Ten-Hour Time-Restricted Eating Benefits Patients with Metabolic Syndrome - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/08/785142534/eat-for-10-hours-fast-for-14-this-daily-habit-prompts-weight-loss-study-finds <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21718456](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21718456)

</comment><comment><USER3> > The study was small, just 19 people. All the participants were overweight > and had a cluster of risk factors (elevated blood sugar, elevated > cholesterol levels and high blood pressure) that put them at higher risk for > Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. A larger study, funded by the National > Institutes of Health, is underway to examine daily fasting in people with > metabolic syndrome.

<comment><USER4> 19 people "study" looks like a fake news?

<comment><USER5> No. This is a preliminary study of a new fasting method. There is no-one who is deliberately spreading this on social media to advance their own political situation.

<comment><USER6> > political

And financial!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wasn't overweight, but started doing IF as part of a larger life shift as a way to improve general health. I ended up losing weight because of the lowering of calories through skipping a meal, but I kept most of my muscle.

The biggest adjustment is that I work out most mornings, and felt I needed food prior. After a few days it became no factor. After doing IF for the past year+, I'm almost never hungry in the morning.

The biggest positive change for me though, was my morning mental sharpness. The hours between my workout and lunch time have become the best hours of the day for anything requiring mental acuity.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is a weird title. Isn't this basically just trying to eat regularly with a reminder to avoid really bad habits such as eating right before going to bed?

For example, eat dinner at 6-7pm and that's your last food intake for the day and then eat breakfast around 7-9am. That's roughly a 10/14 set up. In my mind this isn't "fasting". It's just living life normally based on your sleep schedule.

<comment><USER9> Is eating right before bed actually a bad habit? I don't see why it would matter much what time you eat (barring indigestion possibly).

<comment> blaser-waffle If you're in the first world then chances are you've already 2000+ calories today and don't really need more. You're hungry before bed because your blood sugar is falling, and all those extra calories will do is push you over the limit for the day, aka extra calories lead to fat.

<comment><USER10> I think you are making the assumption that eating before bed implies an extra snack, but it could just be that you have dinner shortly before going to bed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't it just as likely that the 8% reduction in calories gave all the benefits? I briefly read the study and it didn't seem like they had a reduced calorie group without time restrictions. Thoughts anyone?

<comment><USER12> If this strategy works to encourage people to accidentally consume fewer calories, isn't that good enough? I don't think this was about the _mechanism_ about the weight loss, but merely that the behavior pattern ended up encouraging it.

<comment><USER13> > If this strategy works to encourage people to accidentally consume fewer > calories, isn't that good enough?

Depends. I'm sure for some people it does work. I don't understand those people, because I, like many people who put on a whole lot of weight, am a food addict. Give me only an hour in which to eat, with no other restrictions, and I will find a way to shove as much food into my maw as I can. I know this from experience.

It makes much more sense to just track calories directly and stop lying to yourself.

<comment><USER14> "lying to yourself" seems unduly insulting. Maybe other people _are_ tracking calories, and TRF is how they stay within a budget. Even if they are tricking themselves, what's wrong with that? We all hack our own reward-response mechanisms all the time to achieve all sorts of goals. If it works, it works, and what's the harm? Why condemn that as less "honest" than whatever you do to work around your own limitations and achieve your own goals?

Making people feel bad about the methods they choose is real-world harmful. Maybe "advice" like yours won't actually kill anyone, but people who become discouraged by that drumbeat of negativity could experience some ill effects. Be glad that what works for you _works for you_ , but please stop pissing on everyone else.

<comment><USER13> If you count calories, then any additional strategies are fine, but I know from experience that not counting calories and relying on other strategies as an abstraction leaves too much room for self delusion about your intake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Right now I'm doing 16/8, with 3 full meals a day, and I also spend one day a week in full fasting.

IMHO, the current status of nutrition is very divergent, almost every habit is backed up and discouraged at the same time by more than one study. There seems to be some agreements (about sugar, for instance) but the rest is not clear at all. And on top of it, you have to take into account how your own body reacts to a particular habit. Seems that trial/error is the best option for now.

<comment><USER16> > IMHO, the current status of nutrition is very divergent, almost every habit > is backed up and discouraged at the same time by more than one study

Are there any that say fasting is bad?

<comment><USER17> No expert here, but I think fasting can sometimes trigger disordered eating in some people. Binge eating, etc. People are just so varied and so is nutrition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have been skipping breakfast for the past year. This works for me when nothing else has.

I started a new job which is highly unpredictable and involves a lot of last minute travel. Due to the stress, lack of sleep, etc I had gone from 165 -> 180 pounds in 8 months. All fat.

After 3-4 months of morning fasting I am down to 165 pounds again. No change in workout routine. I generally stop eating around 8pm local time, and have my first meal around 11 or 12pm.

The best part is I can eat whatever I want still - burgers, pizza, etc. No restrictions.

I am wondering if female metabolism is fundamentally different. My wife tried the same diet and it just hasn't worked for her. She gets too hangry whereas I find myself in a flow-state by mid morning.

Dr Peter Attia has done some great podcasts and YouTube presentations on the science behind fasting for the curious.

<comment><USER7> > Dr Peter Attia has done some great podcasts and YouTube presentations on the > science behind fasting for the curious.

As someone who wasn't overweight, it was Dr. Attia with his guest Rhonda Patrick who finally got me to try IF for general health. I highly recommend listening to his podcasts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This has worked pretty well for me and my own weight loss (and maintenance) journey. When I eat outside of my own 9-10 hour window it usually ends up as a meal that I overindulge in and subsequently regret.

As more anecdata, I find myself voracious between 8 and 9 AM, again between 11 and noon, and then between 4 and 5. After that I'll throw back a decaf coffee or two but don't normally crave food. When I ate whenever I was hungry I was all over the place and simply ate too large of a portion of anything and everything except breakfast.

</comment><comment><USER20> I have another one, which I followed now for a while. My intention was less about weight loss, but I'd argue it still helps:

Eat breakfast, lunch and dinner like you'd normally do. But in between meals, follow a strict zero-calory intake. This way, you have 4-5 hours of zero calories between meals. Thus:

\- only water is allowed

\- if you want to drink coffee, drink it right with/after a meal

\- if you want to eat chocolate or snacks, they have to come after a meal

I noticed that this has several effects:

1\. For me, it's easier to do than intermittent fasting, because my family eats three meals.

2\. Most people gain weight because they snack all the time or drink stuff with sugar (or coffee with milk).

3\. I actually became hungry after 4-5 hours. A feeling I haven't had in a while.

4\. I can't eat lots of snacks or chocolate, because I'm full from a meal.

<comment><USER21> If you drink your coffee black, you don't need to do it right after a meal :)

<comment><USER22> You're saying this based on what exactly? I've heard that coffee/caffeine is most effective at boosting sharpness when your stomach is not empty. (I'm under the impression now that there is more than one reason why coffee after a meal is the recommended way to take it, and not understanding how whether you take it with milk plays into it... could you elaborate?)

<comment><USER20> Not the parent poster, but I understood this as "black coffee has almost zero calories". This was the only restriction I explained in my post. This is not about boosting the effectiveness of coffee, but simply cutting out all calories between meals (except possibly for neglectible amounts as in tea or coffee).

<comment><USER22> Ah, thanks for the clarification. My understanding about the effects of caffeine is not based on anything other than hear-say from people who seemed to have done their research better than I have, but from what I did hear, caffeine on an empty stomach may have opposite the intended effects, making you actually more confused instead of boosting focus.

Anecdotally after hearing this myself, I have tried to make it a point to take coffee less often when on an empty stomach, and it does seem to help with focus-depletion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Dr. Jason Fung (he is on youtube) found that his patients who fasted during Ramadan had improvements to their metabolic health. After Ramadan, he would have to adjust their meds. This evolved in to him advocating fasting for his diabetic patients and has reversed people's diabetes. Bottom line is that it really works and gets results...and it is easy for people to follow.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Typically, people would go for an 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. eating window

This is something I don't get. After sleeping 8h, you're in a fasted state, having done the "hard part" that is not eating for several hours. So breakfast/lunch should be the easiest meals to skip.

<comment><USER25> Most people I know do IF by waiting to eat until 2-3pm.

<comment><USER26> It seems like this would be the easiest approach but the second part of the article talks about the importance of syncing body clocks with daylight hours. If that argument has merit then we shouldn't be skipping breakfast but missing dinner.

<comment><USER27> The problem with missing dinner is that it makes compliance at lot harder if you mess with social schedules.

<comment><USER28> Also, willpower is strongest in the morning and decreases over the course of the day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Once one adopts a routine like this, it's becomes so much easier to efficiently condense that 10 hr eating window into a 2-1 hr one for more of those "gains". Combine that with a low carb lifestyle and you essentially get yet another free multiplier.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've recently started doing 23h fasts. It's the easiest diet so far. As soon as I come back from work, which is around 5pm, I eat whatever I want. Then no eating until I come back from work next day. It's also nice not to think about food all day.

<comment><USER31> That is incredible, and I'm a little jealous.

I need to eat every two hours, maximum, whilst awake. If I miss one period then I'm basically unable to function normally.

<comment><USER32> That's not a good thing, btw. It shows you're addicted to constant blood sugar hits. Getting through a day or two of agony and fasting would probably help you out in the long run.

<comment><USER33> I've forgotten the details, but I believe the described pattern is characteristic of some metabolic disorders. Considering that, I'd recommend talking to a doctor before going straight to fasting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Honestly, this is a habit that a lot of people (that I know) do without even realizing it. All you need to do is skip breakfast (maybe replace with a black coffee since they wont skip caffeine) and you almost certainly fall into a 10/14 TRE regimen.

</comment><comment><USER35> The main risk in a study like this is that (1) with inclusion criteria but (2) without controls, you're susceptible to reversion to the mean.

Imagine that your weight fluctuates by about 3% every few days. The risk is that by imposing a cutoff for inclusion, you are more likely to identify people at the top of their usual range. So, the natural decline as they oscillate around their normal weight will look like a treatment effect.

Adding controls without intervention would be helpful to identify (and control for) this problem.

Unrelated, but also, I note that 6 people were excluded because they already eat for fewer than 10h/day.

</comment><comment><USER36> I wonder if there is something like a Hawthorne effect for diets that would explain why almost any dietary change leads to some weight loss. Simply changing when they eat seems to make people ingest fewer calories.

<comment><USER33> I'm not aware of a formal name for it, but there's certainly a hypothesis floating around that weight loss diets mostly work by altering the way that people pay attention to food. That is, the behavioral effects of being "on a diet" explain most of the weight loss while the particular rules and theory of any given diet explain little of the weight loss. It's sort of like the dodo bird verdict [1] for diets. It would be interesting to know if any studies have compared "real" and "placebo" diets to estimate this effect; searches mostly come up with references to a book called "The Placebo Diet" which seems related but I'm not sure it directly addresses the empirical question.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The sample of people is really small (n = 19), so I would definitely take this with a grain of salt. I've personally found fasting to be an incredibly effective method of weight reduction, however I was fasting for upwards of 20 hours a day. If you view the world from a basic calories in vs. Calories out lens, what is the best way to reduce calories in... just don't eat. I find it a lot easier to not have the option to eat than to have the option to eat but having to eat less. I would be interested to see how the rest of the HN community sees fasting

<comment><USER38> It's also easier not to eat than burning off the excess. With my complexion, it takes about 5K to burn through 1 Snickers bar. I do run and I find easier not to eat that bar than to burn it, so for people who don't exercise themselves it should be a no brainer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wish it was easier to monitor what goes on inside our body. E.g. digesting works differently if you have some kind of intolerance, allergy, diabetes, whether you have enough muscle mass or not... We treat it as a black box, give blanket statements with a self-selected sample size, and hope that it works for everybody, which it rarely does.

E.g. there are conditions which require you to eat small meals throughout the day, which obviously is in conflict with fasting...

</comment><comment><USER40> I have been intrigued with IF for a few years now. While i think in theory I think it sounds great I also find it difficult to believe that you can strictly stick to a 9-9 diet every day. While on my own I can stick to such, but I will often be asked out to eat later in the evening or for drinks on the weekend which takes place outside of my fasting times. Does anyone have any suggestions for this?

<comment><USER41> I can usually plan for events that would normally be outside my eating window and adjust timing accordingly. But ultimately, I don't beat myself up about it if, say, one day a week I can't get things perfect due to social constraints.

<comment><USER40> yes agreed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As someone who has worked hard to lose and keep off about half my bodyweight, I believe I've got a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't and, frankly, it really irks me that people advise these kinds of tactics. Time restriction alone is not sufficient. I can easily (very, very easily) down 10k Calories in under an hour. By some delusional people's metric, that's a 23 hour fasting period and should work great. I can assure you from experience that it does not result in weight loss.

This sort of advice is, at best, a highly abstracted trick for just plain eating fewer calories. You're better off just tracking the calories directly, _especially_ if you're a food addict.

Edit: To everyone disagreeing, find me a single study that shows anyone gaining weight on a long term caloric deficit. For comparison, here's a nutrition professor losing 27lbs eating Twinkies at a caloric deficit: [http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/...](http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/index.html)

<comment><USER14> > I can easily (very, very easily) down 10k Calories in under an hour.

But would you _want_ to? Maybe you would, but most wouldn't because appetite doesn't just increase linearly over time. The idea with TRF is that even if people eat 500 extra calories at dinner that still has less effect than 1000 calories' worth of breakfast, lunch, and/or snacks, both in terms of raw calories and in terms of varying metabolic effects. Even if it were just a highly abstracted trick for just eating fewer calories (it's not), people might find it easier to stick to than having every meal but eating less at each. Motivation matters.

You're right that time restriction alone is not sufficient. Neither is calories counting alone. How much you eat, what you eat, when you eat _all_ matter. Any diet that focuses on only one - any one - won't work for some people, or at all. Let's not try to counter bad advice with more sample-of-one bad advice.

<comment><USER13> > Neither is calories counting alone.

I've got 160lbs of missing mass that disagrees. Not to mention numerous studies and basic physics.

<comment><USER14> Again, sample of one. Great that it worked for you. Doesn't mean it will work for everyone, even if they can stick to it. Science is not made of anecdotes.

Edit (responding to your ninja-edit): there might not be any examples of people gaining weight _if they stuck to_ a long-term caloric-deficit plan, but there are millions who gained weight when they couldn't stick to one. And be careful about criticizing them for lacking willpower or whatever, or someone might wonder about the willpower aspect of being unable to keep from eating 10K calories in a single sitting. People are different, with individual strengths and weaknesses. That's why statistical evidence outweighs anecdotes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's interesting that they pick 14/10 when most of the "people" hyping IM push for 16/8 or 18/6, It would be nice to see studies that show any benefit of the longner fast window. I have a feeling the longer time has some kind of competition component to it.

<comment><USER43> Perhaps there is a little competition component, but the idea is to stay longer in the ketosis state. If you're doing 18/6, then your body will be in a fasting state for a longer time, and the belief is that the longer your body is in that state, the more benefit you will reap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Seems similar to Ramadan :-) _if_ following the timetable of Mecca [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramadan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramadan)

</comment><comment><USER45> Great, I leave on my commute at 06.45, get home about 18:30 to 19:00.

Do I not eat before my morning commute, or eat my evening meal at my desk?

<comment> blaser-waffle Eat a protein bar at 1400.

Most of the fasting schedules are 16/8, or 16 hours no-eating, 8 hours eating.

Assuming you start at 2pm, you can eat from 1400-2200. Grab a small snack at 2, and then plan on a big meal at home.

<comment><USER45> Hardly a balanced diet. I don't think a lot of schedules that fly in the face of healthy eating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> > We saw a 3% reduction in their weight

> participants consumed about 8.6% fewer calories

I would say the interesting fact is that people consumed less food. It was basically forced diet.

They should do a different study to see how 14-hours fasting compares with a -8.6% calories intake diet.

<comment><USER47> Anything that reduces how much calories you take in without reducing the calories you burn, is going to make you lose weight.

The whole trick in helping people lose weight is finding a way people can easily keep doing that without any expenditure in willpower. That's the big problem with every single diet: it requires discipline and willpower. The less of those it requires, the easier it becomes to stick to the diet.

<comment><USER48> I'd go a step further: That seems to be the problem with the very idea of a diet. The connotations are all wrong. The idea that it's going to be an expenditure of discipline and willpower is intimately wrapped up in the concept, and it's downright depressing to contemplate doing that indefinitely.

I would guess that it's a lot easier to achieve success if you try to play a different mental game, where the goal is to change your habits in a way that makes a different way of eating the default state instead of something that requires a constant effort. Maybe decide that certain kinds of foods are only for when you're eating out? Maybe buy a rice cooker so that whole grains are more convenient to prepare? Maybe find other motivations entirely? Chip bags and the like aren't recyclable, so my home consumption of junk calories dropped off precipitously after I decided to make a concerted effort to limit the amount of plastic packaging I'm sending to the landfill.

<comment><USER47> Exactly. Don't follow a diet, but structurally change your eating pattern. Long ago, after a year of eating mostly pizza, I switched to eating mostly stir-fry vegetables. My food still wasn't very varied, but that meant it required little effort and willpower. And it was still a lot healthier than pizza. Lost 5 kg in 5 weeks.

Then I met my wife and she didn't want to eat just stir-fry vegetables, so now I'm heavier than ever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> intermittent fasting works wonders for the body. Most people I know do 16/8, 16 hour fast with 8 hour eating. the ones who lost the most weight do 20/4\. Now... you still have to control what you're eating. it does no good to fast and then eat 5000 calories.

</comment><comment><USER50> The weight loss is cool and all but it seems like a bad idea to just start doing this method until there's a long-term study about the effects this has on your body. What if you stick to it for a few years and ruin your body? 12 weeks is not nearly enough for conclusive results.

<comment><USER27> People have been going on intermittent fasting schedules for centuries.

Ramadan being a good example.

This is also by no means the first study into intermittent fasting.

While we certainly don't know every detail about what the optimal pattern is, the idea that you might "ruin your body" by limiting your eating to a 10 your window seems far fetched.

<comment><USER50> Ramadan isn't a constant diet, though, it's only for a month in a year. I'm talking about doing intermittent fasting as a regular daily diet. But, yeah, maybe I worded it a bit too severely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Both the article and the study are extremely suspicious.

In addition to the mentioned points:

> When you're constantly giving the body calories, you're constantly making > your cells work

This is a nonsensical statement.

> We saw a 3% reduction in their weight and a 4% reduction in abdominal > visceral fat

Taken out of context, this is poor journalism. There's fat all over the body; abdominal fat is only a part of it.

I've checked the research:

> We observed significant reductions (p < 0.05) in body weight (mean ± SD, 3.3 > ± 3.20 kg [3%]) [...] percent body fat (1.0% ± 0.91% [3%])

If I understand this correctly, they lost, in average, 3.3 kgs of body weight (on an 85 kgs person, that's 3.9%), and 1% of body fat.

This is a catastrophe. It means that a lot of non-fatty tissues (muscles) have been lost, which is the effect of poor diets.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm sorry but these kind of studies tell you nothing.

I've done the "San/Khoikhoi" approach to eat and fast. I've done the "eat small amounts" frequently. All of these have their virtues and under any such (whilst being sensible) you'll probably live to an averaged healthy 80. Edit: If you have a disease that puts you way below average, then you probably already have personal recommendations via the scientific literature (or no recommendations).

What these studies _do_ do is make you panic about your current habits. The oldest woman a while ago was an Italian woman who ate two eggs every morning until she died some time in her 110s. I don't know if that means you should eat eggs.

Stress about your diet at this point is more likely to be an issue that the actual diet. That is now if you don't have Kwashiorkor.</comment>


Yogurl – easy urls for your files and code - <AUTHOR> http://yogurl.io <comment><AUTHOR> The CLI quick example: [http://i.imgur.com/ujrIpEv.gif](http://i.imgur.com/ujrIpEv.gif) Yogurl is meant for developers, please use it with moderation. Any feedback, bug report, issue, doubt is appreciated.</comment>


You're Too Cheap to Fly Faster - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/lift-and-drag/7885a299bca2 <comment><USER2> A big part of the problem is that it is not just about price. New York to London is 5-6 hours. But back when I did business travel regularly (SFO<->LHR), the door to door time for me on an 11 hour flight was 16 hours after a lot of practice. So on a 5-6 hour flight, half would likely be spent on either end (and this is without checked luggage). At that point saving 2-3 hours in-air is not making enough of a dent in the travel time for it to be attractive to pay all that much more.

Much less saving 10% of the time.

<comment><USER3> Completely agreed. I mainly fly internationally, and while shaving 2 hours off a 8 hour flight would be wonderful, it doesn't help me, as the majority of my time is spent in airports between the flights.

For me to get to where my family lives (one layover), it takes me:

1 Hour drive to airport

2 Hours because it's an international flight

8 Hour Flight

2 Hours Immigration / Baggage

1 Hour Re-checkin

3-5 Hour Layover

30 Minute Commuter Flight

30 Minutes for baggage

30 Minutes drive home

So for my entire flight, the flying (even on a 8 hour flight) is less than half of my total time. By lowering the amount of time between connections, or lessening the amount of connections that need to be made, you can get greater gains than by flying faster planes.

Cheaper planes and cheaper flights could actually make overall flying time SHORTER, because there would be more planes in the sky, and less time between fights.

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

Long rambling story:

When I first rode the bullet train back in college, I thought it would be like riding an airplane, at least from a management perspective. My friends and I bought the ticket a week in advance, made sure we were packed, and got to the station a good hour in advance of my train leaving.

It was only then that I realized that the security for getting on a bullet train is "show me your ticket" and that if you miss your train, you can just sit in the non-reserved seating on the next available train that will be along in under 5 minutes. (Back then it was more like 10, but still)

While you can't really compare trains and planes (and automobiles) in these situations, it still makes me think that the solution to faster travel is not faster planes, but better infrastructure and administration for travel.

<comment><USER4> I wish we had more trains. Not just for passengers, but in general. They just get the best cost per mile per pound were gonna get on planet Earth, since the physics of cars requires constant acceleration / deceleration and 2 dimensions of movement, and planes require lift.

I'd _love_ a train from Miami to Boston that hits all the major cities and averages something between the terrible 80 mph Amtrack trains and the way too expensive per mile (or km in a more civilized country =P) bullet trains in Korea or Japan.

Also, that doesn't cost $200 and doesn't take 2 days trip. It should be so much cheaper taking a vacation on wheels than paying the cost to get luggage airborne, and it really is the infrastructure being awful.

Wow, a round trip ticket to Austin is around $800. That is just unacceptable.

<comment><USER5> The fundamental problem is that the ground experience is managed by the airports, which are usually unionized governmental entities with little concern for the customer's time, and by the TSA. Similarly, despite very compelling economics, interstate passenger rail is a failure in the US because the government corporation Amtrak has a monopoly, deals with some of the most absurd unions in America, and doesn't seriously innovate.

<comment><USER6> This post is drool. "Blame the unions" is the new right wing "blame Jews" I guess.

Most airports in the states are reasonably run and don't waste our time, compared to many other European and Asian countries.

Passenger rail doesn't work well in the states given the distances involved, we just aren't that dense. Where it does make sense in the eastern corridor, Amtrak is able to make a profit. Amtrak long haul routes however exist only for those afraid to fly.

Long haul routes in china only make money because they have much more volume than us, and people who don't mind traveling 2 days from shanghai to urumuqi to save on a 6 hour flight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The economics behind the failure of the Concorde are far more complicated than "people didn't buy enough tickets". There were an extremely limited amount of routes (basically you could fly out of NYC or Washington DC to either London or Paris), mostly due to the problem of sonic booms, but also because the plane design was such that there was essentially a minimum travel distance for it to ever be reasonably economically viable. It isn't like there was a Southwest offering Concorde flights from LA to SFO at 1.5x or 2.0x times the price of a normal ticket. The Concorde actually sold pretty well given how limited the routes were until the entire airline industry started to crater around the turn of the century (9/11, etc).

There was also a lot of politics behind the Concorde discontinuation that had nothing to do with pure economics.

Having said all of that, our cheapness does seem to be doing harm to a lot of industries over time, where if you want to buy a new product your choices are like a dozen shitty things made by the lowest bidder in China or 2 "premium" choices that are only marginally better than the cheap shit at like 5 times the cost. Something similar to the capitalistic middle-class squeeze we have been going through seems to apply to product choices as well.

<comment><USER8> I can think of at least 113 other reasons as well. I'd imagine a fatal crash would have had much more impact on consumer attitudes towards the Concorde than it would towards other, more "conventional" plane models. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_4590>

<comment><USER9> It's strange. The Concorde crash was clearly due to a cascade of safety protocol violations, from Continental's runway debris and subsequent skipped runway inspection, to Air France's overweight takeoff, yet the Concorde itself, despite a spotless record, became the target of public outrage.

<comment><USER10> The safety issues were not the full reason that the Concorde was grounded permanently. It was grounded temporarily until the design issues raised by the crash were resolved by design changes (Kevlar lining in fuel tanks, burst resistant tires). If safety was the real driver, the improvements would never have been made and deployed.

The real problem was that the Concorde was a 1960's design in 2003 with only 20 units produced. As such it did not continue to receive upgrades and other refinements that other aircraft do. Compare what a 737-100 looked like and what a 737 you'd fly on today looks like. That's just the visual changes, think of the improvements you can't see. Like improved cockpit controls. With only 20 units parts were expensive. Airbus didn't want to support the aircraft either.

I'm sure there was some decrease in passengers after the crash. But I don't think there was a public outrage. With time the numbers would have recovered. They retired the plan not even a full year after restoring service.

As I understand it Air France was selling tickets at less than their cost to operate it. While both BA and AF announced the cancelations at the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if Air France was the group that decided to pull the plug first. Taking out half the planes would have made the maintenance even more expensive for BA.

Finally, Richard Branson tried to buy the BA Concorde fleet and continue operating it. Branson is not an idiot at business, he obviously thought there was a market there. For some reason that's not clear BA refused to sell to him. Which leads to the other possible reason for retirement, the airlines figured out they could make more profit selling subsonic first class than Concorde tickets. Not selling to Branson prevented him from having the supersonic competitive advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We're not nearly cheap enough: The plane ticket price doesn't capture the cost of flying, the majority of which comes from the greenhouse gas emissions. Further working in the wrong direction is the tax freeness of jet fuel and the 2-3x amplified effect of co2 when injected directly to the upper atmosphere.

<comment><USER4> I have to think the only reason trains pretty much died as an industry in the last hundred years is due to government fiddling or poor infrastructure maintenance. In a trifecta of balancing cost to time to carrying weight, trains should almost always win, with cars never winning in any of them and planes winning only at time investment.

Yet we all drive cars (which win in being personal transport where free wheels in 2d on tarmac is much more portable than steel wheels on tracks in 1d) even though they should cost significantly more, take longer (if we had even a reasonable bullet train at 150 - 160 mph, not even close to the 260mph Japanese / Korean lines) and carry less (especially compared against fuel consumption or just the raw bearing weight of car frames and rubber tires against rail cars).

An amtrack ticket from NY to Austin is $800 round way, and 50 hours each way. I can rent a car for $100 a day, and do that drive in 40 hours. So I save time, it costs the same when you factor in gas, and the only benefit is I can read a book on the train. Which is a nice plus, but not double the price worth.

<comment><USER12> Trains _didn't_ die as an industry. Actually the US has an exceedingly good (privately-owned) freight rail system, compared to the rest of the world (assuming you're talking about the US from the Amtrak reference).

What did happen is that Amtrak was displaced by said freight rail system. It doesn't really own any rail - everything is under contract, with freight getting first priority contractually. Though it also has other issues.

<comment><USER13> Moving freight by train is also a lot more efficient than moving people by train. Freight doesn't need room to walk around, doesn't need to eat, doesn't need to sleep, doesn't need bathrooms.

<comment><USER14> The tohoku shinkansen in Japan can have trainsets with up to 1600 people in one 16-car train, and can slam them down the line at 250+kph, one every 3 or 4 minutes. A couple of E5s could do 1400 people at 320. If that isn't efficient then I'd love to know what is!

<comment><USER6> Japan is a very compact country. Lovely for anyone in the DC-Boston corridor, doesn't scale to most of the states however. Consider how there isn't much of anything between San Francisco and LA.

Love the Shinkansen though. My preferred method of travel within Japan.

<comment><USER14> The "compact" excuse is a cop-out, IMO. LA and SF are two massive cities well within high speed train range. Of course there's nothing in between them - there's no transport! You're thinking backwards. Put a station 150km outside of SF with a 30 minute commute and do you think there'll still be nothing there in 5 years?

My point is that these lines would be considered viable in Japan - more than viable; completely obvious. The fact we can't seem to build them - can't even take the idea seriously - is more about the nature of our society than anything to do with geography.

<comment><USER6> Its not really that though, there is nothing between LA and SF because the land is not really suitable for big cities. Japan is quite lucky because much of the island is unsuitable for habitation pushing many of the cities into a narrow band (e.g. Tokyo - Osaka). You can't really fight geography, and you work with what you got.

> Put a station 150km outside of SF with a 30 minute commute and do you think > there'll still be nothing there in 5 years?

At Shinkansen ticket/pass prices? Really? Depends if we can become as rich as the Japanese. I also find this to be a bad outcome; if you work in SF, why not just live in SF? Do we really need to build a 150km-away bedroom community?

<comment><USER14> > Japan is quite lucky because much of the island is unsuitable for habitation > pushing many of the cities into a narrow band

Lucky? How is that lucky? I believe this is the first time I have ever heard someone describing a lack of habitable land as "lucky".

It's true that in the last 50 or so years, the USA has become extremely suburbanised, totally reliant on cars for transport, which makes it hard to pick "winners" as to where gets a station, but you can't just use that as an excuse to do nothing!

> At Shinkansen ticket/pass prices? Really? Depends if we can become as rich > as the Japanese.

The Japanese are far from "rich". Anyway, a commuter pass pass from, say, Utsunomiya to Tokyo only costs a few hundred, and is anyway paid by employer. The alternative is spending several times that on housing, in a situation of intense competition for limited housing stock in a viable commuting range.

> if you work in SF, why not just live in SF? Do we really need to build a > 150km-away bedroom community?

I don't understand this answer. Obviously, not everyone can live in the CBD of the city they work in. That's the problem fast transport solves in this situation. What's your better idea?

Anyway I'm not blindly recommending anything the Japanese do. I'm just saying that fast transport has the effect of greatly expanding the viable urban living of a major city.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article is correct to a large extent. But I'm surprised it didn't mention the elite group who fly considerably faster: private jet owners and corporate jet "beneficiaries".

These individuals are not nearly as price sensitive as the average consumer, and face much larger opportunity costs when sitting around at the airport or moving slowly in flight.

With some of the newer (and very expensive) private jets like the Gulfstream 650 and Citation X, passengers benefit from an approximately 15-20% flight time savings (depending on the length of the trip and desired fuel efficiency). This is a considerable amount of time for most c-level execs of large companies.

However, where I personally see the biggest time advantage in flying private is the process of actually boarding and securing the plane. Private jets and smaller airports are orders of magnitude more efficient.

Pulling up to a hangar at Van Nuys instead of waiting 2 hrs in the delta check-in line at LAX is well worth the extra money to the ultra rich. Time from pulling into the airport in your car to takeoff can be as little as 10 minutes.

In the late 1990's, as research on super sonic flight was becoming very popular, there seemed to be a divergence in thought: One camp was for larger, slower, but more comfortable airplanes; and the other for smaller, sleeker, uncomfortable supersonic rollercoaster rides through the stratosphere.

It would be interesting to see airlines' market research around higher speed aircraft, and whether there was enough demand for super sonic flights. My intuition tells me they did perform this research, and the data told them that it wasn't economically feasible.

With the introduction of the A380 and other mega jumbos on the way, it became clear that the conclusion is that we'd all prefer to fly slower, but more comfortably. Though, while it appears we only have 2 market segments, super expensive and super cheap, there are some companies who are innovating on the fringes to make private jets more accessible.

NetJets and FlexJet are the first few that come to mind. Maybe there's a YC company that can further optimize this market? I for one would love to travel out of smaller airports if there were more options...

<comment><USER16> > It would be interesting to see airlines' market research around higher speed > aircraft, and whether there was enough demand for super sonic flights. My > intuition tells me they did perform this research, and the data told them > that it wasn't economically feasible.

This is why Boeing's Sonic Cruiser (mentioned in the article) was canceled. The jump in drag approaching the sound speed cascades into more complex and costlier aircraft engineering, which ends up in the fare. Lockheed's Skunk Works also shopped around a quiet supersonic platform (not subject to the sonic boom flight restrictions in the US) biz jet to Wall Street banks in the early '00s, who were the most avid flyers of the Concorde, but there wasn't enough interest to fund it.

> there are some companies who are innovating on the fringes to make private > jets more accessible

This would be air taxi companies like DayJet, which went bankrupt due to the late '00s recession. In an age when most people comparison shopped for airfares $20-50 cheaper, offering a seat costing $200+ more for slightly shorter flights wasn't a great value proposition, and still isn't. Better preboarding and seating on the planes is somewhat taken care of already by business+ class (you also get those airline clubs in the departure areas). This small chunk of benefits still costs too much for most consumers, with the vast majority of first/second class tickets acquired through flyer miles or corporate sponsorship. Air taxi seating would cost even more than first class due to reduced economy of scale. Would this be worth it to skip the TSA line? I'm not sure. Kavoo is a new air taxi operator that flies (slower) turboprops though.

> I for one would love to travel out of smaller airports if there were more > options...

This was the original goal of Eclipse Aviation's Eclipse 500 (in fact the EA logo depicted travel between regional airports like Van Nuys, bypassing hubs such as LAX). I think the higher energy requirements and generally greater distances of air travel magnify cost differences in small transit vs mass transit (taxicab vs. bus), making jet air taxis cost prohibitive at this time.

Disclosure: Former Eclipse Aviation engineering intern

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The worst part of my flight, and most of the time the largest part, is the Home->Gate->Plane part. Why would I pay to optimize the least unpleasant part of the journey?

Give me a way to skip the whole "everybody is a possible terrorist" fiasco and now we're talking ...

<comment><USER18> Few people now remember it, but back in the earlier days of commercial aviation flying was a breeze. You could walk up to a counter, buy a ticket, walk to the gate and walk on.

It was that way for a long while.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I remember the days of "arrive 30 minutes early for international flights just to be on the safe side". Now the "rule" is you can't even fly if you arrive that "late" for an international flight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not only are we to cheep to fly fast but we've also banned supersonic flight over most "civilized" land masses. There are only three or so US mainland airbases where it is legal to break mach 1 due to the fact that the voting public doesn't want to listen to sonic booms. Thanks to relatively new "shaped sonic boom" technology it is possible to massively reduce the acustic profile of supersonic flight but the damage is done. We're too cheap to fly fast and the technology which we need to fly fast still doesn't come cheap.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hard to believe an article on this topic fails to mention airline deregulation[1]. When an industry transitions from mandated prices to open price competition the profit formula changes. It is logical that carriers would prefer efficient, reliable, high capacity planes over faster alternatives post deregulation. Also, given the small number of plane manufacturers and the huge costs of R&D to bring out a new plane, it is unlikely a manufacturer would invest in building a supersonic jet that does not meet the current operating needs of its clients. Maybe Elon will do planes next? The average altitude of Tesla and Space X's vehicles is probably around 35k feet...

[1]<http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AirlineDeregulation.html>

</comment><comment><USER21> Travelling from city to city may indeed take longer than we would like. But the real innovation isn't making airliners faster - it is in getting people from their location and onto the aircraft sooner. The lengthiest leg of the flight to me is the time spent waiting at the gate.

</comment><comment><USER22> Yes, I'd rather flights be faster than cheaper. But for most people, saving a few hours isn't worth spending a few hundred or thousand dollars extra on a flight. Which sounds kind of reasonable, to be honest.

<comment><USER23> I fly about once a month for personal visits. While I'd love to reach my destination faster, I struggle enough to afford tickets at their current prices. If I'm not prepared to spend $30 for a better seat, I'm definitely not about to spend a small fortune for a few extra hours at my destination.

I use Hipmunk to find flights, and by default they sort results by "Least Agony" -- which means least total flight time / stops. Those tickets are generally more expensive, and I often have to sacrifice agony for price.

Not everyone can afford fast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> When we purchase a plane ticket, we aren't given an option for speed; only price. Therefore, we optimize that variable.

<comment><USER25> Actually trip duration is an option, and one which I regularly prioritize.

<comment><USER26> Yes but trip duration in terms of number of stops or speed of the jet that takes you there?

<comment><USER27> Total number of hours from start to finish is commonly displayed. If you want less time traveling, it's trivial to choose that when it's available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I live in Australia and occasionally have to fly to the U.S. for business (the Pacific flight alone is a 15 hour trip one way and an 18 hour trip return). I would lower my consulting fees and channel the money into my airfares if I could get a flight that would do it in half the time. 24+ hours travel time (including connecting flights airports and taxis) is torture.

Sadly, I don't think I'll get the opportunity for anything quicker in my lifetime. I predict there will be humans on Mars before a supersonic cross- Pacific passenger aircraft.

</comment><comment><USER29> for many routine flights (transcontinental vs transoceanic) this isn't the only reason - sonic booms are a problem. And even if you could go from LA to NYC in two hours (versus four), then also add in an invariant hour and a half time you spend going through security, waiting for the plane, boarding, and really the difference is not enough to justify the added cost.

</comment><comment><USER30> Pick 2 out of 3: cheap, fast, good. I guess we've chosen cheap and good. That's why I don't fly United. :)

<comment><USER2> I used to always fly United between LHR and SFO when I flew regularly. Their standard in every class was poorer than Virgin Atlantic or BA for example, but contrary to those United at least had one big advantage:

To get upgrades with Virgin or BA was like winning a lottery. It happens rarely, and getting up in the frequent flier tiers takes a _lot_ of flying and usually buying more expensive tickets. And the benefits are relatively limited. But when you get bumped up with either one it's the royal treatment.

United was more basic when comparing on a class by class basis: Crappier seats, not as good food, etc. But after two returns on a flight as long as LHR<->SFO I was at a sufficient tier in their frequent fliers program to get automatic free upgrades to premium economy, and a miles multiplier that meant I'd get a free business class upgrade every 3rd leg from then on (and often more frequently than that, if there were free business seats), as well as priority boarding etc.. I'd still pick Virgin or BA for "one off" occasional flights any day, but United was great for frequent long haul flights.

<comment><USER31> United has changed, and not in a way that would make this easier. Now they offer paid first-class and "premium economy" upgrades to passengers at or shortly before check-in, usually steeply discounted, and consensus from passengers with status seems to be that A) it's not offered to them and B) it's offered _before_ status upgrades are applied, so if first class fills up from the cheap upgrades, there will not be any status upgrades on the flight.

<comment><USER6> Does United even offer first class on international flights though? I thought they only offered business class on international flights (first class on domestic flights, but so what?).

<comment><USER32> Yeah. United has both business and first on International flights. Having been in both, I'd say that there isn't a whole lot of difference though. But In both cases, I just love those lay-flat seats when doing a 14-hour flight between LA and Sydney...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Shaving a few hours won't open new markets or otherwise fundamentally alter our relationship with distance. It's telling that "convenience" is the selling point, which implies a difference of degrees rather than kind, and shows a lack of ideas of what we could do with this technology.

The next great hop in transportation would have to be instant or near-instant teleportation. And faster jets don't meaningfully bring us closer to that.

<comment><USER34> While cutting time in the air by half may not make a fundamental difference, cutting it by five or six times could. Point-to-point sub-orbital services have the potential to do this, though there are challenges for this type of flight that bring its difficulties closer to orbital operations than the (mostly) straight up and down trajectories that will be flown by Virgin Galactic, XCOR, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I would also point out that the US considered and rejected the notion of building a supersonic passenger plane, in part because of concerns about its effect on the upper atmosphere, in part because of the economics. The debate about building took place about the time that the Concorde was under development, i.e. well before much of the HN readership was born.

</comment><comment><USER36> Point well made. But I rather see efficiency in airport terminals immediately as compared to aeroplane speeds, at least right now. For international flights it's a norm to arrive ~1-2 hrs earlier. Sometimes this time is nearly 20-30% of the entire flight time and in some extreme cases, may be even more.

</comment><comment><USER37> Article talks of mach 5 but fails to mention that our best body designs begin to melt at mach 3.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm just waiting for the invention of the Star Trek "transporter" or the TARDIS.

<comment><USER39> Star Trek's transporters would be excellent. We could recover all that land that's covered in paving, no longer care about location, eliminate the pollution of today's internal combustion engines...

The sad thing is that if this could happen in the next decade, I fear it would quickly become a target of the entire transportation industry as they scramble to lobby for laws to prevent its use. And the same thing would happen for Trek's matter replicators.

But if I've learned anything comparing science fiction and the real world, it's that our scientific understanding of the universe comes slowly enough that society adapts. The only notable exception is the near-instant communication provided by the internet and its effects on "intellectual property" hoarders.

</ramble>

<comment><USER40> _If_ we manage to create transporters at all (never mind the next decade), the impact on religion and legislation would be far greater than on the transportation industry. If your body is destroyed and reconstructed, are you still the same person? What if you could make copies? It's just information, after all. And so on...

Do any of the Star Trek episodes investigate this aspect of the transporters?

<comment><USER39> I do not recall any real attention paid to such aspects of the transporter. I do recall, however, the inventor of the device showing up in an episode of _Enterprise_ [1] and referring to all the dialog that came up when the device was new; his comment? "Metaphysical nonsense."

[1] - _Star_ _Trek:_ _Enterprise_ episode "Daedalus" - Dr. Emory Erickson according to <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transporter_(Star_Trek)>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Ballistic travel is my preferred method.

<comment><USER39> That's gotta be a helluva kick.

<comment><USER42> Yep. Flying UDP-packet class.</comment></comment></comment>


Startups Want to Be the Next Airbnb, Uber - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303417104579546273413969150?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303417104579546273413969150.html <comment><USER2> The low margins mean you have to make it up on massive volume. The two best ways to do this: focus on recurring customers, and make your providers more active on your platform (due to high acquisition and onboarding costs, respectively). The companies that succeed will do both (e.g. eBay with their PowerSellers).</comment>


AT&T lied about everything it promised to do if it got a tax cut - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qjdvex/atandt-lied-about-everything-it-promised-to-do-if-it-got-a-tax-cut <comment><USER2> To me, this whole thing was a sham anyway. Promising the working class some tax breaks but large corps get significantly outsized breaks which will turn into jobs if you just vote this thing through!

Oh and the deficit will add $1T but no one's worried about that.

This is all fixable, but we cannot expect the current administration nor party to do it. Honestly, I wish I knew what was going on in the party such that they perform these long term losses for these extremely questionable short term gains.

<comment> shadow-banned I do believe that we're living in two political dimensions - dimension A, and dimension B. (This is purely academic distinction - just for illustrative purposes.)

I was just in Kansas, and all I saw were people that would benefit massively from Liberal/Democratic policies, and yet vote against their best interest Every. Single. Time.

Wrapping blue collar and middle class voters in a blanket of patriotism, near- worship of the military class and first responders, and positioning anything else as anti-American is very powerful.

<comment><USER3> >I was just in Kansas, and all I saw were people that would benefit massively from Liberal/Democratic policies, and yet vote against their best interest Every. Single. Time.

It's easy to feel that way if you don't understand what is really important to that particular vein of person.

Adversity can be lived and reckoned with as long as there is safety, and overarching stability. People want to be part of something they can be proud of, and that they overcome difficult circumstances makes it all the sweeter. Most importantly though, people just want to be not-interfered with.

When your ostensibly Liberal party has some fiscally attractive ideas, but undermines the very traditional "heart and soul" of the overarching culture, you're going to have a very hard sell. Especially when the other party can sit back and say, "If not for us, they'd have destroyed the American dream, and turned it into a government operated nightmare." Which despite many admirable liberal causes, from the behavior of the political machine elsewhere finds a sizable portion of the populations agreeing with the other side.

Give up on the moral crusade on firearms, get off the Wall Street teat, refocus efforts on organizing and reempowering labor, actually focus on fiscal stability by putting entitlements on a back burner and revamp some of the more fundamental ways our economy is malfunctioning. Use the anti-trust hammer, hold large regional monopolies accountable and make it hurt when they don't deliver. Do something to thwart the problematic forms of financial engineering (private equity abuses, short-term gains over long-term stability, predatory financial products), and for the love of God, get healthcare sorted, and simplify/deantagonize the mechanics of taxation. Shift funding to Research and Education, simplify and raise awareness of ways of civic participation, and maybe consider whether or not some environmental issues can be tackled by the of establishment of Public Works programs.

If anything has stood out to me about the difference between my current generation, and my grandparent's it is that nowadays a civicly minded individual would be hard pressed to be able to actually make a living improving their community.

Funding is trapped in a Market driven by chasing the latest international money making hype scheme rather than actually getting physical labor/goods production done. The service/rent seeking/consumerist paradigm is death and stagnation incarnate. No one is enabled by forced dependence on someone else.

At least, that seems to be the vibe I've picked up on from the Midwest states I've frequented... Which I'll be the first to admit isn't that extensive.

<comment><USER4> It seems as if you favor Republican policies strongly, as those are the tenants that Republicans should stand for. Entitlements, gun control, and cognizance of the interdependence of man are central to the Democratic party - just as stubborn independence, small government, and free market solutions are to the Republican party. The changes you suggest that Democrats make would make them entirely indistinguishable from Republicans.

<comment><USER3> Well, don't shoot the messenger. I just talk to people. That's what I've consistently heard.

I don't label people, or toss am in buckets. I just ask em what they want. The general streak is leave me alone, I don't like the game being stacked against me, keep me safe, free, and capable of making an honest living, and most importantly don't rook me.

Also if you think Republicans have ever been pro-labor, you are sadly mistaken in that regard. Public Works are also generally non-starters except for those who were around in the early 1900's in my experience, and are the quintessential of fundamental interdependence, but also have a tendency to be small localized efforts;something appealing to conservatives more so than not. Enforcing responsibility for corporate actions has always been lackluster on the Republican side as well; Democrats haven't done great on that either. Anti-trust is starting to boot back up again bipartisanly, but it has taken some serious levels of gilded age to even rustletbings enough for that.

Did you even read half the things I mentioned? I'll give you there are quote "Republican overtones" there; but I don't ask people to talk to me about their political party, I ask them what they're concerned about. Think people's political label matters a whole lot less in the long run than their input in what represents the biggest problem to deal with. The "Party Branding" as I call it is just mud in the process of trying to chase down what needs to be prioritized and handled. Both sides are spending more time trying to look like they're the best side of humanity that it seems like actually _being_ that seems to fall by the wayside.

The two States I frequent are Texas and Minnesota. If that helps any.

Frankly, I'd probably get thrown out of any modern political rally, because I think they're all doing a terrible job of running an effective government at this point. There are so many systematic warts that have taken root it'll likely be decades til we get to weeding them out, but hey, that's politics.

Just wanted to share my observation, and point out that to the Voters, they _aren 't_ voting against their best interest. They just have precious little to go from that the "other guy" will generate better results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure what the author's complaint is. The quote they provide is:

"By immediately lowering the corporate tax rate to 20 percent, this bill will stimulate investment, job creation and economic growth in the United States," AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said at the time. "Research tells us that every $1 billion in capital invested in telecom creates about 7,000 good jobs for the middle class," the CEO proclaimed.

Nowhere in this quote it says AT&T specifically promises anything if they get a tax cut, or that they perform any actions at all. It's a generic opinion about a nationwide economic policy, not a specific promise of an action of specific company. To call this "lied" is insane, it's like I'd say "lowering taxes is good for middle class" and the tax cut happens but then I get in financial trouble and some journalist writes an article claiming I am a liar because I am middle class, and taxes were cut but I am actually doing worse off! It should be crystal clear that no nationwide economic policy can guarantee every single company would post profits every single year and would never have workforce cuts.

If somebody is lying here, it is the author of the article. He obviously have read AT&T statements, as he is quoting them, he should be smart enough to understand what is being said in them, and still he claims AT&T promised what it clearly never did. This is textbook definition of lying.

Now, its legitimate to argue that maybe tax cuts were not as good as their proponents promised, and maybe their real effects were different. But one can not do it on the example of one single company! AT&T is indeed in big trouble, as somebody who recently cut off all ties with the company after being a client for more than a decade, I can confirm their service have gone way downhill, while their prices continue the steady march upwards. This company is in trouble, no question about that. But making from that the conclusion that it somehow is related to the tax policy and constitutes a "lie" is plain idiotic and insulting to the reader's intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER6> Lies are only punished if you tell them to rich people.

Further down the article, you can see that investors are mad only because AT&T's mergers and acquisitions don't seem to be paying off fast enough.

</comment><comment><USER7> Almost all companies' overwhelming priority is to increase the wealth of their owners and shareholders. That is often diametrically opposed to benefiting customers. Unfortunately too many people have only attended Economics 101, which insists that the way for a company to be successful is to be the best for the market. Economics 101 fails to be evidence based, or realise that the dominant market is not a company's customers, it's the company ownership.

<comment><USER5> > Economics 101, which insists that the way for a company to be successful is > to be the best for the market

No it doesn't. I don't know which Economic 101 you had, but you may want to ask for a refund on the money you paid for it. Economics says nothing of the sort. For a company to be successful, its services should find willing consumers.

> the dominant market is not a company's customers, it's the company > ownership.

Can somebody translate this to English for me? I recognize all the words, but I can't make any sense of them being arranged this way. What does it mean "dominant market is the company ownership"? It just doesn't compute.

<comment><USER8> I believe he means: they aren't in competition for customers. They are in competition for stockholders. Stockholders exist in a true competitive marketplace where AT&T must provide value to get their business. This is strictly not the case for most of AT&Ts customer-facing business. That exists in an oligopoly that appears to collude on pricing and (lack of) service.

<comment><USER5> As an ex-client of AT&T and now client of a set of different providers, that has not been my experience - both prices and service levels vary quite significantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is the kind of thing that makes me feel like neither party really knows what it's doing. If you're going to create some big tax bill, passing it early on in your presidency is the worst possible choice you can make. Now, the American people can judge the outcome of that bill and will vote accordingly in 2020. If they'd simply waited to pass that bill until just before the midterms in 2018 and had it take effect in 2020, then no one would truthfully be able to say that the bill had failed. This isn't even some deep insight I'm making here - it should have been brought up within the first five minutes of the first meeting of creating the bill.

You could argue that the strategy may have been to stanch their losses in the 2018 election....but that election went almost as badly as it could possibly have gone for the right anyway (depending on who you ask).

<comment><USER10> Genuinely curious as to how this is an example of the neither partying knowing what's its doing since this was Republican legislation which negatively effected that party's reelection campaigns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't really understand corporate taxation, but maybe someone here can educate me.

Why do we expect cutting corporate taxes to increase investment? Aren't costs associated with infrastructure, hiring, wages, etc. considered deductible business expenses? I suppose there are some edge cases there like payroll taxes, but it seems like most of what a corporation spends money on is effectively coming from pre-tax dollars.

</comment><comment><USER12> Huh, it's almost as if Ajit Pai is corrupt. Whadya know.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

A tax break is never a long term incentive for an organization. Each year the financial plan is re-base against last years performance. The expectations is always set at continual growth and improvement. A tax break is only seen as a tax break for a single year... especially when you consider a different political establishment could drastically swing the country in the opposite direction.

<comment><USER14> That quote is actually right though, just like Dave Chapelle said his Dad told him, "poor is a mentality, we're not poor son, we're broke!" (implying it was temporary rather than a lifestyle choice)

<comment><USER15> Well, there's only one Dave Chapelle, but millions of "Dave Chapelle"s that are still "broke".

So while you're not strictly wrong, I wouldn't consider it particularly positive distinction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Set the corporate tax rate to 0. US companies hold trillions in profit overseas which could be used to invest or be taxed when it's distributed to shareholders.

Edit: If the rich shareholders disproportionately benefit from this then raise capital gains. I'd wonder though what proportion of shares are actually held by the 1% though, I'd think a large amount of shares are held in people's pensions/ETFS/401k etc. Theres always calls for taxing the evil corporations more but in the end all taxes are paid by people - either shareholders or employees.

<comment><USER17> Did you seriously just read the article and conclude that the problem is we didn't push hard enough for trickle-down economics?

<comment><USER18> Cutting corporate taxes to zero does not necessarily mean trickle-down economics.

We could cut the corporate tax rate to zero, tax capital at a rate slightly higher than labor (in exchange for using a corporation as a tax-free investment vehicle). We could have a carbon tax and a VAT, with all the proceeds refunded equally to households, which would serve as a UBI.

Eliminating the corporate tax would remove all manner of distortions from our economy, and would free-up huge amounts of resources currently allocated towards avoiding taxation.

Instead of offering insidious tax credits/expenditures to support industries we want, we could offer an equivalent amount of subsidies, which would be on balance sheet, and much easier to judge their effectiveness.

There's no particular reason we must tax corporations, and there are a lot of reasons why it makes sense not to. But certainly we should not cut corporate taxes without capturing that revenue elsewhere in a progressive way.

<comment><USER17> Or we could fix the tax code so that avoiding taxation is simply not possible instead of hoping that altruistic policies will be enacted to help the working class. I'd love for it to be otherwise, but judging by the last several decades of policy and trends, the most likely outcome of cutting corporate taxes is more inequality and very little meaningful help to most Americans.

<comment><USER14> What I am curious about is why corporations need to pay "bonus" tax at all (other than on imports/exports or purchases of commodities/equipment), the employees and the stakeholders of the corporations (the actual people) already pay income tax, why isn't that fair enough?

<comment><USER19> Lots of companies have employees and stakeholders in diferent countries that do not pay any taxes, yet profit from operating here. That's one reason.

Another reason is distribution. You might want employees to pay no taxes at all on their salaries. And you might want shareholders to pay no money at all on their capital gains or dividends, and yet you'd want company revenue to be taxed. The big difference is in theory, a company can just rotate money within itself forever, take revenue and use it for expansion, or investment, or whatever. So all that money only gets taxed once a shareholder sells, or an employee gets paid, but a large portion gets re-invested in the company itself, which you'd want taxed as well, in order to get a steady flow of cash and also capture its real value.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Interactive sorting tool, using FJ algorithm for minimal comparisons - <AUTHOR> http://xomnom.com/prefabout.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I wasn't sure whether to submit the tool or the explanation, though they link to each other.

The tool is here: <http://xomnom.com/preference.html></comment>


Django 1.8 beta 1 released - <AUTHOR> https://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2015/feb/25/releases/

<comment><AUTHOR> Link to release notes [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.8/](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.8/)

<comment><USER2> Reading it put a smile in my face. Looking forward to the final release.

<comment><USER3> Now read this and try to explain your clients why you're billing them extra for an upgrade they did not request: [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.8/#backward...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.8/#backwards- incompatible-changes-in-1-8)

<comment><USER4> Right. Volunteer work on an open source project is a giant conspiracy to blackmail you into contracting for a commercial support contract. The beneficiaries, of course, are the dark cabal of Caktus, RevSys, Lincoln Loop, slashRoot, 791 tech, and so on.

Behemoths all, and existential threats to your clients without exception.

<comment><USER3> Is that a proper response to criticism? Labeling every dissenting opinion as a conspiracy nut's crazy talk just because the project is open source?

<comment><USER4> You are correct that cornering people as conspiracy nuts is not a proper response and, in the presence of a fact pattern of tenuous certain, is a logical fallacy.

However, in this case, you've implied, at least enough to set off my detector of hostility, that all of us that work on Django are engaged in a plot to force you to pay for fancy expensive service contracts.

This is simply crazy on its face. I hardly commit to Django core at all, but when I do, I do so with an intent to make the world a better place - and I say that unironically. I am psyched for the capacity of Django and frameworks like it to make communication and archival of the human condition ever more accessible and powerful.

Do you know how intensely Andrew, Carl, Russell, Jannis, and Aymeric (the 1.8 technical team) work on Django? It's a full-on lifestyle choice. I'm so happy to have the privilege of watching them work, let alone using their product, that I simply cannot imagine the kind of cruelty it must take to accuse them of not working hard enough to ensure that your clients are happy.

We all have clients. If yours aren't sufficiently happy with Django 1.8 (or 1.9 - already time to get going on it), then get your ass over to github and fix whatever's bugging you.

If it's seriously reverse incompatibility with features that have had deprecation warnings for TWO YEARS now, then I want to suggest that you need to zoom out your perspective a little. How many companies do you know that were on PHP frameworks two years ago and have happily switched to Django? Better yet, closed-source CMS systems?

I respect that you have a dissenting opinion, and I really hope you do outline more of your position. But don't you dare cast these people who bust their ass for you - for free - as villains of some sinister plot to bilk all the people who didn't read the deprecation warnings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since 1.8 is an LTS release, those of you using 1.4 can finally upgrade without having to do so again for a couple years.

<comment><USER6> Just as a tip, it might be easier to do a progressive upgrade, i.e. move to 1.5 -> 1.6 -> 1.7 -> 1.8 on older code bases. This way you will get deprecation warning, instead of failure. IIRC Django moves from deprecation to removal in two releases.

On a side note, it is also a good time to try out Python 3, as most packages now support both 2 and 3.

<comment><USER5> Django 1.5 is no longer supported (even for security patches), 1.6 will only receive security and data loss bug fixes after 1.8 is released, and (IMHO) upgrading from 1.4 to 1.6 (or esp 1.7) is almost as difficult and time consuming as just going straight to 1.8, whereas upgrading from 1.4 to 1.5 was a breeze.

Python 3 is wonderful to work with now, compared to just a year ago. Django's support for Python 3 really helped speed up the ultra-slow process of getting many of the popular libraries to support it. IOW, now is a great time to start using Python 3 for new projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This release is going to be huge. With support for Postgres arrays, UUIDs, security checks, jinja2, better fixtures support, etc., the gap between professionals and amateurs is getting smaller and smaller.

I remember five years ago when you could make enormous amounts of money if you knew how to send a tweet, ten years ago when you could make enormous amounts of money if you knew how to install anti-virus software, etc. And now these things have gotten so easy that the value of knowing how to do them is basically zero. Releases like this show that web development is quickly going the same way.

I would add though, the one thing I'm hoping to see in an upcoming release is native support for JWT auth. Right now it's annoying to have to add Rest Framework just to be able to follow current best practices for having an API- driven front end, assuming you don't also have a need to serialize your endpoints into YAML or whatever.

<comment><USER8> > I remember five years ago when you could make enormous amounts of money if > you knew how to send a tweet

What? Do you mean programatically send a tweet based on some event? I think you can still make money from that.

> ten years ago when you could make enormous amounts of money if you knew how > to install anti-virus software

Still don't know what you're talking about. While the demography that had difficulty installing anti-virus on their windows box 10 years ago, now get a bare-bones anti-virus bundled with windows 8 -- this same demographic still need help with a lot of the same things they needed help with 10 years ago. So I'm not quite sure what you think have changed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone know if there will be an official guide for moving between LTS releases? (1.4 > 1.8)

<comment><USER10> No, there won't be. If you upgrade to 1.5, then 1.6, then 1.7, then 1.8 using the release notes from each version, that's your best bet. Any guide moving from LTS to LTS would just be a copy paste job between incremental versions anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, release notes look great. I'm so impressed with the whole Django ecosystem - I'm yet to find a problem without a good answer on SO, there's a package for most of the repetitive stuff when building a web app. I tried to follow the development process on GitHub for some time and while it was a valuable experience [1], it can be like a side project on its own, just to keep up with all the issues and bigger commits.

Anyway, I'm incredibly thankful for all the contributors. Learning and using Django let me meet great people, experience new things and had quite an impact on my life. Yay Open Source! ;).

[1] In general, I think that watching big project on GitHub for just a few weeks can be better lesson than reading a book on the topic (it depends, of course, but it's a great learning experience nonetheless)

</comment><comment><USER12> Is there a specific asset pipeline library that most people that use Django recommend? I'm mainly concerned with filename asset fingerprinting.

<comment><USER13> Django has a `CachedStaticFilesStorage` storage class that you can use to store the MD5 hashed names of your processed files [1]. I use that with django-storages to store my files in S3/Cloudfront [2].

[1] [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/ref/contrib/staticfile...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.7/ref/contrib/staticfiles/#cachedstaticfilesstorage) [2] [https://mike.tig.as/blog/2011/12/22/django-14-first- thoughts...](https://mike.tig.as/blog/2011/12/22/django-14-first-thoughts- cachedstaticfilesstorage/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I only upgraded to 1.7 a month or two back.....

Still sounds good.

<comment><USER15> The Django project shoots for 6-9 months between major releases. This will be on the early side of that window, but still > 6 months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> it is just me or is this a bigger release than normal? Great job to the Django team, this is more proof that Django is the defacto choice when building web applications in Python.

Flask is good, but Django comes with many more batteries included, which all major websites need.

<comment><USER17> I used Django a few years ago but am now learning Flask and coupled with SQLAlchemy, WTForms and a few other extensions seems to be very intuitive and powerful.

Just curious, what batteries in Django make it preferable to you over Flask+SQLAlchemy+Jinja2?

<comment><USER18> I learnt Flask first and then Django. I like Django more. Figuring out which Flask package to pick is lot of unnecessary work. In most cases, you would end up using templates, ORM, Security, Forms, Admin, Migration anyway. Django's defaults for these (now including Jinja2 with this release!) are quite good.

Also I found SQLAlchemy tooo complicated. Too much to learn there. It might be really cool for edge cases, but I'm happy using raw SQL when/if the Django ORM (ever) falls short of my needs.

Also performance benchmarks seem to suggest that Django is faster than Flask. This was a surprise to me. As in, it seems as if Flask is leaner so would be faster, but Django performs better than flask. Also, I kinda like the Django community more.

<comment><USER16> not to mention the vast number of packages, documentation and questions and answers on stack overflow for just about every topic that exists.

rest api's (no out of the box support but plenty of documentation to make your own or just go with Django-rest-framework)

Built in administration system/back end.

easy cache plugins, middleware extensions,

GIS support with Geo-Django

<comment><USER17> I think this has been my biggest annoyance with Flask to date. Searching Google/SO on issues I run into provide far fewer results (and often none that directly answer my question) than Django.

Still probably think Flask is worth learning first though as it gets you closer to the Python core and hoping if I switch back to Django the transition will be easy enough.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Memoir of Growing Up Fat Forces France to Look in the Mirror - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/21/world/europe/gabrielle-deydier-france-obesity-on-ne-nait-pas-grosse.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=Trending&version=Full&region=Marginalia&pgtype=article <comment><USER2> "you can receive criticism if you are eating in a way that is perceived as out of control, such as not at meal times" that can be a part of the problem in itself... why only eat at meal times rather than when one is hungry?</comment>


Dung Beetles Navigate Via the Milky Way, First Known in Animal Kingdom - <AUTHOR> http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/24/dung-beetles-navigate-via-the-milky-way-an-animal-kingdom-first/ <comment><USER2> Paper [http://taste.versailles.inra.fr/AgroParisTech/cours/M1/Neuro...](http://taste.versailles.inra.fr/AgroParisTech/cours/M1/Neurobio_Behav/2012/biblio_2012/neuro/Curr%20Biol%20Dacke%20et%20al%20-%20advance%20publication%20%5B2013%5D.pdf)

<…> Even on clear moonless nights, many beetles still manage to orientate along straight paths. This led us to hypothesize that dung beetles exploit the starry sky for orientation, a feat that has, to our knowledge, never been demonstrated in an insect. Here, we show that dung beetles transport their dung balls along straight paths under a starlit sky but lose this ability under overcast conditions. In a planetarium, the beetles orientate equally well when rolling under a full starlit sky as when only the Milky Way is present. The use of this bidirectional celestial cue for orientation has been proposed for vertebrates, spiders, and insects, but never proven. This finding represents the first convincing demonstration for the use of the starry sky for orientation in insects and provides the first documented use of the Milky Way for orientation in the animal kingdom.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Lastly, to confirm the Milky Way results, the team put little cardboard hats on the study beetles' heads, blocking their view of the sky. Those beetles just rolled around and around aimlessly"

Sounds like they had a good time doing this research.

<comment><USER4> The last bit gave me a chuckle:

> As for the beetles themselves, they were "very easy to work with," he added. > "You can do anything you want to them, and they just keep on rolling."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The researchers won the 2013 Ig Nobel "Joint Prize in Biology and Astronomy" for this interesting discovery ( [http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/](http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/) )

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, thanks. Here is the ceremony: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VG67U2D-gs&feature=player_d...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VG67U2D-gs&feature=player_detailpage#t=1608)

      "South Aftican Dung Beetles teach us
       that to do good science
       you've got to have /balls/"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Actually, they're the second known species to do so in the Animal kingdom.

Humans have looked into the night sky and oriented themselves using the stars.

Although dung beetles have probably been doing it longer.

<comment><USER7> This is what first came into my mind also.

If hairless monkeys can evolve to do this, why not dung beetles?

> Although dung beetles have probably been doing it longer.

That isn't clear. I'm sure we've doing it for much longer than 10k years. That we've always been fascinated with the heavens means that perhaps even other apes were/are doing this.

<comment><USER8> First of all, we are not "hairless monkeys". Second, we did not "evolve to do this". Both of those statements are factually wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I misread the title and was opening that article expecting to read about dung beetles in space.

</comment><comment><USER10> Further proof that humans grossly underestimate all other non-human lifeforms. Parrots reason like three year old children[1], mice feel empathy[2], elephants grieve[3], birds hold funerals for their dead[4], and now this.

And yet we won't hesitate to deforest natural habitats for yet more highways and ugly low density housing. And scientists continue to use animals for all kinds of shockingly inhumane experiments. Over 19 million animals are killed each year in research in the US alone[5], _and that 's not counting mice._

Even house pets are stolen and used for animal testing[6].

Surely we are the smartest animal on the planet (smart enough to rationalize _anything_ ), but isn't it more important we be compassionate?

[1] [http://m.livescience.com/22178-parrots-reason-three-year- old...](http://m.livescience.com/22178-parrots-reason-three-year-olds.html) [2] [http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/researchers-say-mice- feel...](http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/researchers-say-mice-feel-empathy- with-peers/) [3] [http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/06/when-doves-cry- scientific-a...](http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/06/when-doves-cry-scientific- american-explores-grief-in-animals) [4] [http://news.discovery.com/animals/birds-hold-avian- funerals-...](http://news.discovery.com/animals/birds-hold-avian-funerals-for- their-dead-120905.htm) [5] [http://www.statisticbrain.com/animal-testing- statistics/](http://www.statisticbrain.com/animal-testing-statistics/) [6] [http://www.stolenpets.com/about.htm](http://www.stolenpets.com/about.htm)

<comment><USER7> > And yet we won't hesitate to deforest natural habitats for yet more highways > and ugly low density housing. And scientists continue to use animals for all > kinds of shockingly inhumane experiments. Over 19 million animals are killed > each year in research in the US alone[5], and that's not counting mice.

We aren't the only species on the planet that engages in genocide of other species. Plenty of animals, large and small, are predators of other animals as well as habitat destroyers. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if we someday find an animal that performs tests on other animals (other than us, that is). In nature, it is every species for itself, it is like that extreme form of capitalism that libertarians craze after.

It is egotistical to think that we some how exist outside of our ecosystem, with god like choices to make. Nature will throw things back into balance one way or the other, likely to our detriment.

<comment><USER11> Regarding the extreme capitalism: not even every species, every individual organism's genes.

<comment><USER7> Natural selection is quite greedy in general: consume resources, or be consumed as a resource! We've grown rich enough to think a bit more forward, which is where conservation comes in, but to think that any of those animals are less selfish than us is crazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I thought they used a TRS-80:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dung_Beetles_%28video_game%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dung_Beetles_%28video_game%29)</comment>