H.R. 4213 - Payroll Tax for S-Corp Dividends - <AUTHOR> http://www.taxgirl.com/new-tax-bill-raising-eyebrows/ <comment><USER2> _GOOD_. The dividend/payroll split trick that S-Corps play is a huge scam.

Normal people in normal jobs --- hell, ace (non-founder) devs at startups taking W2 wages --- have most of their income subject to payroll taxes (most notably FICA). These taxes are a significant chunk of all your withholdings.

However, if you and your partners own an S-Corp, you can choose to pay yourself not only in direct wages but also as cash distributions (think "profit sharing"). Unlike wages, distros are not subject to payroll taxes. You can skip out on your FICA payments for all the income you elect to pay as a distro.

In an LLC, _all_ of a company principal's income is paid as distros (you can't formally be an LLC principal and take W2 wages). But that income is all subject to self-employment tax. It's only in the weird little blip between LLC and C-Corp that this tax avoidance trick exists.

There is no legitimate reason why an LLC principal should have to fully fund Medicare and Social Security, and a C-Corp director should have to fully fund Medicare and Social Security, but an S-Corp shareholder should be able to carve out some (or even _most_ ) of their income to avoid those taxes.

To my eyes, this is a loophole in the purest sense of the word, and I'd be happy to see them kill it.

<comment><USER3> The big reason people do an S-Corp is to avoid double taxation (and to be a corporation rather than LLC while not having the complex structures of a C-Corp). Better than being a sole proprietor. Keep in mind that S-Corps can only have a certain number of shares and shareholders (100?) in one class of stock, so a startup or large corporation can't be an S-Corp and take advantage of the tax benefits. Also, here in California, all corporations (S and C and even LLC) owe tax even if the company's net income is zero.

<comment><USER2> Um, I'm not a CPA, and I definitely don't know how California taxes work, but at the federal level, isn't that (taxation at the corporate level) pretty much the _opposite_ of how an S-Corp works?

<comment><USER3> An S-Corp just avoids double taxation. Salaries paid out are subject to FICA. As for the remaining business income, each shareholder would still owe taxes based on how much of the business they own. This is different than a C-Corp where the business income would be taxed at the corporate level in addition to the owners paying income tax on their salaries. And if the owners of a C-Corp decided to pay themselves huge dividends to avoid normal income taxation, that would raise red flags.

In California, S-Corps pay a 1.5% franchise tax on net income (minimum $800). You pay this even if your net income is zero or negative. You pay this no matter what.

Disclosure: I'm also not a CPA.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, Alex, I'm just saying: S-Corps don't pay federal corporate taxes, do they? I thought _that_ was the point of an S-Corp. Your comment, before you edited it, said flat-out that they did.

(We file as S, but thankfully I'm not the person here that has to know exactly how this stuff works. See previous comments for evidence that you should not take tax advice from me.)

<comment><USER3> Right, yeah, looks like S-Corps don't pay _federal_ corporate taxes. I knew it was to avoid double taxation but I had forgotten which taxation S-Corps were exempt from. My bad. Unfortunately, for California, you owe the 1.5% (minimum $800) franchise tax on company income whether you're an LLC or S-Corp or C-Corp. In NYC, you are subject to the full corporate income tax rate, even as an S-Corp.

<comment><USER2> That explains why I suddenly had to start paying NY taxes, even though I live in Illinois (we started filing differently).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> " _The bill slowly poisons many s corporations."

[...]

"I'm not alone in my concern over the scope of this bill and what it means for our economy. We keep pushing a little bit at the edges of some pretty sweeping changes at an alarming speed – so fast, in fact, that many taxpayers haven't had time to digest them, much less, react to them._"

A general term for this is "regime uncertainty." People continually complain about a corporate focus on the next quarter while not noticing that major tax and other business law (e.g. SarBox) changes every couple of years makes it well neigh impossible to do long range planning.

Things have been quite a bit worse lately and as long as Team Obama and the Congress continue to move at ramming speed a _lot_ of economic activity is going to be suppressed until many months, probably more than a year, pass so that people can digest the changes and their implications.

<comment><USER2> If you were playing the S-Corp distro game, my understanding is that you were already living in a world of uncertainty, because (a) paying out distros that are large relative to your wages is an audit flag, and (b) the IRS already has the authority to retroactively decide what fair market value for your company role is and then whack you for the money you tried to stash in distros.

People do it anyways because everyone is unlikely to get audited almost no matter what they do. That doesn't mean that closing the loophole is going to throw people's tax planning in to chaos. You opt for chaos when you decide to cheat.

<comment><USER5> Playing the "S-Corp distro game" is _not_ cheating.

If an S-corp brings in, say, several hundred thousand dollars in net profit and the principal pays themselves a fair wage for an employee in that role (perhaps it's in the neighborhood of $80k - $150k), then that is completely legitimate under current law.

Aggressive but correct tax planning is not cheating, and for a responsible business owner who wants to maximize personal income (and ability to reinvest in the business), it's the way the game should be played.

<comment><USER2> I agree, but what's your point? If you're getting ~90k in wages, the rest of your income isn't subject to FICA anyways.

(That may soon change, with talks of lifting the caps on payroll taxes, and that's a change I'll be far more ambivalent about).

<comment><USER5> I admit, that point had not occurred to me. Nevertheless, the Medicare portion isn't subject to a cap.

My main issue was this: "You opt for chaos when you decide to cheat." Aggressive tax planning within the bounds of the law is not cheating, and I think it's unfair to characterize it that way.

The wage/distro setup is an advantage unique to S-Corp owners, and I understand why some want to see it eliminated. But to use it today is not cheating.

<comment><USER2> The courts appear to disagree with you. "Aggressively" characterizing a portion of your income as a distribution when it is really just disguised wages appears to be a losing proposition, except for the fact that you're probably not going to get audited (as long as you pay yourself a relatively significant amount as bona fide wages).

A tax planning strategy that relies on never getting audited, and that fails spectacularly when you do get audited, I think can reasonably called "cheating". I get that reasonable people can disagree on this, and I'm fine with reasonably disagreeing with you.

<comment><USER5> By "aggressively within the bounds of the law", I was suggesting that the IRS's position and court's position was already taken into consideration (not just the low chance of being audited).

Regardless, surely it's possible to have situations where distributions are legitimately greater than zero. If I'm an absentee owner who pays a manager to operate my business, my distributions shouldn't be treated as wages.

I see it as a continuum -- on one end, you have cheaters who are paying themselves $10k annually and taking the rest as distributions. On the other end, you have absentee owners who should legitimately be able to claim distributions. In the middle there are many shades of gray.

<comment><USER2> Here we converge on agreement. Thanks for your patience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Today, an s-corp founder does benefit by being able to split his/her income between W2 wages and distributions (on which payroll taxes don't need to be paid). Besides increasing tax burden, this bill will also make the tax-filing process a bit more cumbersome for s-corp founders.

If HR 4123 goes through, the tax-benefit will be removed for S-corp founders. However, venture capitalists (with carried interest income), perhaps some LLC founders (who don't take W2 salaries) will still be exempted from payroll taxes.

Unfortunately, as part of payroll taxes, s-corp founders are required to pay unemployment insurance taxes that they can never benefit from. For example, I'm required to pay FUTA taxes when I get W2 wages, yet I cannot claim unemployment allowances if my company doesn't make money in a given month.

If they're talking about closing loopholes, I think they should close the reverse-loophole that lets the fed govt collect unemployment taxes without providing any unemployment benefits. My state (WA) exempts corporate officers from paying unemployment taxes, but that just means that I pay even higher FUTA taxes to the the federal govt.

<comment><USER2> You have in reality no such benefit. From my cursory research, taxpayers have consistently lost every case in which they attempted to hide wages as distros. Courts have held that "wages" is a term that describes all remuneration for services rendered in any form. Even loans from the company to shareholders can, under the tax code, be reclassified by the IRS as FICA-eligible wages.

The only benefit S-Corp shareholders have under the present system is that they can force the IRS to audit to recover this money, which is a game that entrepreneurs often win because very few people really get audited anyways.

So, two things. First, the loophole doesn't really simplify your life. For many years after filing one of these bogus returns, you can still be levied for the hidden wages, plus penalties (including a huge extra negligence penalty). Second, there's nothing fair or sensible about the exemption S-Corp shareholders are taking; people with exactly the same skin in the economy have to pay FICA, so why shouldn't S-Corp owners?

<comment><USER6> You're making the assumption that _all_ S-corp distributions amount to "hiding wages". Most accountants will tell you that IRS regulations disagree with you on that point.

I see that you didn't respond to the reverse-loophole point on FUTA taxes. Why should a company pay unemployment insurance taxes for founder-employees when these employees can never claim unemployment allowances ?

<comment><USER2> The general line of argument would be that FUTA payments fund a broad social safety net, and that no "insurance" payment we make to the government has implied 1:1 benefits for the payers.

But we don't have to bother with that argument because I agree with you on that point.

The general logic of the tax code and the IRS' enforcement of it seems to be that as an employee of a company --- which you are unless there's some patently obvious reason why you would be performing services for the company otherwise --- then your role has a fair market value. If you make at least that amount of money in any way, you owe payroll taxes on it. Over that amount, you don't.

The reality of the software business is, if you're a principal, founder, officer, director, or lead at a company that can afford to distribute tens of thousands of dollars to its employees, your fair market value is probably greater than the FICA cap, and the notion of what "is" or "isn't" a distribution is academic.

Are there scenarios where people are legitimately taking profit sharing distros that are not, under the spirit of the tax code, wages? I'm sure there are. Do those scenarios really account for a significant fraction of the cases where people take a "wage/distro split"? _I really doubt it_. My casual sense of it is, people that take a "wage/distro split" feel entitled to pay lower taxes simply because they've finagled themselves into an S-Corp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> First of all let me point out that employees who are not business owners do NOT have to pay in the full 15.3% (SS & Medicare) to the government. Only 1/2 of that gets taken out of their paychecks. The other 1/2 is paid by the employer (social security wage base is $106,800 and unlimited for medicare). Also, in most states employees do not have to pay into unemployment. The employer pays into that for them. They also usually get vacation/sick pay and health insurance benefits. A one owner S Corporation has to pay in the full 15.3% on their wages plus $434 into FUTA that he/she cannot use. In addition they have to pay for their own health insurance and obviously no vacation/sick pay. Please do not compare employees to business owners. Employees have NO idea. This HR 4213 bill is another attack on the small businesses probably because the politicians cannot control us since most of us are free thinkers and usually not tied to one party. The S Corporation has been around for 50 plus years and has been a blessing to us small one-owner firms. I pay myself a reasonable wage (what I would expect if I work for someone else in my line of work) and then I usually leave a good chunk of money in the company savings account and take a small amount in shareholder distribution. With this new bill even amounts I don't take out will be subject to SECA. I usually save about $3,000 per year in SECA because of the S Corporation. This might not seem like alot to most people but an extra $3000 to my family seems harsh. Why am I being penalized when bigger firms won't be? Why are they picking on the little guy who works hard?????

</comment><comment><USER8> Also <http://biztaxtalk.com/node/1576>

<comment><USER2> The main advantage of forming an S-Corp should be that it allows you to have a formalized corporate structure with shareholders (including employees with bona fide ISOs or restricted stock) without incurring the rather large overhead of maintaining a C-Corp. An S-Corp should simply be the corporate version of an LLC.

It doesn't seem to me that the intent of the S-Corp structure was to allow a small number of people at the top of the company to exempt half their income from taxes that virtually everyone else in the country has to pay.

<comment><USER7> I don't think you know what you are talking about. I am a CPA and there isn't any larger overhead expenses for one owner C-Corps vs. S-Corps. The main difference is that owners/employees of C-Corps usually just take money out by way of wages only. If they also take dividends they have to pay income tax on the dividends on their personal return, but get no deduction on their corporate income tax return. Thus "double taxation" is the result. S-Corps make it simpler to take distributions and make more sense and are more fair and equitable. Most S-Corps take money out in wages and shareholder distributions. The wages need to be reasonable and the shareholder distributions are a distribution of profit of which you pay income tax on, but there is no double taxation since the income flows through to your personal tax return anyway. I don't know what you mean about small number of people at the top of the company get to exempt half their income from taxes that virtually everyone else in the country has to pay. Our income is not exempt in any way. You might want to know your facts before spouting off stuff you don't know.</comment></comment></comment>


The Supreme Court Is Stubbornly Analog By Design - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-supreme-court-is-stubbornly-analog-by-design/ <comment><USER2> SCOTUS is weird.

I was an early employee of Aereo (the case mentioned in the article where Breyer went on about phonograph record stores), and I worked there when we were sued and ultimately won the appeal in the 2nd circuit, when we won in 1st circuit, when SCOTUS granted cert, and ultimately when we lost.

One of the strangest parts is that you have no idea when they'll issue your decision. They give a certain amount of advance notice that they'll be issuing decisions on certain days, but you don't actually know _which_ decisions.

For a couple months after oral arguments, we had probably half a dozen mornings on pins and needles while we'd wait to find out if they're going to decide _our_ case. It was really, really hard to concentrate on getting anything done.

Another fun fact: Clarence Thomas has only asked 1 question during oral arguments in something like 10 years.

<comment><USER3> Note that the article takes Breyer's question about phonograph record stores _way_ out of context: [https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...](https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2013/13-461_97l5.pdf) (page 6).

Breyer asked:

> If we take the public performance, maybe we run into what Professor Nimmer > saw as a problem. Why isn't what used to be called a phonograph record store > that sells phonograph records to 10,000 customers giving a public > performance?

The bit about "phonograph record stores" is actually referencing a hypothetical posed by Prof. Nimmer in a 1982 textbook, which addressed the 1976 Copyright Act amendments at issue in the _Aereo_ case. That hypothetical came up in an _amicus_ brief to the court: [https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/sup...](https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/publications/supreme_court_preview/briefs-v3/13-461_pet_amcu_profs- psm-dn.authcheckdam.pdf) (at 7-8).

Breyer is talking about phonographs because that hypothetical references phonographs (and everyone is trying to understand what Congress meant in 1976). Note that a few pages later, Justice Sotomayor asks the attorney to extend the hypothetical to Dropbox and iCloud.

<comment><USER4> It seems plausible to me that something similar was driving Alito's question about compact discs, which this article also derisively referenced. It sounds to me like he might have been attempting an analogy about physical media in order to find out if there were meaningful lines to be drawn between types of storage.

<comment><USER3> I think you are correct: [https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcr...](https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2013/13-132_bp7c.pdf). Starting on page 17, the Justices are addressing the argument that California downloads everything on the phone, and that a smartphone has one's "whole life" on it. Justice Roberts asks "what if it's a FitBit and not a smartphone?" Justice Alito then raises the examples of a flip phone and then a CD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I work for the United States District Courts—- article fails to mention the courts hosts one of the largest electronic database systems ever. Millions of electronic PDFs for millions of cases.

The US Courts uses kubernetes/ open shift, etc..

Analog isn't the right word. It's personal preference and work flow.

There are systems in place scotus could use. SCOTUS are very aware of technology and how it works. That is their job to understand.

<comment><USER6> Compared with the California state courts, the USDC is awesome. But it's hardly a paragon of cutting edge tech with its Craigslist aesthetics and ridiculous paywalls. Try being on the user-side of it for a while, or better yet the real-life scenario of trying to upload and organize 15 PDFs at 11:40 pm on the last day for filing ... only to have it rejected by the clerk the next day for failing to select the appropriate event.

Still, it's a massive leap forward over the Superior Court's fragmented system. And kudos to you guys for keeping CM/ECF up and available. It's a very robust system.

<comment><USER5> UI is ugly, I'm porting it to react. We are speeding up dev time. I hope to fix your frustrations!

<comment><USER7> Please make it work:

a. for the blind with screen readers

b. for those with javascript disabled

c. for text browsers like lynx and links

d. for fetchers like wget and curl

e. for people with cookies disabled

f. for OSes including Ubuntu, Android, etc.

g. for browsers including Firefox, Chromium, Edge, Safari, etc.

h. for dial-up and satellite connections

i. for people with older computers, like a Pentium III

Actually try it. Make sure it is practically usable, not just theoretically possible to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > The Supreme Court is an openly — even proudly — technophobic institution. > Cameras are forbidden, which means there are no images or videos from high- > profile cases, and briefs and other legal filings only recently became > available at the court's website.

Not an auspicious beginning to start this off wrong. The opposition to cameras has nothing to do with the Justices being "technophobic" (after all, video cameras have been common place throughout the Justices adult lives). It's about the possibility of oral arguments becoming part of the 24/7 soundbite news cycle.

As to the website, the slow adoption of electronic filing has been driven more by the fact that it creates a duplicate set of procedures. You still need a paper system, so that _e.g._ prisoners can file cert petitions on paper. So you have to add the electronic system on top of that.

As to the article's substantive points, I think the premise that the "Supreme Court justices lack an understanding of what technology means" is incorrect. For example, _Riley v. California_ , published four years ago, recognized that cell phone searches could result in searches of materials not on the cell phone--such as photos stored on the cloud. Going back a lot further, it's hard to read Justice Stevens' 1997 opinion in _Reno v. ACLU_ (which struck down most of the Communications Decency Act), and conclude that he didn't understand the salient aspects of how the Internet works: [https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/supreme-court- decision-r...](https://www.aclu.org/legal-document/supreme-court-decision- reno-v-aclu-et-al).

The whole analysis of _Olmdstead_ and _Smith v. Maryland_ is also confused:

> Nearly 40 years later, in 1967, seven Supreme Court justices echoed > Brandeis's thinking in a decision that overturned the ruling in the Olmstead > case. But in the intervening years, Taft's interpretation was the law of the > land, which meant that wiretapping without a warrant was legal.

The _Olmdstead_ case was not based on the Justices failing to understand the implications of phone technology: by 1928 a third of Americans had phones in their households, and Justice Taft who wrote the majority opinion had grown up with telegrams and used telephones for most of his adult life. The difference between _Olmdstead_ and _Smith v. Maryland_ was intervening decades of liberal 4th amendment precedent that expanded it far beyond its plain text.[1]

Likewise with Scalia and _Jones_ (the GPS case). The 4th amendment is not a general "privacy" protection. It doesn't use that word or anything like it. It addresses "searches and seizures." Lots of people want to read it broadly to prohibit government tracking, but even those people have to admit that you have to do a bit of clever lawyering to argue that _e.g._ taking pictures of license plates is a "search" or "seizure" of "persons, houses, papers, [or] effects." In _Jones_ , Scalia focused on attachment of a GPS device to the defendant's car, because physical trespass onto the defendant's private property ( _i.e._ , his effects) was an easy basis for finding the existence of an illegal search. That provided a basis for deciding that case that didn't requiring buying into broader theories of the fourth amendment.[2]

[1] I personally think _Olmstead_ was right and _Smith v. Maryland_ was wrongly decided. Under modern 4th amendment jurisprudence, something is protected under the 4th amendment if you have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" in that thing. In 1928, your phone calls were transmitted in the clear on the wires; anyone at the phone company could listen to your calls. It was objectively unreasonable to consider phone calls private.

[2] [http://lawandlibertyblog.com/nyujll/2014/6/3/how-long-is- too...](http://lawandlibertyblog.com/nyujll/2014/6/3/how-long-is-too-long- the-4th-amendment-and-the-mosaic-theory) ("Proponents of the mosaic theory argue that at some point enough individual data collections, compiled and analyzed together, become a Fourth Amendment search.").

<comment><USER8> > As to the website, the slow adoption of electronic filing has been driven > more by the fact that it creates a duplicate set of procedures. You still > need a paper system, so that e.g. prisoners can file cert petitions on > paper.

True, but the Supreme Court's byzantine rules around paper sizes, font sizes, binding, and colored covers makes filing a Supreme Court case daunting. Perhaps that's by design. They could, like any other court that allows e-filing, allow standard printed copies of the filing, instead of requiring 6⅛" by 9¼" paper and binding.

<comment><USER6> it's a specialist bar and they're the 800 lbs gorillas: they get whatever they want, how they want it. I'd be delighted if everyone pushing paper onto my desk neatly bound each submission in the same size with strict page and typeface requirements, all neatly color-coordinated. Wouldn't you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> C-SPAN has a section on their website where they show commentary from each supreme court judge regarding their view on cameras in the court:

[https://www.c-span.org/special/?camerasInTheCourt](https://www.c-span.org/special/?camerasInTheCourt)

</comment><comment><USER10> Hit pieces like this only serve to further prove cameras shouldn't be in the courtroom. The seemingly archaic questions about phonographs and compact discs are not because the justices are living in the 70s, but an attempt to better understand how current issues relate to existing case law.

The last thing we need are out of context soundbites on the evening partisan talk show further polarizing the court.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's one thing to prefer analog process, it's another to be ignorant of technology while making decisions about it. The later is a major problem in the age when technology is increasingly pervasive in everyday life.</comment>


Ask HN: The reasonable man adapts himself to the world? - <AUTHOR> You have to be really exceptional to achieve things being unreasonable. Just like s lot of people wants to be a football player. Where most of the people won't make it. Calm down please, read some books with old philosopher first. <comment><USER2> From a stoic viewpoint: "the reasonable man lives in accordance with nature".

Personally, I try to look at things outside of my control as the weather. I do not control the weather, complaining about something you control is futile, but I also don't have to stand in the rain and I can be somewhat prepared.

You may never really "change the world". However, that feeling arise from a desire of control. Control of the people around you, control of situations, control of systems. It's useful to reflex on why you feel this way and is it reasonable. You can only control your actions and thoughts. I would argue that you will live a "saner" life, not trying to control the things you have no control over.</comment>


Planning for the Apocalypse (by being less handicapped than the fat kid) - <AUTHOR> http://bufr.tumblr.com/post/9197208429/planning-for-the-apocalypse

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't necessarily put getting corrective eye surgery on the same level of achievement as an overweight person losing the weight, but good message nonetheless.</comment>


Evolution of a Haskell programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html

<comment><AUTHOR> and here's a working link to the original "Evolution of a programmer":

<http://www.lri.fr/~filliatr/evolution>

</comment><comment><USER2> Damn, I read that and didn't understand half of the graduate stuff. Then again, I'm at work so what am I doing reading this? I have so much to learn and so little time to do it.

<comment><USER3> Don't feel bad. I've been messing around with Haskell a while myself, and I start to lose it around the functional dependencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the 2nd junior version best.

        fac 0 = 1
        fac n = n * fac (n-1)</comment>


Solid ship ballast from the age of sail tells surprising stories about history - <AUTHOR> https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/how-bomb-debris-from-bristol-england-made-a-road-in-nyc/ <comment><USER2> The building I currently work at in central Bristol was built in one of the areas that was largely destroyed in the war by bombing (Castle Park). There is a BBC article about the rubble being transported here [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england- bristol-41700547/how...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england- bristol-41700547/how-bricks-from-bristol-were-used-to-build-part-of-new-york)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm struggling to find a source, but I've read in a few places that during the the gold rush in New Zealand, ships returning to San Francisco took timber - Kauri specifically - and it's found in older houses there. Judging by the lack or sources I can find this may be a NZ urban legend.

<comment><USER4> Not an urban legend at all. Small amounts of Kauri made it to SF as prefabricated houses.

[http://blog.teara.govt.nz/2010/08/12/san-francisco-kauri- and...](http://blog.teara.govt.nz/2010/08/12/san-francisco-kauri-and-quakes/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > around 1000 BCE there was a short-lived Viking settlement at L'Anse aux > Meadows at the northernmost tip of Newfoundland.

> around 1000 BCE

I'm certain they don't mean BCE here. That kind of bad editing makes me doubt every fact in the piece. Not that they aren't necessarily true, but it makes me suspect the whole endeavor.

Edit: They've fixed that, so my complaint no longer stands.

<comment><USER6> I've let them know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Coal from Fife to Holland, and they brought back tiles.

[https://www.shepherdroofingandslating.co.uk/history-fifes- co...](https://www.shepherdroofingandslating.co.uk/history-fifes-coastal- roofs/)

</comment><comment><USER8> I always wondered where all the material came from that they used to extend Manhattan into the harbor. Largely ballast!

<comment><USER9> And whole ships!

[https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/World-Trade-Center- Shi...](https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/World-Trade-Center-Ship-Mystery- Philadelphia-Buried-Treasure-Colonial-Era-269245151.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am curious what critters hitched rides out of China. Being a collector of antique porcelain in addition to glass I was amazed at how much porcelain still sits on the floors of ocean areas including near some European ports. There was so much of the stuff being shipped that it was used as ballast on its journey to Europe.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've heard it is conjectured that the Basques may have made it to North America before the explorers reported "discovery" of the continent. It will be really interesting if this sort of evidence ends up confirming (or, more disappointingly, debunking) this legend.

But I find it interesting to consider that not all enterprising seafarers would have considered it a good idea for knowledge of exploitable resources across the sea to be publicized.

<comment><USER12> There's other rumours (is that the right word?) that English fishermen were very familiar with the Grand Banks as well, and could have used North America as a staging group

<comment><USER13> I think that "speculation" is the word you are looking for.</comment></comment></comment>


Spend Jeff Bezos Money - <AUTHOR> https://3pic.github.io/money <comment><USER2> The main point it seems to be able to present is that they could end poverty in the US (Or is it global? It doesn't specify.) and still not notice even the slightest ding in any area of their personal home life.</comment>


Emacs xwidget-webkit enhancement suite - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/BlueFlo0d/xwwp/tree/xwwp-ace-dev <comment><USER2> Debian (and probably others) ship emacs with xwidget-webkit support specifically _disabled_ for "security" reasons.

[https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=914568](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=914568)

The argument there sounds like "libwebkit2gtk was never built to be resilient against non-trusted content" and "has no sandboxing". I don't have enough expertise to accurately judge both claims, but the last message in that above bug tread does not like a change is being considered.

<comment><USER3> The original bug report for this issue contains the following text [0]:

        Although there is apparently some sandboxing in the use of webkit in
        emacs (I read that it uses a seperate process, although not anywhere
        authoritative), this still seems to be equivalent to shipping a
        JavaScript enabled browser without any security support.

Debian packages in stable need security team support. It seems more like a procedural argument about support (i.e., "We don't want the security team to bother with another web browser embedded in Emacs") rather than technical ("It's impossible to have sandboxed Webkit in Emacs").

From a security perspective, this addon seems like the worst of both worlds: it's WebKit, so it's commonly attacked and prodded at, and it's relatively unsupported, so 0days are likely to stick around and fester.

As much as I love the idea of this, I would probably run it as a separate user, or maybe in a chroot or restricted namespace. Unfortunately, it would be pretty inconvenient to use a text editor that can't read my files!

[0]: [https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=843462](https://bugs.debian.org/cgi- bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=843462)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is very nice. I use Emacs extensively, even for reading email, but I do not allow Emacs to connect to the Internet directly.

Lots of design decisions in Emacs make a lot of sense for a text editor, or for a Lisp VM in the 80s, but are quite insecure if you plan to browse a potentially hostile environment.

<comment><USER5> Hackers won't target Emacs, they aim for bigger targets, software used by many people.

Emacs is so obscure that nobody bothers to work on emacs exploits, so your worry is not really justified.

<comment><USER6> It's not even about being targeted specifically. It's about the complete loss of sandbox and safety guarantees. There is a lot of LHF here.

<comment><USER7> LHF?

<comment><USER8> low-hanging fruit presumably.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow - Ive used other Browser integrations but none have been with complete. Well done, I'll definitely give it a spin!

</comment><comment><USER10> Why is this fork linked instead of the root repository?

<comment><USER11> It seems that the fork has added a fair bit of functionality. Using Ace-Jump, Sections, and History, at first glance

<comment><USER10> Ah, I see. I should have read the whole of both READMEs!</comment></comment></comment>


A Man Who Has Lived Alone on an Island for 28 Years - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/destinations/europe/italy/photos-of-life-alone-on-a-paradise-island/ <comment><USER2> I read another diary online from a man who lived alone on one of the pacific islands. I want to to say that it was in the 1970s but I can't be sure. I think he was originally a New Zealander.

It was fascinating reading, describing how the wild pigs on the island would eat his freshly planted vegetable garden and how he hid up a tree at night until they showed up before leaping down to kill one of them. Also the regret he felt after killing the animal.

At one point he pulled a muscle in his back and just by chance someone landed on the island a day later and helped nurse him back to health.

I've Googled for it now and again but never been able to find the original side (I read the story around 2008).

<comment><USER3> >>Also the regret he felt after killing the animal.

I feel like a lot of people would benefit from knowing the cost behind meat production. I eat meat, but growing up on a farm in the "old days" when you could still do this soft of thing, I have witnessed a pig being killed by literally stabbing it in the neck through the artery and waiting until it bleeds out, and then gutting it within minutes after death while the flesh is still warm. The whole process made you very aware of what goes into making a sausage or a porkchop and appreciate it a lot more, and nowadays I get upset about wasting food in general.

<comment><USER4> I can relate to this, except the last sentence. Taking advantage of the privilege of living in a society where meat alternatives and other sources of protein are abundant, my delayed reaction to witnessing animal slaughter was to quit eating animal products altogether. The only real cost of it has been in dealing with colleagues in the UK, who enjoy questioning me about my dietary choices (at best), or persistently try to convince me to eat meat (at worst).

<comment><USER3> Maybe "appreciate" wasn't the right word here - I don't mean it in a way like "I appreciate how delicious this is" but "I appreciate that something had to die for me to eat this sausage".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those interested in this story, you may also like the documentary "Alone In The Wilderness" by PBS. It's a great story of a man that lived alone for 30 years in the Alaskan wilderness.

[https://shop.pbs.org/alone-in-the-wilderness- dvd/product/ALW...](https://shop.pbs.org/alone-in-the-wilderness- dvd/product/ALWL401)

<comment><USER6> I usually end up watching that documentary every few years because I find it extremely relaxing. Highly recommended.

<comment><USER7> You might be interested to know that there's more than one documentary. 4 in total!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > During all his years on the island, Morandi says he has never gotten sick, a > quality he attributes to "good genes."

I bet reduced contact with other humans helped as well!

<comment><USER9> That + living outdoors and on your own turns you more resilient. Improves the constitution, so to speak. Like how you're less bothered by the cold the more time you spend outdoors.

<comment><USER10> > That + living outdoors and on your own turns you more resilient.

Isn't this just a case of survivor bias? In that the people it kills, well, they aren't around to be "more resilient"...

<comment><USER11> In extreme environments, sure. My understanding is that this island is temperate, so it's more like camping at the lake than braving the desert or the taiga.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> He appears to interact with tourists, so although the island doesn't have any other permanent inhabitants he does interact with other people, so not alone for 28 years.

<comment><USER13> And he has wifi.

<comment><USER14> Anyone can be alone at any location. If you live in the city, you can live alone. The article states that tourists were banned until sometime in the 90s.

Wifi is a recent thing he has acquired, not something he has had for 28 years. I doubt the 78 year old man browses reddit and hackernews. Probably more of a weather tool.

<comment><USER15> The article implied he uses it to share and promote knowledge of the island, and that it's a concession he makes because he believes it's for the greater good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Also, a Japanese guy has lived on an island "alone" for roughly the same time:

 _Japan's Naked Island Hermit: VICE INTL (2014)_ [https://youtu.be/ZBtBePnUOZU](https://youtu.be/ZBtBePnUOZU)

The thing is there are varying degrees of hermitage and a true hermit obviously doesn't give interviews. ;)

<comment><USER17> A hermit is anyone who intentionally separates themselves from society. Mauro Morandi is also a hermit if you ask me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> At a much lower level, HN readers may enjoy this guy's blog.

[https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/](https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/)

He started out with stone tools (that he made himself) and is now up to the level of experimenting with smelting iron.

</comment><comment><USER19> You don't know how many times I've been tempted to become a monk (not hermit) in a cloistered community and just forget the world entirely. The world is ugly, complex and full of things designed to drive you nuts. But I would have give up programming, so I soldier on. Simplifying your life is very difficult if you have to participate in a world that expects so much of everyone. I have no desire to be alone all the time though which is one reason I refuse to work remotely. If I did ditch everything it would only work if I truly left everything behind.

<comment><USER20> It's not necessarily true that you couldn't be a programmer in a cloistered order; cloistered monks and nuns doing such work, usually either for the order itself or for other Church entities, absolutely are a thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The article definitely appeals to anyone with a Robinson Crusoe fantasy. Framed less generously, you could be reading about a squatter on public land supported by bi-weekly food shipments.

Somewhat related, the homesteading culture is pretty vibrant and full of tech savvy folks like Jaimie Mantzel. His island fortress series is fascinating: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1p7jFXjL7Q0qMii08oAeAQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1p7jFXjL7Q0qMii08oAeAQ)

<comment><USER22> > Framed less generously, you could be reading about a squatter on public land > supported by bi-weekly food shipments.

You could, but that description sounds misleading enough to be verging on dishonest. He is not simply squatting, but has a role on the island - a role that he filled after the previous caretaker retired.

<comment><USER21> Eh, maybe.

I'm wary of romanticizing the situation. There's an island, once privately owned but bought back by the Italian government for several million €, which is part of a national park set up to preserve the ecosystem.

And by serendipity, we have Morandi, shipwrecked some thirty years ago and with no background in botany or biology, who's set up as steward-for-life on a place any grad student would give their left arm to caretake.

The guy lives in a literal (and littoral, ha!) paradise in a situation so bizarrely irreproducible one can only think, "Yeah, must be a nice life..."

Would we have the same warm fuzzy — "That guy's got it aaallll figured out" — feeling if NatGeo wrote the article about the once-owner, Michael Harte, bivouacking on his private island?

<comment><USER22> > Would we have the same warm fuzzy — "That guy's got it aaallll figured out" > — feeling if NatGeo wrote the article about the once-owner, Michael Harte, > bivouacking on his private island?

Probably more so, and it would be an even more interesting article in my opinion - ' _Multimillionaire Banking Executive Gives It All up for a Solitary Island Life_ '. The existing article mostly left me thinking "what caused this guy to leave society". That same question of a multimillionaire in that situation could prove enlightening for many.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I find these stories about people like this exhilarating. I think we all yearn to do this, and yet few of us do.

<comment><USER24> I'm just one data point but I have absolutely zero desire to do something like this.

<comment><USER11> And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm an outdoorsy type, raised in the countryside where houses were miles apart. Still, as an adult I prefer the convenience of close society even though I'm not a "people person" by nature. Everyone has their own comfort zone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This man was not alone on an island for 28 years. He may have lived by himself but that's no real feat, especially considering he was not alone. People live in big cities "alone for 28 years" or even longer.

People live like this without being in a tropical paradise, why is this getting attention? People are fascinated with the idea that they too could live on a deserted island (but of course this island wasn't deserted when he landed).

</comment><comment><USER26> Though not along the same lines as the other stories mentioned here, Seven Years in Tibet was an interesting book, also made into a film.

</comment><comment><USER27> I hope he does an AMA.

</comment><comment><USER28> I guess this man is an island

</comment><comment><USER29> How does he get food?

<comment><USER30> One of the picture captions, "He has a companion who delivers groceries to the island every two weeks."

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Well, I spoke to his friend, Wilson, who said while he was on the island he had a ball.

</comment><comment><USER32> Isn't this article months old? Why is it relevant today?

<comment><USER33> It's only been posted twice to HN, today and 15 days ago. Both times by the same person. They obviously thought it was interesting, and by the fact it's now on the HN front page, [probably] means that the HN community found it interesting also. HN is not a current-news site; posts should be [from the FAQ]:

 _Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one 's intellectual curiosity._

<comment><USER32> First time, no comments. Just an observation.

<comment><USER34> HN has plenty of randomness that may float or sink a submission. That's why the mods themselves have been experimenting with resubmission of potentially interesting links that didn't get any traction.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dark Scrum - <AUTHOR> http://ronjeffries.com/articles/016-09ff/defense/ <comment><USER2> This is a shockingly accurate representation of the vast majority of "Scrum" implementations.</comment>


Hacker News Classic - <AUTHOR> https://news.ycombinator.com/classic <comment><USER2> How is this different from the current site. I don't immediately notice any differences.

<comment><USER3> Maybe that is the point - I guess it means that the "main" version is about to change.</comment></comment>


Zynga to Sell Its San Francisco Headquarters - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/zynga-to-sell-its-san-francisco-headquarters-1456336000 <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11161311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11161311)

</comment><comment><USER3> They announced a few weeks ago that they ditched this plan, ostensibly because it would be too expensive to lease back the space right now. [http://nypost.com/2016/07/14/zynga-isnt-abandoning-its- headq...](http://nypost.com/2016/07/14/zynga-isnt-abandoning-its-headquarters- after-all/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Probably a good move given how expensive real estate is in the city right now and how Zynga has fared in the last few years.</comment>


GAO report reveals Pentagon's use of floppy disks to control US nuclear weapons - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/politics/us-government-information-technology-old-systems-gao-report/?tw=dd <comment><USER2> Here's the full report: [http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-16-696T](http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-16-696T)</comment>


BitCoin Meetup in Berlin next Thursday, room77 - <AUTHOR> http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=27191.0 <comment><AUTHOR> Room77 is a burger bar in Berlin that accepts BitCoin payments. Don't forget to prepare a way to transfer BTC, either an online wallet or some mobile wallet. They also accept EUR if you don't want to pay in BTC.</comment>


Longhorn: open source project for microservices-based distributed block storage - stephane-klein http://rancher.com/microservices-block-storage/ <comment><AUTHOR> Longhorn is a loaded term as it was an MS project name for Windows Vista a few years back: longhorn.ms</comment>


90% economy, 120% gastronomy: Covid-19 seems to have changed lifestyles for good - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/08/08/covid-19-seems-to-have-changed-lifestyles-for-good <comment><USER2> "Covid-19 seems to have changed [x] for good" is not worth reading, for all values of x, until we have gotten to a post-pandemic environment. It's like saying, in the seconds or even days after a car crash, that the car crash has changed your driving styles for good. Wayyyyyy too early to say.

<comment><USER3> Yep, some of these predictions are outright comical. "has covid ended handshakes forever" or "will we ever go back to bars?".

Bars and handshakes have survived _thousands_ of years of pandemics. I get that people always tend to think their moment in history is particularly special, but I'm just gonna say if the black death didn't do something in this won't either

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure bars existed in the times of Black Death. I learned recently that a sit down restaurant with a menu is a relatively new thing. Two hundred years or so. Plus minus a few decades.

Your point still stands though. I just thought I would point that out as I found it somewhat interesting because for a long time I had assumed that restaurant business was much older than that.

<comment><USER5> >I'm not sure bars existed in the times of Black Death

depends what you mean by a bar?

In the UK, taverns certainly existed prior to the Black Death (1346 – 1353). For instance:

> Established in the 13th Century, The White Hart Inn on Drury Lane claims to > be London's oldest pub. Historical records show its first license was > granted as early as 1216

[https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2017/10/the-15-oldest- pubs...](https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2017/10/the-15-oldest-pubs-in-the- uk-ranked-according-to-their-claims/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is premature. There are many regions still either under partial lockdown or where people remain uneasy about going out. These trends may be interesting if they continue a year from now, but it's too early to tell.

<comment><USER7> I'd like to offer you my anecdote, suggesting this will have lasting effects:

it forced me to learn cooking! My folks have commented on this a lot, I really stepped up my cooking game in this confinement. I've learned how to make a lot of pasta sauces, and how to do them _easily and quickly_, etc. The key was learning it well enough to become comfortable with it so that it doesn't loom as some esoteric activity which will eat some unknown amount of time.

Moreover, I crossed the point of being good enough that now it's one of the activities I enjoy... and I'm now intrigued about general principles rather than wracking my brain over strictly, unconfidently following recipes to a tee. Basically, it forced me to get on the right track of starting a wonderful adventure.

<comment><USER8> Mind to share some good pasta sauce ideas?

<comment><USER7> Of course!

Marianara sauce: [https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015987-classic- marinara...](https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1015987-classic-marinara- sauce) You'd have to buy a san marazano can and spaghetti for this, a couple bucks each, and you can store each for quite a while. You can add meatballs in it if you're not a vegetarian.

Pesto sauce: [https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/07/best-pesto- recip...](https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/07/best-pesto-recipe.html) You might balk at the idea of having fresh basil... I would argue it's one of the things you really need in your life! Buy a small plant, it'll run you 3-4 dollars (if that). Keep it by your window sil so it gets some sunshine, and it looks pretty, and the responsibility of having to water it is calming and enjoyable.

A whit'ish sauce: [https://lilluna.com/creamy-garlic-penne- pasta/](https://lilluna.com/creamy-garlic-penne-pasta/)

It really gets fun when you get fancy with it. I often add whatever vegetable I have at hand (e.g. , get some cumin seeds and bay leaves heated up in some olive oil, add some onions/garlic into this oil... and whatever spices you like and can handle (I'm partial to a bit of cayenne pepper, paprika, ground cumin), and finally add your $VEGETABLE). Add this to your pasta sauce.

<comment><USER9> Non basil pesto is also amazing. Some of my faves are with flat parsley (more spicy notes), ramps (not in season right now obvi), and mint pistachio

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> All I know is that a crowded elevator is going to be strange experience for many now for a long time, especially those who work in tall buildings.

A small cough in an elevator is the new fart.

</comment><comment><USER11> How can they possibly come a those conclusions when we're still in the epidemic

<comment><USER12> Ironically, the first news article I stumbled across after leaving HN just now was "Simon Cowell broke his back falling off an electric bicycle".

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> ...why is "hair clippers" listed under "home entertainment"?

Bad haircut pranks?

<comment><USER14> If that's the case, I "pranked" my cat with hilarious effect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is a thing with the media where they seem to take every trend as "the new normal" and extrapolate out to infinity anything that shows even remote signs of being embraced. It's usually not the case.

Sure, there may be some lasting changes that arise from Covid-19, but it's probably not going to be as drastic as is being implied.

Every time something new arises, the media is quick to declare "This is it! This is how things are now and always will be forever!" while ignoring the fact that a change _just_ happened which would seem to imply that another change will probably happen again at some time in the future.

</comment><comment><USER16> Seems like it would be pretty easy to game this sort of conclusion-making based on Google search terms.

For example, let's say I control a popular app which installed on people's devices -- thousands of developers/corporations/other entities are in this position. I insert some new code in the app (perhaps via an automatic update) that sends a Google query for some search term from a pool of similar terms I have chosen. I can easily mimic the HTTP headers sent by a common web browser, thereby making my request indistinguishable from one that is intentionally submitted by a user, chosen from a list of common browser headers.

By having large swathes of users all appearing to search for the same or similar terms I can make it appear to, say, the Economist, that the public at- large is interested in a given topic. From there, the Economist will make assumptions about the population at-large and then make conclusions about what this means. Then they will publish these "findings" as a story. Many readers will be swayed by the Economist's conclusions. At that point I will have effectively influenced what those readers now believe. All it took were some phoney searches.

Later, I could remove the code in the next auto-update.

By the time something like this was discovered by a user MITM'ing the app traffic and reverse engineering the app, chances are I would have already accomplished my objective: to influence people -- perhaps investors -- to believe a story like the one reported here by the Economist. (Note: I am not suggesting the Economist's conclusions are wrong in this case.)

<comment><USER17> Are you suggesting this has actually happened, or are you just saying it's theoretically possible?

<comment><USER16> Purely hypothetical. The only things I know for sure are that there is an enormous amount of 1. web traffic being sent automatically by people's devices which they are wholly unaware of and 2. willingness to allow "auto-updates" where no user ever looks at the contents of the code that comprises the update.

It also seems like there is a trend of increasingly important decisions being made based on assumptions arising from analysis of web traffic, however I could be wrong on that observation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The pandemic proved that remote work is viable. And some people will now be able to do it permanently.

</comment><comment><USER19> Electoric bicycle fall under the Healthy Living category? Like how?

<comment><USER20> I've noticed that people who don't identify as bikers are more and more opting for an ebike over an oldskool bike by default (and bikers too, as another steed in the stable).

I don't think this is a bad thing for public health. Ebikes need pedalling too, they just assist. They assist quite a lot, which makes them fun to ride, and probably makes them more enticing to take out. The fact that they assist means you can go further in the same time, which is certainly what I witness happening amongst my bikehead friends and the people I meet in the mountains.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Oh no, tie-dye has been having a 235% increase in searches.

</comment><comment> aaron-santos Being The Economist I suppose it makes sense they left out the absolutely massive shift in the trending of Marxism[1](~+900%) in the last few months.

[1] - [https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F065...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%2Fm%2F0651vn)

<comment><USER22> I'd like to point out that you are data-illiterate here.

Here is an alternate explanation: Very few people search for 19th century political philosphies on Google, compared to the number of people who search for "hangover". Therefore all it takes is 1 news article, interview, book, movie, etc to cause people to do a quick search and find out what a word means.

So called "using google as a dictionary" is all you are seeing here.

The spike you are seeing, no surprise, coincides with a specific person describing BLM as "marxist".

This has _nothing_ to do with covid. It's honestly stupid for you to try to draw a straight line between COVID and marxism and imply that it's some kind of conspiracy that the Economist is hiding.

<comment> bigcorp-slave This is a pretty hostile post that looks like it violates site guidelines to me. Can you express your point civilly?

<comment><USER23> I don't think the insults obscure the point. I may be "data illiterate" too but it sounds plausible.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Army of the New Independents - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/the-army-of-the-new-independents <comment><USER2> Anyone who thinks $140/hr (or whatever per project rate is) is too high, consider the following.

My CPA in a Midwest/Great Plains rural town of 10K people charges $175/hour. Her firm has 5 other CPAs. The town has around 20 CPAs total.

My attorney charges $90/hour for advice only. Nothing else. $90/hour just to discuss a problem (pro rated per minute) or BS. If there's real work to be done (contract creation/review, legal issues, etc), it's more. He's in a town of 2K people.

Auto dealers in towns/cities ranging from 5K to 200K population are charging between $90-120/hour for mechanic's labor. Not including parts/supplies. Oil changes at many dealerships range from $45 to $70. (Oil changes at mom and pops run $25-30.)

Dentists? I just saw an ad for a newly opened dental office in a metro area. Special for cleaning, x-rays and such was like $75 from a regular rate of around $350.

Electricians? $80-100+/hr easily for a good journeyman or master. Not including service call charge. That was in 2011. ( A good electrician rate thread from 2009: [http://www.electriciantalk.com/f15/when-did-you-last- raise-y...](http://www.electriciantalk.com/f15/when-did-you-last-raise-your- labor-rate-6058/#post68826) )

$40-75 to mow your lawn. $40-50 to clean snow from your driveway.

Technologists make things which can bring in (or save) hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, but seem to consistently undervalue their worth.

<comment><USER3> none of those guys can be easily outsourced overseas though

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I'm taking it at face value for the hell of it:

Horror stories of outsourcing cheaply overseas, where doing it ended up delaying the project and sending it way over budget, are so commonplace now that you really need to define 'easily'. I would reword your statement:

> none of those guys can be recklessly outsourced overseas though

...but it no longer supports your point :-)

<comment><USER3> countless companies have remote employees or contractors and it seems to work out great for them. there are horror stories about anything under the sun if you look hard enough

my point was that the end client will always have more choice regarding building their site than cleaning their pool. they can outsource to elance, get a highschool kid to build on wordpress, use shopify, etc

all of them being orders of magnitute cheaper than hiring the local agency with the fancy offices

<comment><USER4> The downside to getting the wrong Elancer, or the wrong high school kid, in terms of delays and wages paid, is potentially a lot higher than not having your pool cleaned properly.

In my view, you're right about "choice" in the same way you'd be right about the choice of apps on App Store or Google Play.

But, you are right that there is more choice, for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This pretty well matches my personal experience, fwiw. I was pretty content as a youth to have a full time job working for someone else, then I saw a couple of really good, young, skilled people get unceremoniously "let go" one day. A few years later it happened to me, and I ended up bouncing around from job to job for a while before starting my own business.

I didn't start my business solely because of employment issues. I was still employable, I could've gone and gotten another job. I wanted to be able to provide something to lots of different businesses at the same time, and striking out on my own seemed like the best way to do that.

But, seeing other people lose their job and losing my own at one point completely destroyed any belief I had in job security. I naively believed at first that only "bad" employees get fired; as long as you were valuable to your employer, your employer took care of you.

So launching my own business seemed like better job security. Except, that was naive too. I really didn't understand all of the benefits of employment: paid time off, a schedule, mostly reliable income, all of the resources that a larger business has, and most of all, the ability to leave work at work and go home and live an entirely different life.

I think the social contract between employees and employers is pretty broken in the U.S. at the moment. Employees are spending way too much time at work on Facebook and Reddit and other things; employers largely aren't treating their workers as anything other than human livestock. But I still wouldn't recommend getting into business for yourself to most people. It's tremendously difficult.

A little less than 10 years later, and I'm doing OK and my business now employs other people and is still growing -- very, very slowly -- but I'm still attracted to a stable, reasonably well paying job.

<comment><USER6> > destroyed any belief I had in job security

your story exactly parallels mine. living in cold, harsh reality for the past few years has really opened my eyes to a lot of things, including many philosophical questions about what society is, how it works, and how it's broken. it has also taught me to respect a wide variety of professions that i once thought were bullshit.

basically, a lot of these societal 'truths' (about jobs, marriage, school, money, housing, government, etc.) that we accept as really just projected ideals that dress up reality for mass easy living. these ideals (they're myths, really) have worked for decades and are beginning to unravel. just look at the state of employment, gender relations, inequality, debt, financial shenanigans, civil liberties... it's a circus of epic proportions. yet people are so afraid of breaking out of established tracks until they're forced against a wall. it's a complete mind fuck.

kind of a dark take on it, but really it's just a transitional phase, it's not the end of the world. i think a lot of people feel a general anxiety even if they can't articulate the concern. this, even though the economy is ostensibly recovering.

having said all that, i would never take another tech job ever again with anything less than $10M in the bank, a very small (but real) possibility. my tolerance for bullshit from any superior would be exactly zero. sorry, can't do it.

and as i'm sure you know part of 'seeing the truth' is realizing that your business could fail in a matter of weeks - you sound like the kind of guy that is also mentally prepared for that. if everything were to go south for me tomorrow, i would rather work as a bartender or whatever somewhere warm and cheap and just live out my days being a beach bum. i don't need a company or employer to work on my own hobbies. truth.

<comment><USER7> You would still take a job if you had 10M in the bank? I might.. but it wouldn't be for the money. It would be out of interest (which is already what I do).

<comment><USER6> i want a lot of money. if i had 10M, i'd want more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The only way I'd ever make it past the "ballpark figure" requirement is by working in finance in London, which I don't really want to do.

I mostly work for less than that, deliberately work maybe 50% of the time, and consider myself embarrassingly well off compared to most of my peers. I don't think my plumber friend earns as much as I do, but I'm not bothered by the idea that he might.

I am down with the idea that we should avoid racing to the bottom, I don't think "union" is a dirty word, and maybe there's even some kind of argument that I have an ethical responsibility to work full time even though I don't want to. But from where I stand this piece seems a little divorced from (my) reality.

Maybe it's something to do with being called Joe.

<comment><USER9> I don't understand the idea of "...an ethical responsibility to work full time" at all. Why shouldn't the amount of labour you want to sell be open to negotiation?

The fact that it's relatively hard to find "normal jobs" in my field in formats other than full time is one of the factors that makes me seriously consider the jump to freelancing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The 50% rejection rate over pricing is reasonable given the degree to which Jaques has established himself. For a newly minted independent, the percentage of potential clients who will only pay ~$0 is much higher than for someone with a strong reputation among people who have a strong sense of the business value expertise adds.

The sorts of leads a new consultant gets are more along the lines of can-you- do-me-a-favor personal connections. There's much more "You're a jerk for expecting me to pay money" and "I didn't think a suspension bridge across the Colorado Canyon would cost more than $500."

New independents deal with amateurs more frequently than is typical for established consultants. The race to the bottom is a function of that, not always ignorance. Pricing is a good way to get to "No" quickly.

For a newly minted independent, "no" is still better than bad projects which end with not getting paid. The critical rejection rate for a newly minted independent is the rejection rate over retainers. Sure with your former company, so long as they are not downsizing because of a financial shortfall, then payment down the road might be acceptable. But with amateurs, retainers are critical both in terms of financial safety but for screening the amateurs who will view you as a professional from those who will treat you as a rube.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think this is a great list of the costs of being independent. However, he did skip over the benefits, which are:

Closer ties to the market--you are much more employable as a contractor, because you have to be! You have to seek out and sell yourself far more than an employee does, which means you know who is buying what.

The ability spread risk across several clients. This is not always possible in the same week or month, but if you are a contractor and are only working for one client for months at a time, you aren't a contractor, you're an employee with no benefits. Seek out other clients and spread your risk.

The flexibility to work when you want to work. Both in the small (when you want to start working each day) and in the large (when you want to spend down some of your savings in vacation/tech exploration/etc and not work for a while).

The ability to turn down work. Don't discount this as a benefit. If you are an employee, your choices are 'do the work you are assigned', 'ask your manager for different work' or 'walk'. If you are a contractor/independent, you have much the same choices, but 'walking' is far less risky, due to the your awareness of the market and your multiple clients (see above).

</comment><comment><USER12> I had this exact conversation with a friend over beers last week. It basically went like this, "You're only charging X per hour? I make that now as a full time dev with health insurance, a 401k and the expectation that I will have a job next month. You're under pricing your risk." He then asked me to buy the next round. Cheeky bastard.

<comment><USER13> > the expectation that I will have a job next month

That's an assumption on your side. Likely it will pan out for the near future but be careful about relying too much on that assumption.

> He then asked me to buy the next round. Cheeky bastard.

Hehe. That should remind you not to brag ;) I hope he got something useful out of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Passing on costs is a long term pattern. Relatively recently (40 years or so - I did say 'relatively') United States' Congress' changing of the defined benefit (DB) plans to defined contributions (DC) was a prime example (ERISA - think 401K here) and now some in the USA's House of Representatives are trying to get out of bailing out State's shortfalls for State's DBs: [http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-114hres41ih/pdf/BILLS-114...](http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-114hres41ih/pdf/BILLS-114hres41ih.pdf)

Not likely to pass, necessarily, but a sign of the times.

Citizens of countries with Central Banks live in debt-based economies, and thanks to many of the recent gyrations to "correct" some of these economies, more currency has been created. To me, this is another reason to consider raising rates even higher, to offset the weakening currency.

</comment><comment><USER15> There's an acquaintance of mine working as a freelance (ZZP) C# or Java developer for Bose in the Netherlands. I always try to encourage him to either switch jobs or negotiate a higher tariff. He currently earns only 35 EUR an hour (excl. VAT) but he thinks it's a decent income. I really think no developer in The Netherlands should ask anything below 50 EUR an hour (excl. VAT) and even that is quite low.

P.S.: I think one mistake many freelancers make is using the word 'wage' instead of 'tariff' \- in my mind it has a very different meaning and to me I feel less powerful / in control if I would talk about e.g. a 'fair wage' with a prospective client.

<comment><USER16> I get to charge 75 euro per hour for php development. Java / C# should command at least 100 euro per hour in the Netherlands.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. He should _at least_ triple his rates. And if Bose won't have him at that rate then plenty of others will.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd like to add that engineers/developers can hardly do the jump to being independent in the described situation, but there many lower paying jobs where this is being done, too.

Also, I am compeletely amazed by how idiotically this is handled by management with respect to software development, where the code can have negative net worth without the guy who developed it, and knows its ins and outs. And people put on contract work will eventually leave these untenable situations, especially if they are competent.

Call be bitter, but I am quite disheartened when I see how much opportunity and talend is squandered for some temporary short-term gain, like "reducing" fixed costs by outsourcing.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't know that under-charging small companies last all that long. When we first started out we were greatly undercharging, and after a few years almost went under. Luckily for us we figured it out just in time.

Nobody should aspire to be a replaceable unit in any case. If Joe down the road can replace you, yeah, it is going to be tough being a small company.

There is another side to this that I think is worth exploring. For a long time capital has had a significant advantage over labour (see rising inequality). I think we might be at the inflection point where the capital costs of so many businesses are dropping to the extent that capital's advantage is eroding. I'm thinking of bootstrappers and so on. Obviously capital still helps, and the relative advantage isn't uniform across all sectors or industries (if you want to do something for consumers you probably need capital; likewise space exploration or bio-tech), but I think a sizable number of people are in the situation where they can own their output.

</comment><comment><USER19> _I aim for roughly 50% rejections based on the rate I'm charging,_

Shoot for 90%. As long as you keep pumping the funnel with more conversations, a lot of "nos" are just noise on the way to a "yes"

One note here: in most cases, being a 1099 is a much more honest relationship than being an employee. Some of the saddest folks I've seen in my IT career were extremely smart people who thought they had security in an IT job. Such a thing does not exist, no matter what they call you.

</comment><comment><USER20> One of my first experiences out of college was with a company that did this. It was pretty tough to watch a bunch of people I had worked with get laid off and then ironically asked to work as contractors. Most of them did _not_ turn around and start working for the company as contractors even though the offer was made, mostly out of spite. Some of them did become independent contractors, though.

<comment><USER11> I left a company in the early 2000s (quit, not laid off, if it matters). Then they needed help with something that I'd done. I was happy to help, at the highest hourly rate I could imagine asking for (probably wasn't enough, I was only a few years out of school)--paid up front, thank you very much.

I waited to start working until that check was in my hand.

I had friends who worked for that company as contractors who ended on a list of creditors. I wanted to avoid that fate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What the article doesn't mention that the tax authorities in some country's don't like some types of self employed contractors.

Ask a UK based contractor about IR35 and you will get an earful - though of course lawyers and accountants are allowed to continue as before - got to keep those greasy engineers in there place old chap.

<comment><USER13> I'm not familiar with the situation in the UK though I know some freelancers/contractors there, can you explain a bit more about this?

<comment><USER21> For certain types of self employment typically IT consultants HMRC unless you pass a lot of hard to pass tests you treated as an employee for tax purposes.

Self employment can if done via a Limited company reduce your tax rate drastically - but of course it was only selectively targeted self employed accountants and lawyers can carry on as before.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IR35](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IR35)

Most IT consultants work through umbrella companies to get round some of the disadvantages -but you cant make use of some of the tax advantages a re al elf employed contractor can.</comment></comment></comment>


The Real World: A Four Month Retrospective - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hartleybrody.com/four-months/

<comment><USER2> It's a good thing the weight of responsibility is lowered onto our shoulders slowly. You're complaining about bike maintenance, but owning a home is way worse (something is always broken). And when you get married, your spouse is likely also working ... it's quite a shock when one of you has to stay home with the kids. My advice to any newly graduated (and newly earning) workers is to save everything you can. And if you get married, live off one income while saving the other.

Have fun ... life can be rewarding without spending a dime!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the encouragement! I've been trying to focus on saving money, but lately I've been turning more to alternative sources of income to boost the amount I can tuck away. It's hard as a 22 year old to learn proper spending habits when almost everyone around me has bad ones. I wrote a bit about it here:

<http://blog.hartleybrody.com/first-million/></comment></comment>


Automatically finding Codenames clues with GloVe vectors - <AUTHOR> https://jsomers.net/glove-codenames <comment><USER2> I also tried writing an AI for Codenames a couple of years ago, with the help from some friends. Interestingly, we also found out the hard way that the word "round" aren't used in the same contexts as things that actually are round, so our AI also struggled to connect "round" with words like "Jupiter" or even "Sphere". I'm not sure how to fix that, but maybe knowledge graphs could help?

But I also thought it was surprising how well it worked most of the time! It wasn't quite as good as a human spymaster, but with the right choice of scoring function we could actually get a model based on word embeddings to play a pretty reasonable game of Codenames.

[https://github.com/Gullesnuffs/Codenames](https://github.com/Gullesnuffs/Codenames)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a cool article, and I appreciate the actual testing.

I also heartily recommend this implementation using conceptnet embeddings.

[https://github.com/commonsense/codenames](https://github.com/commonsense/codenames)

Grab the latest mini.h5 and go. [https://github.com/commonsense/conceptnet- numberbatch/blob/m...](https://github.com/commonsense/conceptnet- numberbatch/blob/master/README.md)

</comment><comment><USER4> This is cool. With a 300-dimensional word representation, there are a lot of degrees of freedom to play with to achieve sharing meaning axes with the good words and diverging along meaning axes with the bad words.

 _There 's an over-indexing problem: words that happen to be very close to one or two of the targets will rank highly even when they're far away from the third. Minimizing the maximum distance from any target helps mitigate but doesn't entirely solve this problem._

This is because they combine the distances using something like more like OR- gate (are any of these very good) and should be using AND (are all of these very good).

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, but in the first example I would be worried that Wok would be misheard as "walk", which might entice people to pick the instant fail card of "fall". That's a meta-level of the game (which I've played with friends and family) that you have to be aware of, and sometimes you can use to your advantage. Because of that, using a program that can perfectly disambiguate between the word and associations will probably lead to some non-intuitive results sometimes.

<comment><USER6> I believe making use of two meanings of a word through homonyms like wok and walk or night and Knight is technically against the rules.

<comment><USER7> It's not against the rules for players to mishear. There are rules against punning but that's not what the post you're replying to was talking about.

Using a homonym is fair game. Intending that homonym to have two meanings when you give the clue is not.</comment></comment></comment>


LinkedIn communications at center of unprecedented lawsuit - <AUTHOR> http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=3E4521DD-1A64-67EA-E4E72980E5530596

<comment><USER2> " _The case could "have far-reaching implications for the law governing restrictive covenants in employment,"_ "

Outside of California, that is. Again and again I just can't help wondering if this isn't a key part of Silicon Valley's "secret sauce".</comment>


Britain's new Internet Law: Death of the Startup in Britain? - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/20/britains-new-interne.html

<comment><USER4> This Bill is even worse than feared - see London based Telnic's (.tel registry) response to the government informing them that the statutory instrument to seize managerial control of domain registries applies to them:

<http://prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=272545>

Allegations of "abusive" behaviour on the part of registrars or end-users could lead an ignorant Secretary of State triggering this instrument.

So what's "abusive"? Well just for starters, registering an expired domain name is. Yes really, that's what the government believes (see the Digital Britain report).

So a company with about 12 employees has gone from being heralded at the UK IT awards last week for "the biggest innovation to come out of the UK since the www from Sir Tim Berners-Lee.".. to fearing nationalisation!

Brown thinks he can run the "Digital Economy" like a Soviet tractor factory. Who would want to invest in this?

What a joke.

</comment><comment><USER5> Things are bad here with the DCMA, but things are really frightening in the UK which doesnt have the fundamental constitutional concepts of privacy, freedom of speech, and reasonable constraints on libel. Charlie Stross, a UK SF writer, has a blog today on this topic. [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2009/11/imbecile...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog- static/2009/11/imbeciles.html)

BTW: he's one of us.

<comment><USER6> FWIW:

"things are really frightening in the UK which doesnt have the fundamental constitutional concepts of privacy, freedom of speech, and reasonable constraints on libel"

Only if you believe everything you read on the internet.

<comment><USER7> The statement you quoted is technically true, however. That doesn't mean that the UK exercises all the authority available to it or that the US does not pass illegal laws.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is _fantastic_. It's great news.

No, seriously. This kind of thing is exactly what's needed to make services like i2p (<http://i2p2.de>) popular enough to go mainstream.

Or another way to look at it, oft-quoted, is: the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

<comment><USER9> This has been on the tip of my tongue for a long while, so I might as well go ahead and say it now. I am ready to acknowledge the power of technology as much as anyone hanging around here.

But I think that dismissing the computer/internet laws currently being passed by countries in the EU as being unenforceable, or being easily solvable by technology workarounds is a great fallacy and the most stupid thing in the world to do.

The cat and mouse play between technology workarounds and law cannot go on forever, because eventually you will run out of legal workarounds. This is similar to the cat and mouse play between the police and law breakers. Unless you are in bed with the police, you will eventually get caught.

I think that the only viable alternative is to oppose these laws and hope they don't pass.

<comment><USER8> Why not do both? Oppose the laws, protest the laws, and when that doesn't work, then develop new technology to get around the laws.

This is a cycle that has been happening for millennia. It's not new. Authoritarians come into power, then they amass power, and then they attempt to rule by force. Usually, people first welcome their new authorities, because they want order and they naively expect that authorities are on their side; then they begin to become disenfranchised; and finally, they begin to subvert the authority and eventually counteract it altogether.

The only novel thing here is the level of technology that we're dealing with now -- but that benefits both sides.

Look at China: they've developed probably the most advanced national communications surveillance and filtering technology in the world (depending on how deep your paranoia runs); and while that works for many people, others are still finding ways around it.

Or, look at BitTorrent. Media "authorities" attack centralized distribution; hackers develop decentralized distribution. Authorities attack centralized tracking; hackers develop distributed hash tables. Authorities attack the protocol itself; hackers develop a new protocol. Authorities attack unencrypted communications; hackers develop decentralized, anonymous, encrypted communications.

Eventually this cycle of escalation will lead to distributed networks -- "guerilla" wifi mesh networks are already being used in some places -- and the only way the authorities will be able to counter that will be to shut down wired, wireless, and cellular communications for the great majority of the population.

How long do you think that will remain popular?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The text of the bill: [http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2009-10/digitaleconomy/d...](http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2009-10/digitaleconomy/documents.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> It's really irritating when people write the title to make it sound as if a bill which hasn't gone through parliament yet is already law.

<comment><USER6> Where would the modern internet be without groups of people getting completely outraged by things that they shouldn't really worry about.

See also: Every person in the UK is caught on CCTV a billion times every single day, which is fed into a central database and used by the government. Every email is logged by the government. etc etc etc.

This is the entire business model for "The daily mail" paper in the UK - <USER2> people completely scared to death about every single thing so they think the worlds falling apart and they need to buy the paper to keep up with it all. "There's pedophiles on everyones street!" "global warming will kill us all" "the government is spying on _everyone_ " and so on for ever.

<comment><USER12> _Where would the modern internet be without groups of people getting completely outraged by things that they shouldn't really worry about._

You may not be outraged by the curtailment of our freedoms by a man who is unelected and has been booted out of post twice (at least) and who is spearheading a new copyright initiative immediately after staying at the pleasure of a media magnate, said initiative doing nothing for the public domain and everything for vested monopoly interests.

You may not, but those of us who prefer not to enforce the profit of the super-rich by the rule of law, solely for the benefit of those rich, we should be outraged.

<comment><USER6> It's only a few months until the whole government gets kicked out - <USER3> evil mandleson and his cronies. I have quite a bit of faith the Conservative government will undo a fair bit of the damage Labour have done.

<comment><USER13> > I have quite a bit of faith the Conservative government will undo a fair bit > of the damage Labour have done.

Actually the Conservatives broadly support this particular bit of damage. In fact they want disconnection of filesharers to happen sooner: <http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debate/?id=2009-11-09c.6.8>

Furthermore, the Tories are also in with Rupert Murdoch -- they're widely suspected of having done a secret deal with him -- so they'd be likely to go along with any new restrictions on fair use etc that Murdoch wants in order to turn the net into a locked-down pay-per-view digital newspaper. (Murdoch's plans won't work, of course, but that won't stop the Tories pushing through harmful laws).

So while the Tories will be better than Labour in some ways, they're sure to be worse in other ways: meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I honestly never thought I'd say this, but this bill makes our DMCA look awesome. Politics in Europe are so unproductive and ridiculous, I really hope that it doesn't spread to the United States and other countries that still have some personal freedoms.

<comment><USER15> Judging all of European politics by what's happening in the UK right now is like judging American cuisine by one meal served at McDonalds (which admittedly, a lot of Europeans tend to do).

Nice counter-example: Finland just made broadband internet access into a legal right: [http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/15/finland.internet.righ...](http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/15/finland.internet.rights/)

<comment><USER6> I think making net access a human right is ridiculous. What next? Criminals asserting their human legal rights to have 1MB net connection installed in their cells.

<comment><USER11> It's not much different these days than giving them the right to send and receive mail, I don't see why you think it's so silly.

<comment><USER6> Because it negates the whole point you put them in prison.

At some point we'll get the human right to "not be in a cell". And then where will we be?

<comment><USER11> >Because it negates the whole point you put them in prison.

So you think that being in prison would be perfectly pleasant just as long as you had a broadband connection? Some life you must lead.

<comment><USER6> It's a really slippery slope. And to be honest, yeah - having a net connection is a pretty big luxury I don't think criminals serving at her Majesties' pleasure should actually be entitled to. Obviously if they're to be rehabilitated, then it would make sense to allow them that, but whilst they're serving time, isn't the whole point to take away the home comforts?

There was also some call (Probably from EU) to give criminals in jail the right to a vote. Which I also strongly disagree with.

They're in there to separate them from society. And that includes 'online' society IMHO - hence they should not have net connections.

<comment><USER11> >They're in there to separate them from society. And that includes 'online' society IMHO - hence they should not have net connections.

And presumably they shouldn't be allowed to send letters or have visitors either right? There's a "slippery slope" in both directions.

<comment><USER6> It's only feasible to send letters to individuals. Not society. Same with visitors. The two don't really compare.

<comment><USER11> What?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is why we need to overthrow some government and establish a hacker nation. I think something similar happened in the movie Igor....

In all seriousness, this is pretty scary. There is a fierce dichotomy here. There aren't very many people who believe file-sharing is _that_ morally wrong (or morally wrong to begin with), it is just becoming _very illegal._

Things are going to get more and more ridiculous, until we are forced to re- evaluate the very paradigms that hold up our economies. I've said it before, "money" is outdated.

<comment><USER13> Y'know, a hacker nation would have an _awesome_ economy, at least its internet / high tech sector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Related: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=950338>

</comment><comment><USER18> do people have any more freedoms left in UK?

<comment><USER6> At least we can drink a pint of beer before we're 21. Keep your "freedom".

We also have the freedom of health care for all. You know, we look after each other so people don't die so much.

<comment><USER19> _sigh_

I'm happy for you that you have more freedom to drink beer. May I kindly suggest that, when exercising that freedom, you try and avoid nationalistic flame wars? This is Hacker News.

<comment><USER11> Why are you taking the parent to task for this rather than the OP?

<comment><USER19> It's a fair question. To me, it's a positive thing to criticize the decline of civil liberties in one country, but a negative thing to respond to that criticism with a "at least we're better than another country" flame. It's not productive at all to play the "my country is less bad than yours" game.

<comment><USER11> > It's a fair question. To me, it's a positive thing to criticize the decline > of civil liberties in one country, but a negative thing to respond to that > criticism with a "at least we're better than another country" flame.

The OP's comment was clearly a flame of precisely that sort. It wasn't making any constructive commentary on civil liberties issues, just asking a dumb and inflammatory rhetorical question.

I suggest that the only reason you find the OP less offensive than the reply is that you're American and not British. If our internet laws are fair game for criticism, I think your (crazy) alcohol laws and health system must be too :)

Also, what makes you so sure that civil liberties have been "declining" in the UK? There have been steps forward as well as steps back, I don't see any justification for overall pessimism.

<comment><USER19> And if there were an HN article about American alcohol and health care policies, I'd criticize them along with you.

The OP wasn't a good comment either, but the response was even worse, which is another way of saying "internet flamewars escalate".

<comment><USER11> But it was the OP who broadened the topic of discussion by asking if there were "any" freedoms left in Britain. That naturally invites comparisons outside the area of copyright law.

>especially when you're doing it in a dishonest attempt to make British law seem better.

I don't think he was trying to make British copyright law seem better; at least, I didn't read that into the post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Linkbait. Why would this be anything concerning startups? Why would it discourage startups from starting up in Britain? How will it impact current startups? It won't.

No real news here, just some silly politicians trying to show muscle, which will ultimately fail and be irrelevant.

<comment><USER20> This bill very specifically concerns startups. Want to create a disruptive service? (e.g. You create a site to allow people to rate insurance sites) - well with this different businesses that say they're in the same industry can accuse you of infringement (e.g. insurance price comparison sites) and have you shut down providing they can convince the secretary of state, meaning that if you have a competitor then you may be screwed if you don't screw first.

It's not necessarily the case that it will fail. The current government uses laws with enabling clauses that are triggered by statutory instruments. Some of these laws include the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill (which allows wiretapping by authorised authorities) where authorised authorities were extended from the police to local authorities - who use it to spy on people to make sure they're managing bins properly. Another one is the Serious Organised Crime and Policing Act (SOCPA) which even the head of the association of chief police officers (ACPO) has said was excessive - it allows bailiffs to forcably enter your home and remove your goods before a hearing or trial and to sieze all your property once arrested.

My own personal favourite is the terrorism act, which introduced stop and search if police suspect things that may lead to a terrorist act. People get stop and searched at football matches, on their way to work and so on regardless of suspicion of terrorism. These things are all evil and all believed to be irrelevant but still got through. This is no different.

<comment><USER6> So you think that an insurance company can accuse another startup insurance comparison website of infringement, and get them shutdown?

Surely the same argument could be said for any law? Accuse your neighbor of murder, accuse a competitor of money laundering, etc etc.

idk. Things always sound worse when people moan about them on the internet. They'll affect a tiny handful of people. It's more about the government making news stories and appearing "tough on X" rather than anything else.

I've never been stop+searched. :(</comment></comment></comment>


Windows Phone 7's microSD mess: the full story - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/17/windows-phone-7s-microsd-mess-the-full-story-and-how-nokia-ca/

<comment><USER2> This wouldn't happen with Apple's fully integrated (hardware + os/software as cohesive unit) approach.</comment>


Why I Admire Anthony Weiner (diachronous-responsibility test) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/opinion/weiner-sexting-sentencing-prison.html <comment><USER2> But would he be taking responsibility if he didn't get a sweet plea bargain (under 2 years instead of 10 years) for pleading guilty?</comment>