The Secret to the Uber Economy Is Wealth Inequality - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/312537/the-secret-to-the-uber-economy-is-wealth-inequality/# <comment><USER2> The main thesis here - that an Uber-like service requires people who will work for less money than customers are prepared to pay for - is a truism, and probably the #1 principle of any business.

There's a definite relevance that the current inequality leaves people with less other choices for work; I'm sure a lot of Uber-drivers would not be Uber- drivers if they had other, better paying work, but similarly, a lot of Supermarket checkout staff, or bartenders, or waiters, or other low-paying jobs, would not be doing those jobs if other jobs were available.

In the current age, driving is unskilled labour, and so the supply pool of workers is very large. It is not surprising that driver wages are low.

The bigger issue with Uber is one of monopoly effects and competition. The interesting part of Uber - the middle-man part run by Silicon Valley technologists - is the ride allocation part, which by virtue of network effects probably tends towards monopoly. If Uber gains too strong a market share, which it looks like it might be doing, that is when the real problems begin.

In a way, the best thing might be if the cities themselves licensed and ran the ride-ordering technology, as a public good.

<comment><USER3> _the best thing might be if the cities themselves licensed and ran the ride- ordering technology, as a public good._

Isn't the inevitable problems therewith, as exemplified by NYC's taxi regulation system, exactly what led to the rise of Uber?

<comment><USER4> Yes. This.

Municipalities everywhere are notoriously inefficient at running anything sensible that isn't burdened by politicking, group-pandering, graft and ultimately riddled with short-sighted reactive decision-making.

Perhaps we should ask why our governmental - local or federal - bodies are prone to these kind of malaises.

Could it be that our best minds are increasingly not wanting to serve in the public sector? [1]

[1] 'Pro-Government' Millennials Take Government Jobs, Discover They Suck, Move to the Private Sector

[http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/17/millennials-take- governmen...](http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/17/millennials-take-government- jobs-discove)

<comment><USER5> Part of it is also the political climate. If everyone in government is stereotyped as incompetent and corrupt, who do you think would want to soil their reputation by entering a government job? That's right, the people who already are incompetent and corrupt. As for the people who aren't, what are their incentives for doing their jobs honestly? They're going to be accused of incompetence and corruption anyway. (some jobs, like teaching, social work and partly policing, attracts people with idealistic personal incentives, but I'm talking about the administration)

Distrust in government is a self-fulfilling prophecy. "Trust but verify" seems like a better strategy.

<comment><USER6> it's certainly a _self-reinforcing prophecy_ , but you don't suppose there is something inherent about being able to force people to do things that attracts moralizing ninnies and those with corrupt intentions _in the first place_?

<comment><USER5> Power in any form (government, church, big business) corrupts and power attracts corrupt people, yes. Thing is, power is incredibly resistant to egalitarian distributions, so someone has to have it. We just have to make the best we can out of it, and the best is substantially much better than the US government.

<comment><USER6> economics is not a zero-sum operation, though, if two people exchange money for a service or good it is only because a person values the service or good more than the money, or vice versa.

Moreover, in order to wield money as a form of power you have to be willing to give it away. This is not necessarily true of the other types of power.

<comment><USER5> That's only true for small and medium business. If businesses become big enough, they practically speaking become part of the government except with private profits. Then there are monopolies and competitors who are a bit more coordinated than they should be. Big business' power is more limited but in return they get less oversight and a lot more independence. It evens out.

There are many situations where corporations can take your money without permission. A monopoly in a sector you can't do without or a company willing to work the government are obvious examples. Far more insidious are companies who own media, as shown by Berlusconi, Greek oligarchs, Fox News et. al.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Massive wealth inequality combined with few jobs leads to servants. Servants more-or-less stopped being a job in the US after the last Gilded Age with the rise of the middle class, but with Uber and other service apps, they are back, fractional reserve-style.

There's a corollary to this, which is that if the economy starts growing again (for regular people, not just programmers) people now doing 1099 piecework employment are going to find better options, and these services are going to have to increase their prices to attract workers. The cheapness of Uber has been subsidized by investors and made possible by desperation.

<comment><USER8> When my family lived in Bangladesh, we had servants, and never managed to get comfortable with the arrangement. I have a deep and visceral reaction to anything like that arising in the U.S., but I fear that increasing wealth inequality might lead to that outcome. I'd rather have lower GDP, less money in my own pocket, etc, than go back to living in that kind of society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The interesting bit of this article comes right at the end: in the comment on how middlemen like Uber create a barrier-of-entry for workers who want to become small business owners. The easiest place to see this is in house cleaning services, where capital investment to start a business is low. The path from worker to small business owner is one that allows (allowed?) one to build some equity and entry into the middle class. To the extent that technology-based middlemen like Uber create a barrier to this, they may worsen income inequality.

<comment><USER7> Particularly galling is Uber's contention that it helps its "partners" run their own small business. Yeah, right. A small business that Uber can take away from you at any time for any reason. Uber drivers are employees in all but name and tax treatment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the article: _In my hometown of Mumbai, we have had many of these conveniences...This narrative ignores another vital ingredient, without which this new economy would fall apart: inequality._

Only one problem with the narrative: India (Gini 33.9) has considerably less inequality than the US (Gini 48).

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

Oops!

<comment><USER11> _Only one problem with the narrative: India (Gini 33.9) has considerably less inequality than the US (Gini 48)._

You point out the problem with measuring inequality using the Gini co- efficient.

A country where everyone is equally poor has a lower (better) Gini co- efficient than a country where few are poor and few are very rich.

<comment><USER12> _A country where everyone is equally poor has a lower (better) Gini co- efficient than a country where few are poor and few are very rich._

How is "equally poor" bad from the point of view of inequality enabling services like Uber though? In the extreme case, if everyone in India was "equally poor" as you put it, no one should be able to do jobs as cheaply as the author mentions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's built on the backs of the drivers, and their willingness to expose themselves:

[https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-does-an-average-Uber- or...](https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-does-an-average-Uber-or-UberX- driver-earn-in-a-day-What-about-people-that-drive-full-time-for- Uber/answers/3934880)

(Not unlike freelance programming marketplaces.)

<comment><USER14> He isn't getting paid well, I agree with him there. However, factoring your car payment and car insurance into your hourly wage just because you happen to work from your car is kind of silly. If I work from home do I factor my house payment into my hourly wage?

<comment><USER15> Are you serious? Imagine if you are a programmer but your computer takes an obscene amount of maintenance (like a car: tires, oil changes, preventative maintenance) to keep it running so that you can keep freelancing as a programmer. If you didn't factor this into your costs of being a "freelancer" you would be an idiot.

<comment><USER14> Everyone needs a car. If my car breaks down I would likely have to take a sick day to get it to the shop. No one factors that into their pay. I need to wear pants when I go into the office, do I get to allocate pants into my wage?

A car is something almost everyone needs. He's going to end up factoring it into his hourly wage and then getting a car for free.

<comment><USER15> a. not everybody needs a car.

b. the amount you drive even with a lengthy commute is nowhere close to what a person driving 8 hours a day 5+ days a week does. the amount you spend on gas alone is huge never mind maintenance and having the right insurance for driving that many miles (many drivers don't and can get totally screwed over if anything happens and the insurance company finds out they don't have the right coverage).

<comment><USER14> I definitely agree he should factor in costs that he wouldn't have been paying before. I thought his including his entire car was a little disingenuous, that's all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> To be fair, it's not just wealth inequality that makes these services affordable (although that certainly plays a big part) - there's also subsidy from investors who think they're investing in the next big thing.

</comment><comment><USER6> The article is filled with loaded terms but misses the consequence that is very important. The end effect is _wealth transfer from the wealthy to the poor_.

Let's rephrase the thesis in this way, based on my personal experience. My secret of ridesharing is that I was once part of an exploitative, hierarchical, socialist organization (academic science) that kept me in a cycle of poverty[0] intended to depress my wages, limiting my growth opportunities and discouraging out-of-the-box thinking.

I then quit my job, and began working for 'ridesharing'. First, lyft, then uber - and gave myself an immediate runway to launch a nonprofit science organization to cure cancer. Not only did it afford me the independence to pursue this, but I also gave myself a pay raise and began investments. Then, I moved from San Diego (which has an economic climate that makes ridesharing difficult in the 'equilibrium' condition, which had been reached) to San Francisco (where drivers are in high demand and low supply) and gave myself even more of a pay raise (almost 2x) affording me even more of a safety net and more free time to work on the science.

Hell, I even have investments.

[0] spam the populace by telling them they ought to get degrees in STEM, create an oversupply of PhDs, which lets you pay them 30k to work 80 hours in a lab, and then restrict their ability to be promoted to professor so they're constantly struggling.

<comment><USER17> I think what the article is also saying is that you need an imbalance for this new "model" to work. I agree that there is a slight net effect of wealth transfer but if the gap was smaller to begin with then there would be no need for the wealth transfer.

<comment><USER6> I'm not disputing that either.

On the other hand, it's not only the rich that use Uber (and certainly not Lyft), so the OP's argument is a bit hyperbolic. There is this very interesting effect that DUIs have a disproportionately negative consequence the poorer you are; and the price point for both services is low enough that it makes using those services very attractive for people outside the top income bracket.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Nobody is commenting on the middleman insight? Something I don't understand about uber is it sounds like a dating service. If I met my wife on a dating service, I'd pay for the privilege at that time, but I wouldn't continue paying the dating service a piecework fee every time we have sex after 14 years of marriage.

Likewise whats the middleman solution to "Oh thanks for the ride, I'll pay uber $10 and you say they pay you $5... well how about you come by my house exactly a week later and I'll drop you personally $7 cash tax free and heres my phone number to coordinate and ..." The middleman cannot be avoided in top 40 pop music 99 cent song downloads, but it seems pretty easy to work around for taxi-like service.

</comment><comment><USER4> Could someone tell me what's going on with HN submissions and if changes had been made to how duplicates are handled.

Submitted this article a whole day ago, here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8757053](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8757053)

<comment><USER19> Looks like this person just added a # to the end. [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fqz.com%2F312537%2Fthe...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fqz.com%2F312537%2Fthe- secret-to-the-uber-economy-is-wealth- inequality%2F%23#!/story/forever/prefix/0/http%3A%2F%2Fqz.com%2F312537%2Fthe- secret-to-the-uber-economy-is-wealth-inequality%2F)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Technology also allows 1 person to do the work of 10 creating a larger supply of unemployed people. Since right-to-live-well is tied to "productivity" and holding a job, technology in the abstract has also enabled this large pool or workers indirectly.

The part about middlemen is interesting. IMO uber is a better/smaller middleman than the previous one with taxi medallions. The technology that uber provides is connectivity at large scale due to low cost. The article is correct in that if there is nothing to connect, the business doesn't work. It's still comparatively better though, and that's how improvements are made, step by step as people want better and better.

</comment><comment><USER21> Social issues cannot be solved with technology.

[http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/16/as-india- responds-...](http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/16/as-india-responds-to- latest-rapes-the-unanswered-question-is-why/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Can anyone else literally not load this article, getting continually redirected to other articles based off of Quartz's facockta ad mechanisms and scrolling to get to new URLs?

</comment><comment><USER23> This is bogus. Imagine how much more valuable Uber would be if 100% of people could afford to ride them on a regular basis.

<comment><USER24> Your comment is bogus. Imagine how much more valuable Learjet would be if 100% of people could afford to buy their own jet airplane!

<comment><USER23> Income equality helps businesses and the economy grow. Consider the extreme case of inequality where all the wealth is concentrated in just a few people... there'd be no market for Uber.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't like Uber or its founder, but I find it fascinating.

I'm starting to think that technological growth's self-limiting dynamic might be the generation of cheap labor. Ultimately, technical progress _isn 't needed_ if labor is cheap. You're not going to find much audience for modern agriculture in countries where farm laborers can be paid $5 per day. Sure, there are things that the very rich might theoretically want (just as Henry VIII would have had a better life with antibiotics) but since they tend to measure prosperity and status in relative terms, they don't have the imagination to push anything forward. Instead, elites retrench and block progress. It's only when labor is expensive (or in a war, which will make labor expensive if it carries on for long enough, due to depopulation) that anyone in power is willing to fund technology. Of course, those with the resources would _rather_ find cheap labor overseas if that's an option; excluding a small set of celebrity visionaries who are less than 1% of the elite, they only invest in technical growth as a last resort.

Uber isn't at fault for the abundance of cheap labor that has made "the Uber Economy" possible, but poorly managed technological progress is. If technological progress slows in the 21st century (I don't expect it to halt or regress, but it could slow to an uninspiring crawl and give us a disappointing "lost century") it will be due to the demotivation of investment encouraged by an abundance of cheap labor. For all the complaint about "talent shortage" by Silicon Valley executives, the fact is that no such thing exists; there are plenty of unemployed or underemployed PhDs out there. If there were a real talent shortage, the classism and sexism and ageism that characterize the contemporary VC-funded culture wouldn't be affordable, and you'd see all sorts of people (currently below a ceiling) getting coveted opportunities.

In an ideal world, we'd stop this from happening by training people up, out of the jobs no longer needed, in order to be ready for the new jobs created by technology. In practice, this doesn't seem to be what's happening. Laid-off factory workers in Detroit (and Ferguson, MO) aren't being sent to school and trained for the new jobs; they've just been abandoned.

Uber seems to capture the next phase of the Silicon Valley society. There's no basic research or fundamental innovation, but we're seeing new ideas around what to do with the abundance of dislocated and unemployed or underemployed people. Zynga's another one: capitalizing on middle-class ennui. Ultimately, this might explain, in part, the increasing dislike of Silicon Valley that we've seen in the past five years. Silicon Valley isn't singularly or even mainly responsible for deindustrialization and cultural decay, but the modern incarnation seems to be most strongly oriented toward profiting from it.

<comment><USER26> > For all the complaint about "talent shortage" by Silicon Valley executives, > the fact is that no such thing exists; there are plenty of unemployed or > underemployed PhDs out there. If there were a real talent shortage, the > classism and sexism and ageism that characterize the contemporary VC-funded > culture wouldn't be affordable, and you'd see all sorts of people (currently > below a ceiling) getting coveted opportunities.

The problem is that unemployed or underemployed PhDs usually have all of the technical skills, but none of the tradecraft. Things like how to work with a version control system, working knowledge of one or two commercially used development frameworks, security basics, etc.

Silicon Valley has a talent shortage, but I would argue it's self-inflicted. Companies in the valley expect their developers to be rockstar coders who know a lot of languages and tools (Scala, Docker, nodejs, etc) that have very little commercial adoption outside of startup culture. At the same time, few startups have the time to let you learn on the job, so they'll overpay someone who does have the skills. And if you think it's difficult to find a good Ruby or Scala developer in the valley, you should try finding one somewhere else. They either don't exist or aren't looking for work.

The reality is that, globally, your average developer probably isn't a comp sci genius. They probably know Java pretty well, along with a few commercial frameworks, but you wouldn't expect them to have the architecture skills that many developers in the valley are expected to have. There are plenty of those guys. But yeah, there's a talent shortage when you limit your pool of applicants as much as a lot of companies in the valley do.

<comment><USER25> _The problem is that unemployed or underemployed PhDs usually have all of the technical skills, but none of the tradecraft. Things like how to work with a version control system, working knowledge of one or two commercially used development frameworks, security basics, etc._

Those skills can be learned. Incidentally, I'm not especially impressed by most PhDs... but I do think they've shown enough intellectual mettle to learn how to use Github.

 _Companies in the valley expect their developers to be rockstar coders who know a lot of languages and tools (Scala, Docker, nodejs, etc) that have very little commercial adoption outside of startup culture. At the same time, few startups have the time to let you learn on the job_

That suggests that talent has a very weak bargaining position. If talent had leverage, being able to learn on the job would be part of the deal they struck. There may be a strong bargaining position inured to one with the luck of a 100% match between one's technical experience and the trendy technologies _du jour_ , but banking on always having a 100% match to the trends isn't a sustainable career strategy.

Companies demand purple unicorns because they believe they can get them, and that people will work 80 hour weeks or steal time from their employers (risking job loss before they get the next gig) in order to meet their pre- existing knowledge requirements, and that's probably because people do. This indicates a _low_ bargaining position for software talent (not some startup exigency that is largely fictional). Everyone else gets to learn on the job. We don't, because even though what we do is important, we suck at organizing for our own interests.

 _so they 'll overpay someone who does have the skills._

Overpaid software engineers are very rare. Most of the good ones are underpaid relative to what they can do. A good engineer is easily worth $250,000 per year (and, I'd argue, several times that) and very few get even close to that number.

 _They probably know Java pretty well, along with a few commercial frameworks, but you wouldn 't expect them to have the architecture skills that many developers in the valley are expected to have._

Whatever the expectation may be of them, I actually find the average Valley developer to be pretty unimpressive. The Valley may have more of the Jeff Deans, but the 90th-percentile Silicon Valley programmer isn't any better than the 90th-percentile programmer in the general population.

<comment><USER26> > That suggests that talent has a very weak bargaining position. If talent had > leverage, being able to learn on the job would be part of the deal they > struck. There may be a strong bargaining position inured to one with the > luck of a 100% match between one's technical experience and the trendy > technologies du jour, but banking on always having a 100% match to the > trends isn't a sustainable career strategy.

I would argue that a significant portion of that compensation is essentially a gamble that the company is going to blow up and become huge. Companies with momentum or a founder with previous success have a lot easier time hiring good people at the same salaries because there is this expectation of explosive growth. That's the area where people do have leverage, because startups are cash flow constrained and can't afford huge salaries - but that doesn't mean you won't get rich (that's the line they sell us, anyway).

> Overpaid software engineers are very rare. Most of the good ones are > underpaid relative to what they can do. A good engineer is easily worth > $250,000 per year (and, I'd argue, several times that) and very few get even > close to that number.

They're not that rare - there simply aren't enough founders to support the astronomical housing prices in the valley otherwise.

<comment><USER25> _I would argue that a significant portion of that compensation is essentially a gamble that the company is going to blow up and become huge._

Sure, because many engineers don't ask "the tough questions" about what their equity actually means, or even how many shares there are. They gamble poorly, taking a $40,000 pay cut, and working long hours, for equity less than 0.1% of the company.

My attitude toward equity is that, unless you're a founder, you shouldn't let it change what salary you accept, how hard you work, or how you prioritize your career goals. If you want to work 70-hour weeks because it's helping your career, go ahead. But don't make sacrifices unless you're a founder. Otherwise, it's not going to be worth it. These days, founders and VCs don't offer equity at a level that would justify any attitude other than free agency.

 _That 's the area where people do have leverage, because startups are cash flow constrained and can't afford huge salaries - but that doesn't mean you won't get rich (that's the line they sell us, anyway)._

Of course, there are people who get rich on startup equity. It happens often enough to keep the myth alive. However, there are much better and surer ways to get rich. Valley engineers take it as an extremely fortunate windfall. VCs take it for granted. And honestly, I don't think there's much to recommend the VC-funded founder career over being a VC if you've got the connections for the latter. A founder is a mid-level product manager in what is the first postmodern corporate organization; but VCs are executives.

Silicon Valley is a fine place to spend your 20s while you figure out what you want to do with your life, but if you want to stay in that world for the rest of your career, the best way is to become a VC and be a real first-class citizen.

 _They 're not that rare - there simply aren't enough founders to support the astronomical housing prices in the valley otherwise._

Software engineers aren't buying those houses. That's a mix of VCs, career executives in the startup world (who don't program and don't found, but get paradropped in, by their buddies in VC and private equity, to companies with executives) and house-rich natives and corrupt overseas officials.

Sure, there are a lot of rich people (managers, founders, VCs) in Silicon Valley. There are also a lot of programmers in Silicon Valley. The intersection between the two groups is very small. From _Game of Thrones_ : "there are old sellswords and bold sellswords, but no old bold sellswords."

The Valley is constrained by the extreme NIMBYism and that, combined with price inelasticity and low interest rates, is what makes house prices so high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Bombastic click bait morality.

IPhones are affordable because of wealth inequality. Oil is cheap because of wealth inequality. Organic food is purchasable because of wealth inequality. Hipster clothes can be owned because of wealth inequality.

And yet, none of these goods are targeted because those who use them are susceptible to pro-union shilling.

Stop the painfully forced guilt complex from this out-of-touch middle class white perspective. I wish I could have easily sold my spare time for more money when I first moved here with P2P labor systems like Uber... but I had to wait for a central bank's liquidity push to eventually intice small business hiring, some union to not bump a new guy for someone's seniority, or some corporation wonk to figure out a new growth market. Oh, yes, I just felt so equal in that system of waiting for people "smarter" than me to justify needing me.

People should have access to the means to sell their time and labor where ever and when ever they want. Period.

<comment><USER19> I don't know how you missed the recurring outrage about the wages and conditions of iPhone workers. And the article isn't against your last point. In fact the article isn't even blaming Uber for the problems. It's just pointing out that Uber (and other services like it) only work where inequality is pervasive.

<comment><USER27> Globalism works due to inequality. Nationalism works due to inequality. Tribalism works due to inequality. The dirty secret of civilization is that someone has to dig the graves. Why pretend it's an evil from your middle class morally righteous soap box instead of allowing people the means to participate as simply as possible?

<comment><USER19> Why don't I pretend it's an evil from the bottom of someone else's grave I just dug?

<comment><USER27> Because that would make you... a believer of an out-of-touch white middle class moral framework that has failed to predict anything.

<comment><USER28> So, I'm kind of ambivalent about this thread so far, but it sounds like you have thought about this a bit. What sort of moral framework do you find preferable over the 'out-of-touch white middle class' one?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ending the Era of the U.S. Survey Foot - <AUTHOR> https://www.nist.gov/pml/us-surveyfoot <comment><USER2> > In 1959, the relationship of the foot to the meter was officially refined as > 1 foot = 0.304 8 meter exactly.

We can thank one man for this: Carl Edvard Johansson from Sweden. When making gauge blocks, he decided to round off the inch to exactly 25.4mm, and people around the world used his blocks to manufacture everything. The 1959 change just reflected what industry was already doing.

\- [http://mitutoyo.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/07/E12016-Histor...](http://mitutoyo.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/07/E12016-History-of-The-Gage-Block.pdf#page=8)

\- [https://books.google.com/books?id=3rUaAQAAMAAJ&lpg=PA293&ots...](https://books.google.com/books?id=3rUaAQAAMAAJ&lpg=PA293&ots=hiqJuRiYSM&pg=PA293)

<comment><USER3> It frustrates my sense of aesthetics to no end that the inch isn't defined as 25.6 mm.

That would make the imperial system a base-two variant of the SI system.

This would have made the mile around 42 (current) feet longer, which is a non- starter; I just wish the foot had been a little longer, somehow.

<comment><USER4> If it helps, the miles-to-kilometers ratio is approximately the golden ratio... (1.609 vs 1.618.)

So, as a level N nerd, you can convert miles to kilometers by rounding to a nearby fibonacci number, and then finding the NEXT fibonacci number (and maybe fudging a bit in the direction of rounding).

Then, as a Level N+1 Nerd, you can realize that the Fibonacci Base exists, in which any integer can be represented as a collection of distinct fibonacci numbers. (for example, 43 = 34 + 8 + 1, or, using a binary string to show which Fibs are involved, 42 = 10010001.) The conversion of miles to kilometers is then just a bit-shift operation.

Well, almost, anyway.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't help! If the inch were 25.6mm, the ratio would be 1.622!

That's a lot closer! argh!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As an example of a problem that can occur: Client wants to survey the elevations of a parcel of land for building a house. The surveyor goes out and collects data with gps survey equipment, which produces a .csv file of northing,easting,and elevation values relative to some National Geodetic Survey benchmark. The engineer imports this .csv into his cad software, produces a grading plan .csv file. The earthmoving contractor imports the grading plan into his software and grades the site.

Client gets house built, moves in and discovers that the front yard turns into a swamp after every rain.

Somewhere in the chain of importing and exporting .csv files, software A was using survey feet and software B was using international feet.

This can also cause problems like structures built in the wrong spot, fences built on neighbors land, etc.

<comment><USER6> The difference is .0002%. your examples would barely add up to an inch over a mile.

<comment><USER5> Sometimes the benchmark for northing/easting/elev is many miles away from the actual site. This is especially true with gps surveys.

It only takes a few inches to wind up with a substantial drainage problem.

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't the elevation difference between benchmark and site be the important bit here? If so, then the difference would rarely be more than a mile, and the resulting error would be at most an 1/8"

<comment><USER5> It has been 20 years since I worked in this area so likely I have some details wrong. If elevation is distance to the center of the earth 1/8" per mile is 40 feet!

From the link below you can see the noaa benchmark is using both elevation in feet above sea level and in meters from the center of the earth.

[https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/cgi- bin/ds_mark.prl?PidBox=aa3449](https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/cgi- bin/ds_mark.prl?PidBox=aa3449)

<comment><USER8> If you're not converting H (gps orthometric height) to E (local elevation datum to "sea level") first, you're doing it wrong, for a number of practical reasons.

Usually there's not even a reason to use H directly anymore, since elevations should reference a local benchmark.

GPS has changed things, but surveyors are still obscenely practical when it comes to procedures for eliminating systematic error.

<comment> 1-6 Using an RTK-GNSS requires a gravitational model of the earth to measure mean sea level (MSL). Using your position, you use the GEOID model to figure out the delta of the nav satellite's orbit to the MSL.

<comment><USER8> Yes, That's what I mean by going straight from H to e first. The geoid is that conversion.

Although for rtk, the delta isn't to any of the sats, it's to your base station. The deltas to the sats cancel out of the equations, which is where most of the gains in accuracy come from. But it still needs to be tied into a known elevation benchmark.

That said, most field crews will still be shooting a differential to a published benchmark, or plugging the geoid file into the data collector, or dialing into a vrs or cors that already is adjusting for the geoid. For them, H is just an extra data point asking to be plugged into the wrong data field.

Unless you're doing static observations or geodesy or manual network adjustments or direct gravity readings, the new way (22) isn't all that different from the old way (83). There's just different underlying theory of MSL and different math to adjust the network. And if you _are_ doing any of those things, then you generally already know what you're doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If anyone else is curious - the "US Survey Foot" was 609nm larger than the US International Foot. Or, 0.0002% Larger.

<comment><USER10> It would take 41,708 feet for the error to add up to one inch.

<comment><USER11> Which feet?

<comment><USER12> The left ones.

Sorry, I'll show myself out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I actually learned of the difference between the U.S. Survey Foot and the International Foot while working on [https://plantpredict.com](https://plantpredict.com). For years we had infrequent but bizarre unit-conversion bugs. Calculations literally weren't adding up. We assumed it was related to precision rounding since numeric input fields showed rounded values. It turns out the imperial-to-metric feet conversion factor we picked was 1 of 2 choices, and we picked wrong!

</comment><comment><USER14> The article left me confused about what it means to have a legally binding redefinition of a term.

Does this mean that all existing, legally binding contracts are to be reinterpreted using the new definition of "foot"?

Does it mean that any _new_ legal document (contract, legislation, etc.) that uses the term "foot" without further clarification shall be assumed to mean this new definition of "foot"?

<comment><USER15> As a general point, I don't think contracts can have their terms adjusted after the fact without both parties agreeing to it.

<comment><USER16> This seems the only reasonable way to do it except for terms deemed unenforceable (which is why you see a lot of boilerplate about severability)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A good overview on NSRS can be found below, pretty interesting read if you're into datums.

[https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/arcuser/moving-from- stat...](https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/arcuser/moving-from-static- spatial-reference-systems-in-2022/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Fortunately, the inch is defined as 0.0254 meter exactly. So we have consistency for the really important units.

<comment><USER19> Then which "foot" is exactly 12.000000 inches?

<comment> mark-r My calculation shows 12 * 0.0254 = 0.30479999999999996 meters. That may be off a little due to IEEE floating-point inaccuracy.

<comment> d-sc 2 * 4 = 8 so the last significant digit should be an '8'

<comment><USER20> Definitely one to cite in the "overreliance on calculators" \- the comment you are replying to should have realised that multiplication can't create digits to the right like that!

(Most desktop calculators do it in BCD which would give the correct result, too)

<comment> mark-r I use Python as my desktop calculator. It has a Decimal module that would have gotten it correct, but that would have been way too much trouble.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Thank you 'amjaeger for removing the local-TV-news-level attempted pun from the headline.

</comment><comment><USER16> Ah, the joy of standards.

</comment><comment><USER22> If someone had told me this statement was part of a Monty Python script, I'd likely have believed them.

<comment><USER23> For those of us who came later to the discussion, what was the original title?

<comment><USER22> I was referring to the content of the post on nist.gov. But I think the title has changed, and may have been simply "U.S. Survey Foot" when I first commented.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Mildly surprising that we are not just using meters at this point.

<comment><USER25> The situation is far more bizarre than "use" or "not use." As I understand it, America uses something along the lines of "converted metric units" \- i.e. the entire imperial system is defined according to metric/SI. Some subset of public records have been, supposedly, converted to metric. If you have a recent car, it should have km/h alongside mph (in a smaller font, or as a different digital readout). You'll find metric all over the place if you keep an eye out for it.

<comment><USER26> It's called "US Customary", not "imperial".

<comment><USER27> Only in the US - except for gallons/fluid ounces - those genuinely are US only

<comment><USER26> No, that's my point. The system of units that is used in the United States is not "Imperial", it has differences from Imperial. We use "US Customary".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Imagine it being 2020 and not using the metric system.

<comment><USER29> That's not hard to imagine. Quick, what's 1/3 of a meter? The sometimes problem with metric is it's base-10. The prime factors of 10 are 2 and 5. Feet are in base-12, which has the prime factors 2 and 3. Three is much more useful than five. There are marks on your measuring tape at exactly 1/3 of a yard or 1/3 of a foot.

Metric is often easier and more convenient, but not always. So, in the US, we tend to use metric or customary units depending on which is more convenient for the task at hand. Actually, it's a lot like the UK and other countries where older systems still exist alongside metric. The difference with the US is that we don't have as many unnecessary laws mandating metric. You're an adult. You're working with other adults. You're perfectly capable of figuring out what to do without the input of lifelong politicians who've never measured a thing in their lives. Except for the amount of your money that they're going to spend. They like measuring that.

<comment><USER30> My wife's family, who almost all have university degrees, who were all born and raised in the US, and who are very familiar with the imperial system NEVER seem to be able to do math with it. They ask me, a European raised with the metric system, for help.

Find out how many fl oz of milk are in a measuring cup graduated in units of cups? Ask mrb.

Convert my daughter's height from feet/inches to inches? Ask mrb.

Convert a package's weight from oz to lb/oz? Ask mrb.

Need to know how cold it needs to be outside in farenheit for water to freeze? Ask mrb.

I lost count of the number of times they accidentally mix up for example 1.3 feet with 1 ft 3 in. Sometimes it's due to miscommunication, eg. I have seen "six pound five" interpreted as 6 lb 5 oz by one when the speaker meant 6.5 lb. Or vice versa.

It's just comical to see someone trying to argue that the imperial system is "sometimes easier."

<comment><USER31> > Find out how many fl oz of milk are in a measuring cup graduated in units of > cups? Ask mrb.

8\. Volume is base 2. Two tablespoons in an ounce, 8 ounces in a cup, (there used to be other units in between, but nobody used them, like deci in si) two cups in a pint, two pints in a quart, four quarts in a gallon.

If you were going to sell me on switching units, it would be based on hexadecimal instead of base 10.

> Convert my daughter's height from feet/inches to inches? Ask mrb.

5' is 60". Add and subtract from that. 5'6" is 60"+6" = 66" inches, 4'4" is 60"-8"=52", etc. "Normal" humans cluster around 5' so this takes you pretty far.

> Convert a package's weight from oz to lb/oz? Ask mrb.

Again, base 2. As a programmer this is easy because it leverages all the same neural pathways that I use for converting between base 10 and base 2/16\. Hell, maybe learning to cook in base 2 has made me a better programmer.

> Need to know how cold it needs to be outside in farenheit for water to > freeze? Ask mrb.

This is definitely the worst example. 0°F is really cold. 100°F is really hot. Fahrenheit is objectively better than Celsius as a common parlance unit.

> I lost count of the number of times they accidentally mix up for example 1.3 > feet with 1 ft 3 in.

I've never seen anyone do this ever. I've seen dumb computer systems do shoddy conversions on inputting numbers into a program, but that's why you normalize your inputs and show it back to the user. I've never seen or heard of a living breathing human make this mistake.

> "six pound five"

That's like saying "100 centi 57 meters". Those words have meanings on their own, but they don't have a meaning in that order. The only meaningful response to that is to be confused, and then realize they're confused.

How long did they live in the US and how long have they lived where they are now? This sounds like someone who lived in the US until they were ten and moved somewhere where they not only didn't use customary units but didn't speak English. Then spent the next few years scrambling to master the language and hit adulthood understanding neither US customary units nor metric units.

Honestly, culture, customs, and normality run deep. Those handful of nations that use , as the decimal separator and . as the thousands (or otherwise) separator would have a much easier time and much more benefit swapping their separators than the average American would switching from customary units to SI. Nearly everybody uses a 24 hour day, 60 minute hour, 60 second minute. 3600 second hour, 86400 second day, etc.

Oh did I say 24 hour day? Well I lied but it's close enough.

Astronomers happily use astronomical unit, light-year, parsec, and z= redshift to measure distance all in the same context. For me, having "dumb, arbitrary" units is way less important than having familiar units. Despite the fact that humans are dumb and arbitrary, we're still pretty clever.

Most of the people who complain strongly about customary units, which are dumb and arbitrary, speak languages where inanimate objects have gender. (for the record, I also think grammatical gender is dumb and arbitrary in English) "Auto" (meaning car) is neuter and "Wagen" (meaning car) is masculine. If one considers a scale where 100°F is really hot and 0°F is really cold a dumb, arbitrary system, you should stop to consider whether to_lower(str) and to_lower(to_upper(str)) yield the same results.

Humans are dumb, arbitrary creatures. The fact that US customary units are tend towards base 2 units instead of base 10 is way less arbitrary than daylight savings time, or the fact that France is in the wrong time zone, or the fact that Denmark has enshrined in law its own national time basis and then completely ignores it and then refuses to change the law which is ignored by literally every single person in Denmark.

<comment><USER30> The conversion techniques you explained, I use them myself (that's why they always ask for my help, I can do it in my head.) But the fact many Americans are unable to do that is, in itself, evidence the imperial system doesn't work that well for them.

> This is definitely the worst example. 0°F is really cold. 100°F is really > hot.

This might be a sufficient explanation to give to a 5-year-old, but as soon as you need to do actual work with temperatures, this doesn't work so well. Case in point: many Americans don't know the freezing and boiling point in ⁰F. So, no, it's not "objectively better."

> That's like saying "100 centi 57 meters"

No European ever says this. In contrast, many American routinely say "six pound five".

> How long did they live in the US and how long have they lived where they are > now?

Their whole life. Born and raised in America.

<comment><USER32> American here. I've never once in my 40 years on this earth heard someone say "six pound five". That parlance is often used for _feet and inches_ (almost always in reference to human height), but I've never encountered anyone using it for pounds and ounces.

<comment><USER33> I'm American, have lived in many parts of the US, and I agree: "six pound five" is not something that we say. As Gormo says, this construction is frequent for feet and inches ("six foot five"), but would not be standard for weight.

And personally, if I were to use this nonstandard construction, I'd probably pluralize "pounds". I don't know why "foot" is usually singular in the parallel construction.

The most charitable interpretation I can come up with is that your relatives are from the American South, and are actually saying "six point five", meaning 6 and half pounds, and you are mishearing them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I knew about the survey foot because both the l00' tape measures I have are in survey feet. Messed me up on a home construction project about 13 years back. It was then I learned there are 2 differing feet definitions.

<comment><USER7> Are you sure it was the differing length of each version (about 610 nanometers), or was it because your tapes were marked in tenths of a foot instead of inches?

<comment><USER21> I have actually worked with people who didn't notice this about their 100' tapes. Even better are the tapes divided by 12 on one side and 10 on the other...</comment></comment></comment>


Golang Gets Cheaper Context Switching - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Golang-Cheaper-Context-Switches <comment><USER2> I an honestly _shocked_ that Go wasn't already doing this themselves and thereby doesn't already have well-worn implementations of this for every platform (particularly as the getcontext API has been on Apple's chopping block for a long time and might already not work for 64-bit ARM).</comment>


Ask HN: How to perform external monitoring of single-page web apps? - <AUTHOR> How do you perform external monitoring of your single-page web app?
We've recently published a single-page app using the ReactJS framework. Now that it's live, we would like to add some external monitoring to ensure it is always reachable and functioning properly.
With a commonly used external monitoring service (Pingdom), I created a simple "transaction" check: login, then list some things, then verify that the list of things is not empty.
But there's a problem: the login does not generate a page refresh, but instead simply manipulates the DOM to redraw parts of the screen. Pingdom is confused by this; the login action succeeds but the list action fails, because Pingdom doesn't run a JavaScript engine that would update the DOM appropriately.
What kinds of newer/alternative services are out there for external monitoring of a single-page webapp? It seems the existing solutions require full-page reloads at certain points, which is something most single-page apps are designed explicitly to not do.
I suppose we could "roll our own" with phantomjs or something, but if possible I'd prefer to use a third-party service and avoid some of the build/maintenance overhead of an in-house solution. <comment><USER2> I would suggest having it check 2 URLs, the first for the base content/html to make certain it renders from the server[0], and the second being a health/ping of your UI's API resource[1]

In the end, an SPA is a combination of its' components, which means you need to test those API component resources. I find that there are three things that should come at the very start of _any_ application... 1) error state/handling, 2) authentication+roles and 3) feature flagging.

Regarding error state/handling are procedures and definitions of how to pass/return/handle error conditions, retries etc. There's a reason node-style callbacks put error first, it makes that the default, first thing to check. APIs and logging should also account for this... You should also update your state based on certain error conditions in terms of health check. Validate input and return proper 4xx responses, errors as 5xx should be resolved or triaged, and reflected in your health-check.

User authentication and roles can be slightly deferred if you have a well defined interface for control of how to access/use said roles...

The third part being how to define and determine what features are flagged/enabled for what users and in what environments.

If you do the above, and have proper conditional handling, you should be able to cover the rest as suggested.

[0] [https://www.foo.com/](https://www.foo.com/) [1] [https://api.foo.com/health-check](https://api.foo.com/health-check)</comment>


Period Three Implies Chaos (1975) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://yorke.umd.edu/papers/Li-Yorke%20Period%20Three%20Implies%20Chaos.pdf <comment><USER2> Took Dr. Yorke's undergraduate course on dynamical systems at Maryland. By far my favorite course ever. Interesting to note that the result discussed in this paper was independently discovered a few years earlier by Sharkovskii [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharkovskii's_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharkovskii's_theorem)

<comment><USER3> From the wiki page, I am led to believe that he proved a weaker result, being that if there are cycles of period three then there are cycles of every period (which is _not_ the period three implies chaos result).

See the second paragraph in the section 'Generalizations'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There was a good blog post that touched on this recently on Scientific American's website - [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/the- coup...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/the-couple-that- studies-the-intermediate-value-theorem-together-stays-together/)

</comment><comment><USER5> For context, James Gleick's _Chaos_ is a great account of this paper and related discoveries.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=de4PAQAAQBAJ&pg=PT94&dq=Pe...](https://books.google.com/books?id=de4PAQAAQBAJ&pg=PT94&dq=Period+three+implies+chaos+james+gleick&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwimn9zVlt3gAhUOhOAKHUeHBEoQ6AEIMTAC#v=onepage&q=Period%20three%20implies%20chaos%20james%20gleick&f=false)

</comment><comment><USER6> One the gateway drugs to mathematics. Thanks for the reminder!</comment>


Twitter & Friendfeed: Understanding Referral Traffic, Arriving at a Business Model - <AUTHOR> http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2008/05/17/twitter-friendfeed-understanding-referral-traffic-arriving-at-a-business-model/ <comment><AUTHOR> What are you guys seeing (in rank) in terms of social sites referring:

1) twitter 2) friendfeed 3) facebook

</comment><comment><USER2> friendfeed #1. Twirhl #2. Twitterific #3. Twitter.com #4.</comment>


Honeywell says it built the world's most powerful quantum computer - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2020/03/03/honeywell-quantum-computer/ <comment><USER2> Currently powering thermostats across the nation.

They're all set to be on and off at the same time!</comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage your sales leads?  - <AUTHOR> I don't want to make this sound like a scene out of Glengarry, but as a early stage how do you manage your high quality leads?
(I've got about 40,000 leads that I pulled together. There's a good blog post in this story if I get the time).
At the moment, I have a excel document with lots of fields and contact information, and I essentially work my way through it individually emailing each recipient.
Each converted lead is worth upwards of several hundred (to a few thousand $ per year)... so it totally makes sense to research each customer correctly and spend the time to approach them with a highly customised email about why our product is a great fit for them.
The problem I have is keeping track of where I am and who I have already emailed. Once you start getting one hundred names down the list, and then you start having an open discussion with a few dozen customers, it becomes a minefield to remember each conversation chain you are having.
Do you use CRMs for this and handle the emailing through the CRM, or do you use a sales pipeline management tool?
What are your thoughts (and possible experiences with existing CRMs)? <comment><USER2> 40,000 leads is about 38,000 too many. The first thing you need to decide is who are your tier I target customers, and prune the list appropriately. If you product / service is good and solves a real problem for a properly targeted client, it may be quite a while before you bother with the other 38,000. The other 38,000 are marketing leads, not sales leads. They need to do something to identify themselves as tier I sales leads via some set of trigger events that you ID as beacons that could be indicators that the timing is right to contact them. At some point as you succeed you'll grow into a full time marketing staff that spends all day thinking about how to move the suspects over to the sales lead list. But in terms of generating revenue now, you need to prune the hell out of the list so that you are spending your time chasing the highest value prospects.

<comment><USER3> Wish I could upvote this again. codva is absolutely right, you need to be smart about your targets and close potential for each one. Segmenting the list now into "high-priority" and "my-email-marketing-list" will help you be much more productive and will lead to better close rates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We use Salesforce (combined with ecquire.com) at Mixpanel - it's not a very friendly UI but it has every feature you'll need in the future. You learn to love it. Plus, every sales person you may hire in the future will already know how to use it (or should). Salesforce, like most CRM tools, has a way to bcc your emails to keep track of the conversations you're having.

You need to start hiring another sales rep too if you're handling 100s of leads by yourself.

You should begin building a qualification framework to understand which leads are valuable and worth your time: Do they have budget? Who has the authority to get this deal done? Do they have a serious need? When will they buy if everything about your product was perfect? And any other unique factors related to your business. Then, get this information into Salesforce!

It's probably time to start using marketing automation/drip campaigns to keep your leads warm too.

Depending on how long your phone calls/meetings run - you'll usually only be able to handle 5-6/day assuming you're doing this full-time so you should consider calculating how many things you can juggle at once.

Use CRM to build a forecast so you can measure your effectiveness. A forecast is as simple as taking the amount of money you might make from each customer that month and multiplying it by the probability you'll close that customer. That'll force you to prioritize.

<comment><USER5> How could the UI be improved?

<comment><USER6> One of the biggest nitpicks I've always had is the calendar. Whenever I click the quick link from the home page (Chatter summary + dashboards, after logging in), it takes me to the last calendar page I viewed. I don't use the SF calendar all the time, so sometimes it's from weeks ago. Why doesn't it show /today/?

Another thing is scheduling SF meetings/events. In order to invite anyone, they need to be inside our system as a user or contact. Most of the time when I'm scheduling a call, I need to end up adding a new contact because they're not in our system (and I don't think it's reasonable to expect everyone I talk to to be in there as a contact).

If Salesforce would reconsider the UX around their calendar, I would love them. I'm a UX designer myself, and my company uses SF. I typically use it when reaching out to clients to schedule calls--and I avoid it otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We're currently using [http://www.streak.com/](http://www.streak.com/)

It's working fine for us right now, but I'm fairly sure that once we build a decent sized sales team we'll be struggling and looking for something else.

The pros are those good pipelines that they have. The cons are that it can be a bit tricky to manage anything other than a basic flat pipeline and if leads start with a contact or phonecall we send ourselves blank emails to build the stub in Streak.

Oh, and it doesn't work on mobile devices (it relies on a Chrome extension today, so you need to use your laptop/desktop)

Edit: Apparently there's an iPhone app, but our company is 100% Linux/Android so we're just using the Chrome plugin.

<comment><USER8> Founder of Streak here. Happy to answer questions about the product from the OP or anyone else - reach me directly at aleem at streak.

"The cons are that it can be a bit tricky to manage anything other than a basic flat pipeline"

We just launched the ability to link boxes together to allow for more complicated relationships. See: [http://blog.streak.com/2014/01/linked- boxes.html](http://blog.streak.com/2014/01/linked-boxes.html)

"...and if leads start with a contact or phonecall we send ourselves blank emails to build the stub in Streak."

We have some ideas about how we can do a way better job here. It basically boils down to letting you log meetings or phone calls really easily, but under the hood, its still an email (and all the benefits that come with it).

We also have an iOS app as well as an android app in beta. If you'd like to join the beta, shoot me an email.

<comment><USER7> I'd be interested in beta testing the android app, but there is no email in your profile and googling turns up a lot of curry recipes.

<comment><USER9> Email already in his post: "Founder of Streak here. Happy to answer questions about the product from the OP or anyone else - reach me directly at aleem at streak." : )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a co-founder at Streak.com, and I think the problem you're describing is especially well suited for Streak (if you're using gmail). Obviously I'm biased but here's why:

1) We show you the context of your lead right next to the email you're reading in your inbox

2) Our primary interface to your leads is very spreadsheet like. You can search, sort, filter, group, etc to slide and dice your deals in different ways.

3) We extract useful information about your leads automatically (like the date you last emailed them). Combine this with (2) and you can filter and sort your leads so that you know exactly who you need to get back to next.

4) Our saved views feature might be especially useful to you - effectively you can put the leads that need attention right now at the top of your inbox, see here: [http://blog.streak.com/2013/07/using-saved-views-to- organize...](http://blog.streak.com/2013/07/using-saved-views-to-organize- yourself.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> A CRM is the memory of a business. You will never remember what you forget and it's amazing the number of opportunities we forget.

Import your contact list, put _each_ conversation and email in your CRM. Before calling a client, take a look at what happened recently. Your clients will be amazed of how much things you remember.

If someone is talking about a future project/dream, add it to your CRM with a low priority (I use % of probability of winning). Add a task (in the CRM) to call about the project in a couple of months.

When a conversation ends with the client saying "I'll get back to you", ask when you should follow up on the project and add a task at this date. When it is time, follow up! Clients don't call back and it's ok because it means they are busy with their business.

A CRM is not a task manager but it's essential to add tasks related to contacting your clients in there.

I use CapsuleCRM. Not because it's the best but because it was the easiest to use at that time. I tried the old version of ZohoCRM and it wasn't that good, but they changed it recently so you should take a look. Try them all, you'll find the one that fits you best.

</comment><comment><USER11> Streak ([http://www.streak.com/](http://www.streak.com/)) has been a good start for us. Upsides are that it's flexible enough to match most pipeline progressions, exports to CSV, supports mail merge, and allows you to easily track emails.

Our main issue has been that in person meetings and calls are difficult to log and keep track of, and as we've progressed towards those its become less and less useful.

If most of your interactions happen via email however, Streak is a great flexible (and currently free) tool.

<comment><USER8> "Our main issue has been that in person meetings and calls are difficult to log and keep track of, and as we've progressed towards those its become less and less useful."

We're working on handling this better - the main idea will be to let you log meetings or phone calls really easily, but under the hood, its still an email (and all the benefits that come with it).

<comment><USER12> Hey, founder of callinize ([http://www.callinize.com](http://www.callinize.com)) here. We developed an integration for streak.com which will allow you to log calls to boxes automatically!

+1 for streak, we use it here internally and love it.

Feel free to reach out to me at blake [at] callinize.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> +1 Streak ([http://www.streak.com](http://www.streak.com))

Streak is great! We were looking for a lightweight CRM that our team would actually use. Streak does everything we need it to and it does not require our team to dramatically change their work flow.

Everything is right inside Gmail and so for us, at this stage, Streak is perfect. Plus, tracking feature is cool. Easy way to see if an email has been read.

Rapportive ([https://rapportive.com](https://rapportive.com)) is really what makes our direct sales possible. And, Streak plays nice with Rapportive.

</comment><comment><USER14> I extensively researched CRMs a few months back. We were looking for simplicity, cost, and a few key features. Pipedrive was the best we found and it's been really effective for us. If we had a larger sales team (just one person now) we'd consider moving to Salesforce - every sales person you'd hire should know how to use it.

<comment><USER15> We like Pipedrive's overall structure (in particular for the way it looks a bit like a Trello board) a lot for the types of sales we do (multi $k/month deals).

The interface is kind of slow and laggy which for something that our sales team spends all day in, is very annoying... For our purposes we can probably live with it but if we were really sweating call volume then I think we'd get something snappier.

We looked at a lot of alternatives and I was blown away by how un-blown-away I was by anything we looked at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congrats on the 40k leads, that's an impressive number given your estimated ACV. Maybe you could share a few secrets with us as to how you've managed to generate so many.

Depending on the source and your definition of warm lead you have lots of options. I caution you, as a salesperson myself, not to just throw them all into a CRM willy nilly. Doing so will be information overload and can potentially make things harder on yourself. Excel is the fastest/lightest (non-techincal) UI for viewing and manipulating that size of data.

Your best bet is to come up with some qualification criteria and, as someone already suggested above, try to filter it down to 2k of the best (highest value) leads. From here, I'd work out an approach strategy (read the book: Predictable Revenue) and get working.

Using conservative numbers, 2k leads per month will keep very busy and your pipeline full.

Happy selling.

</comment><comment><USER17> Close.io

The platform is great - with built in voip - and does everything I need in one interface. I highly recommend it.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've heard of close.io and the event based features make it look really promising..

<comment><USER19> And you just signed up to write that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> _What are your thoughts (and possible experiences with existing CRMs)?_

You might be too big for it, but Seliger + Associates [1] uses Highrise: [https://highrisehq.com/](https://highrisehq.com/) . It's intuitive and easy to use but surprisingly fully featured.

It may or may not be appropriate for your use pattern, but I'm surprised no one has mentioned it yet.

[1] See www.seliger.com if you're curious; we're grant writing consultants who work primarily for nonprofit and public agencies.

</comment><comment><USER21> Definitely just use whatever CRM with which you feel the most comfortable. I've been comfortable with a variety from the traditional ACT/Sage and Goldmine to the robust SugarCRM.

You can also setup a powerful set of google docs/forms to achieve the exact same thing of course.

That said, always bare in mind how, where, and with who you are storing your data. All it takes is 1 unscrupulous or 1 completely insecure/socially engineer-able individual to make life bad.

</comment><comment><USER22> I see a lot of options listed below but there really is no substitute for Salesforce.com. The basic editions are quite reasonably priced and Salesforce has more integrations than any other platform. Here is a great simple guide on Salesforce basics

[http://blog.prialto.com/essential-crm-management- toolkit/](http://blog.prialto.com/essential-crm-management-toolkit/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I find regardless of CRM or chickenscratch everyday you're going to have to go through at least 5 minutes of masterminding and maintaining the list. For outgoing I use sendy with SES and you can use variables in the template so your .csv of names can auto load to quickly personalize an email to each lead. If you'd like to mastermind more I'd love to! firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER23> Since the title asks, I manage my sales leads with [http://www.onepagecrm.com/](http://www.onepagecrm.com/) because it's simple, I can CC email conversations, make notes etc and it basically does the job a small business needs done (in my case, consultancy)

Having said that, it really isn't the place where I'd put 40,000 leads and custom fields.

</comment><comment><USER24> Try Nimble CRM. We use them at my consulting shop. The product definitely has it's warts, but can help in pulling together (social media) information about leads in your pipeline. You can log calls emails etc but it's a bit more of a pain.

</comment><comment><USER25> My wife's company uses Marketo, though that might be more of an enterprise product. not sure if it's cost effective for a single founder. My wife thinks it is a great product and it integrates well with Salesforce.

</comment><comment><USER26> We use SugarCRM, complemented with our own custom sales-intelligence tooling (which we are probably going to turn into a SaaS offering in it's own right soon. Keep a look out).

</comment><comment><USER27> Try Base ([http://getbase.com](http://getbase.com)) You'll be able to connect your inbox and automatically track and sort your conversations. Creating a customized sales pipeline is also important so your CRM matches your actual sales process. Strong iOS and Android apps as well.

</comment><comment><USER28> +1 for Streak.

It's really simple and frictionless if you are using Gmail.

</comment><comment><USER29> We use Close.io

</comment><comment><USER30> RelateIQ</comment>


A First Look at Windows 7 and Snow Leopard (Finally) - <AUTHOR> http://catsonkeyboards.blogspot.com/2010/08/first-look-at-windows-7-and-snow.html

<comment><USER2> Hmm... seems like (although this guy seems pretty technical) he's also been jaded by a few specific edge cases and made generalized decisions based on those edge cases that prevented him from finding a proper solution to the problem. (This sentence is full of fail, but that's how it streamed out of my head, sorry in advance)

I'd call him a "noob" in my circle of friends. A lot of people will tell you "you can't do this and that and the other with X, Y, or Z platform" when the truth is, you can.

I was immediately turned off when he said that Leopard was a step backwards in the OS X world. I've never heard something so absurd in my entire life. Every OS that Apple has released has become exceptionally better each and every time. I'd hate my life if I was stuck on an old PPC Tiger machine.

<comment><USER3> > I'd hate my life if I was stuck on an old PPC Tiger machine

I have one of those - youtube constantly reminds you to install a modern browser (eg Firefox, Chrome) but there's none working on this machine actually!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm sorry. Why do we care about such article?

</comment><comment><USER5> meh. love what you want for your own reasons. my mac does widescreen displays just fine, so does my win7 notebook. they also both suck in their own ways. build your own perfect machine if you're so damn picky, then you can't blame anyone but yourself.

<comment><USER6> He's not being "picky" though, he's complaining legitimately about things which are _supposed_ to work, or work reliably (or predictably), and don't, despite being built by huge companies with the resources to make them work right.

I can't say much more about this, because the whole subject gets my blood boiling too quickly for me to make much sense. I'll just say that I really wish I could tie some of you guys to a chair, in a room with me, while I try to coach one of my clients through using their new computer. (Like the older couple that made the switch from WebTV to a Mac last week ... that was an adventure.) For example, if my clients are anything to go by, there are _huge_ numbers of people who are afraid of updating their software, ever. That is a problem!

Unrelated: hey cool, saundby is right around the corner from me. I'm in Grass Valley. I run up to Colfax Max for burgers and shakes all the time. Neat!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not a high quality review, more like a few micro rants and tunnel vision comments about various features. Summary: he generally wasn't impressed by either Windows 7 or Snow Leopard, though ranted a bit more about the latter.</comment>


Could NSA be spying on technology companies to help competitors compete? - <AUTHOR>

It's more likely to be an employee who might take advantage of this, though it makes me wonder if your company's technology-related emails safe then being talked about or other data shared online. <comment><USER2> Such as, for example, to help U.S.-based social networks and telecommunications providers to succeed in the face of competitors which might be more difficult to extract intelligence and data from?

I think it's plausible -- spy agency's incentives are to access as much communications as possible, and to be able to break into communications, and both of those would be massively helped by having big service players on your side (preferably ones which have lax internal controls and engineering policies).

I definitely remember a lot of skepticism about privacy and safety of information regarding data placed 'in the cloud' when the concept first appeared - it would certainly seem rational to keep your plans and designs outside of cloud systems if you worry about these kind of possibilities.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that's unfortunate. I wonder if there's much of a business built around providing this solution for companies, "ready made."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I seem to remember a German wind turbine company applying for a patent and finding out that an American company had shortly beforehand registered the same thing. I can't remember the details of who the companies were though.

<comment><AUTHOR> With NSA surveillance it makes it a much more real of a possibility..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Answer is Yes. Previous related discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6192878](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6192878)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Unfortunately I don't catch all posts on here. ;)</comment></comment>


'Rammed it through': Trump's Twitter order riles staffers and tech reformers - <AUTHOR> https://www.protocol.com/trump-twitter-executive-order-230 <comment><USER2> I suspect that Trump "riles staffers" daily, so that's not news.

The CDA Section 230 is 24 years old, so "reformers" have had plenty of time.

I'm interested to see how this new EO is abused.</comment>


Heimcontrol.js – Home Automation in Node.js with Raspberry Pi and Arduino - <AUTHOR> https://ni-c.github.io/heimcontrol.js/ <comment><USER2> For the people that prefer their Home Automation to be in Python, have a look at Home Assistant [https://home-assistant.io/](https://home-assistant.io/)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you dont want to open your network ports, you could setup an amazon aws or something (or firebase, disclaimer im a firebase torch/fan) to allow control from outside your house

<comment><USER4> I've solved this problem for myself, and I suspect that many other people have it, but nobody has shown any interest in my solution so far:

[https://github.com/skorokithakis/gweet](https://github.com/skorokithakis/gweet)

It's a command queue that allows your Raspi/Arduino to listen to commands and your control apps to issue them. I use secret keys for the commands, but you can also use crypto to sign the requests. It's been working very well for me, and with very low latency (the DNS query and TLS setup are the slowest parts, it seems).

<comment><USER5> posting as breadcrumbs. I'll need this in the next two months.

<comment><USER4> It should also be on the first page if you Google "message queue internet of things".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Panopticon Is Already Here - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/china-ai-surveillance/614197/ <comment><USER2> Here's hoping for a Butlerian Jihad... or, you know, just introducing privacy legislation that make specific outcomes, not methods, illegal – in the same way that murder is illegal, regardless of method, tools, etc.

While Tethics and AI are buzzwords du jour, the problem is more general: The weakening of liberal democratic values.

We need laws and regulation that guarantee privacy more concretely as a foundational right.

<comment><USER3> Spot on, America, and West such, wouldn't have a reason to worry in the first place if it managed to maintain the integrity of the Western bloc after the cold war.

By letting its foreign policy wonder into grey area by playing overtures with regimes of all kind without any reservations, it allowed for norms, and boundaries to be blurred, and resolve of its camp blunted.

What is happening now, is that the whole Western camp have descended into whataboutism with relation to what rogue regime each bloc member is playing ball with, without no authority left in the bloc "clean enough" to police it.

What rogue regimes made to the West in the last 20 years, is nothing, but a gang initiation in reverse.

First they lured the West into playing their dirty games, and when Western countries thoroughly dirtied their hands, then come and say "your hands are as dirty as mine, what's the point fighting now?"

<comment><USER4> What is the evidence that US foreign policy decreased in integrity after the Cold War? There was plenty of dirty stuff during the Cold War too.

<comment><USER3> The critical difference was that when the West was engaging with rogue elements, they stayed rogue elements, not "strategic partners," and trade deal members.

<comment><USER5> What do you think happened in El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, Iran, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Honduras, etc

<comment><USER3> USA has since disposed of their pawns in Chile, Argentina, and did not oppose them being taken out in Indonesia, and Salvador.

<comment> blaser-waffle That's because they stopped being useful in pushing back against global communism. Chile, for example, ditched Pinochet but kept the liberal US style economy.

And Argentina is kept in line via WHO loans and regular scourging through economic means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a good, chilling read but this sentence right at the end bothered me.

"Until they secure their personal liberty, at some unimaginable cost, free people everywhere will have to hope against hope that the world's most intelligent machines are made elsewhere."

I don't agree, with the "right" people in charge, the intelligent machines pose a risk to humankind everywhere.

<comment><USER7> I agree with that intelligent machines pose a risk regardless of who has the best intentions, but its also true that certain countries (namely china) have demonstrated that they are more willing and motivated to use it for devious surveillance purposes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is a lot to read here, but it is all important and all possible. I don't know that it can even be stopped at this point, it's just an index to check on periodically to confirm "ok, that's how far down the path we are right now".

<comment><USER9> "Predictions" are pointless. It's wrong, and just about everything that is good and decent about human life and the human mind is endangered by it. So I'm against it, regardless of the "chances" of whatever outcome. I know what's required for human dignity, I will rather die than betray that, and if everybody thought that way, it would be over in one week. That they don't is their problem and something for them to find peace with. I don't worry about that nor about saving the world, my sole responsibility is being _worthy_ of having been born into a better one, or into the same one among better peers. That is within my agency, and only I can let it slip.

<comment><USER10> This seems like pseudo-self help nonsense.

What exactly are you suggesting, other than "be a good person?"

<comment><USER9> > What exactly are you suggesting, other than "be a good person?"

I didn't say "be a good person", so what exactly are you taking issue with, other than what it "seems like" to you? I even stated that I'm not primarily concerned with outcome or others, this isn't advice to anyone, it's a statement of fact.

<comment><USER11> It doesn't seem like facts, it seems like opinions, but that's ok too. For instance...

> "I know what's required for human dignity..."

This is a personal value statement, different people have different ideas of what dignity means. There are likely some universals but there's a huge amount of variance too.

<comment><USER9> > This is a personal value statement

Of course it is. What else could it be?

> different people have different ideas of what dignity means

Then they can come forward and state that theirs is compatible with being subject to totalitarian rule.

Even without trying, I find so many wise words in support to what I know to be true both in my heart of hearts and from decades of lived experience.

> _I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and > speech — the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments > which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don't convince > me and that our civilisation over a period of four hundred years has been > founded on the opposite notice._

and

> _The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be > free inside._

\-- George Orwell

> _the concept of "freedom and the pursuit of non-material goals" is > incredibly important, but also incredibly fragile. Not only does it allow us > to pursue our own lives, it also prevents us from becoming tools of crime. > It is humanity's first line of defense, or we should say the last. Actually, > it's the sole line of defense. [..] Freedom is not a handout, we need to > earn it with our efforts. You can lock up my body but you can never imprison > my will._

\-- Qu Weiguo

> _Suppose that humans happen to be so constructed that they desire the > opportunity for freely undertaken productive work. Suppose that they want to > be free from the meddling of technocrats and commissars, bankers and > tycoons, mad bombers who engage in psychological tests of will with peasants > defending their homes, behavioral scientists who can 't tell a pigeon from a > poet, or anyone else who tries to wish freedom and dignity out of existence > or beat them into oblivion._

\-- Noam Chomsky

In the meantime, the _criticism_ is that "other people think differently", with not even a hint of what arguments they might have.

And the kicker is, if the arguments are for totalitarian rule, their content wouldn't even matter, I could simply kill or ignore or slander the people who bring them forward to win the argument -- while that would violate my own principles, it would not violate theirs. If being ruled by and deciding facts by force is okay, my force is as well as any -- but if that path is suggested in earnest, the hypocrisy instantly becomes visible. And preaching water and drinking wine isn't _even_ a different set of values, it's nothing.

<comment><USER12> +10

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Stuck at home with more time on my hands I've been rereading a lot of old sf. I just finished the last of John Twelve Hawk's 4th realm trilogy which has a modern technological Panopticon society as it's central theme. While some of the technological speculation is strictly fiction, it's surprising how much the series (last volume published 2009) foreshadows modern surveillance trends. The trends mentioned in the article could have dropped right into the story.

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

<comment><USER14> Ive considered making decisions off my RSA token values before. I've come to realize I'm not one for the chaos of harlequin life though.

<comment><USER15> The Tiktok man rewards you with one more minute of life then

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Does the technology exist? Can we put the genie back in the bottle? So then what?

This article and a lot of the literature assumes the same tools are not also turned upon the managers of society (i.e. that they get to use the times in secret). Many fear that knowledge of our lives will support interference in our lives. Perhaps any such interference must be just as observable and prohibited by law in a free society.

Who watches the watchers? We all could. When there is a conflict or question we have records to review and public opinion to adjudicate.

Of course we would have to rethink a number of assumable cultural expectations.

</comment><comment><USER17> Very sad and horrifying to read about. Worse because I don't know what constructive things I can do in this context.

AI is a race that absolutely must be won by good actors rather than totalitarian states.

<comment><USER4> It looks like AI will be simple and not prohibitively expensive to develop. So it doesn't matter who "wins the race"\---once it exists, it will be available to all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My personal belief is that the problems are being oversimplified and that is very counterproductive.

I'm sure people will misinterpret what I am trying to say. But, it is framed as a "democracy or tyranny" question. I believe that although the authoritarianism is quite horrific in some ways, in some respects there are actually advantages. Which, if you are still reading, is not to suggest in any way that it is the correct path, but maybe is a hint that our current "democratic system" may not be quite what it is cracked up to be either.

Again, in no way suggesting we should get closer to a closed system, but I feel like honest evaluation will see very significant deficiencies with western governments such as the United States. For example, looking at the extreme political divide in the country sometimes makes government seem like a joke.

I personally believe that the best and maybe the only way to move forward constructively is to be realistic about the flaws in both extremely divergent views (east and west) and think of a totally new shared philosophy and way for government to operate..

But most likely that will not happen, and I also personally believe that another world war may be stimulated by poor technical adjustment to global accounting collapse (along with the complete failure of cultural and political integration). I think if this occurs then it will prove that humans are not fit to control the planet, and hope that we will soon have competent and (one can hope benign) but much more sophisticated AIs that we can pass the torch of evolution to.

</comment><comment><USER19> "A crude version of such a system is already in operation in China's northwestern territory of Xinjiang, where more than 1 million Muslim Uighurs have been imprisoned, the largest internment of an ethnic-religious minority since the fall of the Third Reich."

There's so much in this article that merits comment / discussion, but this sentence really jumped out at me. I'd been vaguely aware that this kind of thing was happening in the PRC, but not at this historic scale....

Western values matter more than ever. Here's hoping for a sea change this fall.

<comment><USER20> Pro tip: If you ever find yourself in a semi-professional discussion, I would avoid referring to democracy, human rights, and individual freedoms as "Western values." Attaching a specific cultural and anthropological carte to what I view more as universal values that have yet to take roots universally, is exclusive and counter-productive. For one, China went through a period of Western domination starting in the 19th century, and Chinese people haven't forgotten that. Asking China to follow Western values in this context is about the worst thing you can say. Just because these concepts originated in the Western world should not preclude one from putting them in the context of the larger human enterprise. Do not ask, "Why shall China not walk in the footsteps of the West in giving its people the right to shape their destiny?" Ask, "Why shall the Chinese people not be at liberty of shaping their own destiny?"

<comment><USER21> Oddly enough, the West conceded this battle against the Muslim world to some degree. We are exhausted from that debate. The Muslim world mostly believes in their own bullshit, thankfully we bowed out from that fight.

We need to bow out in the same manner with the debate against the East. There's a billion people, if they don't want free uncensored Internet, who are we to say anything? If they wanted it, they'd have it. They know the ins and outs of the idiosyncrasies of their society, the same way the west does (how the west reconciles virtual slave labor to maintain it's lifestyle of affordable luxuries (everything from food to clothes to electronics)).

But, there is a new issue. Slavery in America was considered the 'peculiar' institution. Surveillance state is something we have to ignore, similar to, I don't know, making your women wear varieties of face coverings (Islam), we have to accept they are acclimated to the mental gymnastics required to sustain their pride. Whatever. We shouldn't waste our energy on that, it's a losing battle.

But, the 'peculiar' institutions are the things we need to probe. A repeat of pre-extermination Holocaust in China is a no go. I hope the examination keeps up, and I hope we retroactively apply this new spirit to some of the trespasses that occurred in Palestine as well.

<comment><USER22> _Oddly enough, the West conceded this battle against the Muslim world to some degree. We are exhausted from that debate. The Muslim world mostly believes in their own bullshit, thankfully we bowed out from that fight._

China, though, owns an Islamic region. So they can't run away from it. They could build a wall, as Israel did, but that just contained the problem. Israel was never able to get large numbers of Arabs to abandon Islam. So Israel has an ongoing headache. China is trying to avoid getting stuck in that deadlock.

It's not the surveillance system that's the big problem. It's that they went all the way to concentration and re-education camps. They're trying to break the hold of Islam. In too brutal a way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sounds like we're heading to a new era of feudalism.

<comment><USER24> If not worse. The current system of capitalism already feels quite feudalism like in that the "peasants" have very little chance of escaping.

Developments like these will just turn that up to 11

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Let's try a thought experiment. Suppose that human intelligence and consciousness are not ends unto themselves: I think therefore I am is false. Suppose that human intelligence is secondary to the will to power, to life, which is merely a chemical that repeats or does not: I am that I am, just an infinite paperclip factory. Suppose what is meant by consciousness and feeling is merely a death/not-death projection machine that attempts to conjure scenarios of fear and joy, dreams and nightmares, through the dimension of time, via memory stored in gray matter. Now this human AI creates a tool which can read the nuances of the human AI and bend them to its will.

What occurs after?

</comment><comment><USER26> [https://outline.com/ApPUdb](https://outline.com/ApPUdb)

</comment><comment><USER27> We are creating a concentration camp for ourselves to get people to click ads.

<comment><USER28> There is a major logical flaw in that rhetoric. What good would displaying ads to concentration camp prisoners do? Advertising is fundamentally about getting something that they want from the capabilities of the audience be it votes or money. Concentration camp victims are rather lacking in them - even if you include "ability to resist" which in itself is redudant given the extreme measures of control.

That is like saying "In the dark future of unrestrained capitalism will sell ads to sex slaves chained in the basement - where they have no money or freedom." It might tug at heart strings but it makes so little sense it sounds like an outright parody of such sentiments.

<comment><USER29> I took "concentration camp" as a metaphor fwiw.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> A good read. Again, imagine such a government in charge of universal basic income distribution and the majority of 'citizens' dependent on that. Not a bright future.

<comment><USER31> Sorry, what does this have to do with UBI?

With such a government, any future wouldn't be desirable. Imagine such government in charge of unemployment benefits, health services, the military, anything really: it's grim in any case.

Moreover, universal basic income is universal, by definition. If a government denies it to some particular citizens according to some criteria, it is not universal anymore. It becomes an income provided to anyone who is in favor of the government, which is a very different thing. So, if universal basic income existed, even the Chinese government would have to give it to everyone... or otherwise give it another name.

<comment><USER32> > Sorry, what does this have to do with UBI?

UBI gives government a lever to control people by threatening to reduce or stop payments as a form of punishment.

<comment><USER33> We have the technology to not build that lever into the logistics design of UBI

<comment><USER32> This isn't a technology problem. Congress could put whatever restrictions on UBI it wants to. The technology would be required to implement whatever kind of UBI system Congress made into law. Congress could also change the law any time in the future -- and every time party control over congress changes, you can bet they will push for tweaks to UBI that they promised to their base.

The most likely outcome, which happens with many other kinds of government programs, would be for Congress to delegate significant authority over UBI to some regulatory bureaucracy in the executive branch.

Similar to the way the IRS, EPA, and FDA work, there would be some department of UBI with broad discretion over how the law is interpreted, the ability create additional regulations and fine people who do not obey them, etc.

You can't solve this problem with code. It's a political problem.

<comment><USER33> If you had crypto that used biometrics to generate unique secret keys and automatically mined X amount of coins (based on a set of public economic inputs) to evenly distribute to all participants, and made it part of the constitution that the distribution mechanism can never be changed you'd be as close as you can to solving this issue.

Any group trying to take it away once people have it will find out it won't go well.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Layoff List - <AUTHOR> I was browsing the layoff news this morning.  In summary, it looks like the following sectors are getting hit: tech, energy, schools (local & universities), retail.
Here is a half-ass aggregation of some of the stories, if the name follows with -x% it means I couldn't easily find the actual number:
Autodesk -925
BlackBerry -200
Practice Fusion -25%
Chicago Public Schools -227
VMware -15%
GoPro -7%
Mixpanel -20
Microsoft -18,000
Cisco Systems -14,000
Juniper Networks -1,300
Oracle -26,000
IBM -95,000
HP -86,000
Hewlett Packard Enterprise -72,000
EMC Corp -15%
Chevron-x%
BP-x%
Volvo-x%
Alcoa-x%
Sprint -800
Shell -10,000
Twitter-x%
Nasty Gal -10%
Yale University Tech Dept. -24
Wells Fargo -581
Genworth Financial -200
Eastern Illinois University -200
Illinois State University -x%
Delta Airlines -100
Credit Suisse -4,000
Yahoo -15%
Random Oil Companies -x%
Random Coal Mines -x%
Newport News Shipbuilding -700+
Sandridge Energy -172
Brach's Supermarket -127
Regions Bank -260
Polaris -100
Carrier Corp -62
Caterpillar -120
Sam's Club -120
good summary article on tech layoffs:
http://www.benzinga.com/analyst-ratings/analyst-color/16/01/6149651/chowdhry-major-tech-layoffs-are-coming-feds-dudley-is-cl <comment><USER2> It would be nice to see a list of sources you used.

<comment><USER3> It would also be nice to compare these numbers with historical data: are they higher, lower or the same as layoff numbers in previous years (across the economy and by business sector)?

Companies lay off people all the time, and some companies can be having financial difficulties even when the economy is doing well. Layoffs at Yahoo probably occurred for completely different reasons (e.g., not being able to compete against Google and Facebook for ad dollars) than the ones at Chevron (probably due to the declining price of oil). The fact that some number of companies laid off some number of people this year doesn't imply anything interesting unless it's placed in context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like a good half a million people.</comment>


Use Bash Strict Mode (Unless You Love Debugging) - <AUTHOR> http://redsymbol.net/articles/unofficial-bash-strict-mode/ <comment><USER2> Don't write programs in shell script, unless you love an endless supply of bugs, half of which cannot be solved.</comment>