The Cost of Frameworks - <AUTHOR> https://aerotwist.com/blog/the-cost-of-frameworks/ <comment><USER2> And here is Tom Dale's reply: [http://tomdale.net/2015/11/javascript- frameworks-and-mobile-...](http://tomdale.net/2015/11/javascript-frameworks- and-mobile-performance/)

<comment><USER3> Guy that makes a framework replying that frameworks are good. Aha....

<comment><USER4> Well, I believe it is a "good thing" when you believe in what you do and got arguments to back up what you believe in.

<comment><USER5> Advocate something you do: cynical self-interest

Advocate something you don't do: hypocrite

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems like a zero sum, the problem is that any real world project that starts off as vanilla without a framework is almost assured to mutate into its own framework as the complexity of the project matures. Most of the pain points and pleasure points that frameworks bring to the table are slowly replicated with self built devices.

So the real choice here is not vanilla vs framework but do you want to use someone's framework or build your own.

</comment><comment><USER7> It seems JS developers are recreating the debates that were already had, numerous times, long ago.

Yes using a JS Framework is going to be slower than writing and optimizing code by hand. In the same way that you can do faster code in assembler than using any languages or that using GTK on top of X is going to be slower than writing directly to the graphic card.

Yet we still uses them because it mean less bugs (because you are not reinventing the wheel every time), it encourage code reuse, it add structure, allow other dev to easily enter the code and open you to a vast library of modules. But most importantly it allow shipping features faster and that's where it impact the users.

Users care more about having an usable product than a fast one that does nothing (with some exceptions obviously). We can afford to optimize everything by hand and ship at the same time.

Sure, in some use-cases it will be too slow, but then you identify those particulars cases and you take your time to optimize them. Even by bypassing the framework if you need to.

But don't decide to not use a framework because the general use case will be a bit slower.

Or as Knuth put it decades ago "Premature optimization is the root of all evil"

The complete quote being, because it's relevant here:

> "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: > premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up > our opportunities in that critical 3%"

<comment><USER8> These aren't "small efficiencies". Ember TodoMVC takes _over 40 times_ as long to start than the vanilla JS version.

<comment><USER9> We have an Ember mobile app, with native wrapper. Loads in ~1 second on a modern phone, which feels reasonable.

If it would take 25ms in vanilla JS (40x quicker) I'd still consider it a small efficiency gain in our case (from a users perspective).

\---

(should mention that there is no network latency, since it's an installed app the JS-code is bundled, obviously)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes, but the problem is that you can have slower performance during loading, or you can have slower performance _overall_ , and this is all down to the fact that the DOM does not have a native way of _explicitly_ batching updates, and doing things like touching offset* properties can trigger layouts/repaints. ReactJS uses DOM tree diffing and merging, but that can also get you into trouble with the GC (this may be a solved issue, don't use ReactJS, so my bad if this isn't correct...).

Our product, Elevate Web Builder, uses an in-memory element representation with a DOM change management architecture that avoids all of these issues. However, because of this design, you _have_ to use our product and our framework in order to benefit from it, because it sits as a virtual layer on top of the DOM.

What the DOM really needs, but probably won't get because there could be some serious side-effects from bad coding, is a set of simple reference-counted beginUpdate/endUpdate methods on each DOM element that isolate that portion of the DOM tree from repaints, but not layouts. That way, dimensional information is always immediately available, but painting is always handled as a single last step.

I'm meandering here, but the point is that improvements in the DOM management layer of the browsers could drastically cut the necessity of frameworks whose primary purpose is to work around deficiencies in the DOM. Fix the browsers, and you fix the load time. Cutting out the frameworks just ends up trading different kinds of pain...

<comment><USER11> The DOM already does dirty-checking on manipulation. Manipulating the DOM is cheap, it's manipulating the DOM _while also getting dimension or style information_ that's expensive.

None of the major frameworks solve this problem. The closest may be React, which strongly discourages you from interacting with real DOM nodes or doing anything stateful, but even then, if you really want to touch that offsetWidth you can trivially destroy React's performance. Maybe the best alternative is just strict coding standards that say "Don't do that!"

I'd talked with a few Chrome PMs when I was working on Material Design for Google Search and discussed the possibility of some sort of batching API for layout-causing operations. They weren't against it in principle, but nobody could think of an API that was something we'd actually use as web developers. The problem is that thinking about your app in terms of "This expression causes layout, this expression dirties the DOM" is a big cognitive load, and making those two classes of expressions non-interleavable means you suddenly need to structure your whole app in different ways.

There'd also been talk of doing a subset of HTML that includes only the operations that can be done quickly, but to my knowledge, that never went anywhere. You run into problems with the whole huge installed base of the web; if you're going to throw everything out and start from scratch, why not just use a native mobile app, or even raw OpenGL ES commands?

<comment><USER12> Wasn't the subset of HTML AMP? [https://www.ampproject.org/how-it- works/](https://www.ampproject.org/how-it-works/)

<comment><USER11> I don't think so - it was different people working on it, from the Chrome team side, and it involved changes to Blink or an outright fork rather than anything server-side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd be interested in seeing [https://lhorie.github.io/mithril/](https://lhorie.github.io/mithril/)) added to this list.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm yet to see a non-trivial (100+ screens, 10+ devs over 10+ months) production-level app written in "vanilla JS" without any framework (popular open-source or home-grown "monster"). You need _something_ to structure your code and take care of repetitive / boring details.

<comment><USER11> Google Search, from when it first got Javascript in 2008 to when it adopted Closure in 2012.

<comment><USER14> What most people don't understand is even if you don't use a framework you end up building your own.

<comment><USER11> The flip side of this is that you end up building your own _that is tailored to the particular requirements, users, and resources available to your product_. That can be a huge advantage, given that differentiation is the only thing that will make your product stand out in the marketplace.

Are you in a latency-critical domain, which Google Search is? Then optimize to minimize the number of bytes shipped to the user and startup time. Do you have 100+ screenfuls of information? Then optimize so that making new screens is easy. Do users load your app once, leave it open in the background, but then need to perform a number of interactions quickly? Then ship down the initial interface quickly and progressively lazy-load bundles of functionality that are just a JS function away on click, like GMail does.

Incidentally, one of the main reasons Google Search finally adopted Closure was because it had to integrate with Google+, which was all done using Closure. So again, the choice of a framework was driven by product concerns.

It's not a failure when a company builds a home-grown framework that is carefully tailored to the product needs that they've discovered over the last few years. Indeed, having the resources and domain knowledge to build your own framework is a far bigger success than building an app with the hot framework of the month and failing because you look just like every other app out there.

<comment><USER4> How many apps in the World require a specialised framework that GMail might require? 10? 100? 1000? Sure, everyone can invent their own framework to be very "specialised" and "tailored" to a given app needs but is it going to give a competitive advantage for a given app? Probably sometimes. Probably not most of the time.

Constructing your own framework has cost. Sure, you will acquire a lot of knowledge doing it, but is it going to help the bottom line? Maybe.

Once again, are you seriously advocating that _everyone_ should do "vanilla JS" without any frameworks?

<comment><USER11> I'm advocating that everyone _start with_ vanilla JS without frameworks. See how far it will take you. Once you've built a simple prototype, put it in front of users, made a few changes, and have a sense of how the product will evolve to satisfy those users, _then_ you can choose a framework. And you can choose it with a lot more knowledge about what your needs will be than if you tried to guess ahead of time, and you won't be steered away from particular customer desires because the framework makes them difficult and other stuff easy.

Rewriting your product is not failure, particularly when done at the very early stages where it only takes a week or so anyway.

As a nice side benefit, this also avoids all the holy wars about which framework is best, since you can put off the decision until you have hard data about which is best _for you_.

<comment><USER15> If you're going to rewrite it anyways, then why not just pick a random framework? "No framework" is still a set of trade-offs, and for better or for worse, most teams aren't made of super star devs. A lot of them appreciate the hand-holding through the where-to-put-what drudge at the beginning of a project and the presence of a community to ask questions.

<comment><USER11> For a few reasons:

1.) Just by choosing to use a framework, you incur costs: download time, initialization time, complexity & bug surface area, etc. You should make sure that you gain benefits commensurate with those costs. If you start by picking a random framework, then a.) how can you measure what the costs were? and b.) how do you know what sort of benefits would be most useful to you?

2.) Relatedly, starting from a baseline random framework can teach you lessons that are _not true_ , and then you base your product decisions on that. For example, there's a common meme that you cannot have smooth 60fps animations on mobile websites. This is not true; however, getting smooth 60fps animations on the mobile web requires careful attention to which elements will render on the GPU and which won't, and no framework currently in existence will help you with that. Back in 2008 when I did my first startup, it was generally believed that Javascript was too slow for games; not true, _JQuery_ was too slow for games. Doing things that others believe to be impossible is the essence of competitive advantage.

3.) Frameworks make certain tasks easy at the expense of making other tasks hard. If you start with a random framework, you will be incentivized to do things in the same way that everyone else who uses that framework is. That's why almost every web 2.0 startup started from around 2007-2010 looks like a frontend over a database. Looking like everyone else is a recipe for failure in business.

4.) The framework authors are all subject to the constraints of the browser; however, browser vendors (and people who program directly to web APIs) are not subject to the constraints of the framework. The set of programs that you can write efficiently without a framework is a strict superset of the set that you can write efficiently with one.

5.) It's easier to add code than to remove it. If you start with no framework and then decide that you need one, you've written only the code that you actually _did_ need for your problem. If you start with a random framework and then decide it's not appropriate, you need to backtrack and identify what you were actually trying to accomplish before you shoehorned it into the framework.

<comment><USER15> 1) this line of argumentation seems like selective reasoning. For example, one could say, ok I need ajax. Let's use a `fetch` polyfill. Wait, you can't abort the request with it? Fine, XMLHttpRequest then. How do I take my object and serialize it to a querystring again? Oh, I need to change a HTTP header to make my server accept the request body as JSON? Should I just use jQuery? It's too overkill. What about Reqwest? Does it do what I need? Is it maintained? etc etc etc. Point is: you _don 't_ know what kind of costs you're going to incur, regardless of whether you're using a framework or not.

2) going off 1), one could come to the (obviously ridiculous) idea that AJAX is really hard. Or that frontend build systems are not worth the trouble (I actually see this "myth" in the wild, and people wasting time due to it). 60fps on mobile is really not a "competitive advantage", even if you're going into the hyper-saturated gaming market (and in that case, you really ought to be writing ObjC/Java if you care about speed at all). Competitive advantage is about creativity and relentlessly exploiting opportunities, it's rarely ever the case where an obscure piece of software trivia will make a huge difference.

3) frameworks exist on a spectrum: if your argument was true, one could just pick an obscure framework. But honestly, It strikes me as wishful thinking to suggest that framework choice is the primary driving factor for a product (that's why the role of product managers exist)

4) there's a very real and recognized constraint that affects all low level systems compared to higher-level abstractions: complexity. jQuery is a DSL for avoiding 10000+ LOC DOM API code. Virtual DOM (or any "retained mode" templating system) help avoid 10000+ LOC jQuery spaghetti. Component systems let you create more DSLs, etc, etc.

5) it _is_ easier to add code than to remove it, and that's precisely why most systems in the wild have technical debt: organic growth. When you start from scratch, in my experience (especially w/ a team over a period of time), it can get pretty hard to untangle the various subsystem out of an organically grown codebase. We had this issue in my previous company: there was a monolythic architecture for a mission critical system, and the 10 year old Session class was essentially impossible to replace without breaking everything. Speaking from experience, frameworks actually make it easier to bail out because there are only so many idioms you need to expect, and code is more-or-less organized even if it is a shitstorm by any other metric. With non-framework code, you get to spend a lot of time evaluating for the umpteenth time why exactly foo is seemingly replaceable, but actually not without breaking bar, baz and quux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Big picture this is a good reminder when the _next big thing_ comes along <cough>React</cough> but he forgets where we came from. Prior to Angular, the major way of doing web-apps was with rendered templates that would replace whole swaths of html and so the "updating the DOM" step truly was more expensive than the Javascript driving it. This is the problem that Angular (and newer) frameworks/libraries sought to address.

But there's one more consideration...isomorphic rendering. If a framework can be rendered on the server-side then the time-to-interaction only matters if it's longer than it takes for the user to mentally process the page and take an action.

<comment><USER17> Turbolinks is a good alternative if you want to stay on the Rails path. While Turbolinks 2 just replaced <body> with Turbolinks 3 you can replace partials without resorting to js.erb-templates.

<comment><USER18> Turbolinks should be turned off by default. Rails developers went way too far with it, it actually can f-ck up third party scripts on a page. Opinionated web frameworks are good, but they should stick to server-side tasks.

Turbolinks should have been an extension, not in the core. With these kinds of gimmicks, and constant breaking of APIs from versions to versions , Rails is committing adoption suicide.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This could be a very dumb question, since I don't use any JS frameworks (on the client side), but… would it make sense to standardize (on the web platform) certain aspects of JS frameworks (their internals), so that the frameworks themselves could become leaner.

My thinking is, if the frameworks do similar things, i.e. provide similar functionality, maybe it would make sense to have browsers provide (standard) APIs for (some of) that functionality.

<comment><USER20> This is exactly what Web Components are: a standardized, minimal, HTML- compatible, component model that's understood by the browser. It solves DOM encapsulation, style scoping, element lifecycle, and DOM composition.

Frameworks and libraries can then build on top of that to provide templating, data-binding, additional lifecycle stages, and other helpers, which Polymer and X-Tags do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I read half of this article before I realized the author was talking exclusively about Javascript frameworks (when I saw the diagram with the frameworks he tested).

There are more frameworks in the world than Javascript frameworks, if you are only going to discuss a subset of them you should make this clear in the headline/introduction. A heading such as "The Cost of Javascript Frameworks" would be appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER22> Developer ergonomics and agility serves the users' needs in a different way. If I can more quickly deliver value to my users, that's a good thing. It's not black and white though. These are trade-offs and need to be weighed for a given context/project.

</comment><comment><USER23> To everyone defending JS frameworks: create a challenge that you believe requires a framework and see if someone can solve it more elegantly in vanilla JS.

Years ago when browser compatibility required 100s of workarounds for each browser and version, it made sense to use a framework to hide the complexity and keep up to date. But with modern browsers this just isn't the case.

<comment><USER24> \- render a list of items, with a panel showing additional details for the selected item.

\- update the view when changes from a backend data source arrive, either via some sort of polling mechanism or a persistent connection.

\- allow the user to edit fields on the selected item.

\- automatically save any pending changes when navigating away from the page.

AKA every CRUD app ever. You are going to need a framework (most commonly MV*) to deal with this in a maintainable way. Whether you use a vendor or create your own, you will end up with a framework.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Users want a right product first, then a fast one.

<comment><USER26> Very much this. Fast is very important for usability, but it doesn't matter if it doesn't work correctly. Time and time again in my consulting engagements it proves far easier to get it right first, and then refine and optimize later.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Do Programmers Look for When... - <AUTHOR>

A start-up offers an equity stake rather than an hourly/salary position? Feedback would be great. Thanks. <comment><USER2> Here are the basic mechanics: <http://paulgraham.com/equity.html>

EDIT: The only other thing I can think of is that you need to make sure you're equally protected against dilution (like what happened to Eduardo Saverin), I don't really know how this usually works.</comment>


Make government software open source, German parliamentary committee advises - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/open-source/3421166/german-government-should-open-source-its-software-committee-advises/

<comment><USER2> Again computer literacy is mistaken for "using PowerPoint"

The benefits in open source, platform neutral software where all government development is put back into the commons is going to be huge and is what the Germans are recommending

Then the article (and to be fair the German debate) focuses on whether spreadsheets in MS Office are easier to use than Open Office

This is like suggesting we should teach our children to read and write, and then people suggesting that Microsoft comic books have better pictures in them so it's easier to work out the story.

Aaarrgghh</comment>


What Does Good Internet Privacy Mean to You?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wamda.com/2013/02/what-does-good-internet-privacy-mean-to-you-wamda-debates

<comment><USER2> It may be too late to worry about privacy, too much is out in the open already.</comment>


The Dirty Business of Hosting Hate Online - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/the-dirty-business-of-hosting-hate-online-1836286885 <comment><USER2> It seems the irony of calling out sites that draw attention to black-on-white crime, while in the same article drawing attention to white-on-black crime, is lost on the author.

Implying, but not outright saying, that only one of those inspires hate.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm very glad someone did this trawling. Corporations are, and have been, getting away scot-free with an unbelievable amount of reputation laundering.

</comment><comment><USER4> > "Most people engaging with extreme right ideologies, memes, views are doing > so online and often not part of a formal network, organization or political > movement."

This seems like a problem that could be solved by giving right-leaning people a platform to peacefully organize. Deplatforming and segmentation leads to right-wing activists lacking good examples for peaceful demonstration. There are peaceful right-wing political activist organizations but they get deplatformed by intolerant anarchists like this article's author and then others have trouble finding peaceful outlets for their viewpoints.

<comment><USER5> My (fairly rudimentary) understanding of the United States is that the right wing controls most of its governmental apparatus as well as the biggest news outlet. How are they being 'deplatformed' or segmented in any way?

<comment><USER4> This is a mantra repeated by the far-left as an excuse for their excessive protest against the ability of the right-wing to speak. They usually point to Fox News and the Republican senators as evidence of right-wing power in the US, but these are constituted of neoconservatives (who's movement descended from ex-Trotskyites in New York City, where neoconservative media is based). If you compare the platforms of most of today's Republicans on social issues then you would find them to the left of Obama in 2008, most agreeing with Obama's free-trade deals (which they passed). The only thing distinguishing the GOP establisent and 2008/2012 Obama is the occasional extra tax cut.

Most movements of actual right wing activism are straw manned, attacked, deplatformed or subverted.

<comment><USER2> I find that reducing politics to a one-dimensional left-right is unproductive, and leads to people arguing past each-other.

E.g. you will pick one property by which Republicans/Fox News _aren 't_ right wing, while your counterpart will pick one by which they _are_. Without saying which property you picked to represent right-wing-ness, you/your counterpart will be baffled as to how you/they could possibly believe Republicans/Fox News are/aren't right wing.

<comment><USER4> I agree, but I was trying to simplify for someone who said "they have a rudimentary understanding". There's many distinctions to make: on the right there's paleoconservatives, neo conservatives, right-leaning libertarians, nationalists, right-leaning populists, fascists, and classical liberals. On the left there are social liberals, democratic socialists, left-leaning populists, left-leaning libertarians, socialists, anarchists, and neoliberals. What I see overall is a coalition of anarchists and neoconservatives to pressure neoliberals and libertarians to deplatform all groups on the right besides the neoconservatives.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A Child's Puzzle Has Helped Unlock the Secrets of Magnetism - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-childs-puzzle-has-helped-unlock-the-secrets-of-magnetism-20190124/ <comment><USER2> I always think of Richard Feynman's response to the magnet question: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO0r930Sn_8)

<comment><USER3> If it weren't Feynman, I'd swear he's just beating around the bush because he doesn't want to admit he doesn't know the answer. :)

<comment><USER4> Indeed. He then actually does admit that, but indeed he does so in so many words, which was however probably expected given the nature of the interview. His start is rough, even arrogant, but then it gets better. I think the part where he answers is basically "so far magnetic and electric forces look like basic elements of nature, we can't explain them using anything simpler or more familiar. In fact these forces are what we use to explain the familiar mechanical forces."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whoever thought a 3k (resolution) gif was a good idea should be informed it made the page all but unusable for me on Chrome on my desktop.

</comment><comment><USER6> This concept seems like it may have application in the understanding of superconductivity.

</comment><comment><USER7> The 15 puzzle is for all ages.

<comment><USER8> No child is too puerile to be beneath its entertaining powers, and no man is too vigorous or in too high station to escape its fascination,

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This does not need to be in all caps, but good submission regardless.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apologies. I cut and pasted it. I couldn't edit it on time.

<comment><USER10> Half of HN posts are in caps, don't worry about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article was originally published on another site, and was already posted on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18995360](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18995360)

<comment><USER12> OK, we've updated the link from [https://www.wired.com/story/a-childs-puzzle- helped-uncover-h...](https://www.wired.com/story/a-childs-puzzle-helped- uncover-how-magnets-really-work/).</comment></comment>


Parenting by the Numbers - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/03/parenting-by-the-numbers <comment><USER2> I haven't read Oster's books yet, but I am trained in economics, worked for the national statistics body, work with data and tell people how to collect evidence and reach conclusions, and now have a 6 month old at home.

what I have heard through the grapevine is that her conclusions are very similar to my own doing similar reviews: breast feeding is probably good for some minor things (gastro etc), but its hard to separate it out from education, income, and risks from other sources (ie bad drinking water) and there's probably no long term effects from not doing it if you're smart, rich and clean.

A lot of the diet stuff during pregnancy sounded nuts, and the advice (and subsequent stats/research/ recommendation s) seemed culturally affected and based on extremely unlikely/ minimal outcomes.

And then I'd see other parents stressing about co sleeping, but not even give the faintest thought or worry to living a life with car dependency and strapping kids into them: apparently culture changes your perception of relative risk.

The other things that became apparent to me:

-just how dodgy the evidence base is for a lot of claims on parenting

\- a lot of modern western parenting is pretty anti- woman/parent IMO. so little regard for the idea of taking care of baby by taking care of parents.

\- the number of people and pop resources abusing and misquoting science, sometimes to reach the opposite conclusion to the one I reached when reading the actual papers/original sources. And yet you have pundits and salespeople repeating 'study found X' ad nauseam.

<comment><USER3> That's pretty much what I thought as well. Most of the parenting advice is unsubstantiated claims written to make women feel guilty (over what, who knows?). As if your joy of having a kid needs to be tempered by giving up sushi. (What do people do in Japan?)

But generally the books don't even say where the claims are coming from, and everything is like you suspect, quite small effects if any, a priori.

Even the co sleeping thing seems to be fearmongering. Unless you're drunk, you're not gonna squash your kid to death. Plus the sleep benefits of letting the kid have boob on tap are enormous.

<comment><USER4> "sleep benefits of letting the kid have boob on tap are enormous" this cannot be overstated. We co-slept with my youngest and the difference between that experience and our first who was strictly bassinet/crib can't be put in words.

<comment><USER5> Like most things parenting related, this is probably up for debate. Many leading baby sleep books suggest that co-sleeping leads to a baby who nurses all the time, long past the point where Mom wants the bed to herself. My own child sleeps 8ish hours in a row at 3 months, which I attribute to feeding him on a flexible schedule instead of on-demand. Not to say that your experience is invalid, just that it's hard to draw any conclusions from the limited data we have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The recent Freakonomics Podcast episode on Oster and her work was a little more in-depth than this article. I really enjoyed it.

[http://freakonomics.com/podcast/parenting/](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/parenting/)

</comment><comment><USER7> I was at Home Depot buying some stuff with my kids and the 5 year old was hanging of the handle of the cart like a monkey. It was one the low to the floor carts for heavy stuff and the handle was a bit lower than a normal shopping cart. One of the idle cashiers, an older woman, came over said he shouldn't do that because he might fall and bump his head. I said "that's how he'll learn". She gave me a frown and walked away. He didn't fall or bump his head, that lesson was saved for another day.

Edit; she expressed her concern, she did not cite any company policy or appeal to authority. The handle was low enough such that I wasn't concerned about a concussion. I wasn't rude or snarky in this exchange although some seem to read it as such. Wow judgmental reader! I think this was mentioned in the fine article!

<comment><USER8> For every person giving a minimum-wage employee trying to help an unnecessarily snarky response, like you chose to do, there is someone else who'll sue them. So they can't win. The best thing you could have contributed would have been to be polite to the employee.

<comment><USER9> > For every person giving a minimum-wage employee trying to help an > unnecessarily snarky response, like you chose to do, there is someone else > who'll sue them. So they can't win. The best thing you could have > contributed would have been to be polite to the employee.

Someone would sue a minimum-wage employee personally because they didn't say something to their kid playing dangerously? I know America is litigious but that sounds like it would never happen. They would sue the store owner if anything. The best thing would have been for the employee to keep their comments to themselves, which the snarky response probably reinforced.

<comment><USER8> No, 'them' is the company.

But you're missing the point. People have to be cautious, because their employers require it. Don't be mean to people who don't control what they have to do.

<comment><USER10> It's not mean to express boundaries. Strangers offering unsolicited advice, regardless of intent, crosses a boundary for many people. And since the employee making the comment would never be personally liable in the case of a lawsuit, such advice boils down to misplaced concern or simple nosiness/bossiness. People should mind their own business unless their is a clear and present danger to thselves or the public. A kid horsing around on a hauling cart does not match that description IMO.

<comment><USER8> Yes in the street. But you're in their shop, and the horsing around is being done in their property on their equipment. You're a guest there. Either leave or politely comply with what they ask.

<comment><USER10> It is extremely unlikely in this case that the employee was also the proprietor, so there is no "their". It was an individual decision, not a business decision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Oster now finds herself brainstorming punishments that a four-year-old will find "devastating."" (on 1-2-3 Magic)

So she found it "just works". But how does she define "it works"? The child becoming obedient? That's not exactly what many parents want, but it would be the classic approach to child rearing (teaching kids obedience)...

Her book may be a good thing, for people who find it difficult to dig their way through all the information online. Personally I am wary of that type of public science book of outsiders of the field digging through hundreds of articles. At the end of the day, they might still fall prey to confirmation bias or only consider research that supports their thesis.

Any why is it so important to drink alcohol during pregnancy? There really weren't that many rules - no alcohol, no raw cheeses or meats, no honey. It's not an impossible toll on mothers, although my wife still has high respect from me for being extremely consistent about all those rules during pregnancy.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would expect that if there was a valid debate to be had she would also have peer reviewed papers published on the topic.

Skimming [https://www.brown.edu/research/projects/oster/](https://www.brown.edu/research/projects/oster/) I haven't found any related

It seems like her general cause is a good one: to ease parents to relax a bit on what some perceive as apparently harsh recommendations on health and parenting.

But it also seems like she misses the point on what public health bodies are for (minimizing risk on large scale) versus clear advice to individuals. Take alcohol for example, if the actual evidence is flimsy on whether 1 drink is bad or not, it's an easy choice if I'm speaking to millions of people: play it safe. That's not the same as claiming that low alcohol consumption is bad, and it's certainly not an attempt to shame.

<comment><USER13> One of my pregnant friends talked to their doctor about having a glass of wine once a week. Her doctor said that was fine but when she ordered one at the restaurant it was terrible. The waiter was visibly uncomfortable serving it, other people in the restaurant stared. The intent might not have been to shame but the effect has been that lots of women feel way shittier about themselves than they need to.

And the science might say something like 3 glasses of wine are terrible but we can't really statistically tell the difference between 0 and 1 glasses of wine. But what has filtered down to the masses is "if you have a glass of wine while pregnant you're a terrible mother."

<comment><USER14> Sure, but that's because it's easier to say have no glasses of wine, than to try and explain to every person that having some is still within tolerance (and then also why one is decent, but two maybe not).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is irony in discussing this article in the comments.

</comment><comment><USER16> interesting article but too long, I am looking forward to the movie by Wes Anderson.</comment>


To anyone who believes in unskilled work - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/alisonkatebr/status/1229901486693462017 <comment><USER2> "Unskilled" is not the same as easy. Digging ditches all day would be very difficult, but I can learn how to do the digging in almost no time.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. "Unskilled" generally refers to how long it takes to learn the skill. You can teach someone to efficiently change duvet covers in... maybe a couple hours? You can teach someone to be a competent accountant in... maybe a couple years? That's the difference.</comment></comment>


The Blu-Ray Reauthoring Project - <AUTHOR> http://temporary.directory/blog/10-23-2018.html <comment><USER3> The Blu-Ray video format is pretty cancerous in terms of DRM; there's not really any salvaging it.

One of the most nauseating restrictions of all is that replication plants aren't even allowed to fabricate Blu-Ray video discs which don't have AACS. This means that if you want to get some Blu-Ray video disc fabricated which contains Creative Commons content and you disagree with DRM, for example, you're out of luck: AACS is _mandatory_. Archive Team had issues with this - as I recall, the best compromise they were able to find was to just put video files on a normal Blu-Ray data disc and get that fabbed. I suspect this is enforced using conditions in the patent licences Sony hands out to fabs or DRM in the software used by fabrication plants, or both.

You start to realise why this is the case when you research how the production process works. When you send a Blu-Ray video disc to a fab for mass production, you don't apply the encryption; the fab does, and you have no control over the process. Moreover, this process involves sending a request for encryption keys to AACS LA, who then issue newly-minted encryption keys for the disc. Yes, this means that all Blu-Ray video discs must be centrally approved by a single organisation in realtime, as an integral part of the AACS application process. Which explains why AACS is mandatory; it lets them catch attempts by commercial pirates to get discs replicated in mass.

So I don't think Blu-Ray can ever become a non-helldamned format. The fact that the specifications are all secret is just the icing on the cake (this is actually the case for DVD too, open source implementations all had to reverse engineer it). I always found it deeply ironic that by comparison, the AACS specification, which specifies a DRM scheme, a type of thing fundamentally dependent on security by obscurity, is freely available.

<comment><USER4> I find this deeply amusing. I see how this could have worked in the DVD era, but these days with all of the options we have it's no surprise why most people don't have bluray players. It is kinda sad though because as much as streaming gives us options, the quality is always terrible.

<comment><USER5> YouTube and Netflix stream for me just fine. Are you on 4g/fibre?

<comment><USER6> Theoretically, UHD (4k) blu-rays can go from 80 mb/s to 120 mb/s depending on the authoring of the disc, compared to Netflix's maximum of 25 mb/s that's a massive difference.

However... unless you have a UHD projector, or VERY large TV (60"+) then you are unlikely to see the difference under normal viewing.

Where I feel streaming typically fails, is in the audio. They may 'say' it's a 5.1 surround sound mix, but if so, why does it sound _so_ flat compared to the same film on blu-ray ? All I can think is that the audio is compression is also 4x as compressed which to our ears is quite significant.

<comment><USER7> Actually even at 1080p, Netflix streams are visibly worse quality than blu- ray. Particularly in the compression of dark colors. I'll occasionally see color-banding, which you never see in Blu-ray.

<comment><USER6> Oh don't get me wrong, I'm 100% in the Blu-ray camp; Netflix is for casual viewing, but proper viewing such as big hitter movies are on blu-ray always (I'm yet to get a 4k projector).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder, with some amusement, how much the current state of multimedia ripping, editing, encoding, MUXing, etc. owes to the underground community of internet nerds that just wanted to watch their anime.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm a little puzzled as to why he's so set on having a physical disc as output. If this is for personal use, wouldn't it be easier to just rip the episodes to mp4 using Handbrake, which can also add subtitles? And once you've got eps as separate files, no need for menus.

I buy a fair few Blu-Rays, but I've never watched one directly. It's just a distribution format for me.

<comment><USER10> Yeah. I take the UNIX approach to media storage, everything is a file.

If it's not a file, that's probably due to some anti-user nonsense (a dvd, bluray, whatever could just be an FS with an mp4/mkv/whatever file on it, but it's not, 'cos DRM.). A challenge, then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I personally own a lot of dvd's and blurays, but it's been a while since I actually watch them in that format.

I just rip the disc to my harddrive, demux/convert what i want (usually just the main audio to flac), then remux to mkv and store the result (video + audio + eng subs + commentary tracks). Then just watch in kodi/plex.

Dealing with the actual discs etc seems just weird, neither dvd nor bluray as a media was never any fun to use. Using a remuxed copy of a tv series i'd be half way through an episode by the time the trailers and fbi warnings stopped playing on the disc version.

<comment><USER12> I had probably 400 DVDs and i never started with BluRay.

Not because of the cost, i can afford what i like to watch, but having to buy the physical copy, which i would rip and put on my storage system and than would probably need to store or throw away, sucks.

Why can't i just buy a digital BluRay? Like yes i can do whatever i want with it :|

Yes i know people would copy those asap but still AARGH...

<comment><USER13> If you're really rich, you can. Kalaidescope. But the studios really fought them hard on that.

<comment><USER12> "I liked it so much I had it installed in all of my homes."

-_-

<comment><USER14> There's also a whole section about their experience installing systems on yachts!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Blu-Rays are very hard to edit and it's no wonder that they're dying in comparison to streaming"

I see zero corellation here. Out of people buying blu-rays maybe 0.00001% will want to rip them and edit them.

<comment><USER16> But they might want to watch a video of their kids' school play or some other video not from a big studio.

<comment><USER17> Do people actually ever watch those videos though? People love to record events and then it collects dust afterwards.

<comment><USER18> My family definitely rewatches videos all the time. As they grow, my kids become new people every year or so; I like the chance to at least briefly visit every one of the people they have been.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> For comparison between BluRay and DVD: I did something similar, also for an animated series, for DVD. I took DVDs from Japan, ripped the video, and inserted good subtitles (the original subtitles for the series as released in the US were trash), and burned to DVD.

The hardest part was making sure the subtitles were in sync. After that, a simple shell script and dvdauthor were all I needed. With some modifications, this shell script could also take speedsubbed episodes and produce DVDs containing between four and six episodes per disc (this was before streaming simultaneous releases).

To address a question from mrec above about why physical media was chosen - <USER2> was making this set of discs for a friend for a lending library for their club. The easiest way to move video around at the time was DVD (this was right as BluRay was taking off). Having the disc images was also helpful in case the (relatively fragile) DVD-R media got damaged while it was lent out.

</comment><comment> m-p-3 I'm kinda glad the piracy community exists because of all the tools and file format they bring to the masses that are useful for legitimate archival purpose, which are well thought and make sense.

MKV containers with multiple audio tracks and embedded subtitles in actual text format makes so much sense that you wonder who the hell thought the Blu- Ray specs made sense.

It tells a lot when mainstream device manufacturers starts sorting these formats that came from the scene.

</comment><comment><USER20> I haven't done much Blu-ray ripping, but I try to keep an eye on it to make sure it's still "working" as a thing. I want a movie collection, but I don't want to invest heavily in maintaining a RAID array of live drives to store giant 25 GB archives of each movie. I'd much rather just hang onto the Blu-ray discs, and know that inevitably they all get cracked, so I'll always have ripping options if I need it.

As a physical disc you can keep in your possession, it's still really the only way to "own" a movie these days. Vudu is nice, and I'll do a lot of casual watching via my digital copy codes, but the discs are my "collection".

<comment><USER21> A WD 4TB external drive can store 160 25TB blurays for $100. That adds a "tax" of $1.60 per disc if you rip the raw disc.

I tend to re-encode as libx265 (preset veryslow CRF=18) which is a fairly transparent reencode at 20-40% the size, which lowers the storage cost to under $1 per disc. If you also have backups, that will double the cost, or you can accept the risk and re-rip them if you lose the drive.

[edit] They have 6TB and 8TB options now that are cheaper per-disc if you have more than 160 bluray movies.

<comment><USER20> Or I could just get the disc off the shelf and pop it in the drive on the rare occasion I want to watch it. What's the benefit to spend the time ripping it?

Like, I manage an ebook library, and I easily spend more time and effort managing said ebook library than I actually spend reading the ebooks. So I'm hesitant to bring myself into movie library management when I have a fairly robust physical storage medium already handy.

<comment><USER22> Kodi has a great interface for browsing movies, and automatically tags things like director, year, nationality, and summary. My fiancée likes to flip through that to pick things to watch; it's a lot easier and faster than trying to figure out all those details from the backs of BDs, which often make it very difficult to even see the duration of a film.

And it allows me to mix together video files from BDs and DVDs with files from other sources (a lot of which are commercially unavailable, such as an Ethiopian film which has never been released except on VHS and a version of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg which has been modified to fix a color error) into one seamless interface.

Obviously, though, this is just what works for me. If physical BDs are easier then by all means go for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Back when I cared about physical media I wrote a substation alpha to blu-ray subtitle encoder.

It isn't exactly spec compliant. Hilariously, the spec is patented dispite prior art & simple run length encoding: [https://patents.google.com/patent/US20090185789/da](https://patents.google.com/patent/US20090185789/da)).

Output is good enough for power dvd when using the admittedly closed source TSMuxer. Always meant to try to port it to ffmpeg, but it just doesn't seem worthwhile, given the context of Netflix.

[https://github.com/slartibardfast/punkgraphicstream](https://github.com/slartibardfast/punkgraphicstream)

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually tested out PunkGraphicsStream as a subtitle renderer, but it had issues with some fade effects which is why I had to go with easySup instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What a strange end-goal. I'm not sure why you would want to "reauthor" a DVD or a Blu-Ray, as their contents are much more convenient once you've ripped and transcoded them. The difficulty he encountered doesn't sound like a good reason at all to buy DVDs instead.

I have roughly 200 Blu-Rays in my collection, and I've watched maybe one or two of them in an actual Blu-Ray player.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm secretly pleased that I never really took up the format and am still buying DVDs if I want a hardcopy of something.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm rather disappointed that he pirated some software for this. I thought this would be a how-to to help people in the future.

>You can find a copy of the BDFix Pro installer and a keygen here.

<comment><USER27> He said that the cart page of the software website was blank, the last version of the software was from 2012 and the web page was last updated in 2014, so he had no other option.

<comment><USER28> Legally dubious, morally ... make your own mind up?

<comment><USER5> Legally dubious? Not sure of the "website is old so pop along to a .ru site" exemption to copyright law. Did the author attempt to contact the copyright owners or discover an alternative?

<comment><AUTHOR> I did attempt to contact the owner of the site. Nothing happened for 2 months. All other alternatives were expensive or not maintained, so that was the best I could find.

<comment><USER28> Indeed. It may be legally wrong, but what is the risk that they will actually sue you?

<comment><AUTHOR> Likely none. The product in question is a translation and upgrade of a Chinese tool anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Blu-Ray is complicated and stupid.

A better way is, simply patent-free unencrypted video files with track numbers and caption streams, perhaps on a HD-DVD disc (without using the HD-DVD video format). We don't need menus and AACS and all of that other junk, please.

</comment><comment><USER30> So basically you'd be better off ripping and then adding subtitles and video files as data on your media of choice (BDRay, HDD, networked HDD, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER31> My son, 11, just asked me "What's a blu-ray?" Need I say more?

</comment><comment><USER32> > We'll be using easySUP to convert our ASS file to a SUP file.

Was the spec written by precocious twelve-year olds?

<comment><AUTHOR> ASS stands for Advanced Sub-Station (Alpha). It's a newer version of the Sub- Station Alpha format. Acronyms aren't always made to be funny, sometimes they just turn out that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Off-topic: Accessibility-wise reversed out type is difficult to read, if one must have a black background a green colored font is best.</comment>


Show HN: CoSurfin - Live Chat Support Software - <AUTHOR> http://cosurfin.com/

<comment><USER2> I think this is awesome. Upboat</comment>


The Mega Rich Have Found an Unlikely New Refuge - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-02/the-rich-have-found-a-place-to-escape-the-horrors-of-the-world <comment><USER2> The modern world has such a ridiculous disconnect. The people fleeing to remote places because of instability are the very same people causing these issues in the first place. Hedge fund managers selling toxic assets bemoaning the uncertainty of the financial world? And what will your island paradise look like with no one to trade with or if the world economy collapses? NZ doesn't have much of an economy in itself, what are you going to do, go back to farming?

It's even more hilarious because the reason NZ is a desirable place to live is because there is little money in politics and there are few class distinctions. How will that change when all the billionaires move there and want to get their way (and are used to the world conforming to the bank account)? Just another place for the wealthy elite of the world to slowly ruin, maybe the next step is the moon?

The system is rapidly growing out of control and no one seems to be able to stop or halt the insanity. It's like we're all marching towards oblivion and everyone knows it but no one has the will to turn the ship around because the system incentivizes short term greed.

<comment><USER3> > _And what will your island paradise look like with no one to trade with or > if your financial firm collapses? NZ doesn 't have much of an economy in > itself, what are you going to do, go back to farming?_

these locations aren't just for vacations. they are stocked with supplies and probably guns and ammo. if the SHTF, they'll be on the first (private jet) flight out of london, hk, zurich, or new york. why do you think they chose a place so remote? there are nicer places a lot closer. they just don't have the infrastructure that new zealand has, and the natural oceanic protection.

as a bonus, they also have a military that is closely tied to the commonwealth crown. how convenient.

it used to be normal to prepare for disaster. in california they taught us how to do it in elementary school in the 90s, for earthquakes. now people think it's crazy. it's not. normal people do this too. who do you think is buying up all the ammo before elections? i know people who have boats, trucks, etc. for the purposes of preparedness.

one thing a fund manager or CEO knows how to do is hedge against risks.

<comment><USER4> "as a bonus, they also have a military that is closely tied to the commonwealth crown. how convenient." ... well seeming NZ is a commonwealth country it's not some convenience, it's history.

And it sounds like you think NZ has some huge military power. I think we have like one jet plane, so stock all the guns you want, I imagine in the case all the allies die and Russia invades we'd probably just give them a welcome ceremony.

<comment><USER3> i didn't mean 'how convenient' in any sarcastic way, i was literally saying.. it's convenient that your getaway island also has a military. most don't.

and nobody said any of it was rational. it's just what people do. i live in earthquake country so i have water and canned food and a means of defense. some people have taken this mindset to an extreme, including buying large homes on remote island countries and a private jet for trips there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fantastic. As a NZ expat currently resident in London it's depressing the way global market conditions have sent house prices skyrocketing in the places I'd like to live. My partner and I are doing well here, and we plan to go back to NZ one day, but in just 6 years since my partner's brother was here what we'd go back to has changed immeasurably.

He and his partner managed to come over here when the pound was worth $3 NZD, rent was cheaper, save well and move back to Auckland when houses were depressed (2009-2010). Since then they rode the wave and now have a beautiful home with a view straight down the Waitemata harbour.

My partner and I? We came here when the pound was at $2.10ish, not so bad I thought, not as good, but y'know, we make good money, we can deal with it. Then BREXIT. BOOM. Now the pound is $1.70, our salaries are, of course, still the same. Also a shithole house in Auckland in a bad suburb now costs at least $700k NZD - the first house that my partner's brother bought cost $650k NZD, in a nice suburb on transport links.

The world is mad.

<comment><USER6> The fact that you're talking about $650k - $700k being in your price range means that you're doing better than a lot of people.

<comment><USER7> Is that the metric you want to choose to decide how happy you should be about a given situation?

Comparative performance with people in the same demographic and income range seems a lot better. Otherwise you can pretty argue ad absurdum that yeah, you aren't starving, you aren't dead so everything is good! R-r...right?

<comment><USER8> well, the reality is that level of optimism is required for the 800 million people living on a dollar a day, and if they can do it then perhaps those more fortunate could learn something there, as the Somalian I met said, 'nobody promised me tomorrow', or the popular 'yesterday was better than today, and today will be better than tomorrow'...

<comment><USER7> Oh please, I am barely holding back my tears.

Is that unreasonable for people to improve their living conditions and be disappointed when those don't even match the ones of their parents? Or should they just accept the extreme poverty threshold as the sole upper bound required to be content about their lives.

<comment><USER9> Ok, if you go that route, don't complain about rich people wanting more and more. They are just "improving their living conditions".

<comment><USER10> There's 'sweet, a promotion, I can finally afford that nice car' "greed" and then there's 'lets destroy 6000 people their jobs to make the shareholders happy so I can get a $1.000.000 bonus' greed.

<comment><USER11> So, accumulating ever more amounts of personal wealth is fine as long as you aren't the the top 1%, er 0.1%, er 0.01%, er, as long as you have less than someone you know.

<comment><USER12> There has to be a line somewhere. I don't claim to be the person qualified to draw it, but society has to be willing to define it and say "Wealth accumulation on this side of the line is OVERALL healthy for promoting fair and evenly distributed prosperity, and wealth accumulation on the other side is OVERALL destructive and benefits only a small few."

<comment><USER13> And what if that line was drawn and you are on the wrong side?

<comment><USER12> That would be a nice problem to have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The ultimate NIMBYs. The same people that are responsible for the many uncertainties multinational corporations bring and therefore stimulate the dangerous populism in this global age now go to Queenstown, have a pint and wait for this to all blow over.

Money does not buy style if you see all those new houses by the way...

<comment><USER15> > Money does not buy style if you see all those new houses by the way...

Always thought it must be something with my taste but every time I see houses by 'the (super) rich' I think; why didn't you hire an actual talented architect?

<comment><USER16> There's a method to the McMansion madness: the houses are designed in a sort of modular style that assumes the owners will regularly reconfigure and remodel to keep up with the latest trends.

Kitchen out of date? Gut the kitchen module and replace the parts. Home theaters are out, and home gyms are in? Gut the theater module and reconfigure it into a gym. Sticks-and-drywall construction can be demolished and rebuilt in practically a day. Room "pods" can be torn down, merged, or separated at will, with little impact on the livability of the rest of the house. There's a lot more (ostensible) flexibility in an amorphous blob of room modules than there is in attempting to maintain a coherent, symmetrical, balanced architecture. The traditional house is a fixture; the McMansion is a living, changing, multicellular organism.

McMansion developers aren't selling houses; they're selling services. All of this runs parallel to, and feeds off of, the macro-social trend favoring interiors over exteriors. People care more about kitchen appliances and countertop surfaces than they do about architecture. It's crass, tasteless, and economically silly. But it's the prevailing culture. And it's designed to _keep selling things_.

<comment><USER17> McMansions aren't bought by the rich. Mansions are.

McMansions are an exercise in echoing certain features of the latter on the cheap, but they are primarily an embodiment of social positioning within the upper middle class.

<comment><USER18> Exactly correct. McMansions are expressions of middle-class "success" yet are often just "normal" cheap houses built on a bigger scale -- same contractor- grade fittings and finishes.

For example, I bet you'd rarely see actual Venetian plaster in a McMansion, but you'd see a "faux finish" version of it. McMansions are movie sets and the owners are playing a "role" of a "successful" person/family.

<comment><USER19> > McMansions are movie sets and the owners are playing a "role" of a > "successful" person/family.

Ah, I love that. Applies to so many people I know. Well, at least, it DID apply to them before they lost their McMansion and, in some cases, went bankrupt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've long expected these kinds of stories. The same people who have benefited from climate change and bred a lot of the chaos we're now experiencing will be able to live quite comfortably while the rest of us are left to deal with the consequences. This is one of the most distressing things about climate change: so much wealth was created at the expense of the planet and so little of that will ever go into fixing it. We will pay for it in terms of higher energy prices a million other ways instead.

As the arctic continues to melt I expect there to be some nice openings in northern canada that are even more remote.

<comment><USER9> Nearly everyone benefitted from climate change. The only people who didn't are the ones living in remote villages that don't have electricity or any other modern technology.

<comment><USER21> For some time now, we have been in a era where we have the knowledge and incentive to act, yet we haven't acted strongly enough to combat climate change.

Nearly everyone benefited in the short term, but those with great wealth also have much more power to speed or slow the change away from fossil fuels. I think in general that power has been used to slow the fight against climate change.

<comment><USER22> According to studies, public opinion has almost zero effect on politics in contrast to the opinion of the very few wealthy individuals and businesses who can focus their influence and lobbying and have custom legislation written for them.

At least in the USA.

[http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs- echochambers-27074746](http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746)

We are ruled by a small oligarchy which sees itself as invulnerable to economic and climate change. This is why we're incredibly late to the game of correcting it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Funniest thing I ever heard about it was a girl from Cornwall saying "Ah, New Zealand, the thinking man's Australia."

<comment><USER24> I don't get it. Is that a Kiwi joke?

<comment><USER25> Australia is dumber than NZ. So the "dumb" NZers are leaving, and leaving makes them dumb, but their presence in Australia makes Australia smarter.

<comment><USER26> So the average IQ rises in both countries, then. Sounds like a win to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "House prices in New Zealand increased 12.7 percent in the year through October, and the average price in largest city Auckland has almost doubled since 2007 to more than NZ$1 million." That's about $730,000 USD which would make me worry if I was a New Zealander.

<comment><USER28> I believe most folk are worried, and the media has been referring to it as a "housing crisis". Notably the price increase has been limited to Auckland though (and Queenstown, but Queenstown is the NZ equivalent of Aspen, Colorado; which is to say it's a bit of a millionaire's club).

Unfortunately the currently in power government has done a lot to court this outcome, and so has mostly been avoiding doing anything about it. I think they did recently step in to make it harder for Chinese investors to purchase property in NZ though.

<comment><USER29> Average house prices in Christchurch just hit half a million, so it's not limited to Auckland and Q'Town, it's just that they were already crazy markets in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When vancouver adopted a %15 non-resident house purchase tax, prices and demand dropped a lot. Maybe nz wants to adopt something similar, combined with singapore's for citizen public house purchase program.

<comment><USER29> We really do, the amount of foreign money in our housing market is quite scary (China is prominent in the internal debates, but there's a lot of money flooding in from the UK also, not to mention all the cashed up ex-pats coming home), as locals are ultimately competing against the entire world for property. A capital gains tax or land tax would be a good idea also. But our incumbent government is very reluctant to do any of that. Some people would suggest that large donations from foreigners with financial interests here may have influenced their thinking, but in reality most of it appears to be catering to the Kiwi baby boomers who a) own a large proportion of the "investment properties" (did I mention no capital gains tax?) and b) are the largest voting bloc. As their perception of their wealth is intrinsically tied to property values, anything that would depress property value increases would be politically bad.

Same reason we're not doing anything about the pending state funded superannuation crisis - we don't even means test the bloody thing, which means that millionaires and paupers alike get the same level of government money when they hit 65 - but touching national superannuation is political suicide.

This does imply an onus on the non-baby-boomer generations to get more involved in politics and start voting way more than they (we) do.

I'm also starting to think that five year terms instead of our current three year might be worth a shot, as our politicians are very much focused on short- term never the long.

<comment><USER18> A capital gains tax a good idea? No -- that would decrease market liquidity and make the problem even worse. France has high capital gains taxes and it means that people are less willing to sell houses because capital gains taxes eat the profit, so people tend to hang on to houses in the hope that in many years they'll appreciate enough to make swallowing the capital gains hit worth it. I have a place in France that I'd consider selling but I am not interested in giving the government a huge percentage of the profit.

Meaning if I take a risk in buying and renovating something, my profit has to make the whole affair worth it. If I'm giving the government 34.5% of my profit, if my house was bought at €500k and my target profit is €100k, then that means I have to sell the place at roughly €635k instead of €600k. That knocks many potential buyers out of the market, thus means that the house won't sell as quickly. That also means that my capital is tied up in the house instead of moving the market in some other deal or otherwise putting that money into the economy some other way. The net gain from a capital gains tax is actually a negative when you count the lose of market liquidity resulting from capital gains taxes.

Increasing the price of something lowers demand. If you increase the price of selling, less people will sell, causing house prices to increase.

Capital gains taxes are always a bad idea. Capital liquidity is critical for an efficient economy. The only people who support capital gains taxes are typically people with little capital -- they don't actually understand how it works and the stunting effect it has on an economy.

<comment><USER29> > A capital gains tax a good idea? No -- that would decrease market liquidity > and make the problem even worse.

Depends on the level. At the moment, the big problem is that nearly all of NZ's capital goes into housing - the significant tax advantages (no tax on your profits and LAQCs/LTCs) are one factor in this - inflating the price of living, and starving our businesses of capital to grow and actually be productive with.

I'd ask you why it's a good idea for an economy that profit from running a company is taxed along wit the incomes of all your workers, but not the profit from trading houses - especially as a lot of our property investors are rolling by on the minimal amount of capital necessary - their debt is liquid more than their capital.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> So, now NZers will not be able to afford to live in their own country.[0]

The mega rich should buy sailing vessels and live on those and leave the housing prices affordable to the rest of us.

[0] Or at least not own a house.

<comment><USER32> > The mega rich should buy sailing vessels and live on those and leave the > housing prices affordable to the rest of us.

If housing prices are unaffordable, blame property developers and/or government. If they are unaffordable, that's usually a market signal to build more housing because "all these property developers in city X are making lots of money, let's build there too", which lowers the prices as more people get in, etc. Unless "Ah, but dealing with government there will cost more money than there is profit in the development, let's not build there"

Also, the term unaffordable is relative. Downtown San Francisco is very expensive. It's not "unaffordable" because people have purchased most of those units. And that's just how markets work. You've got a set amount of X (like habitable living space), you've got a certain amount of people that want that thing with a certain amount of money to spend, put it to an auction to determine a fair market price. What's wrong with this equation exactly?

Blaming people for outbidding you in buying a house is ridiculous, even if they outbid you because they simply have more money.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, this is what doesn't make sense to me. All of these people blaming the buyers for buying and the politicians for not passing laws to disincentivize them from doing so.

The solution is to build more housing. Full stop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> In BC, Canada we laugh at your measly 12.7% and raise you a ~18% [0] for a total of +31.4% 2015aug-2016aug. Yes, you read that right.

It's funny how this article's impression is "prices are returning to normal" when in fact the government's new token rules haven't had a chance to take effect and certainly haven't had time to be analyzed.

Sadly, these new rules are just for show (an election is nearing here) and until effective reforms are put in place the bubble will continue to rise.

[0] [http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/26-slump- in-v...](http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/26-slump-in-vancouver- real-estate-sales-called-a-return-to-historically-normal-levels-1.3745825?kkk)

</comment><comment><USER35> _...have helped make the South Pacific nation -- a day by air away from New York or London_

Isn't that essentially anywhere on the planet?

<comment> hash-set "A day by air" doesn't really connote how arduous a trip it is from the states. It's a long trip, even by air.

<comment><USER36> I'll bet that flight is less taxing in the company jet.

<comment><USER37> There's not a lot of corporate jets with that kind of range. It's more Gulfstream ($60MM+) than Embraer, Lear, or Cessna (~$20MM).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "The world is heading into a major crisis," said Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom in an Oct. 31 Twitter post. "I saw it coming and that's why we moved to New Zealand. Far away & not on any nuclear target list."

It will probably ruin his day but the good thing with nuclear fall out is it's globalized nature. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_%281959_film%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_%281959_film%29)

<comment><USER39> You do realise that _On the Beach_ is a completely fictional account of the aftermath of a nuclear war? Fortunately nobody ever stockpiled cobalt salted H-bombs.

Mind you _On the Beach_ is excellent, but not as a documentary on what might happen after a global war.

<comment><USER33> So the "source" the OP posted is based on something more like the doomsday machine from Dr. Strangelove than a real nuclear attack?

<comment><USER39> Yes, the book _On the Beach_ is from the 1950s not long after H-bombs were invented - it is mentioned in the book that a lot of weapons used in the war it describes were salted with cobalt to create large amounts of long lived fallout. This is perfectly possible but fortunately was never actually done - I suspect salting with something like cobalt would dramatically reduce the direct effects of weapons.

I can't remember if the cobalt bomb element is mentioned in the film versions but was definitely mentioned in the book.

<comment><USER40> _I suspect salting with something like cobalt would dramatically reduce the direct effects of weapons._

Not based on my understanding of H-bombs. For one thing, you need a tamper made of _something_ dense, and depleted uranium U-238 is used if you want to roughly double your yield while massively increasing the fallout created, then it becomes a fission -> fusion -> fission bomb. Lead is substituted for weapons like the one off 50 Gt Tsar Bomba, even the Soviet weren't willing to damage that much of their territory, and there were minor details like pilot survival ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba)). That tamper could perhaps be made out of cobalt, or you could wrap the "physics package" in cobalt.

But it would be a fairly daft thing to do, cobalt-60 has, compared to normal fission products, a long half-life of 5 years, so that which would eventually fall out of the stratosphere would make things uncomfortable for you (normally it will decay to a _de minimis_ level by the time it comes back down in quantity).

On the other hand, it was pure propaganda to suggest such weapons would kill all life on earth. Ignoring details like the impossibility of getting even enough distribution, and that the earth is _big_ , really only issue for humans who want to survive it, who'd be in heavy fallout areas, and who had any time to prepare is having enough food until it decayed enough, more of a lifeboat ethics sort of thing instead of the all but explicit message that we should surrender to the USSR because we and they were so crazy we might do something like that (and evil; if we, the far more evil _nuclear_ power after JFK and McNamara changed our policy to MAD, weren't going to do it, there was no danger).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> expensive, isolated, absurdly beautiful...

i guess "unlikely" probably isn't the word i would use in this situation.

<comment><USER28> I wouldn't exactly call New Zealand expensive? It's more expensive than say, south-east Asia (or similar regions), but then most places are.

I would consider it cheaper than the US and parts of the EU for most things. Exceptions being certain imports (like cars) being more expensive due to the cost associated with shipping them. From experience this doesn't hold for smaller tech devices, for example I priced up a camera there vs my current residents (Dublin, Ireland) and it was about $1,000NZD cheaper to purchase in NZ (most likely due to being parallel imported from South East Asia).

Reference: grew-up in NZ, and have been living in Dublin for the last year.

<comment><USER42> Food is a lot more expensive in NZ than in Germany (to give one datapoint).

<comment><USER28> That's fair, and it's something I've noticed at supermarkets in Dublin as well. I think the price of eating out is comparable though.

That said, I've noticed the portions of food tend to be smaller here in Dublin as well (I suspect being a metropolitan area the supermarkets cater more to individuals whereas the supermarkets back home tend to cater to families). For example, it's next to impossible to buy 1kg of Cheese here in Dublin as the largest you can get from a supermarket is 400 grams.

<comment><USER29> > I think the price of eating out is comparable though.

Eating out is cheaper in Germany (if you weight prices relative to wages) than NZ.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I really like it when Russian oligarchs buy entire beaches here. :/

<comment><USER43> Do you prefer locals to buy the beaches?

<comment><USER44> How about keeping them public for everybody?

<comment><USER33> It depends on what your priorities are, but the tragedy of the commons is a real thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Really sad to read this in a "wish I could preserve it just as it is" protective kind of way. It's a beautiful place.

If any of you mega-rich are reading this. Please don't fuck it up.

Consider your impact - and I'm not just talking about the enviroment.

<comment><USER12> If the mega-rich considered their impact--they wouldn't be mega-rich.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I know nobody wants to admit this but this is only going to get worse. India and China are going to eat the world, because this is a numbers game.

<comment><USER47> It's much more a game of _wealth_ than of _population_.

India and China were the largest countries (or regions) of the world for most of the period from the fall of Rome through the early stages of industrialisation -- say the 17th century. But they lacked the global reach European nations established -- Portugal ("Bombay" comes from the Portuguese "Bom Bia", or "good harbour"), Spain, the Netherlands, and of course England.

What India and China will need to compete with the West is a large wealthy class. That's going to depend on both the absolute size of their economies (or their capabilities to extract wealth by other means), and the size and wealth of individual members of their wealthiest classes. China's economy is pulling even with that of the US, though how sustainably it can do so remains a question. It has over three times the population, though, so the _mean_ wealth will be smaller.

What we're looking at though is the stratum of the ultra-rich. Here there's a fair argument that, say, China could produce more billionaires than the US, and if I'm remembering recent stats correctly, it's approaching that count. Again, though, that's somewhat shakey, and it helps to remember that such standings aren't based on _liquid_ wealth (cash and equivalent holdings), but on the valuation of held assets. Should the Chinese or Indian economies collapse suddenly, those valuations will fall (of course, the same caveat applies in the US, UK, or EU).

<comment><USER33> I think there are some good arguments to be made that economic mobility is much more important to a healthy economy than any other metric, and this seems like one place where China may have a handicap. India, though, depending on the way their social structures move in the coming years, may have a good chance at surpassing the US in terms of economic strength.

<comment><USER40> _India ... may have a good chance at surpassing the US in terms of economic strength._

I would think sufficient and reliable electrical power would be a prerequisite for that, and to my knowledge that isn't going to happen in India in the foreseeable future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I've heard this story in the past. People buying farmland and building air strips in NZ. Makes sense, it would be fairly isolated from turmoils in the rest of the world

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2931325/Super- rich-b...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2931325/Super-rich-buying- property-New-Zealand-bolthole-case-west-goes-meltdown.html)

[https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders- network/2015/jan/...](https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders- network/2015/jan/23/nervous-super-rich-planning-escapes-davos-2015)

</comment><comment><USER49> Isn't the irony here that the world isn't becoming more uncertain?

<comment><USER50> Here in the US, people seem less certain about the future than they were a year ago.

<comment> hash-set The US Debt to GDP ratio has turned us into Japan. It's stagnation. It's hard to be optimistic in such an environment because nothing feels right and then we have a lying-ass government to further obfuscate the facts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Stupid question but how much medicine/drugs does New Zealand produce? Does anyone produce insulin in New Zealand? What about electronics? Components to repair electronics? Cars? Car parts? Lightbulb manufacturers? I'm guessing like most countries New Zealand is very dependant on global trade to make basic things work. If things are so bad you need the remoteness of New Zealand to survive I can't imagine global trade is going to be working all that well.

</comment><comment><USER52> I always thought someone could make a fortune introducing insulation to homes in NZ. Loved living in Wellington, but my god, the homes there are the draftiest coldest places ever!

</comment><comment><USER53> ISP pricing/caps?

<comment><USER28> In the major cities you can get unlimited fiber with 100Mbit/s connection for around $90 NZD a month.

in more rural area's the internet tends to be standard ADSL.

(side note; the governments "fiber to the door" roll out is apparently 68% complete for urban areas as of June this year).

<comment><USER54> As an anecdata point, I don't know anyone with fibre and I live in Auckland. I get 3mb on a good day when it's still and sunny. Rain and wind lead to dial up speeds.

<comment><USER55> Really? Similar anecdata, except nearly everyone I know is on fibre. 100/20 for $79 a month, or 1000/500 for $129/month.

<comment><USER54> Wonder if the rollout has targeted certain areas first - newer suburbs first or those with the dodgiest copper? It really is dire where I am. I tried to get on the Rural broadband (4g) bandwagon but the people at Spark I talked to just couldn't understand why anyone wouldn't want the copper connection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> ^^^^^^^^^ THIS IS More evidence that the condition of the world is degrading. Making huge sums of money is immoral. The 62 wealthiest people in the world have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion people. This is completely immoral and should be illegal. The mere fact that a person has billions of dollars is evidence that there is tyranny in the world. The paradox of capitalism is that the more a capitalist succeeds in reducing his costs (labor), the less money the mass of people will have to buy the very products by which a capitalist produces and thus cannot sell the products and services he is producing. It is bound to fail in time... and after it does, we will have to find a system which puts morality and love for one another at the center of its goals.

</comment><comment><USER57> What i think is funny is that the mega rich thing in a collapsed society they will be able to hold on to these areas? People... will just come and take it.

<comment><USER58> They'll probably hire some security to keep people out.

<comment><USER57> Why wouldn't the security people just take it then? in a time like that, clearly asking for help is a sign of weakness...going to someone stronger and begging to keep you in power? doesn't make sense.. in chaos people will _take_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Rubbish. New Zealand's not that great. It's rubbish in fact.

Please everyone stay away.

</comment><comment><USER60> Just don't try to plant your own garden!

<comment><USER29> Can we not do that here please. :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> How odd. A former British colony with a land price problem washed through banks that are making life worse for working people.

Most unusual. /s</comment>


(prologue) Legacy Software: Raze and Pave or Stand Fast and Refactor - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tygertec/legacy-software-raze-and-pave-or-stand-fast-and-refactor-e42e745538bf <comment><AUTHOR> Alt link for those without Medium sub: [https://www.tygertec.com/legacy- software-raze-pave-vs-stand-...](https://www.tygertec.com/legacy-software- raze-pave-vs-stand-fast-refactor/)</comment>