California bans private prisons - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/12/california-private-prison-ban-immigration-ice <comment><USER2> I find it fascinating that private prisons draw such ire while the prison guard union draws so little, when the prison guard union has all the exact same incentives and is drastically more powerful.

California would have had legal marijuana a decade sooner except for lobbing by the union, they're a major force for mandatory minimum sentences and tougher sentencing in general.

This seems like a trivial easy-PR win for some legislators that does very little to meaningfully address the problems with criminal justice in the US. Private prisons are a tiny little piece of a much bigger problem and there's still a lot of real work to be done.

<comment><USER3> Going after public sector unions at all is extremely difficult. The most successful attempt to do so that I'm aware of was Gov. Scott Walker's in Wisconsin. And even he didn't go after the law enforcement unions. (It might be possible to split off the police unions from the prison guard unions, but it's not clear to me that it is.)

Law enforcement unions are one of the few American institutions with completely bipartisan protection. Democrats don't go after them because Democrats are pro-union. Republicans don't go after them because Republicans are pro-police. Furthermore, you really don't want to pick a fight with police unions. What happens if police officers and prison guards go on strike? It's against the law in many places, but if _the police are on strike_ , who's going to enforce that? There is a very significant risk that you'd have to call up the National Guard just to maintain public order. And even then, how many National Guardsmen does California have? How many LEOs? And most of those National Guardsmen are not actually trained in law enforcement. In effect you would be declaring martial law. It's not worth it.

<comment><USER4> "Law enforcement unions are one of the few American institutions with completely bipartisan protection. Democrats don't go after them because Democrats are pro-union. Republicans don't go after them because Republicans are pro-police."

Perhaps your "democracy" needs more than 2 parties.

"What happens if police officers and prison guards go on strike?"

The American culture is very antagonistic. In democratic societies, which are less antagonistic, this would become a matter of new public consensus much sooner before they would go on actual strike (there are many forms of strike and some of them do not involve stopping all work, for example, work-to-rule).

<comment><USER5> "The American culture is very antagonistic. In democratic societies, which are less antagonistic, this would become a matter of new public consensus much sooner before they would go on actual strike"

Like France?

<comment><USER4> I think France is kind of odd because yes, they do strike a lot, but usually the public approval of the striking is quite high. So it is less antagonistic in this sense.

I live in Europan country with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartism), and that's one option how to make things less antagonistic. There is lot of negotiations going on before the strike happens, and it mostly gets averted.

<comment><USER6> In France most of the strikes come from the public sector. And I'm pretty sure the public approval for the strikes depends if it affects them: if you'd poll people living in Paris about the current public transportation strike, I don't think you'd see a lot of support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Private prison companies used to view California as one of their fastest- > growing markets.

This is such a bizarre and twisted sentence to hear without a hint of irony. It's like dream/nightmare logic except in real life. In 100 years private prisons are going to be a hideous stain on our history and this is such a huge step in the right direction that it really makes me proud to be living in California and supporting the state with my tax dollars.

<comment><USER8> Isn't it? Companies that probably lobby for stricter and longer sentences, looking at a populated state as a "market," with caged human beings as their product. It's the most absurd concept to me, and it's even more disgusting when it's put in such an innocent manner. "Private prison companies used to view California as one of their fastest-growing markets." It just gets more disgusting the more you look into it, and the statistics around incarceration in the US.

<comment><USER9> Just to throw it out there: the idea isn't absurd; it's evil.

<comment><USER8> You're completely right on that. Absolutely evil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Honestly, it's a bit of a red herring.. nothing is going to change from a criminal justice perspective. Less than 10% of incarcerated people are held in private prisons. But even more importantly, there are still so many private contractors / unions in the (public/private) prison industry that this ban won't really affect policies or outcomes going forward.. private interests will almost always exist in it that have perverse incentives that are contrary to what's actually good for crime and recidivism rates. [0]

An example would be the prison phones / video visitation industry. It's absolutely abhorrent what's going on there (removing in-person visits, replacing them with stupidly expensive phone calls that prisoners can hardly afford).. and yet public prisons / jails are using their services just the same. [1]

[0] - [https://worthrises.org/picreport2019](https://worthrises.org/picreport2019)

[1] - [https://www.prisonpolicy.org/phones/state_of_phone_justice.h...](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/phones/state_of_phone_justice.html) Just look at how expensive those phone calls are :(

<comment><USER11> Public jails are doing the same things because companies that provide those services lobby them to do it. The FCC under Obama had capped the amount they could charge which was promptly undone with government changes.

This also ignores known stories such as an example where a judge had a stake in a private prison company (or was bribed outright?) And as a result was sentencing school kids to prison for things which probably needed detention at worst. And this went on for a decade.

The prison system in the US is not good to begin with. Largely because the citizens look at prison as retribution rather than rehabilitation. But the private nature only adds to and exacerbates issues.

<comment><USER12> > The FCC under Obama had capped the amount they could charge which was > promptly undone with government changes.

We see this time and time again. There really needs to be a better protocol for this. It takes so much time and effort to make these laws, yet they can be undone in a heartbeat. It's an inherently flawed system.

<comment><USER13> These things COULD go through a functioning legislature. Functioning being the key word. When you have one party who outright states that they will stop any and all work in the legislature just because Obama is president, and the citizenry continues to re-elect that party, what else do you do? What else SHOULD you do?

<comment><USER14> > These things COULD go through a functioning legislature

Which would just make them subject to switching when the legislative majority changed, rather than actually fundamentally changing the situation.

But I'm not sure either is really a problem: otherwise, bad laws would be impervious to change, too. If you want good laws, you have to keep electing good government.

<comment><USER13> True but there are multiple levels of law "inertia", and stuff passed through congress at one point carried more of it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm so happy about this. Private prisons are the scum of the earth. They're totally antithetical to a free society that values human life. They often lobby for minimum occupancy levels in law (effectively requiring by law a certain percentage of citizens to be marked as criminals). Any profit they skim off the top is money that should be spent rehabilitating criminals and making them functional members of society. Next up should be criminalizing charging huge quantities for prisoners to video call / phone call and the usurious fees on commissary.

I'd wager $1 in their pockets costs society easily 10X that.

[EDIT] Surprise surprise, when Canada experimented with private prisons, they found measurably better outcomes in public prisons [1] and took the private prisons back over.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#Canada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#Canada)

<comment><USER16> The public sector isn't any better.

The Price of Prison Guard Unions [https://capitalresearch.org/article/the- price-of-prison-guar...](https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-price-of- prison-guard-unions-2/)

PORAC's contribution to California's prison crisis [http://www.cjcj.org/news/5423](http://www.cjcj.org/news/5423)

<comment><USER17> Classic to see the correct take get downvoted.

If anyone's interested in actually learning about the causes of mass incarceration, I'd strongly recommend John Pfaff's _Locked In_: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01L6SLKK8/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01L6SLKK8/ref=dp-kindle- redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

In short: a) It's not the war on drugs. b) It's not private prisons. c) It's not sentencing laws.

You could get rid of all of those and America would still lead the "free" world in incarceration.

<comment><USER18> For the lazy:

Pfaff is convinced that aggressive prosecution is the biggest cause of over- incarceration. His argument here is compelling. He notes that while incarceration rates began to climb in the 1980s as a response to rising crime, those trend lines continued through the Nineties, even though crime was steadily falling. Why did that happen? Examining all the relevant variables (crime reports, arrests, charges filed, and convictions), Pfaff found himself looking squarely at the prosecutor's office. As less crime was reported, arrests dropped proportionately, and among those who were charged with a crime, conviction rates held steady. But prisons continued to fill, because prosecutors were filing felony charges against ever-growing percentages of their dwindling arrestees.

From [https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2017/02/20/john- pfaf...](https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2017/02/20/john-pfaff-locked- in/)

<comment><USER19> The change in monetary system caused a cascade of despair.

[https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/](https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/)

<comment><USER19> More specifically here is the incarceration rate change when the monetary system changed.

[https://wtfhappenedin1971home.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/in...](https://wtfhappenedin1971home.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/incarcerationrate.jpg?w=780)

PS. Don't downvote me if you don't know economics morons.

<comment><USER19> Something that isn't intuitive about our monetary shift is that as we debase the USD, we also debase the most desperate/marginalized of our population.

It is a feature of our system that is only accelerated by income inequality and labor price suppression.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The first public academic to my knowledge to begin crystalizing the problem of private prisons and the prison industrial complex was Angela Davis [1] -- I first remember hearing her address this in a 1998 lecture at Northwestern.

Ruth Wilson [2,3] has worked for years analyzing and working to end the expansion and privatization of California's prisons, through both academic and grass roots efforts [4]. Her "Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California" [5] book is both accessible and rigorous, I highly recommend it. I am a bit shocked that their and foundational work were not mentioned in the piece.

There's a discussion between Davis and Wilson here [6] where they surface the mass incarceration/private prison issue, and detail the pathology of California's prison system.

[1][https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583225811/ref=dbs_a_def_r...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583225811/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0)

[2][https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison- abolition...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition- ruth-wilson-gilmore.html)

[3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTPjC-7EDkc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTPjC-7EDkc)

[4] [http://criticalresistance.org/](http://criticalresistance.org/)

[5] [https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gulag-Opposition- Globalizing-C...](https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gulag-Opposition-Globalizing- California/dp/0520242017/ref=pd_sbs_14_6/140-9692660-6198769?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0520242017&pd_rd_r=967d5b8c-466b-4fec-9974-b0ffa782f3e5&pd_rd_w=dsvaO&pd_rd_wg=nl4CJ&pf_rd_p=d66372fe-68a6-48a3-90ec-41d7f64212be&pf_rd_r=E6HJNZAF3HPJE5KMQ3MK&psc=1&refRID=E6HJNZAF3HPJE5KMQ3MK)

[6] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGPVPrJGXsY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGPVPrJGXsY)

</comment><comment><USER21> Good riddance.

The whole premise of private, for-profit, prisons has always seemed deeply troubling to me. The focus of a healthy prison system should be to rehabilitate people and help them turn their lives around so that they contribute positively to society. That can take years of hard work by the individual, and require assistance from professionals (therapists, teachers, ...).

A for-profit company by definition seeks to maximize profits. Expensive rehabilitation is therefore immediately off the table, or given at the minimum allowable level. That is just not in the best interest of neither the individuals in the prison system, nor the rest of society.

<comment><USER22> The purpose of imprisonment is to punish criminals by depriving them of their liberty. As a side-effect, society benefits because a criminal has been forcibly removed from visiting further misery on law-abiding people.

Imprisonment is and should be a deterrent punishment - it is not a support group.

One can both be in favor of abolishing for-profit prisons and also in favor of severe deterrent sentences for law-breakers. Profiteering private corporations naturally seek to maximise the number of prisoners in their facilities, because they are paid per inmate - so they have every incentive to ensure future "custom". This motive naturally conflicts with deterrent imprisonment - the whole idea is to forcibly prevent criminals from breaking the law again.

<comment><USER23> Exactly. Statements like the commenter above are not universal truths. Certainly, some people believe the purpose of prison is rehabilitation. That is neither a universal belief however, nor the focus of our legal system. Many people believe the point of prison is punishment, just as the point of fines (like a speeding ticket, for example) are to make someone hurt financially, not to recoup costs (one person speeding typically costs the state nothing).

<comment><USER24> It can be both at the same time. A step of the reformation process is for the inmate to understand the need for the punishment. It doesn't mean that there is no punishment, just that blind retribution is insufficient to form a perspective for the inmate and society. Most inmates are not going to stay in prison for their whole life, so of obviously you try to maximize rehabilitation.

I do believe it to be a universal truth that a reformist approach is superior. Treating it as opposed solution is certainly short sighted.

<comment><USER23> > I do believe it to be a universal truth that a reformist approach is > superior.

Exactly. This is your belief, and clearly not everyone believes it.

It sure could be both at the same time. Many people believe that too. It could also only be one or the other. Lots think those ways. There is no universally accepted truth here, and pretending like there is is not fruitful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think private prisons could work if:

\- Convicts could choose whether to be sent to a public or private prison.

\- Private prisons had financial incentives for post-incarceration behavior. Eg: If their prisoner recidivism rate after 3 years was 10% lower than the average public prison, they would get a 20% bonus.

Those changes would create enough competition and align incentives such that we could see some real innovation in the criminal justice system. Sadly, I don't think these sorts of experiments will ever be tried. If someone ever proposes such a system, they'll be branded a supporter of "private prisons".

<comment> the-pigeon Ah I see you've never implemented an incentive program before.

EVERY SINGLE SYSTEM GETS GAMED. NO MATTER WHAT YOU MEASURE.

Every metric you could possible think of can be manipulated in ways you can't imagine. But give private companies the incentive and someone in them will figure it out.

IMO the only way to run things like prisons is to hire people that strongly care about the public good to run them. Hire people who want to run a good organization that accomplishes the organization's goals. Which for prisons should be rehabilitation and safety.

<comment><USER25> If you look at my comments throughout this thread, you'll see that I am aware of the potential for incentives to have undesirable higher-order effects. Many people in this thread have suggested certain concrete undesirable consequences, and I've replied to them.

In contrast, you are putting forth a fully general counterargument to any incentive structure. But clearly financial incentives work in many cases. It's what sports teams use for their athletes and coaches. It's what businesses use for their leadership teams. When we need the best people possible to perform at their best, we tend to pay them money and pay them more money if they meet certain goals.

> IMO the only way to run things like prisons is to hire people that strongly > care about the public good to run them. Hire people who want to run a good > organization that accomplishes the organization's goals. Which for prisons > should be rehabilitation and safety.

Yes, ideally we'd have every job staffed people who are wise, kind, competent, and hard working. But we don't have nearly enough of such people and we judge traits inaccurately. So instead we have to make do with less effective but more practical methods. Financial incentives are one of those options.

<comment><USER26> > a fully general counterargument to any incentive structure.

A general counterargument is worth considering. Any incentive sufficiently powerful to draw forth extra resourcefulness in its legitimate pursuit is quite likely to also draw forth extra resourcefulness in its illegitimate pursuit.

> It's what businesses use for their leadership teams.

This is may help your case considerably less than you think if you look closely. Various forms of the principal-agent problem pop up all the time. Pink and Kohn have also forwarded some research suggesting that extrinsic incentives have diminishing returns or run counterproductive in some cases. And Goodhart's law is a proverb in the business world for a reason.

Aligning incentives is still important, but getting optimal performance is rarely as simple as tying rewards to a goal. Hell, half the time _defining_ optimal performance is a project.

And when the underlying issues involve social safety and significantly curtailing someone's liberties via imprisonment (and the already fine tension between them), it's an especially tricky topic.

<comment><USER27> How exactly can a private prison "illegitimately pursue" having a lower recidivism rate?

Simply handwaving it away with incentives being gamed seems to complete ignore that you are suggesting that there will be widespread systemic corruption of the entire nation's judicial system. Perhaps the general counterargument could really take a moment to focus on the details.

Prisoners not being convicted of more crimes down the line seems to be a no- brainer in societal benefit, or does the line of generalised argument presented here think that's not the case with some more handwaving about optimal outcomes?

<comment><USER28> For instance, they could teach prisoners how not to get caught.

EDIT: what does it mean that I love thinking about ways of gaming systems like this?

<comment><USER25> > what does it mean that I love thinking about ways of gaming systems like > this?

That you might be a good security researcher? From [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/the_security_...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/the_security_mi_1.html):

> Uncle Milton Industries has been selling ant farms to children since 1956. > Some years ago, I remember opening one up with a friend. There were no > actual ants included in the box. Instead, there was a card that you filled > in with your address, and the company would mail you some ants. My friend > expressed surprise that you could get ants sent to you in the mail.

> I replied: "What's really interesting is that these people will send a tube > of live ants to anyone you tell them to."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does it really remove the profit motive from incarceration? There are still thousands of vendors of various types making probably billions of dollars off of prisons, private facility or no.

<comment><USER30> Progress is better than no progress.. Removing profit motives can only happen by reducing profit motives

<comment><USER31> They're still making a great point. Yeah it's progress but I think most people aren't aware of the extent of the problem, making further progress impossible. There's some really terrible abuses happening, like replacing visitors with video chat that you have to pay for.

More info: [https://www.prisonpolicy.org/visitation/](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/visitation/)

Another example: getting rid of donated books and libraries in favor of paid tablets that also restrict the books you can buy, both for political and monetary reasons.

<comment><USER30> True... the outrageous telephone call fees being just one completely unjustifiable thing that comes to mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> >Servin said that while the new law was a significant victory, there was one other thing immigrants rights groups were concerned about. When several sheriffs' departments canceled their contracts to house Ice detainees last year, instead of freeing the detainees, Ice moved many of them to prisons in Colorado and Hawaii.

Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the prisoners when they close the prison?

<comment><USER33> _> Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the prisoners when they close the prison?_

There are a few different strains of thought when it comes to opposition to private prisons, but I believe the common denominator is that they create a perverse incentive. They turn prisons into businesses—the more prisoners, the better.

So while there are definitely people who want these prisoners freed immediately, and even people who want prisons abolished altogether, getting the profit motive out of prisons would be a significant win regardless.

<comment><USER34> > There are a few different strains of thought when it comes to opposition to > private prisons, but I believe the common denominator is that they create a > perverse incentive. They turn prisons into businesses—the more prisoners, > the better.

The same criticism can be applied towards forced prison labour, and yet, it is explicitly permitted by the thirteenth amendment. (And is commonly used in state prisons.)

Just because a profit incentive falls in the hands of the state's coffers, as opposed to some corporation, does not mean the incentive is not perverse.

<comment><USER35> Forced prison labor should _also_ be outlawed. Just because we haven't fixed every problem yet doesn't mean we shouldn't cheer improvements like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is incredible. I can't believe it's happened so soon, putting people (especially such a stigmatized group) above profits really gives hope for the future of the country. Thanks for leading us in this, California.

</comment><comment><USER37> The cynic and me sees this as a win... for the prison guards union.

It seems to me that whether public or private, prisons should have good, independent oversight. Pretending that the "profit motive" is the biggest issue overlooks the horrific abuses committed by guards in California's public prisons.

<comment><USER38> You're right. People scream bloody murder about "omg! This means a financial incentive for imprisonment" and then ignore how the exact same thing happens with public prisons, in particular how prison guard organizations pushed for Three Strikes to pad demand for their work -- same dynamic.

[http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/the_undue_influen...](http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/the_undue_influence_of_californias_prison_guards_union- californias_correctional_industrial_complex.pdf)

And IMHO is bizarrely inconsistent outrage.

Want to make a profit from supplying prisons? Activists see no problem with that!

Want to make a profit from hiring felons, who are cheaper due to having limited options? Activists give you the thumbs up!

Want to make a profit for your private corporation from building a public prison? AOK!

But _run_ it for profit? No matter how much oversight or regulation is applied, it's somehow inherently evil.

It feels like a distraction.

<comment><USER39> Wow bad faith all over the place... People do see problems with all of those, but the only solution to people making a profit from supplying prisons is for there to be no prisons (or for the government to make all the food and clothing soup to nuts, but that'd be crazy). Same with the others the issue with post prison jobs is that they're not enough so hiring them is good and a step down the road to a solution.

Reform is a step by step process, getting people used to the idea of thinking of rehabilitation and reintegration instead of the gut instinct to punish takes a lot of time and in the mean time address the worst abuses of the system. In the mean time make sure you're not setting up systems that will fight for their own survival and demand (in some cases by contractual obligations for the state to fill X number of best!) to be fed.

<comment><USER38> It's deeply confused to see a farm selling food to a prison as some kind of evil. It seems you've dove head-first into an anti-market position that sees _any_ for-profit production as bad, which should be a big red flag.

Hiring a felon should not be regarded as evil, either; just the opposite.

I don't see how it's bad faith to assume activists don't advocate full abolition of markets. If you want to take the position that all profit is evil (or at least is evil if it ever touches any part of the prison system), that just makes your position harder to defend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Here in Brazil criminals riot to be transferred to private prisons because the ones ran by the state are inhuman.

</comment><comment><USER41> Next we have to remove all for-profit 'prisoner support' services such as the staggeringly expensive communications firms that are bleeding prisoners and their relatives dry.

</comment><comment><USER42> This applies for four prisons. But, from the article:

 _The contracts for these four prisons expire in 2023 and cannot be renewed under AB32, except to comply with a federal court order to reduce crowding in state-run facilities._

That court order is still in effect and doesn't seem likely to go away any time soon. So... the contracts _can_ be renewed? It's not clear to me if this law is going to make a difference.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'll be the first to admit I'm not the biggest fan of California (housing & homeless crisis spring to mind) but this is great.

</comment><comment><USER44> So does this also ban private companies from operating inside prisons? Most of them don't care who holds the actual keys so long as they can take advantage of the prisoners. They may not be the warden, but they can still control the purse strings.

</comment><comment><USER45> It is very silly to be happy about something you not yet know the results, it's interesting and can be a case study. As long as the government doesn't fiddle with the numbers to manipulate voters.

</comment><comment><USER46> > The contracts for these four prisons expire in 2023 and cannot be renewed > under AB32, except to comply with a federal court order to reduce crowding > in state-run facilities.

Hmm, something tells me these will end up being renewed considering getting budget approval and completing construction in 3 years is basically impossible so unless Californa has some prisons with spare space or in-progress new construction. OR, even better, reduces it's prison population... we may still have some private prisons for a while.

Still fantastic news.

<comment><USER47> The next step is for the Governor to pardon all the people who are in for possession and other "lesser crimes" and the release them over the next there years, alleviating the need for additional prison space.

</comment></comment><comment> Hex-3-En Fun thing, I just watched this a couple days ago:

[https://youtu.be/wtV5ev6813I](https://youtu.be/wtV5ev6813I)

spoiler: no private prisons in Germany

</comment><comment><USER48> California has been busy the past couple weeks, they passed the rent control law, a labor law about contract workers(mainly about Uber and Lift drivers), and now this.

<comment><USER49> I was thinking the same once I noticed this headline on the front page. California has been busy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Reforming private prisons is just a small part of criminal justice reform. This is a good step but it seems like many are unaware or are ignoring the impact that labor unions have on overcriminalization. Police and corrections unions exist all across the country and share many of the perverse incentives that private prisons do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true. The California Correctional and Peace Officer's Association is one of the largest unions in the state and exercises a good deal of political power, albeit less than it used to.

Part of the problem is the division into _trade_ unions, in which different economic sectors have their own unions and can then be rolled over or pandered to as is convenient for business or state interests. Syndicalism is an idea of people in different businesses and employment sectors to combine their labor power more efficiently by avoiding the fragmentation problem.

<comment><USER14> > The California Correctional and Peace Officer's Association

There is no "and", just "California Correctional Peace Officers Association" (and, as the absence of the "and" suggests, it is just prison guards, and not other law enforcement.)

<comment><AUTHOR> A careless mistake on my part. Thanks for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> California's prison population is declining. Especially in juveniles. So there's less need for prison space.

</comment><comment><USER5> I was busy doing God's Work (upvoting any downvoted posts) and was considering the article.

So far as I can tell, the point of the article is that this is another salvo in the war between California and the federal government in terms of who gets to run immigration law, not some sort of newfound distaste for private prisons.

Curious that all the posts are about private vs. public prisons. I did poke around a bit and the private prisons don't appear to be cheaper, and it's rather surprising that they even exist given the amount of power public unions have.

Perhaps someone in the biz could pipe up, just what is the point of a private prison? All that occurs to me is the opportunity to ramp up a facility quickly or perhaps just the need for a law enforcement organization to park people when they don't want to be in that business. Dunno.

</comment><comment> Paul-ish In "Locked In" John Pfaff makes the point that private prisons are not the problem. It is a more nuanced problem, but prosecutors play a large part in our national incarceration problems. Definitely recommend the read (or listen as an audiobook as I did).

<comment><USER52> _> but prosecutors play a large part in our national incarceration problems_

The problem is pro-punishment politicians. Singling out any particular office/position misses the point.

Even when judges practice discretion, pro-punishment legislators step in and introduce mandatory minimums.

And even when prosecutors practice discretion, pro-punishment judges will step in and force them to prosecute cases that the prosecutors don't want to prosecute [1].

[1] See Suffolk County for a recent example

<comment> Paul-ish Pfaff has pretty good data to back up his claim. He looks at legislation. He looks at mandatory minimums. Everyone plays their part, but prosecutors have a lot of power over sentencing. Plea deals play a role here.

And in many places prosecutors _are_ politicians in a sense, because they are elected. One recommendation is to go back to appointing prosecutors rather than electing them.

So no, singling out prosecutors doesn't miss the point. It is an important point.

<comment><USER52> Yes, but it's become in the past couple years an out dated point in major cities (Boston, Philly, LA) where activist prosecutors attempting to prosecute fewer crimes and hand out lighter sentences are now being stymied by (appointed!) judges.

The problem with focusing on any particular role is that the other parts of the system will step in to force punishment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> While probably a good idea, I fear somehow the execution will be butchered by incompetence and then blamed on cops or racism. Issues have a tendency to go left unsolved when maintaining a narrative takes precedent over actual problem solving.

</comment><comment><USER54> Are there any private prison models that were shown to be more effective than their peers or public counterparts?

While I agree that the vast majority (if not all) of private prisons, and those who participated in profiting from them, are ugly spots on the progress of modern humanity, I'm weary about an overall ban on the concept altogether.

Rather than creating rules against an evil business model or incentives to promote a beneficial one, this "unabashedly California" move cuts off any hope of someone with an ounce of morality to disrupt and ideally create a prison system that truly aims to reform inmates.

</comment><comment><USER55> I heard a very interesting take on this topic on local radio. Basically, on average private prisons are no worse than public prisons as both make many of the same mistakes. The only difference is that public prisons are invulnerable to reform. [https://wfhb.org/news/kite-line-september-6-2019-the- busines...](https://wfhb.org/news/kite-line-september-6-2019-the-business-of- incarceration-a-conversation-with-craig-gilmore/)

<comment><USER56> > The only difference is that public prisons are invulnerable to reform.

None are invulnerable to legislative reform. However, _private_ ones are closer to it, since they're, well, private.

> No worse

If you mean they're both terrible, exploitative, have guard violence, don't provide reasonable facilities, don't provide opportunities for personal development and education, and underfunded - maybe you're right. (although frankly I doubt it.)

Mass incarceration in general is a perverse US government sport / poor people population management/behavior shaping mechanism, anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> > "We have to worry about all the people who are detained right now," said > Servine. "Where will they end up?"

Along those lines, what's the plan for dealing with the inmates from other prisons that this legislation will make ineligible?

For example, there's a private correctional center in California City:

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

</comment><comment><USER58> Wondering from where it comes the optimism in this thread for this ban. Ive traveled to more than 40 countries, and lived for some time in 5, all of them with public prison monopolies. In all of them the prison systems turn to be terrible. And by terrible, I mean that the US prisons look like 5 stars hotels compared to them. For reference, I was in most south american and caribbean countries, Spain, Portugal among others.

<comment><USER59> What is it with Spanish prisons? I live here and have heard about the problem of foreigners from UK and US not wanting to serve time in their owne country. They prefer here, but overpopulation is a problem, hence the articles about the cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Wholly supported. There's no way a private prison would be incentivized to lower recidivism but is instead incentivized to increase it. Here's to hoping we foster rehabilitation over punishment in our prisons and put an end to what is effectively slave labor (inmates making things for pennies on the dollar).

</comment><comment><USER61> The sad and bitter truth: as the anecdotal Silicon Valley startup CEO is a closet right leaning Republican donor, and with the amount of military money up for grabs, I'm surprised to not see a flurry of startups "disrupting" prisons yet /0.5s

</comment><comment><USER62> I find it fascinating how incentives shape human behaviour: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison–industrial_complex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison–industrial_complex)

</comment><comment><USER63> California prisons are pure hell. Listen to a few min of this interview; it's eye opening (warning: prison language)...

[https://youtu.be/2I4imzTOpQM](https://youtu.be/2I4imzTOpQM)

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm pretty happy about the laws california has been enacting recently, this plus the uber / lyft law both align with my views. I'm glad that politicians are actually doing what we vote them in todo.

</comment><comment><USER65> I've always wanted to see a lambda school model for private prisons. they get some share of an inmates future tax revenue but pay a significant penalty if ex-inmates re-offend.

I've reached out to Austen..

</comment><comment><USER66> What's going to happen to the existing private prisons? I assume this involves tearing up very expensive contracts. Will the government purchase them and convert them to public ones?

<comment><USER47> The law says that current contracts can run until expiration, which is a few years from now. They'll have to either release prisoners, move them, or incarcerate fewer people (or a combination thereof) otherwise they'll have to renew the private contract, which is also allowed under the law if necessary to alleviate overcrowding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Great news! I first learned about private prisons over a decade ago and since then I am in disbelief by how many people aren't aware there are for profit prisons.

Really good move. Bravo.

</comment><comment><USER68> Hope they soon go after privately run homeless "shelters" as well, another huge pit of waste and corruption in dereliction of public duty.

</comment><comment><USER69> Am listenning to the dem debate now where kamala (?) mentioned (promised) to ban private prisons. Coincidence?

</comment><comment><USER70> Calif seems to be on fire these days (no pun intended). They are passing one great legislation after another.

</comment><comment><USER71> It's frustrating that most reform and change is happening at the state level. It just means a completely fractured political environment where some states are progressive around data and prisons, whereas others are regressive. As a company, how do you even enforce things like privacy standards at a state level instead of national? Seems like a terribly complicated and inefficient system.

</comment><comment><USER72> I am looking at all the other major news publishers, and none of them have this on their front page.

</comment><comment><USER73> This is the best news I've seen all month. Maybe all year. Props to California.

</comment><comment><USER74> Great job CA legislators. Prisons for profit were an abomination. Good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER75> Why have the past couple days seen several high-profile California laws passed?

</comment><comment><USER76> GOOD, if we can start rehabilitating prisoners, giving them skills to succeed outside of prison then there might be a chance. Yes, I know many have psychological issues and they can't be fixed without a complete brain rewire or hard drugs but many are non-violent and poor.

</comment><comment><USER77> Rent control, and now this? California is turning into a good state!

</comment><comment><USER78> California passes a sane law, what is happening to this world?

</comment><comment><USER79> Wow, didn't know there were private prisons!

</comment><comment><USER80> If the government does not want to run prisons, don't send so many people to prison. Prisons and other core governmental services should never be outsourced.

</comment><comment><USER81> I thought such things only exist in movies.

</comment><comment><USER82> One thing that shouldn't really be controversial. Incentives are misaligned with private prisons. It really hard to find an argument for them.

</comment><comment><USER83> A great day for California.

</comment><comment><USER84> Can we do something about Betsy DeVos and the efforts to privatize our public school systems next?

</comment><comment><USER85> I watched an episode of last week tonight in which John Oliver covers issues of private prisons. Basically it's inmates being exploited by extremely low paid labor and various unreasonable charges for necessities. But I don't see how government run prisons can solve or mitigate the problems.

</comment><comment><USER86> This is such good news.

</comment><comment><USER87> FINALLY

</comment><comment><USER88> These John Oliver docs were very illuminating:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjqaNQ018zU&t=2s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjqaNQ018zU&t=2s) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJtYRxH5G2k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJtYRxH5G2k)

</comment><comment><USER89> Banning private prisons is good.

Public prisons though are not necessarily good.

I remember when a good friend was forcibly sterilized without consent by California state official directed medical staff. Eugenics and genocide has been a fundamental part of the Golden State's agenda for over a century.

</comment><comment><USER90> I've never understood how we, as a society, accept private prisons.

I've also understood why police hiding behind bridges was considered acceptable.

Or how the hell a debate about waterboarding could ever happen when it's clearly immoral.

At some point in my life I just decided we suck shit as a society and move on.

<comment><USER91> i think you just answered your own question there at the end

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> California is on a roll this week, it seems. Can someone local explain what's going on?

<comment><USER93> Maybe if they're ambitious they can do something about the homeless crisis next.

<comment><USER94> Hahaha yea right, that problem is actually hard. Cleaning up straws is much easier.

<comment><USER95> That sort of cynicism is needless. Considering that this thread is about private prisons, a very serious issue, bringing up a literal straw man is disingenuous and completely unnecessary.

<comment><USER94> It's not a strawman argument if that's really what they are spending time on that should be spent addressing far more important issues like homelessness. They shouldn't spend 1 second talking about an issue so meaningless on the list of issues they need to tackle. If you can't see that they are grabbing at low hanging fruit so that they can say they accomplished something then I think you might be a bit naive. A ban is literally the easiest cop-out for legislatures to do. No deep thinking required to blanket ban everything you don't like or perceive as problematic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> Just for fun, same sentence on health care.

> I'm so happy about this. Private health care insure are the scum of the > earth. They're totally antithetical to a free society that values human > life. They often lobby for minimum health care coverage in law (effectively > requiring by law a certain percentage of citizens to be marked as clients). > Any profit they skim off the top is money that should be spent on research > and education. Next up should be criminalizing charging huge quantities for > basic health care by private hospitals and the usurious fees on drugs.

I'd wager $1 in their pockets costs society easily 10X that.

<comment><USER15> Yes, I'm also in favor of socialized medicine for basically exactly these reasons. Shocker, I know. The system works!

I grew up in socialized medicine, and you get sick, you go to the hospital, they treat you and you leave. There's no step 4. Why Americans continue to willingly subject themselves to these torturous systems is beyond me. It's all in y'alls control.

<comment><USER97> There is a step 4: pay exorbitant tax rates.

<comment><USER98> Is there a story of poor people getting bankrupted by taxes anywhere in the world that has socialized healthcare?

<comment><USER97> Different systems have different problems. In Canada, some people die due to wait times for treatable conditions, or are forced to wait so long that their condition worsens to be beyond repair and they are permanently debilitated. Over 50k people leave Canada per year to get their healthcare in the United States instead.

<comment><USER99> The trope that wait times are materially worse in single-payer systems is precisely that: a trope. You do not have to dig hard to find examples of wait- times measured in _months_ to get _diagnostic_ procedures scheduled, and where I live — the San Francisco Bay Area — the wait time for an _initial consultation_ with, e.g., a dermatologist has been about the same, for as long as I've lived here. I know _doctors_ who work in _hospitals_ who've had to wait _months_ for a _breast cancer scan._

A thing that sucks in both systems _can not_ legitimately be used to argue against only one of them.

<comment><USER97> That's because California is a terribly run state, and one third of your population is on Medi-Cal. You literally have the same problems as Canada.

<comment><USER100> Here's me in Washington where I had a severely injured wrist after a car accident, was advised to get PT immediately...

... and had no PT within the county with a <10 week wait time.

I guess we're close to Canada though, so maybe it's contagious?

<comment><USER97> People wait 6 months or more in Canada.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> I'm so happy about this

</comment><comment><USER102> Great news! Let's work on abolishing public prisons next.

<comment><USER58> So no prisons at all? So murders should be free, for example?

<comment><USER102> Exactly. Crime is a social and economic problem that prisons and police do little to solve, with great harm to society. Our resources would be better spent elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> wow! awesome!

</comment><comment><USER104> Dude this is great news. Keeping people in prison should never be a for-profit initiative.

</comment><comment><USER105> Private prisons is how you get kids sold our by corrupt judges

</comment><comment><USER106> >Two of Ice's largest immigrant detention centers in California

Can somebody explain to a legal immigrant why The Guardian keeps omitting the _illegal_ part over twelve times throughout the article?

<comment><USER107> Many immigrants (especially those from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) in ICE detention facilities presented themselves at the border and _legally_ requested asylum. For more information on "northern triangle" and why these immigrants are fleeing their homeland, read [https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/central-americas-violent- no...](https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/central-americas-violent-northern- triangle)

This is an ongoing and growing challenge for our immigration system. _In FY 2017, as instability in Central America's Northern Triangle showed few signs of ending, immigration judges decided over 30,000 asylum cases, a considerable increase over the roughly 22,300 asylum cases decided in FY 2016, and the most [since] FY 2005._ (source: [https://immigrationforum.org/article/fact-sheet-u- s-asylum-p...](https://immigrationforum.org/article/fact-sheet-u-s-asylum- process/))

<comment><USER108> Wow.

20,000 granted asylum to the US in 2016.

70,000 granted asylum to Sweden in 2016.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> Sounds like California is entering an ERA OF MASSIVE OVERREGULATION. Goodbye, startups, goodbye investors :(

</comment><comment><USER110> $3 per day per inmate on average for food, keep the wig, leave us with a wreck of a human, covering his/her medical bills until end of life.

</comment><comment><USER20> It's a start. Thank you Ruth Wilson, thank you Angela Davis

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison- abolition...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition- ruth-wilson-gilmore.html)

[https://books.google.com/books/about/Golden_Gulag.html?id=zT...](https://books.google.com/books/about/Golden_Gulag.html?id=zThPAQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false)

</comment><comment><USER111> Well done California.

\- Private prisons has no incentive of getting rid of its income source the prisoners.

\- More emphasis should be put into preventive nature. Ie to stop people from becoming criminals. This most likely involves more instruction on how to raise children.

If analog was to computer program it is cheapest to do things correct at the design phase, once late in the phase the issue hits production it is very expensive to mitigate. Thus we should as society do maximum effort into supporting young children and parents. Once the person has turned into a criminal it is very expensive for society to correct the issue if at all possible.

</comment><comment><USER112> I'm sure there's at least a few free market purists that will decry this move as it removes competition from the market, but this happens to be one instance where public prisons actually cost _less_ on average than when outsourced to the private market [0]

[0] [https://www.criminaljusticeprograms.com/articles/private- pri...](https://www.criminaljusticeprograms.com/articles/private-prisons-vs- public-prisons/)

<comment><USER23> I really doubt it, most libertarians and free market purists object to the idea of anyone but government being able to violently deprive someone of their rights without repercussion. The reaction on forums like /r/libertarian is mainly positive.</comment></comment>


A Thousand Lines of Code Per Week - <AUTHOR>

How many lines of code do you write in a week?  Let's forget for a moment the fact that line counts in different languages can differ in productivity, and that line counts aren't the perfect way to measure program complexity.  Let's also say if you write a line of code then delete it, it still counts as a line.  Do you write over a thousand lines of code per week in the language of your choice?  If so, Bill Gates says you're an excellent programmer.  From http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s... :
"Well, let's figure it out," he said in a slightly condescending tone. "I don't think it could be more than 10,000 lines of code, and a really good programmer like you should be able to write at least a thousand lines of code per week, so I think it will take you less than 10 weeks to write it, if you're as good as I think you are."
How fast do you write code? <comment><USER2> This depends entirely on the sort of code I'm writing.

If it's throwaway code -- that is, stub functions for use while I'm writing and testing other code, and which I know I'll replace before production use -- I can easily end up writing a thousand lines of code a week, or even more.

If I'm writing good, solid code -- that is, code which I expect to write once and then use for the next 20 years without ever making more than cosmetic changes to it -- I'll generally write about a thousand lines of code per month.

If I'm writing best-of-breed software -- that is, code which comes with a proof of correctness and at least a very strong argument for being the optimal solution (e.g., code which computes a roots-of-unity table in linear time with O(1) maximum error, and will thus never be surpassed by more than a constant factor) -- I'll typically write 100-200 lines of code AND a 5-10 page paper in a month. Of course, this last sort of code falls into the "yes, I would trust this to operate a nuclear power plant" category, which is a rather higher level than most applications require.

<comment><USER3> Very true. I can spend weeks researching and analysing the most import 100 lines in most of my apps.

 _no one_ uses LOC any more - that article is from 1984! I'm pretty sure Gates would have a different answer if asked now.

<comment><USER4> _no one uses LOC any more_

I feel obligated to mention the classic LOC management story: [http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...](http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt)

<comment><USER5> What would -2000 get you if you used it in YC's application form?

<comment><AUTHOR> $100,000 in funding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It may be the best answer is to change the question. Why do people measure LOC? Because they're trying to measure the productivity of programmers. Why are they doing that? Largely to decide how to reward them. So that is the ultimate problem. But it goes away if the programmers work in smaller groups, in the form of startups, because then the market decides how to reward them.

So odd as may seem, the answer to the question of how to measure LOC is: startups!

<comment><USER5> _Why do people measure LOC? Because they're trying to measure the productivity of programmers. Why are they doing that? Largely to decide how to reward them._

Yes.

But if I'm an IT manager at a large company, the answer to that question is not _startups_ (it's not LOC, either).

(I know this site is all _rah rah startups_ and I'm not trying to harsh anyone's mellow, but this question is still largely unanswered)

<comment><USER6> It could be, if you're a high enough manager. You could let two similar projects compete and see who got the most users internally, then release that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That story sure brings Gates down another few notches in my book, as a programmer at least. Predicting how long it will take to implement a totally new program with lots of unknowns is crazy in itself. Trying to estimate how many LOC it will take _another_ programmer and then estimating a schedule on the fly like that is just pure fantasy. It's also _unbelievably_ aggravating to be on the receiving end.

John Carmack's permanent answer on projects is "When it's done". The only truthful answer when developing anything new and interesting.

<comment><USER4> _That story sure brings Gates down another few notches in my book_

It seems he was a bully, too, at least in the early days: <http://blog.tomevslin.com/2007/05/microsoft_memor.html>

Then again, most people probably don't care, given Microsoft's financial results.

<comment><USER8> Hmmm I cannot really claim to read Bill Gs mind. But the man was an accomplished programmer and knew that great software gets built when a hacker commits himself to doing nothing else but working on it for a couple of weeks. I think he was just trying to edge Hertzfield into working on the Switcher. Another interesting take away from the story is how Gates focuses on what is good for the users and not on M$ controlling the Switcher

<comment><USER7> > I think he was just trying to edge Hertzfield into working on the Switcher.

He was trying to get him to do it really quickly so he could justify paying him as little as possible. He got it for $0, so that made him happy.

> Gates focuses on what is good for the users and not on M$ controlling the > Switcher

He wanted to take advantage of the fact that his apps had very low memory footprints. Switcher was the way to do it. He had no need to control Switcher itself. The fact that he wanted the project done quickly to save money says to me he didn't really care about quality, which users obviously do.

This is an amusing lesson in how different people interpret the exact same thing so differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's not how many lines of code you write, it's how effectively you both turn out features and leave the code base in a clean state. The folks I've worked with who crank out lots of code tend to be the ones who missed reuse opportunities and did't refactor, leaving a mess for the people who came along later to extend their work.

Measuring by lines of code is silly unless you also have a way to measure code debt.

<comment><USER10> great point

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> As I'm sure everyone will say, this heavily depends on what you are writing. If you are writing Windows Forms in C# using Visual Studio you could easily write 1,000 lines of code in an hour (because the IDE makes them for you). Similarly, if you are merely typing up what should be done by an ORM product, then you can easily write 1,000 lines of code in a day. I've had 3-4kloc days doing the combination of these two. It's possible because the coding is easy, and you have tools to help you do it.

Also, are we counting things like macros in this estimation? I mean, a single line macro could yield hundreds of lines of code once through the compiler.

</comment><comment><USER12> I once touched 2,700 lines in a day in a grand feat of manual code manipulation. That certainly made me want to code differently.

</comment><comment><USER13> Perhaps "Refactor %" would be a better measure than LOC. Turn 1000 lines of code into 100 lines of better code. Then we can talk.

<comment><USER10> I get very annoyed by LOC questions. They are idiotic. I was very, very surprised that PG uses it as a measure, in his interview to NYT and in the YC application.

In my day job, I am maintaining (and enhancing) a distributed system that was written by apparently Cobol programmers who switched to Java rather suddenly last year.

\- apparently did not hear of functional programming, so 600-800 line sub routines with if-else-while nesting up to 7-8 levels deep. very hard to follow the logic.

\- no knowledge of exceptions, so return codes were used.

\- hand rolled socket server because application EJB servers were not on their radar.

\- a pseudo "object-oriented" database layer with all sorts of design problems and takes 5-10 times the LOC (that I have written in a simple database access class to show them a better way).

 _Their output in terms of Lines Of Code is phenomenal but it is a maintainence nightmare._

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I never counted them.</comment>


So, who's going to Startup School? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER3> Not me... I got my rejection email yesterday. I thought I'd be more disappointed at getting turned down, but I'm not. It's actually motivated me to step out on my own.

One of the big reasons that YC exists is to mentor young entrepreneurs. I would love to have a mentor, but I think that I"m going to branch out on my own to find them, instead of drowning in the crowd at Start-up school to exchange three words with Jessica or Paul. Instead, I've been considering volunteering at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View to hang out with some elder geeks. The Computer History Museum has a bunch of volunteer hardware/software hackers who restore vintage main-frames. These are all really smart hackers who have spent decades in the tech business, and they are spending time in retirement doing geek stuff, because they love it. These are the kind of people that I want to spend time with.

My team and I just moved to Silicon Valley this past year, and we're setting up out entire lives around the idea of having a series of start-ups. We've driven a combined total of 12 thousand miles to get here. We're set up financially so we can afford to iterate through start-up ideas without breaking the bank. We have a great space to work in, and we're meeting a lot of cool people. I actually talked with a man a few weeks ago who knew William Shockley of Shockley Semiconductor fame.

Yeah, It's been a hard road just to get to Silicon Valley. I'm sad that I didn't get in to the startup school. But, I'm sure that I'm going to get a lot more rejections throughout my career as an entrepreneur. If I wanted something easy, I'd choose a different career. I'm doing this because I enjoy the challenge. I'm doing this because I love technology. I'm doing this because I love the game, and I'm in it for the long haul.

</comment><comment><USER4> Coming from Wash DC...

Just made a wiki so we can all coordinate stuff to do and share rides: http://startup_weekend.bluwiki.com/

<comment><USER5> also coming in from dc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would anyone care to toss out an evaluation of how worthwhile it is? I want to attend, but I would be taking days off from school and traveling from east- central Canada. (Very Expensive!) Feel free to drop me an email at email@example.com if you don't want to be public with your opinions. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER7> I'll be 'attending'...via podcast.

When I first got involved with a proto-startup (redundant?) I came across a podcast of some previous year and it was by far the best crash course in startup business I've seen.

Has there only been one previous year? Other online?

</comment><comment><USER8> I'll be there as well. I'm looking forward to meeting the lot of you. :)

We have a meetup discussion going in here: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=2757

It'd be great to meet the startup community "after school," so let's decide on a place.

</comment><comment><USER9> Guys I missed the deadline for application. If anyone got approved but can't attend, please, I'd be very thankful to you for sharing your invite with me, I can even consider buying it! Thanks! Please drop me a few words to email@example.com

<comment><USER4> chiefwhite,

last time I went (in 2005), there was absolutely no security and plenty of free chairs. Anyone could've easily shown up without being questioned...

I don't know if it will be the same this year, but if you're in the area maybe you can try showing up?

Who knows... if they catch you... maybe PG will appreciate your hacker-ish persistence :)

<comment><USER10> Actually this year we're tightening up security a bit.

Please don't just show up. It's very nice of Stanford to lend us the auditorium, and we don't want to be bad citizens. If we have too many people for the room, the campus police won't like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'll be there, just got my invite, I made a facebook group so we can all chat & talk about meeting up...

http://up.facebook.com/event.php?eid=2251607090

anyone else coming from out of town? (I'm coming down from Portland, OR)

<comment><USER12> I'll be coming from PA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Coming from Miami, looking to see if I still own a coat. :)

http://carlos.bueno.org/2007/03/startup-school-startup-culture.html

</comment><comment><USER14> I'll be there (From Cleveland, OH). Staying downtown with a rental car - <USER2> my cell number on the bluwiki site.

</comment><comment><USER15> I will be going! My name is Robert from Phoenix, Arizona our site is TallStreet.com, if anyone cares.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'll be there. I'm from St Louis, MO, so it'll be refreshing to get out of the midwest ;)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'll be there. I am working on Social Marketplace called Onista. http://www.onista.com

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'll be there. :)

\-- Ryan Park, Stanford grad student

</comment><comment><USER18> I ll be there (from Atlanta,GA)

</comment><comment><USER19> See you there (from Florida).

<comment><USER13> Where in FL? I'm in Miami. Maybe we can meetup before or after.

<comment><USER20> I'm in Miami too. Not sure if I can go, though. When are you flying up?

<comment><USER13> We're going out Friday morning, back on Sunday evening. Ping me, eh? There's a surprising amount of startup stuff happening in Miami. Carlos at Bueno period organization-tld

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'll be there from Jersey.

</comment><comment><USER22> Count me in. :)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'll be there.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'll be there.</comment>


Everything you need to know about the Facebook IPO (Live Updates) - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/05/18/ipo-what-ipo-heres-everything-you-need-to-know-about-facebook-today/

<comment><USER2> Let the action begin!</comment>


Bugs produce diesel on demand - <AUTHOR> http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/research/title_281715_en.html

<comment><USER2> Original Press Source

<http://www.exeter.ac.uk/news/research/title_281715_en.html>

Actual Paper

[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/04/17/1215966110.full...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/04/17/1215966110.full.pdf)

<comment><USER3> I thought I had seen it before. It saves the post processing step that the NASA algae experiment had. Still it's an interesting result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If these processes ever go into production and create cheap fuel, the world will really change. Presumably it will stop oil extraction industries from the top down, i.e. high cost producers first. So tar sands, shale oil and deep water sub-salt are the first to go (Canada, offshore Brazil, ...).

Even though Saudi Arabia is the lowest cost producer, it gives a lot of the profits away to the people, in free health services, education, housing, low cost fuel, and, increasingly, in bundles of cash, to reduce dissent. Of course, the extended royal family takes a huge piece of the pie too. The break-even cost of oil to balance current budgets in the GCC states is in the range $80-130, with exception of Kuwait at $55:

<http://www.businessinsider.com/breakeven-oil-prices-2012-6>

The current price is around $100 for Brent, so it would only take a 25% price fall to put the whole region in recession and turmoil (note Bahrain is under water at the current price). The 'curse of oil' often means there is not much other industry to take up the slack in these economies, although the UAE has done a much better job than Saudi Arabia on that score. If you add recent news stories about deep sea methane hydrate extraction, and fusion research at Lockheed Martin SkunkWorks, the leaders of the world's oil producing nations must be getting just a little bit apprehensive.

<comment><USER5> Oil reserves are like a piggy bank of 100k year.

These bacterias still need to be fed with sugar. Like corn oil it means you're diverting arable land to produce that. I'm not sure if it's really cheaper to produce in the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did anyone else looking at the front page of HN jump to the conclusion that if this strain or similar of E. coli could be developed to live of human faeces India could become a future bio-fuel giant

<comment><USER7> Yep, I came to post this. But you beat me to it!

India, meet your saviour. Soon, the water tables of India will be awash with... er... Diesel?

Hmm, not sure if that's that good a solution?...

<comment><USER8> Regarding India's sewage issue, I wondered why feces isn't used in a methane digestor, or as fertilizer?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Okay, Awesome. Now find something else that will eat up the carbon being released from burning that diesel fuel.

<comment><USER10> The bacteria will be fed with sugars from crops that pulled carbon out of the air. The whole cycle would produce energy from sunlight without netting out any carbon release.

Given that liquid hydrocarbon fuels aren't going away anytime soon (or possibly ever) finding non-fossil sources for them like this is pretty important.

<comment><USER11> And everyone will starve, but will be able to drive to work! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am not a biochemist. Is this doing an end-run around the energy density problem by converting useless hydrocarbons (which already have a lot of energy stored, but not in a usable form), or does this still need an energy source - be that solar, heat, whatever - to provide the energy to be stored in the biodiesel?

</comment><comment><USER13> The most frustrating thing about reading about exciting discoveries is how few of them ever go into 'production' in the near future.

-Graphene

-AIDS vaccine

-Malaria vaccine

-Fusion reactors

</comment><comment><USER14> Amryis produced a drop-in biofuel before this, but this work appears to use a novel biosynthetic pathway.

</comment><comment><USER15> I thought initially I will be able to run my car for free thanks to this piece of shit enterprise presentation software we have that crashes all the time.

I need some coffee.</comment>


RAM Is Cheap So Why Don't We Run Everything from It? - <AUTHOR> https://www.howtogeek.com/171500/ram-is-cheap-so-why-dont-we-run-everything-from-it/ <comment><USER2> Because it's actually not that cheap compared to SSD and HD? (Not to mention the obvious persistence issue.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I do a lot more in RAM these days. Everybody is. But once I commit, I want it on solid storage.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I invest time for learning Go? - <AUTHOR>

Seeing Google cleanup, anything non-mainstream, do you think it makes sense to invest any time to learn and invest in Go? Could Google pull the plug on it anytime in the future cleanups? If they do, is there enough non-Google momentum for Go to survive? <comment><USER2> Go is a tool that Google is using to reduce its development costs. It's not something they're looking at from a profit perspective. If it does it's job and makes their development process faster and easier then they have no reason not to keep supporting it. If it doesn't do its job then it's a clear sign that you might want to discontinue using it too.

So far, from what I've seen, companies who use it love it.

I think it's a safe bet that it's not going away and will only get better.

<comment><USER3> Any Googlers care to chime in on this? I've heard Java and C++ are pretty entrenched in Google these days so there's a lot of inertia to get people to try Go for production level work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Go source code is available. Google can stop subsidizing development but they can't stop development. Even if they do, exposing yourself to new programming ideas and concepts is generally a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER5> Yes, you should.

a) it's very easy to pick up (not an exaggeration). If it's not a good fit for you, you'll probably know within a week or two.

b) it's fun, especially if you've been knee-deep in script languages for a while like me and suffered from quirky implementations and buggy code with too many run-time errors

c) the community is extremely friendly and helpful (OK, anyone could claim that, but just go look at the google group or the IRC channel and see for yourself)

d) people actually seem to get stuff done with it, I'm amazed at the quality of available libraries.

</comment><comment><USER6> Learning Go is at the absolute top of my todo list. I went to an intro talk about Go at Google in Montreal last week and I was flabbergasted. It looks amazing and I can't wait to write it.

I don't think I understand your concerns about it, though. It's open source. It's a new evolving paradigm with and language concurrency planned from the start. At the very least, it will be good for your brain to learn it. And it has momentum both inside and outside of Google. It's my understanding that much of YouTube is written in Go.

</comment><comment><USER7> tldr; YES !

You have to recognise the Go was spearheaded by folks who were there from the earliest days of Unix and Plan9 (used by IBM supercomputers). They know how not do do things. With all that experience you can accept that they have the experience to make good decisions. And those decisions are clearly documented and explained in the various documents.

From a technical side, Go is statically linked. So can cross-compile and not have to face DLL nor shared library hells. Whilst the resulting binaries are larger than those that use shared libraries you can have many goroutines running at once. Each goroutine uses only a small amount of stack space. So for any production sized project the ease of deployment outweighs any incremental memory usage. After all, these days 32G or more memory is not unusual.

On Google AppEngine - Go programs run faster and consume less resources than comparable programs written in Python and Java. Google is run by some very smart folks. They are unlikely to be going down a unviable path.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wondering the same</comment>


The Brain, the Criminal and the Courts - <AUTHOR> https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2019/neuroscience-criminal-justice <comment><USER2> In many jurisdictions there is still this outdated reasoning based on M'Naghten rule from 1843: " as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing or, if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong." If person knows that what he does is wrong and knows what he is doing, he is responsible.

Damage into prefrontal cortex can radically change the ability to control impulses. Many violent acts are done by people with brain damage who know exactly what they do and they know it's wrong, but they have no choice at the moment of the crimes.

One study examined 14 juveniles sentenced to death and found that all of them had suffered head trauma, most in car accidents but some by beatings. In adult death row inmates the number is also very high.

Edit: found a review article: [https://www.brainline.org/article/traumatic- brain-injury-pri...](https://www.brainline.org/article/traumatic-brain-injury- prisons-review)

<comment><USER3> In his dissent in Roper v Simmons, Justice Scalia gave a couple examples of brutal crimes committed by juveniles:

"Defendant Christopher Simmons of this case, who was only seven months shy of his 18th birthday when he murdered Shirley Crook, described to his friends beforehand—in 'chilling, callous terms,' as the Kennedy majority opinion puts it—the murder he planned to commit. He and his 15—year—old accomplice then broke into the home of an innocent woman in the middle of the night, forced her from bed, walked her to a trestle spanning a river, 'hog—tied' her with duct tape and electrical wire, and threw her off a bridge alive and conscious. She drowned."

"In Alabama, two 17—year—olds, one 16—year—old, and one 19—year—old picked up a female hitchhiker, threw bottles at her, and kicked and stomped her for approximately 30 minutes until she died. They then sexually assaulted her lifeless body and, when they were finished, threw her body off a cliff. They later returned to the crime scene to mutilate her corpse."

In these cases, the problem is not impulse control but _evil_. I hope the courts never forget that evil exists.

<comment><USER4> Evil does not exist. What does exist are errant mental states and antisocial impulses.

<comment><USER5> Presumably then you don't consider goodness to exist, either?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On the same subject, an older article from The Atlantic : The Brain on Trial [0], which mentions some extreme cases. Worth reading if you have the time.

[0] [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the- bra...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-brain-on- trial/308520/)</comment>


No, Your Service isn't "Open" - <AUTHOR> http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/no-your-service-isnt-open

<comment><USER2> I give my deepest respect for anyone who fights for open software. I wish I would do more..

I've never met RMS, and as far as I call tell he might be a bit weird, but I still owe him the greatest degree of respect. Thanks to him, and to people like him, I was able to grow up with software I could hack on my own. I started learning proper programming in the early 90's, and I could do that using free (I'm not going to qualify what type of free we're talking about. If you don't know, you're not on HN) software and the reason is for people like him who lead the way

(ok, this post might be more about protocols rather than software, but the main gist of my point still remains)

<comment><USER3> Not really. RMS has harshly rejected terms like "open source" for free software.

"Openness" is a relative and meaninglessly vague term in this context. Anything short of a open-sourced program and completely public data is less "open" than some alternative. The complaints that 99.99% of people make about APIs have less to do with "openness" than poor communication by the provider in the forms of bad documentation and unwarned changes.

TFA: " _Facebook Connect is not open. It's controlled by one company._ "

Yes, because if it was another company, _you wouldn't care about this API_. The API only _matters_ to anyone _because_ it's Facebook.

I adore free software, but "openness" is a lousy justification for trying to work up umbrage about the difficulties of working in a parasitic developer ecosystem.

<comment><USER2> There are plenty of words in this particular universe that are thrown around a lot. You mention "openness". Another big one is "freedom". You can discuss to great length what these words mean, but I'm not going down that route tonight.

I don't know specifically what RMS has said and has not said. For the most of it I'm not interested. What I am interested in are the actions. Like him or not, but RMS has clearly done good things for anyone who believes computers should be devices that you and I are free to hack on on your own.

(I'm carefully avoiding your TFA quote because I have nothing useful to comment on that. Yes, I agree that the API only has value because it's coming from this one company. I don't really think this has much to do with openness).

<comment><USER3> I'm not really concerned about RMS. I just pointed out that he isn't about "open".

To the extent that you're fond of free software and RMS, that's nice, but the topic is TFA.

<comment><USER2> Alright, we're discussing "open" vs "free". Right now I don't care too much about semantics..

For anyone reading this that don't know what we're on about , read --> [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the- point.h...](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html)

(edit: I generally agree with RMS's points. I might confuse "open" and "free". For anyone not native to English these words might be interchangeable. I'm not a native English speaker. It becomes clearer when you define the words such as done in [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the- point.h...](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html) , but in a day to day conversation, it's easy to get the exact definitions wrong)

<comment><USER3> " _Alright, we're discussing "open" vs "free"._ "

No, we're not discussing one thing vs. another, we're discussing _different things_. That is a whole other situation entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Maybe we should all start stressing the difference between "Open" and simply "Available"

<comment><USER4> Michael, do you also see Appleseed, Diaspora, OneSocialWeb and Buddycloud as part of a "federated social network" movement?

Are there any concrete steps the different projects are taking to work together?

<comment><AUTHOR> Most definitely, I think we all see ourselves that way. There was a Federated Social Web conference in July that was pretty well attended by the different projects, and I believe a follow-up event is in the early planning stages. We also have a federated social web mailing list, with w3c representation.

We're all interested in inter-operability. It's still too early to tell what shape that will take, we're all experimenting in different directions, but from my take on it, the future looks bright for interoperability.

We may find ourselves with 3+ protocols early on, but they'll all be open, documented and available to anyone, and the different projects hopefully will try and support more than one protocol. But eventually, something will rise to the top, it's just too early to tell what that will be at this point.

But that's not hindering anybody's progress, in fact, in a lot of ways, the platform can be a lot more difficult to build than the protocol.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only one who found the like button and the disquis on that page ironic?

</comment><comment><USER6> Well in all fairness, I would assume that most API's and Services have some form of disclaimer.

What TOTALLY 100% open service have you ever seen?

<comment><USER7> This. Frankly, there has to be TOS around any API released, because there are always nefarious uses just waiting to be exploited by non-"legit" consumers.

I realize that "legit" is a subjective term, so well, that is why TOS for API's are needed.

<comment><AUTHOR> _This. Frankly, there has to be TOS around any API released, because there are always nefarious uses just waiting to be exploited by non-"legit" consumers._

Actually, you can (and should) build protections against spam and improper use into the protocol instead of relying on a centralized gatekeeper. All truly open systems do this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really don't think there is anything to complain about here. When I hear that an API is "open", I have always assumed that means that it is published, and open to the public to use, both of which are true of the Twitter API.

However, I have never assumed that "open" means that I have a right to abuse a publicly available API without getting banned for doing so.</comment>


The Best Countries for Starting a Business Now - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/ss/9-best-countries-start-business-right-now

<comment><USER2> I'm more interested in countries that make it easy for a company to grow. If taxes and restrictions are high, but it's cheap and easy to start a company, it doesn't really help me as a business owner.</comment>


Intel lays off hundreds of tech administrators - <AUTHOR> https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2019/03/intel-lays-off-hundreds-of-tech-administrators.html <comment><USER2> It seems really perverse incentive wise that layoffs always seem to bump stock prices. Companies are going to need to transition at times and have cut backs and pivots but it doesn't seem like it should be a market signal that the company is doing something worth investing in so consistently. Many times what these cuts do, in many companies, is just offload the tech overhead to another department, or lower quality and quantity of work being done by another department. When I was in IT they wouldn't replace workers who had left. This caused IT hold times to go from less than a minute for an answer to over an hour. We estimated that it ended up costing the company over a million dollars in man hours over some non-trivial period because of wasted time on users who were no longer able to perform their duties. They outsourced the call center after I left. I heard it's only gotten worse as the call center frequently hangs up if the call is too hard or is taking too long since they are tracked on call times and numbers. Perverse incentives.

<comment><USER3> Tech companies don't know how to fire people, and the market seems to know this.

It's generally assumed that the first round of layoffs, if small, is to cull underperformers. Further rounds seem to make everybody jumpy.

<comment><USER4> > Tech companies don't know how to fire people, and the market seems to know > this.

citation on that?

<comment><USER5> HN is not wikipedia but I don't have any citation to prove it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That last line caused me to do a double-take:

> Intel shares were trading up 0.9 percent Friday at $53.61. The stock is near > its highest point since the dot-com era.

Sure enough, it hasn't recovered its pre-crash price (~ $75). That's 20 years in the red if you happened to invest at the top.

Many (most?) of the high fliers from back then that are still around did recover (e.g., AMZN, MSFT, AAPL). Even ORCL (but barely).

<comment><USER7> Are the numbers inflation normalized?

<comment><USER8> No, and they also probably don't account for dividends.

Edit: after dividends it would be 10.7% higher, but annualized returns of <1%. So still really bad, but not less money than you went in with.

<comment><USER8> Actually after dividends but after inflation too you're still negative I guess, hah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If anyone affected by this happens to be well-versed in Kubernetes/SRE, please shoot me an email!

</comment><comment><USER10> Oregon and many other states are often providing companies with massive tax breaks. These kinds of layoffs, in my book, justify terminating such tax breaks. (actually in my book no companies would get a tax break - but just say'n)

<comment><USER11> _actually in my book no companies would get a tax break_

Generally speaking, I agree with that. Tax breaks lead to a race-to-the- bottom. The "winning" location gives away so much that it's often a negative for the municipality. This may well have been the situation with the recent proposed HQ for Amazon in NYC.

However, there are exceptions. I don't know the exact details of the "massive tax breaks" you are referring to. But they could be justified in this case. Otherwise the investment would simply go to another state.

Here's now it has worked in Oregon with Intel in the past: The tax breaks were because of the extraordinary high cost of a semiconductor fab. It costs literally billions of dollars to build and equip a modern fab. This cost is far out of proportion to what a more mundane industrial development would cost. Assessing a property tax on the full value of that fab would mean the amount of tax is far far far out of proportion to the cost of providing government services to that fab.

So lets say, making up some numbers, a municipality has an existing property tax base of $5 billion. Intel builds a new $5 billion fab there. The burden of that fab on resources such as fire and schools is minimal. So, does everyone else in the municipality get their property taxes cut in half just because the expensive new building appears? Or does the municipality now get 2x the previous revenue (which whey will most likely spend recklessly).

The same argument as property taxes can be made for income taxes on the business. Let's say a company can build a widget factory for $5 billion. The widgets from that factory can generate a profit of $1 billion per year, at very little cost to the municipality or the state. Should the state collect income tax on that full $1 billion of profit?

If you say yes, collect the full amount of property or income tax, then the factory just gets built elsewhere. Maybe even in another country. In that scenario, the USA loses and the state loses. They lose the high paying jobs that the factory brings. They lose all the "trickle down" that the factory brings. They simply lose.

Dont forget, all the new local employees buy homes, pay property taxes, pay state income taxes, pay capital gains taxes on all the appreciated Intel stock they sell. In Oregon, unlike at the Federal level, there is no tax reduction for long term capital gains and there is no tax reduction for dividends. The income tax rate hits 9% at $8,401 in income.

Oregon gets plenty of money at the 9% state income tax rate that most people easily hit. Oregon takes 9.9% above $125,000 but that's not a big added burden for most people.

Semiconductor fabs are so very capital intensive that I think adjustments must be made to the general method of taxing both property and income.

<comment><USER12> What you're saying seems to argue for a different corporate tax structure.

Tax a some based net employee pay and per employee (cover municipal costs like roads and such per employee).

Tax by land area usage (everyone should be taxed this)

Also by how much of the commons is affected (noise, exhaust, etc).

<comment><USER11> Those things make sense to me, but change is usually difficult to accomplish.

Still, there already is quite a bit of differentiation between states. E.g. Oregon state taxes income at up to 9.9%, but has no sales tax. Adjacent Washington state has no income tax, but has a sales tax of between 6.5% and 10.4%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some telecoms call app admins, SMEs, Subject Matter Experts. They administrate a service. I'm guessing Tech Administrators are the same thing, they run internal applications, databases, internal tools, non-major platforms, more of a sysadmin+app admin role.

If you bounce around different projects internally, you can grow your experience in that company. You can learn networking, databases, operating systems (diff flavors), deployment tools, etc, and further your career. Major companies offer a yearly educational package also.

This is how I qualified for tiger teams at a few companies. Teams formed to troubleshoot major problems, check new projects for issues, etc. Collection of experts.

Not sure if Intel "Tech administrators" are just production facilities app owners, some of those apps are so old, running dos/95, that upgrading it would be too expensive.

</comment><comment><USER14> Technical administrator is a strange title, but also seems kind of accurate. I know folks who are in IT at Intel and a majority of those who were let go seem to be 'systems analysts' and management of systems analysts. Where the systems in this case are internal enterprise tools.

</comment><comment><USER15> What does a technical administrator do?

<comment><USER16> Probably things like being a DBA.

Intel has a lot of 1-off databases for internal tools used in manufacturing. The database sees a lot of heavy use, but is tied to one particular step in manufacturing, so there aren't a lot of traditional users.

I suspect that they've migrated these databases to versions that don't require as much heavy oversight.

<comment><USER17> That's exactly what they did. In the past year or so they've migrated everybody from a custom DBA type arrangement to a self-serve DBaaS system. They've also turned over the keys for people to do their admin stuff in a self-serve way in the on-premises-hosted cloud. You can now spin up an onsite VM very easily and do your thing, without letting the precious-precious flow outside of Intel at any time to e.g. AWS, Azure etc. (Though if what you do is below a certain secrecy level, you can do that too.)

The downside is that for those applications that have tried to stay on the custom model (cough), IT service quality and quantity has gone straight down the shitter. You can submit help tickets and like never hear back. I guess now I know why - it wasn't so much "Thanks for coming, enjoy your stay" as it was "Run for the lifeboats, we're sinking the ship!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> And here I was thinking they were laying off the administrators because they are an impediment to progress in tech

</comment><comment><USER19> Never heard of this role. It's a general name for people that work in tech? An Intel-specific term?

<comment><USER20> They probably refer to people that have been maintaining legacy apps, database, or web servers that have been in more or less maintenance mode for a long time until new replacement came long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Offshoring?

<comment><USER22> If so, then even the offshore teams are vulnerable to the tsunami change coming with devops, SRE, elastic infrastructure, etc.

It drives me a little crazy inside when I go to clients and see their system administrators have never developed automation for routine "small" events and are _still_ after N years (where sometimes N>10!) responding to the same disk full alerts in exactly the same way, with absolutely zero automation of what they learned, cleaning up the same selection of files, and so on. And this is before I try to extol the virtues of devops over lunches, or go tactical and encourage them to try out Terraform, Pulumi, or the like (MEGO is my usual audience reaction). Fortunately my clients don't pay me to transform their IT, so it's no skin off my back.

But make no mistake, that change is building a powerful head of steam, and I'm excited to work on automation solutions that embrace these principles, tooling, culture, etc., in my own service offerings for another part of my business. The folks who are resisting this change though, are not going to react well if/when the change starts seeping into their worlds.

<comment><USER23> I think that many of these seemingly change-resistant folks actually would have loved to embrace new stuff.

The problem, in many places, is that they're in departments like operations that value "convergent" work. This means they're stuck with their noses to the grindstone at all times and judged on volume and consistency of work. If they want to change something, they need to go through an onerous process designed to keep mistakes from happening at all costs. There is NO experimenting in such places and the workload is such that it's hard even to get some interstitial time to explore new ideas, of course forget about conferences and 20% time.

The way they end-up canned or otherwise scattered to the wind is when someone way higher up in org see's that there's a better way and brings in someone from the outside to implement much needed change. It usually never occurs to these folks (the managers bringing in consultants) that they would not have had to do that in the first place if there was some value placed on innovation.

<comment><USER24> So true. Always love it when a new hire comes in and trashes how everything is done inefficiently, tries to change things, and then ends up putting up with it after realizing the futility of it all. The only way it ever works out is if you have a supporting environment where not everybody is stressed out and overworked, which doesn't seem to exist in tech anymore.

<comment><USER25> Or the new hire just up and leaves: me, at 2 companies already. I've learned that life is too short to put up with so much bullshit. I generally give them about 6 months to decide if there's any chance of turning them around. But frequently it seems that they'd rather go down with the ship...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Tech Administrator sounds like some type of government job</comment>