"Last Mile" Barriers to Removing Legacy BIOS [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/Brian_Richardson_Intel_Final.pdf <comment><USER3> This is sad. _Very_ sad. It means "PCs" are only going to become more closed and proprietary than ever before, at an even faster rate.

"Legacy" is a _good_ thing. It means simple, stable interfaces that have been around for long enough to be mature, well-understood, and relied upon by everyone. Some examples: A PS/2 mouse or keyboard doesn't require a full USB stack in order to work, nor can it exploit the system by becoming a different USB device and sending malformed packets. RS232 is simple enough that it's the de-facto "standard input/output" on embedded platforms. LPT/IEEE1284 gives you 8 bits of GP(I)O with ultra-low latency (microseconds vs milliseconds for USB.)

It's disgusting to see the "security" argument brought up again here, when it's all about corporate control over the users. To them, it's a "security risk" to not have secure boot. To the users, it's freedom.

The "advantage" of "smaller code size" is complete FUD. I'm pretty sure the ROM images have gotten much bigger since UEFI became the norm, composed of bloated compiler output instead of the beautifully efficient handwritten Asm that BIOSes used to be written in.

 _No DOS requirements for pre-OS validation /tools (try UEFI Shell or Python)_

DOS is simple, which is why it remains so common for BIOS flashing, testing, etc. Replacing that with the horrendous bloat of UEFI Shell or Python!?!? Yuck!!

Linus Torvalds' famous rant is well worth reading: [http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/efi.html](http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/efi.html)

tl;dr: You can pry 7c00h and INT xx from my cold, dead hands.

<comment><USER4> Secure boot doesn't mean the user isn't allowed to replace the bootloader or kernel, and it _is_ more secure.

UEFI doesn't require USB or secure boot or a compiled language or Python or proprietary code.

It would be nice to have something simpler than UEFI to replace the legacy PC boot process, but the point IMO is that _we want to replace the legacy PC boot process_. It's not as straightforward as "simple, stable interfaces that have been around for long enough to be mature, well-understood, and relied upon by everyone." It's a de-facto standard with a lot of room for things to go wrong, and they do.

<comment><USER3> _Secure boot doesn 't mean the user isn't allowed to replace the bootloader or kernel_

Unfortunately that's what it will likely turn out to be in practice.

 _It 's a de-facto standard with a lot of room for things to go wrong, and they do._

...as opposed to an even more complex standard? The saying about "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns" comes to mind... there is literally tons of documentation out there about all the "legacy" devices in a PC, but far less about the newer proprietary bits.

<comment><USER5> > Unfortunately that's what it will likely turn out to be in practice.

Even Microsoft specifically forbids hardware marked as "Windows compatible" from not allowing user installed keys on x86. I'd like some actual reasoning for "likely".

<comment><USER6> Okay so how is an 'average' computer user supposed to install a Linux OS that they want (or another OS) on their PC without reading up on MoK keys and UEFI and delving into the key management interface?

Yes, you _can_ install the few 'blessed' distros like Ubuntu, Fedora or OpenSuSE, but what about distro X? Thus far, an average user need only pop a CD to install Majaro or FreeBSD or FreeDOS. Now...? Install their own keys? Sign their kernels and modules?

This reminds me of all the anti-piracy measures. Sure, you can theoretically circumvent all the DRM. But is it practical for 90% of users? No.

Sure, DRM is theoretically perfectly fine, as is Secure Boot. As is even ME. The theory is always fine. How it turns out in practice, not so much. We should be asking ourselves if this marked disparity is really just inadvertent.

<comment><USER4> Woah, wait. DRM and the ME are _not_ fine in theory. Secure boot is.

If the practice of installing your own keys is too hard, that's something we can fix. We can't fix DRM or ME without just removing them.

<comment><USER7> Secure Boot is part of an effort to harden DRM on PCs; this is something Microsoft and Intel have pushed for over a decade, especially now that they have seen how much money is being made on mobile devices (where DRM was baked in from the beginning). There is not much benefit to users, because bootloader malware was never a major threat and malware remains a constant threat for users despite years of Secure Boot deployment (just the other day my mother- in-law asked us to deal with a ransomware'd surface pro). The real point of Secure Boot is to create a system where users do not have the freedom to install arbitrary software i.e. where all software must be installed from an app store, where it can be vetted to ensure that it does not allow users to do things like breaking DRM systems or blocking ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> UEFI is a great example of second system syndrome. In the BIOS world, more featured boot loaders were chained in early (think pxelinux, grub, *BSD loaders etc) so even though it was primitive it wasn't the typical UX. UEFI is almost trollingly bad, the worst amalgamation of low level firmware, boot loader UX, and OS->firmware runtime services I've seen when contrasted to OpenFirmware, uBoot, petitboot.

OpenFirmware was a much more elegant technology sitting around for the lifetime of modern x86 but intel had to be different.

I like the direction IBM is going with OpenPOWER.. petitboot/kexec by default [https://sthbrx.github.io/blog/2016/05/13/tell-me-about- petit...](https://sthbrx.github.io/blog/2016/05/13/tell-me-about-petitboot/) although all the firmware sources are on github so you could do whatever the heck you want. It makes intel look positively oppressive.

<comment><USER9> > OpenFirmware was a much more elegant technology sitting around for the > lifetime of modern x86 but intel had to be different.

Let's rather look at the reasing of the UEFI developers why they have a different opinion on Open Firmware (page 5 of [http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/A_Tale_of_...](http://www.uefi.org/sites/default/files/resources/A_Tale_of_Two_Standards_0.pdf)):

"Another effort that is similar in its role to the PC/AT BIOS-based platform occurred with Open Firmware (OF) [4] and the Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP). CHRP was a set of common platform designs and hardware specifications meant to allow for interoperable designs among PowerPC (PowerPC) platform builders. Open Firmware, also known as IEEE-1275 [4], has issues in that it is an interpreted, stack-based byte-code. Very few programmers are facile in Forth programming, and it is renowned as being "write-once/understand-never", and having poor performance, and non-standard tools. Also, Open Firmware has a device tree essentially duplicating ACPI static tables. As such, the lack of Forth programmers, prevalence of ACPI, and the fact that UEFI uses standard tools and works alongside ACPI — versus instead-of — helped spell Open Firmware's lack of growth. In fact, it is used on SPARC and PowerPC, but it is unsuitable for high-volume machines and thus prevent it from making the leap from niche server & workstation markets."

<comment><USER8> That is almost entirely FUD, every Mac before the intel switch had OpenFirmware. FCode was elegant in that it is cross platform, and the option ROMs can work across multiple uarchs. The only valid point is that Forth is obscure. I don't know how much that matters in reality due to how obscure working at that level is itself, as an OS dev you're working on the device tree and runtime services in a language like C. But I will grant benefit of the doubt since I'm an OS dev and not an option ROM dev.. and say, well, Petitboot is the logical endgame as the industry has made Linux uber alles and you're going to be writing drivers for it anyway.

<comment><USER10> Also, if it was really an issue, you could just compile something else to FCode. Pretty much every non-native language is being compiled first to a stack language that looks a lot like a shitty version of Forth as the IR.

<comment><USER9> > Pretty much every non-native language is being compiled first to a stack > language that looks a lot like a shitty version of Forth as the IR.

It is not clear what you mean with that. I assume you want to hint that the CLR and the Java Runtime use a stack-based instruction set and are common compilation targets, which is true.

But there are lots of other virtual machines that provide a runtime that are not stack-based. For example the implementation of the Lua 5.0 runtime is register-based. An other example of a register-based virtual machine is Parrot.

<comment><USER11> I believe that many compilers have an intermediate step that looks like a stack based language.

<comment><USER12> Compiler IRs are often based on reflecting expression DAGs rather than manipulating a finite register set or an infinite stack.

<comment><USER13> Manipulating an infinite stack sounds like a _really_ big world of pain.

I realize you're only ever poking around near the top, but if the system has the chance to grow infinitely, well, it will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My main concern with this is the fact that if Secure Boot is forced (UEFI Class 3/+) users might not be able to change or manage trusted keys. It is quite sad that every few years we have to yet again have this conversation or defend the right to freely install software on machines that we bought or own.

<comment><USER15> A concern that has been repeated for 5+ years at this point, and one that has proven to be almost completely unsubstantiated by any real world devices.

Don't get me wrong, the day I can't install Linux on my laptops, I'll grab the pitchforks, but the claims that this is going to happen almost exclusively hinge on some boogeyman ideology related to Microsoft that is fully unconvincing to me.

edit: Please, tell me a single consumer laptop that doesn't allow key enrollment or complete Secure Boot disablement, otherwise, please stop with the FUD.

<comment><USER16> I may not be especially competent but I had significant difficulty installing Linux the last time tried.

Thankfully it was possible but there are now significant hurdles. That's problematic. Whether it gets worse is unknown but the situation now is bad if anyone wants Linux to be freely available.

<comment><USER15> Can you elaborate on the "significant hurdles"? I've heard this before, but it never comes with any specifics - examples, error messages, forum posts, _nothing_. If nothing else, if there is seriously a manufacturer that is botching their implementation, please tell the community so that we can avoid them.

I've installed Linux on dozens of laptops. Here are the "significant hurdles":

1\. Literally none, because mainstream distros are signed and boot under Secure Boot

2\. Literally a single toggle in the BIOS to disable SecureBoot. (Enrolling user keys is more steps, but optional)

And then since most people really mean "UEFI" or other miscellaneous compatibility problems when they say SecureBoot:

3\. Literally a single toggle in the BIOS to enable CSM mode for distros/install media that don't support UEFI.

4\. Laptops that ship with the SSD in RAID mode (only very, very new kernels ship with support for it). I've only heard of one laptop that didn't allow it to be toggled and it was fixed within two weeks.

<comment><USER17> I observed a friend's computer that shipped with no hotkey to access the BIOS settings or boot menu. In order to get into the computer to boot to a usb drive for installing Linux, you had to either accept the Windows license agreement or disassemble the computer and pull the hard drive.

<comment><USER18> The laptop i am tying this on supposedly had a "BIOS" key combo, but i never got it to work.

What i had to do was hold a key (shift i believe) while clicking restart in Windows, and then i would get a menu that could take me to the menu...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sorry to go straight off-topic but if anyone from AMD is reading, please remove PSP from future and/or give us the ability to remove it from existing machines, this is a golden opportunity (with the Intel ME having been shown to be broken recently [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15656931](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15656931) ) you really shouldn't pass up.

<comment><USER20> They already said they wouldn't open source it (after suggesting they might). I doubt they'll ever think about removing it.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14803373](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14803373)

<comment><USER10> Being open source doesn't really matter; it's having access to the keys. And they're never going to give those up because it would break the chain of trust for their DRM.

<comment><USER21> I don't want their DRM or their DRMed content. I'll gladly buy a computer for my own uses that don't have those "features".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Helping to secure the boot process is valuable. My main concern about UEFI is end-user control, and one way UEFI reduces end-user control is through complexity.

Think of what someone new to IT had to learn 20 years ago about bootup and compare it to now. UEFI is far more complex than BIOS; IIRC the spec is over 2,000 pages. I'm a professional and I've spent significant time looking into UEFI, and I don't feel that I really grok the whole subsystem. What is some kid going to do? And add to that all the other 'new' subsystems in the boot process, from TPM to ME to AMT to TXT ... someone would need to be a full-time 'boot specialist' to grasp it all, keep up with them, and understand how they interoperate.

</comment><comment><USER23> I find this the inevitable "next step" into more appliance mode that these machines are moving into. And like tranches of collateralized debt obligations, harder and harder to figure out exactly what your buying into when you decide to get one of these machines. On slow days I try to imagine what I would really "like" here. One of the things I would like would be a stance on surveillance that would protect me from commercial surveillance that I had not explicitly agreed to, and a way for individuals to take action against people who violated that stance.

</comment><comment><USER24> How about 'there's no good replacement yet'? All that the firmware should be doing is making sure the hardware is intact enough to load the next stage, then finding, loading, verifying (a the very least, checking signatures for accidental modification, and ideally checking the keys against ones that require physically moving a jumper or dip switch to change), and executing the first on-disk stage. MAYBE initializing a very basic text mode so it can show errors, MAYBE a halfassed keyboard handler to let you help it out if it gets confused.

Granted, this does mean it has to have some sort of bus it can use to talk to various storage devices, but even this should be as simple as possible - <USER2> can switch to a more complex but faster one later, you just need to be able to load a couple kilobytes.

</comment><comment><USER25> There sure was a lot of "people use legacy for specific reasons" in there, but they don't mention what those reasons might be -- except for Linux support.

Kinda hard to fix the "last mile" when you don't know anything about the last mile.

<comment><USER26> > they don't mention what those reasons might be -- except for Linux support.

I UEFI boot all my Linux systems.

What FUD are you on about?

<comment><USER25> If you Read The Fine Article, it says that people disable UEFI for Linux. And, like you, they point out that secure boot can be disabled instead.

I pointed out that they list zero additional reasons people give for disabling UEFI, so it is hard to evaluate how to fix the "last mile" for _those cases_.

Calling that FUD when it is literally in the article is unkind at best. I shouldn't have to reiterate stuff already said in the article in order to avoid hurting the feelings of Linux users who haven't.

<comment><USER26> > And, like you, they point out that secure boot can be disabled instead.

Why would I do that? All Linux distros I use works fine with Secure Boot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Everyone is bitching about how UEFI makes them not the owner of their computer anymore, as if they're using an open source BIOS and ever had any firmware layer control over their PC.

The fact that you can argue that with BIOS you have control means you don't really understand Intel ME and the other firmware components that actually run your PC. If you want an open platform, Intel and AMD aren't it. If you want a modern functional platform, Intel and AMD are it.

This is why I have such high hopes for RISC-V.

<comment><USER28> I don't understand how RISC-V will lead to open platforms. Vendors of RISC-V SoC's will most likely include their own Intel ME type bullshit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I run Linux in legacy mode on my 4 machines. UEFI for me was extra complexity without any gain. Sad to see that's uefi is gonna be only option in the future.

<comment><USER30> I've been booting with the kernel as an EFI stub, and I love it. I can copy a new compiled kernel to the right directory, and reboot into it. No grub involved. And to edit the boot menu, or just change what I'll boot into next, is the handy efibootmgr tool.

<comment><USER31> Unfortunately, that means you don't have an initrd so you can't do luks encryption of your root, support certain filesystems as root (like zfs, mdadm raid), or various other things.

efistub kernels may work for some people, but they're not a generic solution.

<comment><USER32> That's totally false. Just yesterday I booted a kernel using the EFI stub and was able to use an initrd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does this mean they're also looking to rip out 16bit real mode support entirely from their x86/x86_64 CPUs?

<comment><USER34> There isn't much reason to do so. Additional resources needed to support 16bit modes probably does not exceed few hundred transistors of logic and bunch of words of microcode. The data path is completely same, there are only few control differences (loads to selector registers set offset=value<<4; limit=0xffff; size=16bit instead of consulting descriptor tables).

On the other x86_64 CPU can be significantly simplified by riping out both 16bit and 32bit modes and thus all the selector/descriptor segmentation logic and replacing IDT with something simpler and less general.

<comment><USER35> According to Wikipedia Windows 64 bit runs 32 bit apps by switching back to 32 bit mode.

> which switches the processor hardware from its 64-bit mode to compatibility > mode when it becomes necessary to execute a 32-bit thread, and then handles > the switch back to 64-bit mode.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WoW64)

<comment><USER34> "Compatibility mode" is sub-mode of long mode which has limited support for 16/32b i386-style memory segmentation (notably there is no support for vm86 code segments and gate descriptors have different format and can only reference 64bit "segments").

It is clear that AMD's intention for this was to implement just enough of segmentation in long mode to allow compatibility with segment-aware user-space code (eg. mixed 16/32b Windows userspace) but there does not seem to be any OS that actually uses 16bit descriptors in long mode (probably due to the mechanism being significantly different than i386's 16/32 compatibility). For compatibility with "normal" flat address space user space code the whole mechanism could be significantly simpler and have same "segmantation" behavior as 64b mode, have 32b EIP pushed on stack by CALL/RET and trap on anything that tries to load new selector anywhere (ie JMP/CALL/RET FAR, MOV whatever, ?S), even REX prefix could be supported in such an "limited compatibility mode" and we would not have to invent things like x32_abi (which is to some extent the same idea, although with different motivations, ie. run new ABI- incompatible 32b code in 64b mode to gain access to new registers and instructions while having 32b pointers and thus reduced memory footprint).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Floppy disks used to have a tab to lock them (write only mode). The whole secure boot thing could be solved by having a switch/tab that you would have to use when you want to make changes to your bootloader. This would fix the secure boot issue and let us use our beloved BIOS.

In different jobs I have hear coworkers spending several hours dealing with UEFI in order to be able to install linux or enable multiboot. As a final user I don't see any added value except for the secure boot. As others has pointed out here if a malware has enough access to rewrite your boot probably they could do a lot worse stuff like installing a keylogger, a fake browser, encrypt/steal your data, etc.

UEFI looks to me like Inte ME. A tech that it might make sense for enterprise, servers, etc. but not to the final user.

Looking forward to let Intel alone and use more open alternatives but I know that it is very hard to get the same computing power/features in other platforms.

</comment><comment><USER37> What currently deployed attacks does secure boot prevent? We hear a lot about secure boot is going to improve security but not a lot about exactly how it is going to do that. If some sort of malware has the ability to rewrite the relatively tiny boot stuff it also has the ability to write anywhere in the operating system.

</comment><comment><USER38> So does uefi support multi boot or not?

<comment><USER39> The standard supports multiple bootloaders, but specific implementations may be locked down to a single one. Even on systems that support multiple bootloaders, it's pretty common to bypass the built-in menu in favor of a more configurable chainloader like GRUB or rEFInd.

<comment><USER40> I mean, basically every UEFI implementation I've worked with supports any number of boot entries - but I'm forced to hit a key during startup to even get to the menu to select one. All it would take is an option to present a selection menu every boot (unless the operating system has asked to boot a specific one during a reboot) and I would set my grub timeout to like 2 seconds with no menu by default.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Last I tried, more that 2 years ago, Ubuntu was able to install on LVM over LUKS over sofware RAID and boot from it in BIOS mode but the result in UEFI mode completed install but didn't boot.

I wonder if that has been fixed.

<comment><USER42> Usually it's because he installer mucks up the crypttab, or doesn't install mdadm module, or something. And yes, installing with BIOS usually gets it right. But it can be made to work with UEFI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Meaning I will migrate all my machines to coreboot.

</comment><comment><USER44> I recently disabled secure boot so I could install linux...

I was quite amazed I had to do that to be able to install a system I wanted...

</comment><comment><USER45> Why can't there be normal open source UEFI? No one seems to be pushing to get rid of all these blobs.

</comment><comment><USER46> > Some users blame UEFI or Secure Boot whenever something doesn't work

and what else to blame?

<comment><USER26> The words of a true detective.

Like there's nothing else in the giant mess which is the x86 architecture which can't break.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Can anybody point me to a list of problems with "legacy" BIOS that UEFI fixes? My PCs have had no problem booting in the decade I've been using them. They boot windows, ubuntu, arch, basically whatever I want them to boot. What's the big problem?

<comment><USER7> Well, consider the situation Blizzard is in with WoW: people who want to cheat have resorted to writing rootkits to defeat the DRM system. Locking down the bootloader will help prevent users like yourself from defeating DRM, this making the platform more secure for entertainment companies.

Sorry, did you think the improvements was for users?

<comment><USER47> > Sorry, did you think the improvements was for users?

Well, funny but sad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's about time this happened! I spent the last decade using computers free of that BIOS crud (various Macs and now a Surface Pro), and all I can say is, "good riddance!"

<comment><USER49> Surface pro has a BIOS interface, it's just stupidly inaccessible. Their design also means that you can't easily install your own copy of windows and are instead stuck pulling down their stupid recovery images whenever you want to format. I'm very annoyed that they decided to go this direction personally.

<comment><USER50> They did that to protect the platform against stupid enterprises.

<comment><USER49> What do you mean?

<comment><USER50> Office 365 taught them how much corporate testing and imaging hurt their products.

In one case I'm familiar with, they were getting pummeled over poor O365 user experience in 2015 because the customer was refusing to upgrade past Office 2007.

Everything they've done in the last 5 years is about pushing out software faster and making traditional enterprise IT too expensive.

<comment><USER13> Suddenly the push behind cloud makes a lot more sense. Interesting to know.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


3 MORE ways to come up with Startup / Product ideas - fast - <AUTHOR> http://quicklytest.it/blog/?p=85

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone have any other ideas?</comment>


Archy - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy

<comment><USER2> For anyone who hasn't read it, Jef Raskin's _The Humane Interface_ is a great book. Makes you really stop and think about how we interact with objects around us - physical and virtual.

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Humane-Interface-Directions- Intera...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Humane-Interface-Directions- Interactive/dp/0201379376)

<comment><USER3> I still find a lot of inspiration from the earlier UI books (ideas), before everything settled down. Lots of crazy, awesome ideas. Now it's just how to books.

I've been anticipating the ZUI for ages. eg It's the correct answer for a window manager. It's the only way to maintain continuity, preventing users getting "hyperlost", kinda like what breadcrumbs try to accomplish.

Did you see the new flashy zooming Calendar transitions in the WWDC Mavericks demo? It appears to have the right balance between zooming and level of detail (LOD). Me want!

FWIW, I did _not_ anticipate the dynamic 2.5D in the forthcoming iOS 7. That's gonna be huge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've clicked because I tought it was Archie

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

for which I have fond memories.

<comment><USER5> Fond memories? Archie was truly horrible.

<comment><USER6> Archie was no doubt truly horrible compared to every search engine that came after it. However it was at it's time a god-send, as previously there was simply no way to find anything you weren't directly linked to.

<comment><USER4> Exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice, especially the zoom-approach, have anyone seen this being implemented? However, I disagree with the whole idea of typing commands. For power users that's great, but for casual users, it's nearly impossible to know which commands exist, what they are called or what they will do. The menu based interface has the great advantage that it categorizes commands and allows the user to see what can be done, and use deduction to pick the right command. There should be no need to remember any command names or key combinations for light users.

<comment><USER8> Menu and typing commands are not either-or exclusive; you can have both. In a system like Archy there can be menus stored as plain text - given that it's trivial to select text and invoke it as a command. It's just that menus don't require a separate subsystem or component, they're stored in the homogeneous system's data representation (and they can be user-editable, which modern GUIs don't allow - yet).

I've known of Archy and The Humane Interface for about ten years, and it's funny how more and more interfaces are converging towards the interaction style defined by it (with some tweaks because of backwards compatibility and- or because some of the ideas in the book have been tested and improved since then).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting how OSX strives to achieve similar points, although not coming from a "from scratch" experience.

\- persistence + universal undo: Versions and Time Machine

\- leaping: missing (although OSX strives to support both fn/alt/cmd+stuff and a reduced set of emacs keybindings, it's a far cry from doing it anywhere)

\- commands: services. Also, the 'bundle' architecture, of which applications are a specific instance of aims to make self contained components that add features to the system.

\- zoomworld: Exposé/Mission Control/App Exposé (with open/minimized/MRU). Also, Finder inline previews, then QuickShow and finally the document opened in the corresponding app.

Again all of this is in a reduced form, and applied to a pre-existing WIMP environment. None of those features existed on OSX 10.0, and it gradually evolved to have them.

</comment><comment><USER10> Has anybody used this, and can comment on how well the "type while holding the Alt (or capslock) key" works? I imagine it's a bit hard to type with both hands while holding down a key.

<comment><USER11> I used it. It was a very interesting experience, but a little hard to get used to. The position of alt is not comfortable for the quasi-mode required. CAPS is more accessible, but then you can't use your pinkie. Raskin's idea was to use a special keyboard with two spacial keys, LEAP FORWARD and LEAP BACK near SPACE.

It's so sad that the project died. The interface was very promising and I long for that keyboard I never used.

<comment><USER8> Even though the project died, the ideas in it have spread. It's a funny exercise for a trained eye to look for ideas originating in The Humane Interface throughout all kind of modern interfaces.

That book has been much more influential than it may seem - all the good interface designers seem to know it or at least follow its principles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The hardware keys were actually implemented, in the Canon Cat project: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_Cat)

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks like a lot of good ideas have been taken from Emacs and applied to the windowing system; which btw is a great idea. Hope it is as scriptable and extensible as well.

<comment><USER14> A big difference between Emacs and Raskins' design is the concept of modelessness. If you've ever typed META+X in emacs in anticipation of typing a command, and then switched windows or got distracted or clicked the mouse, emacs is left in the 'command mode' and will misinterpret your next input.

Raskin coined the term 'pseudo-mode'. The difference between a pseudo-mode and a mode is the difference between the SHIFT key and the CAPS-LOCK key (for entering uppercase letters). The latter frustrates while the former goes unnoticed because it works so well.

If you are in any way involved with usability, read The Humane Interface: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface)

<comment><USER15> actually he coined to term "Quasi-mode"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like that he named Archy after Don Marquis' Archy and Mehitabel, the cockroach and alley cat duo. Archy the cockroach would spend hours throwing his body against the keys of a manual typewriter to convey his poetry about his muse Mehitabel, who in turn would throw herself repeatedly against the harsh world of alley-cat living with irrepressible gaiety. Two paragons of the struggle with interfaces!

</comment><comment><USER17> No comment on the license yet?

I might be dumb but if somebody don't sell commercial licenses why would they restrict the usefulness by adding restrictions on commercial usage?

Edit: style. And a possible reason - maybe they have used a non-free library with a non-commercial only clause?

</comment><comment><USER18> Don't take this the wrong way but for an interface expert Raskin doesn't seem to give much consideration to typography. While it might be innovative, I couldn't use that interface simply because of the bad readability…

<comment><USER6> Those are details that can be refined later. The overarching concept is great.

<comment><USER19> I see what you did there.

<comment><USER20> Is this reddit?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting. The modern smartphone OS is almost exactly like Archy. Perhaps related to the common Raskin@Apple lineage of Archy and the iPhone.</comment>


Why the more your job helps others, the less you get paid - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2014/06/01/help_us_thomas_piketty_the_1s_sick_and_twisted_new_scheme/?source=newsletter <comment><USER2> Humans value conformity more than we care to admit. There are a couple of studies in this vein, but one from Baylor shows that people in groups punish others who are more generous, even when the generosity benefits everyone[1].

The author makes an interesting point about people who dislike their work begrudging people who do meaningful things (in their judgement). Throughout our history, we have had an idealized vision of the average American in the back of our heads -- first it was the farmer, creating food for their family. Then it became the factory worker, creating cars for the masses -- now it may be the programmer, making the software that powers our world.

The interesting thread here is creation. We live in a country that idealizes making things and taking risk/responsibility. Yet society is heavily geared towards conformity, and work is an extension of that. Even tech startups are increasingly becoming a systematic, codified industry. Is it no wonder that there is some resentment of people who are perceived to truly be free to create?

This is why something like basic income[2] is so interesting. Once we are freed from having to conform to society in order to meet our basic needs, what will we be able to do? The cynic would say that people will all collect their checks and accomplish nothing. The optimist would say that everyone would start creating new art, music, machines, etc. I think somewhere in between, but that somewhere in between is still vastly more interesting than what we have now.

[1] [http://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=st...](http://www.baylor.edu/mediacommunications/news.php?action=story&story=131067) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income)

<comment><USER3> > _There are a couple of studies in this vein_

The largest and most instructive one is, I think, Facebook. And tumblr. To a lesser extent reddit. For shits and giggles, 4chan and SA.

And if you look at the latter of those, you'll see kids making things by themselves in large amounts. You could take that as support for basic income - everybody under 18 pretty much lives on basic income and then some. A lot of them make really fun things and publish on the internet.

My hunch is that if we do get basic income, it will take one to two generations before the floodgates really open and our problem will not be people being too uncreative, but exactly the opposite.

<comment><USER4> The idea that the cat memes and horrendously inane linkbait headlines that litter the social internet might be representative of the creativity that could be unleashed in even greater volume with basic income is the best argument in favour of "worthless" mid level marketing managers and the forty- hour workweek I've ever heard.

Don't get me wrong, I've seen dilettantes' blog articles that are more thought provoking than supposed social science classic writings, but _in general_ the more user-generated areas of the internet - populated by adults as much as kids - we'd still mostly waste the free time we got anyway.

(I've been distracted from a bit of volunteering I was going to do in order to add a comment on a social site that won't be read by anyone after tomorrow, and probably won't be remembered by many ten minutes after they've finished reading it. QED, I guess)

<comment><USER2> Your comment is definitely interesting, and I will remember it for more than 10 minutes. But the real question isn't "is what people do in their free time a good thing?", it is "is what they could do in their free time better for society than what they are doing at work now?" What are the hidden personal (not using your time optimally, lower happiness, etc) and societal (more stress, higher medical bills, etc) costs of people constantly doing things they hate? Not saying I have an answer, but it would be nice to find out.

<comment><USER5> >"is what they could do in their free time better for society than what they are doing at work now?"

That is a really great question and one that I think gets to the heart of the problem this article and others like it are demonstrating.

<comment><USER6> When we do things for the love of them, we tend to excel.

Furthermore, when we are truly passionate we can maintain focus and energy towards our goals for far longer periods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7>
      If you think about it in that light, it makes the
      achievements of the socialist bloc seem pretty
      impressive: a country like Russia managed to go
      from a backwater to a major world power with
      everyone working maybe on average four or five
      hours a day.

That is a _very_ selective reading of history.

<comment><USER8> The empire-building helped I'd guess. Funny how a Socialist country had to depend on exploitation to grow. Just like most everybody else.

<comment><USER9> I'd be interested to see when actual socialists think the Soviet Union stopped being an effective socialist state and started being more of a totalitarian kleptocracy with a veneer of socialist rhetoric as justification.

I was an early Agile person, starting with Extreme Programming in 2000. It blew me away how quickly a revolutionary approach to the work I loved was turned into a bunch of empty labels and pointless rituals that covered up the same old power structure but provided the useful appearance of change. [1] It's definitely made me wonder what early Russian revolutionaries would think of how the Soviet Union turned out.

[1] [http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and- how...](http://agilefocus.com/2011/02/21/agiles-second-chasm-and-how-we-fell- in/)

<comment><USER10> Since Stalin was both an early Russian revolutionary and the nadir of "how the Soviet Union turned out", it's hard to accept the reading of history that says the Soviet Union didn't turn out according to plan.

<comment><USER11> Considering Stalin's swift elimination of all his political rivals, it's reasonable to assume not everybody shared his political vision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "I want to do something with my life that actually benefits others; but if I go into a line of work where I care for other people, they pay me so little, and they put so much in debt, that I can't even take care of my own family! This is ridiculous!"

Yet, the big swing in silicon valley is B2B.

The question we should asking ourselves is:

What can we, as software engineers and web developers, do to support our working class?

We need to reduce their debt, reduce their cost of living, and decrease the amount of time they waste dealing with the intricacies of living in modern society. How can we do this?

<comment><USER13> Exactly the question to be asking, in my opinion.

I like what Balgair has to say, to some degree - though voting without education may backfire, so it's not that simple.

Some off-the-cuff ideas re; debt reduction, in the hope that others find their flaws & suggest others:

\- Facilitating P2P debt _may_ help make debt cheaper by crowdsourcing the "overhead" of evaluating creditors. I believe there's a site that does this but can't recall the name.

\- Reduce student debt by making expensive college degrees obsolete. I think the next step in that (now that we have libraries, wikipedia, coursera, udacity, etc) may be changing hiring practices: a startup that helps companies hire based on experience/aptitude rather than falling back to the college degree heuristic could have a big impact. Relatedly, other startups (or FOSS) might replace the traditional degree in other ways, like guiding students through free online tracks or connecting them to advisors, mentors, internships, peers, and jobs.

\- Change how employers pay employees. Most large employers have cheap debt and/or lots of cash, while many of their lowest-paid employees have terrible credit. This means they have to rely on mind-bogglingly expensive services like Payday loans and credit cards to cover their basic expenses (which don't come due on payday). A startup that helps employers pay daily instead of fortnightly, or pay bills directly, or even provide credit directly to their employees could put a _lot_ of money back in poor pockets.

\- I don't know the other main sources of American debt. Car payments? Large houses? I just don't know. But a systematic investigation of the sources of the debt, the costs of servicing it, and the underlying reasons it's required may be a decent way to scout out some good ideas!

Ultimately, though, much of this comes down to Policy and Culture. Student debt would evaporate if we just had free education. Cost of Living would likely plummet if we had terrific public transportation. There may be tax schemes (land taxes?) that would lower rent/home ownership costs. A culture of minimalism would likely also reduce cost of living =)

<comment><USER14> > Facilitating P2P debt may help make debt cheaper by crowdsourcing the > "overhead" of evaluating creditors. I believe there's a site that does this > but can't recall the name.

There are a number. The one I'm most familiar with Prosper.com. (Most of them technically aren't _really_ P2P debt because the central site is the lender of record, in order to deal with regulatory compliance, which can be quite involved when it comes to lending and debt collection, but they approximate P2P lending.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If we're making sweeping generalizations about why "helping others" apparently pays less well, the most concise and obvious answer is that those who need the help most (those with debilitating illnesses, the developing world, bootstrapped startups, the offspring of uncaring parents) have a lot less access to cash than those that arguably need it least (fund managers, brand managers, large multinationals, high-net worth individuals). A corollary of this is the latter groups also tend to be much more forgiving of your cockups and are certain not to be aggrieved if you get rich helping them.

The irony of Graeber's generalizations is that his job has arguably less reason to exist than most hospital paper-pushers'. As a result some of his understanding of the real world seems more theoretical than practical (I mean, I agree with him in principle about the concept behind many internships being dubious, but I don't think "for the first few _years_ they won't even pay you" actually applies anywhere outside academia.)

</comment><comment><USER15> The Enlightenment produced a society which identified pleasure as its most fundamental social value. As Locke says, individuals are hardwired to pursue pleasure. And as Smith says, capitalism is the economic system best able to produce the most total pleasure. Thus, if you can produce lots of pleasure for people, if you are useful, if you can make money appear out of the stock market, you are rewarded. The jobs most rewarded by society are those that are most pleasurable to others, like CEOs who can turn profits for board members. The group who's pleasure is the deciding pleasure is the dominant social group, who has the most of whatever currency matters to society. (Status, property, now cash)

Whether someone is virtuous, or caring, or helps others, is irrelevant in ascertaining their value, and thus how they should be paid. A teacher might produce pleasure in a student, but that student is in no capacity to makes its pleasure the deciding one. The moral good of a job is, at best, a footnote, and only valuable insofar as far as the dominant groups are pleased by them. The market doesn't care about your moral good.

The mistake of writers like this one is supposing that such a system can be fixed within the confines of modern capitalism. It cannot. People will conduct their campaigns, and go on strike, and create new movements, and perhaps pay teachers more out of social duty and pity, but they will ultimately butt heads with the philosophical underpinnings of modernity. If this writer is serious, the solution is not to turn to mere Marxist-inspired theories of labor, but to Aristotle and Aquinas.

For what Aristotle, Aquinas, and essentially the entire stock of pre-modern philosophy, approached differently was the question of, "what should our fundamental social value be?" Their answer was not, "pleasure." For Aristotle, it was the good produced by a life trained in socially-imparted virtues--which ultimately allowed one to contemplate the divine. For Aquinas, it was more explicitly religious: loving God, which entailed doing and believing all the things He wants us to do. And as was the case with the Enlightenment, the cultures that both these thinkers embodied were constructed around such answers, from the top down. In either system, the moral worth of work is not irrelevant, it's the only thing relevant (with differences in how moral is defined).

In-depth rebuttals should be directed to Alasdair MacIntyre, a Scottish philosopher whose book "Whose Justice, Which Rationality," I just paraphrased in part. (But seriously...)

<comment><USER16> The interviewee, Davide Graeber, is considered to be one of the leading figures of the Occupy movement so probably does not believe that a solution to this problem lies with the confines of modern capitalism. He identifies himself as an anarchist.

There's more detail on his political/economic views in his book, 'Debt: The First 5000 Years':

[http://p2pfoundation.net/First_Five_Thousand_Years_of_Debt](http://p2pfoundation.net/First_Five_Thousand_Years_of_Debt)

<comment><USER15> Thanks. My point is, activists like Graeber are bound by philosophical systems they don't recognize, which have been in place for hundreds of years and which form the foundation of our entire modes of thought. He may dislike modern capitalism, but he probably accepts the core tenets of modernism which allow it, like the assumption that the good of man is to be achieved by man pursuing whatever his interests happen to be. He might be radical, but I'm guessing he's not a radical as to reject Hume. (the source for the aforementioned tenet).

<comment><USER16> Graeber probably spends more time analyzing the effects of various philosophical/political/economic systems on individual and social behavior than most people. I'm not familiar enough with the totality of his work to directly address what he does and does not accept about modernism, but from reading 'Debt', he rejects many of the core tenet of modern economics.

Another of his books is titled, 'Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams'. Its summary on Amazon begins: "This innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism."

So I rather doubt from the title and the summary that we'd discover that he blithely accepts the core tenets of modernism. It appears to me that he probably would reject quite a bit of the core tenets of modernism and those that he accepts he probably does so understanding their roots and implications. Again, I can't be sure b/c I haven't read it but the guy assumes an outsider, iconoclastic stance in almost everything I _have_ read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I found quite interesting his point regarding the redirecting of funding away from automation innovations and towards military and advertising innovations. It resonated with a blog post I read recently[0]

[0][http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/07/we-wrestle-not-with- fle...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/07/we-wrestle-not-with-flesh-and- blood-but-against-powers-and-principalities/)

</comment><comment><USER18> This is because the more your job can only affect the live of one person, the less leverage you have. (1 unit of work effort = 1 unit of work output)

This is why we are so highly paid. We can put in 1 unit of work and enable checkout for all of Amazon, for instance.

Also: 1) supply and demand and 2) rewarding jobs pay less than shitty ones (all of finance in my opinion)

<comment><USER19> The guy who repairs the rail tracks that get thousands of commuters to their office every day should have a ton of leverage then, right?

<comment><USER20> Actually, the guy who can ensure those rail tracks get repaired _does_ have a ton of leverage, and reaps the reward.

It's not just the guy who pulls out a broken rail and nails a new one in place. Finding someone to do that isn't hard or expensive. It's the guy who _knows_ who will do that for a competitive price in a timely (urgent) manner, can ensure such guys are available to thousands of miles of track, has enough replacement track on hand & well-situated, owns (or can rent) equipment to move such long heavy rails to where needed fast, has personnel handling all the QA & regulatory burdens to ensure those rails won't likely fail soon after installation, etc etc etc; few people are willing & capable of pulling all that off. Rail replacement also includes paying some to do "BS jobs" which those with the money & responsibility know are needed, even if seem largely pointless or distasteful to most casual observers. And yes there's some abuse buried in all that; human nature is far from perfect.

I didn't fully appreciate how some earn their keep until I joined a startup. Organizing productivity demands talent and risk, without which (and obtained/retained by salary) very little resembling corporate productivity would happen. Yes, swinging a hammer is valuable; knowing who should swing it, where, when, and to what purpose - moreso.

<comment><USER21> What I find fascinating is that I feel a strong desire to respond to your statement, write out a long comment (which I've done and posted earlier on in this thread) explaining how I disagree, only to realize that it's really hard to get anywhere when our disagreement is so fundamental and complex.

I stopped to think where we disagree fundamentally, and I think it boils down to this:

Our technological, social, and economic developments, I believe, have led to crazy increases in wealth and comfort, and I suppose happiness too, at least in the West, but arguably even globally. I think we more or less agree on that.

I think we are also in agreement in many ways we're better off than we have been in the past.

We are somewhat less in agreement over the cause of this, and I suppose that could be a worthwhile conversation. I'm inclined to believe capitalism played some role in this, but that, from a 'social evolutionary' perspective, it's become, or turning into a malignant growth. I'd say technological developments play a much bigger role, and perhaps capitalism was just a mechanism that 'worked' to enable this. But I'm by no means certain of that, and it seems to me that there's no way to get anywhere on this subject other than sustained conversation where we move down to our most basic 'axioms' step by step.

Where I am more certain, and where I suspect we agree _least_ , is whether the status quo is 'good enough' and by extension worth defending or 'fighting'.

I think it's not worth defending too much, primarily because I strongly believe that should be no reason whatsoever for us to be working as much and as hard as we do now. The 'general' increase in wealth and comfort pales in comparison to what would be possible if we had a fairer system in place, and I believe it is absolutely worth the effort to take a shot at creating such a fairer system. I think we've learned at least something from the past, and that we won't attempt to just implement a full totalitarian redistribution scheme.

And even if there's a significant risk of our efforts turning into another 'failed utopia', merely the rising social instability and the (I'd say) well- proven disastrous ecological developments are reason enough for me to take that risk rather than making some small incremental changes to our current system.

However, that would be outside of the confines of the discussion in this thread, and that's quite frustrating.

I guess what I'm saying is that without considering these more fundamental disagreements, our collective discussions in this thread are bound to frustrate and not really significantly 'shape' or change our views.

That said, I enjoy reading your views and I mostly just felt like writing this; it's not something 'aimed' at you in particular!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Although the trend of more work today than ever is obviously troubling, as an engineer, I can't help but think that the reason we don't yet have what the past promised because "the robots" really are not that great yet--we do, after all, need an entire staff of people to design, test, build, and monitor them.

In addition, for every problem that we solve--global distribution, connectivity, transportation--we create even more. All of these "solutions" require additional infrastructure, research and development, and ultimately, breed entirely new disciplines and fields of study--i.e. STAFF. Additional flexibility breeds complexity.

100 years ago, I probably wouldn't have ventured very far from where I was born. Food would be grown locally. I wouldn't have internet, etc. Today I have MUCH more flexibility, but that comes at the price of complexity. I tend to believe the SUV / iPhone argument but think they're pretty terrible examples. All things equal, I could likely maintain the same level of technology and lifestyle as someone 100 years ago on about half my income. It's simply, not our culture, which is in large part driven by consumerism. Even if I WANTED to, most companies wouldn't allow it.

The real question we should be asking ourselves, is do we need the iPhone / SUVs, etc. And if not, why are we working so hard for them?

The film Happiness [1] also explores the work / leisure balance in depth.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_(1998_film)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happiness_\(1998_film\))

<comment><USER23> "do we need the iPhone / SUVs, etc. And if not, why are we working so hard for them?"

As a personal anecdote, I don't need those things. I don't need a car, I don't need a smartphone, I don't need a TV, I don't need more than a few clothes, I don't need furniture other than a bed, I don't need to eat out or eat expensive food/drinks, if I wasn't working I wouldn't even need a computer and internet. I'm quite happy without most of those things. I make an engineer's salary and save almost all of it, so that one year out of college (cheap education, no loans) I now have savings that could easily last me 5 years in the bay area at my current lifestyle (counting housing/food/healthcare) or significantly longer in a cheaper area. (Though I'm not quitting yet, I still enjoy my job and maybe there's the beginnings of golden handcuffs there.)

Unfortunately for my case, I expect it will be hard to raise a family on this below-standard-expenditure lifestyle, although that is something I think I want to do. For one thing, I can't imagine how I'd find a wife who was on board with living without all the standard American luxuries. I imagine such a woman exists, but I wouldn't know where to look.

And even though I want to take a bunch of time off and travel the world / work on my own (zero-hope-for-profit) hobby projects, I can imagine society's disapproval of this, and also can't help but wonder if I'd regret it. What if it was hard to get a job as good as this if I later wanted to go in for money like everyone else?

<comment><USER6> Compelled to respond as after the big risk of leaving the west at 17 or so, it all worked out well for me. I've dipped back in to western 9-5 for two years out of the last 14, to great success (one employer, rose from entry-level to hiring/managing teams and relationships, international travel, more money, relocation, and finally a payout when the company was acquired) but it's just not for me right now ... and no longer required.

 _I can 't imagine how I'd find a wife who was on board with living without all the standard American luxuries. I imagine such a woman exists, but I wouldn't know where to look._

Clearly, outside America.

 _I want to take a bunch of time off and travel the world / work on my own (zero-hope-for-profit) hobby projects, I can imagine society's disapproval of this, and also can't help but wonder if I'd regret it. What if it was hard to get a job as good as this if I later wanted to go in for money like everyone else?_

The answer to this is definitely _No, you won 't regret it_. As long as you can carry yourself in the workplace, you are likely to return with skills, motivation and experience far outweighing that which your peers in industry were able to gather in the equivalent period. After years running my own startup in mainland China, I found my workplace competition in London to be frankly underwhelming... to put it bluntly, I was learning things full time during those years and they were filling in time for a salary with bureaucratic and temporal challenges to overcome. Even if you can't envisage a return with such confidence, you're smart and will be fine. Fear not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What strikes me is that this article seems to conclude with a focus on changing society's perception of work as a means to changing its nature ( _I think we need to start by redefining labor itself, maybe, start with classic "women's work," nurturing children, looking after things, as the paradigm for labor itself and then it will be much harder to be confused about what's really valuable and what isn't. As I say, we're already seeing the first stirrings of this sort of thing. It's both a political and a moral transformation and think it's the only way we can overcome the system that puts so many of us in bullshit jobs._ ) whereas _Debt: The First 5000 Years_ focuses, to my mind, essentially on proving the heterogeneity of value and value-exchange systems (ie. psycho-social and concrete economies) in past and present human societies that deviate significantly from our present-era global neocolonial capitalist system.

I wonder if this represents a change in Graeber's own mindset, or is merely representative of the interviewer.

PS. I've had emails with Graeber and he's every bit as personable and intelligent in private communications as in his conventional written output.

</comment><comment><USER24> "At the same time, these companies are willing to shell out huge amounts of money to paper-pushers coming up with strategic vision statements who they know perfectly well are doing absolutely nothing."

Ahh. So for some reason, private companies (or shareholders, if you like) are willing to give their money to people who they know are doing absolutely nothing. Well, I simply don't believe that.

<comment><USER25> Shareholders have a lot less influence over the running of a medium-large company than you would think.

In a 1000+ employee profitable company do you really think the shareholders will revolt because senior management has a few dozen worthless positions that help consolidate their power?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The main reason is because human desires are inexhaustible. As our society gets wealthier, more people will be hired to perform tasks that make people's lives easier, though those tasks are ancillary to an organization's main mission. For example, the university's main mission is to educate students, but more and more administrators and staff will be hired to turn the university into a luxury resort to satisfy students' desires (big gym, mental health services, remedial education, sports, expensive food, transportation systems). And the university will also use more of its wealth to satisfy its employees' desires and problems (by hiring human resources officers and lawyers and hedge fund managers). That happens to every organization as it grows wealthier, I suspect. And those jobs, being ancillary, being divorced from directly helping people, are miserable. So, paradoxically, inexhaustible human desire for what is "better" and easier ends up creating jobs that, while comfortable, feel wretched and meaningless.

You see this in a society, too. Yes, our individual desires for "food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on" are never sated. It's partly because we're trying to keep up with our peers, but much more importantly, it's the hedonic treadmill. That is, the satisfaction we feel after buying a BMW or becoming CEO or getting a new house will fade quickly - and be replaced with the desire for something else. No doubt even the world's wealthiest people are dissatisfied with some aspect of their daily lives. Perhaps they wish for faster travel than is possible with current airplanes or for a longer lasting house or less crime or more love or whatever. That's a microcosm of what happens to the world's wealthiest societies, which, after all, are composed of people. It's why we've moved from Bell phones to iPhones, but it's also why we have so many more ennui-creating jobs.

<comment><USER8> There's actually a hard limit. e.g. Retina displays are as good as you need because they are finer than the eye's ability to distinguish.

Likewise there are only so many hours in the day, and days in your life. There is a hard (large) limit to what you can do in a lifetime. We may be increasing what we desire as resources become cheaper, but it is increasing asymptotically to 'what a person can consume/experience in the hours they have'.

<comment><USER27> > There's actually a hard limit. e.g. Retina displays are as good as you need > because they are finer than the eye's ability to distinguish.

I'm sure someone will see value in a gold retina display. And if we get that done, I'm sure we'll start selling retina displays that have been baptised on pluto by the pope himself.

There is no limit.

<comment><USER8> Most of us are not in a position to demand Plutonian displays. In an efficient market we'll take a functional one made in Korea. So in our market which is pretty efficient, there's a calculable reasonable bound to consumption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Simple: the more your job is about helping others, the less it's about helping yourself.

<comment><USER29> helping other is also an intrinsic reward which lowers the amount of money you need in order to be willing to do the job

<comment><USER28> No, no it isn't. That's just a bullshit excuse managers and government bureaus use to justify not paying people a living wage.

<comment><USER29> maybe not for you, but for me it is

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why have so many people been convinced that money is anything more than an arbitrary system at this point? It is bizarre to me how many smart people keep believing that it isn't. The reason something generates money from something else is simply because it does. There is nothing good, bad or otherwise about it.

</comment><comment><USER31> The caring classes he talks about being underpaid are probably underpaid because they tend to help the poorest who do not have much money, the amount of people with their skill set is high and their professions do not scale in the amount of people they help.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think this idea of the bullshit jobs, and the implicit removal of them, has corollaries with what was posted here recently: "How to get business ideas - remove steps" [1]

The trouble is, as was pointed out in the article, is that removing steps means removing a person from their source of income and in a lot of cases also their identity and social network. So how do you remove bullshit jobs without causing a massive collective existential threat?

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826338](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7826338)

<comment><USER9> It's definitely an interesting topic. One of the reasons Toyota had a deep tradition of avoiding layoffs was so that people would feel safer helping remove waste from the system.

One way to look at it: idle people with decaying skills and self esteem are just another kind of waste. So if your first step is to eliminate some particular sort of bullshit work, the second step could be to find some non- bullshit way to employ the people who no longer are doing anything.

Thinking broadly, that shouldn't be hard. After all, we could afford to pay people to do bullshit, so we'll be even better off if we pay those people to do something productive. But the current way we account for things often makes it tricky in specific cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This fact can be derived from very simple assumptions. Let's assume people value pay, and let's assume they value helping others. Different people value pay more/less.

People will then choose jobs on the "efficient frontier". Which point on the frontier depends on how much you value pay.

Now it follows from the efficient frontier that if job A is both better paid and helps other people more than job B, then no one will do job B. So for all pairs of jobs (A,B) that people do, one will be better paid and the other help others more.

</comment><comment><USER33> What nonsense! Certainly there will be outliers, but _in general_ people get paid more because they help others more. Your pay comes from other people giving it to you willingly. They wouldn't give it to you unless you were helping them somehow.

I think the confusion is that, as you get paid more, you tend to help people less directly. A minimum-wage fast-food worker is obviously helping people. That's what he does. He probably says the literal words, "May I help you?" a hundred times a day. But he's not helping very _many_ people and he's not helping them very _much_ , and that's why the job doesn't pay so well.

Compare to, say, a chemist (as in chemistry, not the British term for a pharmacist). He's not directly helping people. In his day to day work, he doesn't interact with the customers. But he's helping to create new products and maintain existing products that people want, in a fashion that can be ludicrously indirect but is still ultimately extremely helpful.

Or look at senior management. We like to deride them, but _most_ managers in _most_ companies are useful. They don't help the customers directly, but they help their employees help people, and that can translate into a _lot_ of help in a big company.

Yeah, there are people who get paid a lot to basically shaft other people, but they're not the common case.

<comment><USER34> In this sense, I'm guessing he's pointing that those who help with more immediate, physically-demonstrated (helping) results are getting paid less. Coming back around, like you said, I agree that jobs (such as chemists) do "help." In fact, he's helping the helper. Yes, as you mentioned too, even though there might be no "consumer good" produced, senior managers can be described to help indirectly, although the clients may not see their actions on the front end. It's a weird combo of perspective and purpose to grasp. Most jobs are 'helping,' whether it is for something or someone; its not a one-to- one process, but often a chain of events that can change order. "The more your job helps others, the less you get paid" is pretty shallow.

<comment><USER33> Thinking about it more, there's a fundamental limit to how many people you can help directly in a day. There are only so many hours in a day.

If you want to break that barrier, you _have_ to provide your help indirectly in some manner, whether it's shaping an organization for people to work within, or building tools that help them do their jobs, or what have you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Title is junk, article is overwritten, some claims are wholly unsuported by evidence, but there are some uncommonly heard ideas that make it worth a skim toward the bottom.

<comment><USER21> I find this article the least interesting one I've read so far, so if you find the ideas interesting, be sure to check out some of his other writing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> So doctors get paid less than, say, used car salesmen, pawn brokers, payday lenders, etc?

</comment><comment><USER20> A telling & loaded question: _Are people working so many hours because we've just somehow independently conceived this desire for lattes and Panini and dog-walkers and the like, or is it that people are grabbing food and coffee on the go and hiring people to walk their dogs because they're all working so much?_

Making panini or coffee - _good_ ones - takes effort, time, and resources to a degree few are willing to engage on their own. I've a dozen coffee makers, acquired in the quest to learn how to brew a perfect cup, and still drop $1.75 at Starbucks because a swipe of a card and a few minutes of scheduled skilled labor are often preferable to finding decent beans, grinding them, heating water, buying & fitting a filter, pouring, timing, cleaning and stowing what's needed; ditto lunch and dog-walking. Sure, we could all make fancy lunches and fine coffees and walk the dogs, and enjoy doing so at select times, but most people are unable and unwilling to at that level day-in-and-day-out when slinging dirt, paper, or bits can acquire such lifestyle.

As for the "BS jobs": in between the productive (slinging dirt, or deciding who should sling which dirt where) are "glue jobs" and "filler jobs", not notable of themselves but required to cover & hold together aspects of productivity, without which cumulatively expensive problems would arise.

That opportunities in any job may be abused for personal gain, or trail off to nothing useful, is simply a reality of human nature and imperfect systems.

The question, foundational to much of the biased rambling in the rest of the interview, is either naive or disingenuous. We _have_ independently conceived of odd luxuries, and made them profitable for someone to do despite being arguably wasteful, or that they are in fact our chosen outlet for the long- predicted "life of leisure". Like "living on the Moon", the remote notion is romanticized, but when given the option to ... most people are disinterested in eeking out survival on a giant atmosphere-free dead rock, or idly reading or playing games whilst subsisting on mundane food & accommodations; rather, they'd instead choose a routine of imposed obligations, coupled with swipe-a- card easy access to higher luxuries of relatively fine foods and fancier surroundings.

I guess my gripe with the interviewee is that he has a notion of how society should be, and argues toward forcing economic redistributions to make it happen ... decrying & denying the reality that the economy is what it is, on the whole, because it's the cumulation of free choices. Sure, I could be living a "life of leisure" (and nearly did) enjoying majority time of idleness; instead, I (like most) chose a more frantic life of productivity (and sometimes gap-filling) so I could enjoy relatively luxurious goods & services with the swipe of a card. Force redistribution to impose the social structure & values the interviewee wants, and methinks most of us would rebel at the results; we're _not_ living that way for a reason.

<comment><USER37> Okay, here's one for you…

You can work as an EMT, in the back of an ambulance, running 15+ calls in a 24 hour shift (which is basically back to back with a few minutes break between calls), dealing with anything from sick old people to immediate life threats.

And you'll get paid approximately $9/hour for doing so.

<comment><USER38> I didn't believe you so I checked for myself. [http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/emt-salary- SRCH_KO0,3.htm](http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/emt-salary-SRCH_KO0,3.htm) Seattle probably has higher pay than usual so.... your statement is close enough.

Wow. I really thought working as an EMT paid better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Just because certain people can't describe or understand the value of a given task or job, doesn't mean it has no value. Clearly if person A pays person B to perform a task, then person B must be creating at least as much value as they're being paid. Who are you or I to judge that value? We're neither receiving the value nor paying for it. If person A is consistently paying more than $2 for $1 of value, then they'll soon be out of money, and the system will unceremoniously remove person A from decision making authority.

While it's nice to suggest that Wall St. doesn't create any value for people, ~20% of our GDP would suggest otherwise. The truth is that Wall St. acts much like Adam Smith's invisible hand. For our system to work, capital must be allocated to optimal uses. Command economies do a poor job of this, except in war time. Wall St. helps us reallocate capital to the most productive endeavors. That sounds pretty valuable to me. Even if the folks on Wall St. don't build your car, they did pool the capital necessary to finance the construction of the manufacturing facility. Can't have one without the other.

As a final point, if the 'caring class' isn't compensated enough, perhaps it's because there is an oversupply of 'caring folks'. Or perhaps they're not really creating any value for others? Perhaps some of the 'caring class' should get creative and find other ways to be caring, or perhaps they should find ways to provide more 'care' with their time so they can command a higher share of the value they create?

</comment><comment><USER40> Visible help, yes. But as a programmer, I help to write HTML/CSS and rails and js code that makes a friendlier and more engaging UI that makes every user's shopping experience that much more pleasant; also unlike conventional charities that offer sometimes intangible emotional support, I can quantify "the net happiness add" by Google Analytics, the higher the conversion rate means, higher the user's "engagement" and contribution to my company and shareholder value.

I'm also contribute back to the tech community by sharing my code that I experiment on my own during hackathons and weekends on Github. Unlike other professions where things are not as transparent, I love that our field is always on the cutting edge, experimenting with the latest frameworks and technology and sharing the results (be as it may that sometimes it's not as well-documented but I make up for it by writing an enthusiastic blog post about it).

</comment><comment><USER41> Honest question: Is the headline linkbait? I read the entire interview but I didn't see where he really explained why the more your job helps others, the less you get paid.

</comment><comment><USER42> "... ditch all traces of the ideology that says that work is a value in itself, but rather redefines labor as caring for other people."

</comment><comment><USER43> Not true, Bill Gates put a computer on every table and made billions of dollars while at it.

<comment><USER44> well bill gates is one of the few guys who managed to properly get something in return, at least he understood there's no such thing as one way altruism. You have to insert yourself in a business model to make things happen.

of course if we had thousands of bill gates, I guess it would be better don't you think?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> TL;DR

If your job helps others, you may _want_ to do it [1] for reasons other than money and therefore get paid less.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs)

</comment><comment><USER46> a good piece. one that I suspect resonates with more people than care to admit.

</comment><comment><USER47> Assuming no corruption, politicians have jobs that help everybody. They are paid incredibly well.

<comment><USER48> Assuming no illness, doctors help no one.

<comment><USER49> If there's no illness, the doctors must be really good! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Most of work, especially the corporate work that pays well _reliably_ , isn't improving the world or helping people. It's helping individuals _within companies_ in their campaigns for more money and more status. It's helping one middle manager become a director, or one executive beat out another one. The problem is that (a) 90% of corporate executives are completely worthless, overpaid deadweight, and (b) people have no choice where they land (under closed allocation) and have no say which boss (i.e. private-sector politician) to throw their muscle behind.

It really is amazing how much of the work done by the highest-paid people is completely unnecessary, if not counterproductive.</comment>


The New Physics of Tennis - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-new-physics-of-tennis/8339/

<comment><USER2> It was strange that the article didn't talk about how one of the reasons there is so much more topspin and power in today's game is because the strings are less energetic now than they were before, meaning that players can swing a lot harder without worrying about sending the ball long.

I normally play with a racquet strung with a synthetic poly string (less stiff than Luxilon, but still pretty stiff and slippery), which allows me to absolutely whale on the ball, and in the process, generate a lot of topspin (as the racquet velocity at impact is pretty high).

A few weeks ago, while playing with a much family member, I used one of her racquets, which is strung with a much bouncier string; it was amazing how much I had to pull back on my shots to keep them from going long. Didn't hit with anywhere near as much spin or power then.

The slipperiness of the string certainly seems to have an effect on the flight of the ball, but so would the liveliness of the string. It would be interesting to see if those variables can be isolated.</comment>


Computer chip with holes is speed demon - <AUTHOR> http://outcomemag.com/science/2012/03/08/computer-chip-with-holes-is-speed-demon/ <comment><USER2> Original press release: <https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/37095.wss>

</comment><comment><USER3> Oblig Simpsons reference: "Speed holes - they make the car go faster."</comment>