it is. It _is_ 3D printing, and they are (correctly) claiming it is.

<comment><USER3> I was not talking about their 3D printed products... I was talking about their other products.... Fisherprice toys for example... Why don't they tell you how they where molded?

<comment><USER5> Ah, ok. That's a fair point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's an interesting idea, but looks quite limited in the available options.

What most people miss is that current cheap 3D printing doesn't produce very durable, large, or high resolution parts. To get really good quality, you need an expensive machine, and that means expensive parts to pay for the capital costs.

Also, for the best results, you have to understand the limitations of the machine: resolution, minimum wall thickness, and so on.

This is part of the reason I've been focused on waterjet and laser cutting. You can design parts on the computer the same way, but the limitations are quite easy to understand, and you can end up with large, durable parts at the end of the process.

<comment><USER7> > To get really good quality, you need an expensive machine, and that means > expensive parts to pay for the capital costs.

It's maybe possible that Amazon has access to _lots_ of capital if desired. Hell, they have "bronze-infused stainless steel" as a material option - <USER2> think it's obvious that Amazon isn't using hobby-grade 3d printers.

<comment><USER8> I imagine they use a process similar to Shapeways for that:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9VOwqtOglg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9VOwqtOglg)

I wouldn't be all that surprised if Shapeways or similar is actually doing the printing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118660757/](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118660757/)

Ok, this really irks me. Why do people keep writing and printing _paper books_ that will become obsolete before even the first batch is sold out? Topics like this, or the latest (at the time of writing) version of jQuery or other things that have lifespan of few months? Surely this is just a waste of money and paper for everyone. I can see the value of e-books, or even print-on-demand publications, but not this. Those books end up either cluttering the local libraries or pissing off second-hand bookshop employees because no-one will buy or read them in a year. It's almost a printer-to-recycler pipeline.

<comment><USER10> There are lots of reasons. The fact that you don't have a use for this does not mean that other people don't too.

I buy text books, not as often as I did because of things like Lynda but I do from time to time. The first thing I do is to cut the book with an automatic saw and give the pages to my amazing Fujitsu automatic scanner.

Then I store the book on a box far away in a storage room.

This way I have a 100% DRM free book I can read whenever I want and weights 0 grams, and I can travel to other countries with it. Most of the time(when buying multiple books) the tree killer version is cheaper than the DRM ebook one, and it does not have your name in all the pages like some bastards do.

Some books never will have a DRM free ebook ever.

<comment><USER11> Why not just buy a digital version and remove the DRM? It's easy enough and almost always cheaper.

<comment><USER3> although it does not make sense, I believe it is illegal to remove DRM...

<comment><USER12> That's under the DMCA's no circumvention clause (in the US at least). It may not be illegal in other jurisdictions.

Interesting that the DMCA essentially slapped fair use squarely across the face.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> AutoCAD? Seriously?

For consumers, who are the primary market here on Amazon, looking to get started, why would they buy very expensive software for the CAD part?

Blender is a free CAD tool that I use, as well as millions of others, and is just fine for 99% of consumers. If they get serious & professional, then they'd feed right into the expensive corporate CAD solutions: SolidWorks, AutoCAD, etc. But, it's odd that Amazon would start you with B2B tools like that.

Of course, that makes me suspect that AutoCAD is paying Amazon for this positioning. If not, then it's just a mistake IMO.

</comment><comment><USER14> If anyone has a chance of making it work, it's a company like Amazon.

I spent a bit of time last year trying to work on a a 3D model sharing site: [http://www.fabfabbers.com/](http://www.fabfabbers.com/) \- as a personal project rather than a viable business. In the end I found the idea of providing 3D development tools online much more interesting, and spent a bit of time converting OpenSCAD. I got a bit fed up with it in the end though, so it's just bit rotted since.

<comment><USER15> I don't know -- if it was one thing Amazon could do better than anyone else, it would be print-on-demand. But apparently they prefer to stick with traditional physical books.

Granted, unlike 3d printing a toy, or tool or what-not -- there are better (well potentially better) alternatives to print-on-demand: e-books.

I do find it kind of odd that they don't allow custom designs -- seems to defeat the purpose of 3d printing?

<comment><USER16> hrm? Amazon does do print-on-demand.

It seems fairly obvious that they don't allow custom designs. If you want to print your own stuff, go to a maker space. Quality control is important for a company like Amazon, and custom designs make that impossible. A small batch of items is the logical place to start a service like this. I'm sure over time they'll steadily incorporate proven designs onto the platform; probably they'll also let people submit designs and get a cut of the design, just like books. But, there will need to be a rigorous quality control process in place before the platform can be that open.

<comment><USER15> Amazon does print-on-demand for books? Eg printing copies in Germany rather than shipping from the US?

<comment><USER16> The print-on-demand is only available if the author enrolls in the program, I assume for legal reasons.

[https://www.createspace.com/](https://www.createspace.com/)

<comment><USER15> Oh, I had entirely forgotten about that service... Thanks for pointing it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Kind of off topic but recently, I broke my washing machine by trying to open it while being locked. The little piece of plastic broke and I can't find a similar one anywhere... So I got the idea to make the thing myself, send the model to some company that provides single unit 3D printing in europe (I'm located in Spain) but haven't found any with reasonable pricing.

Anyone here know of such company where I can send my 3D model and they will print it and send it home to me?

<comment><USER18> Sculpteo[1] and Shapeways[2] seem to be the two largest printers. According to what I have read[3], they are priced roughly in line with the costs of materials, plus some overhead.

You may just want to find a maker space somewhere near you[4] and go print it there. Plus then you get to play with their kit and meet some cool people.

[1][http://www.sculpteo.com/](http://www.sculpteo.com/)

[2][http://www.shapeways.com/](http://www.shapeways.com/)

[3][http://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1b1701/is_shapew...](http://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1b1701/is_shapeways_overpriced/)

[4][http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Spain](http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Spain)

<comment><USER19> Another option if you want to meet the person behind the printer is [http://www.3dhubs.com](http://www.3dhubs.com). It's all about connecting people on a local level around 3D printing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I love that they have integrated partner 3D printing community sites like the beautiful Pinshape:

[http://pinshape.com/index](http://pinshape.com/index) (Right now [http://pinshape.com](http://pinshape.com) isn't working)

<comment><USER21> If you go to the url above you receive the error:

"The enemy gate is down! That's certainly some out of box thinking, launchy! The application has encountered an unexpected error and cannot display the page you requested. In case you want to contact us about this, be sure to include the error identification so we can get at your issue more easily:

anonymous-1406558433-440654a4421d29f6e36ae663eb2c1df3b30ada6c62698cfe49d7c04c2dd0ca17"

I haven't seen it before. If you go to [https://pinshape.com/index](https://pinshape.com/index) there is no error.

<comment><USER22> Same

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As much as I love the 3D printing revolution, I feel like we all collectively skipped a step - most parents and teachers I know would just be ecstatic to have a 2D cutter plotter for the purposes of cutting out silhouettes of letters and the like.

<comment><USER24> You can get stencil cutters for not-very-much-money: [http://www.amazon.com/Silhouette-Cameo-Material-Cutting- Prin...](http://www.amazon.com/Silhouette-Cameo-Material-Cutting- Printer/dp/B0060D1LFO)

<comment><USER25> Both that and the somewhat cheaper cricut are into the whole walled garden thing where you get to buy the letter "H" for $1 or whatever.

Its not like owning a laserprinter where you can reasonably assume you can "just print" without having to purchase each letter in each font first.

Also my wife has a cricut and its slow. Fast enough for home craft use, but don't expect 15 ppm laser printer speeds, its more like 5 to maybe 10 minutes per page. This has scaling effect and labor cost issues for a school teacher. Theoretically you could build something as fast as a modern laser cutter, heck, you could use a modern laser cutter, but even those aren't as fast as a laser printer.

Giving the kids some fine motor practice in cutting out laserprinted outlines would be cheaper and more effective.

<comment><USER24> > Both that and the somewhat cheaper cricut are into the whole walled garden > thing where you get to buy the letter "H" for $1 or whatever.

Both the product FAQ and the customer comments on that page disagree with you:

        Q: Can you create your own illustrations / decal designs (vectors) and print them with
           this - or is it only clip-art images?
        A: Yes, I create my own vector designs and import them from adobe illustrator.

Seems like either you or they are wrong.

<comment><USER25> I am surprised, and they are technically correct.

My only alibi is no one in my wife's scrapbooking clique could handle creating their own dxfs or pirating any kind of files off the internet, making me correct in practice. There surely do exist at least some scrappers who have CAD skills. Just not many of them.

When circut was new the carts I bought my wife for gifts were all like $60 and have steadily dropped in price over the years. Now they're mostly like $20. When diecuts at the local scrapbook store are only $1 or even 50 cents a cartridge is a luxury but not really economic, but at $20 its hard to justify buying diecuts instead of a cartridge.

Is a ripoff a good deal if the alternative is technologically impossible for most and the ripoff is really cheap? A good analogy is a buck for a two minute .mp3 top 40 song, I don't think its worth a buck, but its more convenient than filesharing or ripping, especially for people technologically incapable of it, and its not a lot of money so, ok fine whatever, even if I'm not smiling while I pay my $1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Does anyone else think that the slogan "Shop the Future" is kind of corny?

<comment><USER27> One person's marketing gold is another's marketing cheese.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> 3D printers, capable of creating anything you can imagine. Only phones supported for cases are iPhones. The future is now!

Edit: Lots of iPhone owners on HN, I see.

<comment><USER22> you probably still need a model for all the other phones, I agree that a lot of other phone models could be supported but I don't expect anything to be instantly available.

<comment><USER29> I do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So, clone-a-willy?

</comment><comment><USER24> Someone needs to hide my credit card.

</comment><comment><USER31> It has been around for a while

<comment><USER32> You are being downvoted but it's very true. Amazon has had this partnership with 3DLT for a while but have only just now published the news.

I guess they were doing a pilot of the project to see if anyone would buy.

<comment><USER31> Thanks. I am actually very excited for Amazon efforts in 3D printing. My comment was more about the effect of press releases

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Huh. I thought based on the title that this was 3D printing as a service, which would have been quite useful.

It actually seems like yet another uninteresting store for 3D printed tat. I don't see how it fills a niche that isn't already filled by, say, Etsy, or how it's really any different from the existing Amazon marketplace other than "Look! 3D printing: New! Trendy!"

What makes 3D printing interesting is the ability to create things that could not have been created before. If you are selling just those things (and not a design or custom production service), it's more appropriate to categorise them according to what they are, not how they were made.

<comment><USER34> I would have liked to see a "create your own" service for the general customer as well, but if you stop and think about it, that is still a ways off for a couple reasons off the top of my head:

1) Customers would need 3D design experience, or Amazon would need to come up with a truly novel CAD type program that the general populace could use. Even products like Google's SketchUp aren't exactly easy to use once you get past drawing cubes.

2) I think most people don't yet realize the limitations of this technology. They're going to be expecting super detailed minifigs and nice polished paint jobs, not rough plastic that doesn't have a great amount of detail in it. There's also the problem with designs that are impossible for current 3D printers to create. In both cases injection molding is still king, IMHO.

I think both of these will eventually get solved, but I don't think it will be this year. 3D printing is progressing at an awesome pace, but it still has to bake a bit before it gets as good as other creation methods. And most people are going to be expecting something better than what consumer grade 3D printing can currently offer. That means lots of returns for a site like Amazon.

<comment><USER35> [http://www.shapeways.com/](http://www.shapeways.com/)

You can get your own designs printed, or print other people's designs.

<comment><USER34> I'm aware of shapeways, and I think they're awesome. But you'll notice they still require you to design the part in some sort of CAD program. Most of the people visiting Amazon looking to replace a broken part or make a new toy for their kid aren't going to know how to use Blender.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> 3D printing is not new, but once this become cheap and available to everyone, it will be a really unimaginable and unprecedented world.

What a great years to be living =]</comment>


The Slow Way To SPDY - <AUTHOR> http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2011/09/25/1940#the-slow-way-to-spdy Someone is picking up on the existing SPDY code bases and trying to build a reverse proxy to SPDY-enable any old site. But apparently it isn't that easy... <comment><USER2> I am waiting for Go to get an implementation... Looks like it should happen [http://groups.google.com/group/spdy- dev/browse_thread/thread...](http://groups.google.com/group/spdy- dev/browse_thread/thread/32902395e06045a5)

<comment><USER3> <http://golang.org/pkg/http/spdy/> ?

<comment><USER2> Excellent. Behind on the mailing lists... just what is needed.</comment></comment></comment>