Deliverr raises $7M to help e-commerce businesses compete with Amazon Prime - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/05/deliverr-raises-7m-to-help-e-commerce-businesses-compete-with-amazon-prime/ <comment><USER2> Any company who uses Deliverr is going to quickly figure out that they have placed their most important business process in the hands of a third party, and that they have very little control over it.

eBay, Wal-Mart, and Shopify are in the business of delivering products. They don't make the products, they make them available to the consumer. Delivery is like 90% of that. This is why amazon runs their own fulfillment centers, it's the most important part of their process.

It would be better for eBay, Wal-Mart and Shopify to merge and compete against amazon as one, rather than fighting over the table scraps that amazon leaves them.

<comment><USER3> I disagree with you on many fronts -

First any business should ask for metrics on past performance and that is how you should judge the performance and not by assertions or business models - Case in point -- Taxis were fully controlled they all looked the same, the drivers were all trained the same way -- yet the consumer experience was bad. Then Uber/Lyft came in and they don't drive the taxis but they are able to orchestrate demand and supply and offer visibility and a better price to customers. So going by your analogy Taxis >> Uber. But I think it is settled that Uber/Lyft >> Taxi. Judge Uber/Lyft with their metrics such (a) time to get a taxi (b) on time delivery and (b) cost to consumer. And businesses and consumers are smart enough to do that.

Second - marketplaces are in business of connecting buyers with sellers; laying out rules of engagement so trust is built for discovery and transaction. They are enablers. But a merchant participates in many markets and not just one. You cannot ask each marketplace to do fulfillment for the merchant because that will mean the merchant will have to predict and send inventory for eBay and Walmart and Shopify separately which is not efficient for anyone in the market.

<comment><USER2> Ok, I hear you, but I think you're missing the forest for the trees - Why did amazon beat these businesses in the first place?

It wasn't because they connected buyers with sellers, people have been doing that for decades. It has nothing to do with the rules of engagement, amazon is full of fake products and reviews. It wasn't because the user experience was bad, the amazon UX is pretty bad, it's very cluttered, and Shopify's UX is really impressive.

Amazon beats Wal-Mart et al. because their delivery is faster. And that takes control. The difference between delivering in two days and delivering in three days comes down to seconds.

And for what it's worth - Sometimes I am unable to get an Uber, but every time I call the taxi company, a taxi shows up.

(All of this isn't to say Deliverr won't provide value, just that I am doubtful it can beat amazon)

<comment><USER4> Personally, I think Amazon's original advantage was definitely in a high- quality experience. (FWIW, I've been a customer since 1997, but didn't join Prime until 2010.) They used to have pretty reliable reviews and real products. They used to have better prices. And they used to have a much better user experience.

What I really want is shopping as a _utility_. I want to spend the minimum time possible and get great results with no worries. Speedy delivery is sometimes part of that, but not always. If there were something as reliable as the Amazon of 2010 but defaulted to 3-day delivery for free, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

<comment><USER3> Interesting so in your opinion Amazon has gotten less reliable for you? In what regards ?

<comment><USER4> A number of ways:

I trust the interface much less. Just this week I had to send back two things that were mistakenly ordered. One was clothing. I set the size I wanted, then clicked on the color I wanted. The size I wanted wasn't available, so it switched the size without telling me. The other was a tool. I was searching for Dremel sanding accessories. Mixed in with Dremel-specific stuff were things that weren't compatible, but I didn't notice the switch.

It is now packed with ads of various forms. I want them to be on my side, showing me the best stuff. But instead, they are getting paid to show me stuff without regard to quality or usefulness.

The mixing in of stuff from others stores is another area where my trust has declined. If it were a separate site, that would be fine. But when I want to just buy something from Amazon, I now have to evaluate a bunch of possibly- dubious vendors on the basis of too-little information.

The reports of counterfeit products and comingled inventory has left me much more skeptical when buying things there.

The reports of terrible warehouse work conditions mean that I trust them less to take care of the people doing the work.

The way many people are now making bank doing store arbitrage, where they buy things at Target, Walmart, Trader Joes, etc, and sell it at high markups means I trust the pricing much less. I also suspect Amazon of marking things up more now than they used to.

And finally, their experiments with various shipping options means less reliable delivery. If something comes via UPS or Fedex, I know when it will arrive and trust the drivers will put it in the right place. But their various other shippers provide a different and usually worse experience.

When they started, it was magic. They took all the confusion and stress out of mail order. Now they've slowly been putting it back in. I'm sure it has increased the revenue metrics of various sub-sub-teams. But they've taken me from being a loyal customer to one ready to switch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I run engineering at Deliverr. Happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER5> "Uber didn't change the physical infrastructure of cars. They didn't build their own taxis. What they did was create software that could connect excess capacity drivers," Krakaris told TechCrunch. "Most warehouses aren't going to be full. We are going in and filling that extra space they wouldn't otherwise fill."

Does Deliverr rely on the third party warehouse staff to perform fulfillment? How do you ensure SLA's are met?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's right. Effectively we measure everything and have multi-factor performance metrics with our partners. So it's a bit more objective than Uber which is entirely based on user feedback. If we detect that a node in the system is performing poorly we will not use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't this what selling 3rd party on Amazon is? They handle fulfillment and delivery? I think it's a good idea since I don't think eBay or Walmart offer this service (?), and I'm continually hearing how Amazon is screwing over their 3rd party sellers (Amazon basic to replace 3rd party products that sell well, etc). What would you happen to you guys if say Walmart started offering 3rd party fulfillment? Think they could do it well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Amazon has a program called Multi-channel fulfillment. But there are significant drawbacks to sellers and marketplaces:

1\. It comes in an Amazon box. Large marketplace have started penalizing sellers for that.

2\. They don't integrate into fast shipping programs that act like Prime, as an example eBay eGD.

You are right that eBay and Walmart can offer this service, but most sellers will sell in multiple places, and splitting inventory across different facilities is expensive, inefficient, and difficult to manage. Isolationism in this market hurts everybody.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm am ecommerce seller; why Deliverr inatead of Shipmonk, Shipbob, Easy Post?

Do you have clear and transparent pricing?

<comment><USER3> Absolutely the pricing is per unit per SKU - all inclusive of receive, shipping, box and pick pack. I think you will find pricing to be at least 30% lower. You can check out pricing for your items here - [https://deliverr.com/fulfillment-cost/](https://deliverr.com/fulfillment- cost/)

However the bigger reason for our existence is faster shipping. You can now affordably do 2 day shipping on Walmart and Guaranteed Delivery on eBay and offer 2 day shipping on your Shopify store. You can see here the sales boost we are seeing with fast 2 day shipping -- [https://deliverr.com/walmart/](https://deliverr.com/walmart/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article talks mostly about Wal-Mart, eBay, and other very large retailers, but I noticed that they also have options for small businesses.

<comment><USER3> In fact it is designed for small merchants - and enables you to sell on Walmart, eBay and Shopify stores with fast shipping

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> We use "AWS" :)

</comment><comment><USER5> I was interested, so I dug a little. Here is my conclusion: While Amazon continues to lower the cost of fulfillment through management and the development of new technology that is driving operational efficiencies, Deliverr tries to lower fulfillment cost by gaining access to excess warehouse capacity for pennies on the dollar.

The below pricing shows that Deliverr is able to drive value by offering competitive pricing on the fastest shipping times over other third party logistics providers (3PL). They claim they are able to achieve this cost savings through their "machine learning and predictive intelligence" which they use to determine which of its warehouses to store its client's goods. However, they go on to say they typically only store the good's in 3-5 warehouses. This means any 3PL should be able to compete on pricing for "2 days shipping" by having 3-5 properly placed warehouses.

It seems the key cost saver for Deliverr is their outsourcing of the fulfillment to the excess capacity of the third party fulfillment centers. Using a similar model as Uber.

According to this article that states the amount of warehouse space that goes unused on any given day is 4 billion square feet, or roughly 30 percent of total warehousing: [https://www.pymnts.com/matchmakers/2017/warehouse-space- matc...](https://www.pymnts.com/matchmakers/2017/warehouse-space-matches- customers-with-unused-storage-spaces/). If deliver is able to unlock only 1.7% of this space for pennies on the dollar, they will achieve FBA warehousing scale (77 million square feet: [https://archpaper.com/2017/08/architecture- fulfillment-cente...](https://archpaper.com/2017/08/architecture-fulfillment- centers/)) and FBA pricing.

In determining if they will be able to gain access to the 1.7% of excess warehousing and maintain SLA's, it is interesting to see what the current warehousing market is in the US. According to this report: [https://www.logisticsmgmt.com/article/cbre_research_shows_th...](https://www.logisticsmgmt.com/article/cbre_research_shows_that_many_u.s._warehouses_are_under_equipped_to_meet_e), it seems the majority of this excess warehouse space is most likely not well suited to efficiently deliver on the type of fulfillment Deliverr is advertising. "In data analysis for 56 major U.S. markets, a key finding from CBRE showed that the majority of facilities built before the mid-2000s have certain limitations that hinder e-commerce distribution usage, including low ceilings, small footprints, uneven floors, and inadequate docking."

The article goes on to mention that only 11% of total warehousing in the US (1 billion square-feet) was built within the past 10 years. It does not mention how much of this space is not being occupied on a daily basis. It would seem Deliverr will need to access about 7% of this warehousing, at a fraction of it's 3PL rate, to reach FBA scale.

Unlike Uber drivers, let's hope Deliverr's fulfillment partners are pricing their excess capacity appropriately so as to be able to afford to pay their employees a living wage.

Deliverr pricing example for an iMac: [https://deliverr.com/fulfillment- cost/B071G2S8LZ/apple-imac-...](https://deliverr.com/fulfillment- cost/B071G2S8LZ/apple-imac-mne92lla-27)

Amazon Multi-channel:

Standard: $29.07

3 Day: $30.07

2 Day: $30.07

Deliverr:

Standard: $26.73

3 Day: $29.70

2 Day: $29.86

Typical 3PL:

Standard: $19.74

3 Day: $83.29

2 Day: $83.29

<comment><USER3> I think you analysis is extensive but misses a few points. To analyze the economics you have to look at the entire value chain. For e-commerce fulfillment it looks likes this roughly - sending products into the warehouse, receiving, storing and pick packing the products in the warehouse, shipping the products out. Traditionally each of these items are decided on sequentially in isolation. Without any regard on how it impact the others in the value chain. This causes inefficiency in the system and bloated costs for everyone.

To consider all of these value chains at once requires your to evaluate literally millions of data points (no exaggeration here) for every SKU inventory placement decisions; evaluate different states of the world and choose the is likely to represent the future. Majority of efficiency comes from this and that is what is reflected in the cost savings merchants get from using Deliverr.

Second - the state of the world is changing and we hope to be leading that change - 1 day shipping and same day shipping are not far away. That requires more distributed infrastructure and radically different placement strategies to keep overall costs in the systems down.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the response, I definitely see the potential of Deliverr (related to the use of excess warehousing capacity) as expectations move to 1 day and same day shipping.

It seems inventory placement strategies developed by demand prediction models are only as good as the data set used to build the models. Obviously it's going to be hard to compete with Amazon on the breadth of data you have access to.

Where has Deliverr gotten the data to feed the prediction models in the early days?

Do you require your customers to provide historical sales data?

Do you pool customer data to improve the models for all of your customers? If so, do customers have a way to opt-out of their data being pooled?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Commenting only on the title here (I haven't RTFA yet or heard of Deliverr before)...

Amazon is a logistics powerhouse. $7M probably wouldn't even cover the capital investment of a fraction of their equipment in just one of their warehouses. Claiming a series A startup is going to compete with that is a surefire way to discredit it.

<comment><USER11> I'm part of the team at Deliverr. The implication that the $7M will go towards building a parallel infrastructure is not an accurate view of the strategy.

This company is setting up the infrastructure to leverage the vast investments in warehousing that already exist all over the US.

Definitely recommend reading the article, it does a solid job of summing the mission up :)</comment></comment>


Pure Operation-Based Replicated Data Types - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.04469# <comment><USER2> I've been following the literature on this topic for a while now, and I've always wished for more examples of _actual systems_ built with these techniques. Are there any? What kind of scales do they deal with? Are there any write-ups on them? (I know of at least one good one[1].)

In particular, I've wondered how a simpler solution to the problems posed in this paper stacks up. At what point does it fail? e.g., Consider:

        * An op based model.
        * A client-server architecture (not p2p).
        * Operations are assigned a total ordering by a central server.
        * Given any two dependent operations A and B, A is always
          transmitted before B.

This still gives you a lot of the stated advantages of an eventually consistent system, where each client communicating with the server will eventually converge even if they all temporarily diverge. The central server and total ordering is a key ingredient, because it's what lets you guarantee ordering between any two causal operations by having the server "choose" an ordering.

I'm naturally interested in trade offs. For what use cases does the central server model break down? Is it still useful for other things at lesser scales?

[1] - [https://medium.com/@raphlinus/towards-a-unified-theory-of- op...](https://medium.com/@raphlinus/towards-a-unified-theory-of-operational- transformation-and-crdt-70485876f72f)

<comment><USER3> What you describe looks a lot like a Google Wave like OT system. Wave-style OT is eventually consistent, like CRDTs, but you need a central server to give the event history a total order. This is necessary because Wave-style OT is a 1-1 model: clients are 1-1 connected with the server, but not with each other, which would be n-n, which is what CRDTs can do.

The total order of the central server can make the system simpler and more efficient, but by itself it doesn't solve the problem that Wave has, which is allowing a client to edit his text/message without being interrupted by network latency/interruptions -- imagine typing a letter and having to wait for the server to acknowledge that keypress with >100ms latencies. To solve this problem, you still need some form of xform/merge algorithm that OT and CRDT systems provide.

EDIT: I assumed you were not familiar with OT systems since you didn't mention it in your post, but now that I followed your link I can see that you are. In that light, it seems your comment is more a question about what the tradeoffs are between OT and CRDT systems rather than whether a central server can solve all problems without xform/merge logic.

One tradeoff that comes to mind when thinking about OT and CRDT systems is in the way operations track locations in the datastructure. In OT systems you have offsets (small), in CRDTs you have uuids (large) or dynamically growing identifiers (usually small but possibly large). This has implications for the byte-size of operations or the in-memory datastructure.

Another is that CRDTs have a pruning problem. It has been some time since I looked at CRDTs, but I remember that Wave-style OT didn't have the same problem due to the central server. The pruning problem can cause a CRDT to grow larger than it needs to by forcing it to keep more historic data around just in case it gets an old operation it hasn't seen yet. The central server solves this problem by guaranteeing that it will have sent you all old operations before sending you a newer one. If you know all actors in a n-n system you can also solve this issue, but in an unbounded n-n system I didn't see any way this issue can be solved when I was researching it.

EDIT2: Just want to add that there are lots of other problems that are more practical than theoretical. For example, authorization, authorative copy of the data, REST API, things like that, but that would depend more on the exact use case.

<comment><USER4> With CRDTs log entries can be purged once they synchronize with everyone, no need to keep them just in case. Although it's rather implementation specific.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I did address that when I said you can solve it if you know all actors in a n-n system, but I should have been clearer by pointing out the solution, which is (as you already said) every known actor acknowledging it.

In an unbounded n-n system I still don't see a solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not an expert or an academic, but I've been spending a lot of time with CRDTs lately. It seems to me that there are two major issues with this approach.

First, little is said about performance. As the paper explains, the meat of each CRDT is pushed into the eval function, which to my understanding is simply a function over the PO-Log. However, is it always possible to adapt a convergent data structure in such a way that eval takes a reasonable amount of time? I notice that sequences — perhaps the most important data type in CRDT- land! — have not been implemented using this approach. If we assume that a sequence can be retrieved from an insert/delete PO-Log by simply sorting it and removing the deleted operations, does that mean that every eval is O(Nlog(N)) at best? And if your solution is to cache the output sequence as an array, a) how do you ensure a correct mapping between the PO-Log and cache on every new operation, and b) what happens if you lose your data and need to replay your PO-Log from scratch? Can the cache be reconstructed O(Nlog(N)) at worst? A complete guess, but maybe having CRDT-specific bits in the prepare/effect steps is what actually allows CRDTs to be performant in the first place! PO-Log representation is alluringly flexible but seems to come with some hefty tradeoffs.

Second, one of the cleanup steps relies on causal stability, i.e. knowing that each client is ahead of a potentially concurrent op. This is a problem in pure, decentralized P2P environments. First, depending on your network architecture, it's not necessarily possible to identify each peer until they actually start sending messages around. Maybe they got their hands on an early revision of the data and have been chipping away for weeks before going online. Second, nothing prevents a peer from connecting for a bit and then leaving forever, thus ensuring that their last edits will never be causally stable. This can be solved with some centralized logic, but then what's the point of using a CRDT at all?

Finally, and less critically, the lossy cleanup steps make it impossible to retrieve old revisions or identify the author of a particular change.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is the exact topic I've been trying to think on for the past month. Excited to dig through it.</comment>


"Flick to tv" represents everything wrong with product design today - <AUTHOR> http://fuckjetpacks.com/read/flick_to_tv_represents_everything_wrong_with_product_design_today <comment><USER2> 3 years ago, I made a prototype for LG of a social remote control. It allowed anyone in the room with a web browser (including smart phones) to send videos to the tv. It was great for group tv watching, since it gives everyone the ability to search simultaneously for a video, instead of instructing the one guy with the remote where to go.

Anyway, LG wasnt interested until I made a super gimmicky way of sending videos to the tv instead of using a button. You held your phone up to the tv, and it would transfer.

Concept Demo: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETRwc7B_NNc>

This limited it to apps instead of web browsers and was less reliable. But it was slightly cooler than pressing a button.

It distracted them from the whole point of my idea though. They just wanted a cool remote control they could sell with their tvs.

<comment><USER3> Why not start with the really awesome remote control - and move toward your final idea?

<comment><USER2> Selling a specialized device for tv watching undermines the purpose of my social remote idea. Your friends wont have one, so they can't participate as easily as they could if it was a webapp.

I suppose you could buy 4 of them, like I (an only child) did with Nintendo 64 controllers so that my friends could always play.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most gesture controls fit in this category of jetpack design, too.

<comment><USER5> The ipad app switching/closing/task bar gestures are pretty natural though. See them once and they are unforgettable.

<comment><USER4> actually I totally agree - I meant 3d gestures with hands in space, not multitouch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is this referring to? Is there an actual product that allows you to flick to TV and provides no other UI for that functionality?

<comment><USER7> Not sure how this relates to the real world experience, but there's a Samsung Phone TV ad that shows a businessman flicking his presentation onto the conference screen.

<comment><USER8> Samsung has two commercials airing currently with new forms of interaction ... might be the Galaxy S3 (I'm not sure). One example shows the user dismissing a call by speaking to the phone while a call is coming in. The other commercial shows that you can take a screen-shot by waving your hand over the device whenever - kind of ironic since screenshots from Android devices was always a pain back when I owned one.

Maybe they both work flawlessly - I don't know, but both seem like they could easily misfire when you intended to do something completely different with your device.

<comment><USER9> I have an S3, and the screenshot thing is actually very neat and handy. It is a bit wonky when you try to capture apps with scrollable windows, but it never misfires. You have to basically press the side of your palm on the screen and move it from left to right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The author should really let the reader know what this is in response to. Having never seen the ad nor heard of "Flick to TV" makes and otherwise good article kind of hard to relate to.

</comment><comment><USER11> He is simply listing the challenges any designer would face to make a simple yet obvious feature that just works. It is NOT describing a reason to "go back to buttons" or do something in the traditional way. This is where home electronics need to go - where you can interact with them directly instead through some button interface. If I direct my phone at the TV, both the phone and the TV should know that this is happening and depending on context, do something or offer a choice. Another example is touching your phone to your computer, etc.

The challenge, apart from making the design intuitive, is for the devices that take part in this form of interaction to understand the intent of the user.

<comment><USER12> What is wrong with having the user say what they want? My microwave doesn't popup open the door and grab what I am holding whenever I pass food in front of it, and that is fine.

<comment><USER13> If the gesture is intuitive and simple, it can be much more efficient than a button and reduce cognitive load by eliminating symbolic abstraction.

A great example is browsing in Safari. Scrolling, zooming, and going back/forward with gestures is far more efficient than explicitly pressing buttons to do the same actions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Solution: Let these interface gimmicks be the stuff of tech conventions and demos, and never part of any mass-produced product.

But maybe some marketing folks, seeing the success of Apple, have reasoned that these gimmicks can sell products in the short-term, at least until consumers discover the problems with them.

At the end of this era of tapping and rubbing little screens with our fat, dirty fingers, we may be reminded why we had tactile interfaces to begin with. What ever happened to the PDA stylus?

<comment><USER15> Constantly fumbling with; forgetting or losing the PDA stylus – happened to the PDA stylus.

<comment><USER2> The other thing removing the stylus did was force the software to go in a completely different direction.

With a fat finger, the ui can't look and work the same as mouse driven ui as it could with a stylus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great little post and totally true. Related, the Airplay implementation is a good example of restraint in interaction design. Airfoil does much more, but it isn't as natural or easy to grok as Apple's implementation.

</comment><comment><USER16> People always use the example of all cars having the same basic controls when they are talking about patents. But they normally forget to mention that there was a lot of experimentation with different control layouts and systems before a default was established. It took decades (I think) but that's how good ideas can come to the front.

Experimentation in the marketplace is not a sin. Sometimes designers cannot figure out the best solutions before shipping.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think you always need a phase of experimenting new ideas before people find out what works and what doesn't. Ideally, those failed experiments would stay in-house and never reach the market, but it's not always easy to know which ideas are good...

So anyway, since you never know what might eventually come out of it, I'm personally grateful for the existence of "flick to tv" gimmicks.

As long as I don't have to use them myself, of course.

</comment><comment><USER18> Blogger team needs to read this article and rethink their "flick to change article" UX travesty.

</comment><comment><USER19> Just because you need to a higher learning curve, doesn't mean it's wrong.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm struck by the negativity of the post. While the arguments listed are valid user interface design points, the "flick to TV" just works (assuming you have the right hardware), and it's pretty simple. If you wanted to get everything correct, you'd probably end up with a more normal user interface with buttons and whatnot, plus you'd spend more time developing it to get it right according to how you're supposed to be doing it.

Instead, they went out and developed a neat little feature that yes, has its problems, but it works and it's a little more innovative than a button-based interface.

<comment><USER21> Unless you're busy making or avoiding patents, I'd argue that the innovativeness of a feature shouldn't be a factor unless it works better than the normal solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The last sentence absolutely says it all. Great post.</comment>


PHP.net serving malware - <AUTHOR> http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http%3A%2F%2Fphp.net%2Farray_search&client=googlechrome&hl=en-US

<comment><USER2> Getting it as well, First thought it was my chrome.</comment>


Intel CPUs fall to new hyperthreading exploit that pilfers crypto keys - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/11/intel-cpus-fall-to-new-hyperthreading-exploit-that-pilfers-crypto-keys/ <comment><USER2> Recent HN discussion on a different article about the same exploit: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18362905](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18362905)</comment>


The Forgiving User Interface - <AUTHOR> http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/TheForgivingUserInterface.html?HN_20150814 <comment><USER2> Somewhat related: "Why do numpads on keyboards and phones have reversed layouts?" [http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/16666/why-do- numpads-o...](http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/16666/why-do-numpads-on- keyboards-and-phones-have-reversed-layouts)

I personally suffered this once because I remember my ATM PIN by "shape" not by "numbers", I was very confused until I realized the difference. At lest in this example both dispositions are arbitrary, so it's not as bad as the examples in the OP.

</comment><comment><USER3> _There 's the real design challenge. By all means make it pretty, but above all, make it unsurprising. And in the cases where that fails, make it forgiving._

Sounds like there should be a corollary to the "Principle of Least Astonishment"[1]. Maybe it could be called the "Principle of Least Damage" or "Principle of Maximum Forgiveness" or something. Or maybe that already exists?

[1]: [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrincipleOfLeastAstonishment](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PrincipleOfLeastAstonishment)</comment>


Democracies are on track to lose their global economic dominance - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/05/democracies-are-on-track-to-lose-their-global-economic-dominance.html <comment></comment>


How an Imaginary Island Stayed on Maps for Five Centuries - <AUTHOR> http://hyperallergic.com/316836/how-an-imaginary-island-stayed-on-maps-for-five-centuries/ <comment><USER2> I always wondered if name and dreamy search in Brazil (1985 movie) for a mystical place (and woman) was motivated by Hy-Brasil.

I suppose it has been debunked, but it still seems apropos... [http://stanleyrumm.com/?p=12](http://stanleyrumm.com/?p=12)

"Port Talbot [in Wales] is a steel town, where everything is covered with gray iron ore dust. Even the beach is completely littered with dust, its just black. The sun was setting, and it was quite beautiful. The contrast was extraordinary, I had this image of a guy sitting there on this dingy beach with a portable radio, tuning in these strange Latin escapist songs like 'Brazil'. The music transported him somehow and made his world less gray."

Terry Gilliam

<comment><USER3> Wales has also [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmeirion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmeirion) , where the TV series The Prisoner was filmed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When I see things like this I always wonder if we can find a nearby underwater mountain upon which we could build an island.

<comment><USER5> Yes if you don't mind building on the top of a volcano :-) Plate tectonics take to long to create new land surface.

<comment><USER4> Free energy for the next couple million years. What else could you want?

Porcupine Bank goes all the way up to 200 meters deep. Seems very doable for a very determined multi-billionaire. 200 meters of rubble is not that hard to stack.

The main problem is that there are a couple people drilling for oil around there and I suppose they'd object to being in someone's territorial waters.

OTOH, negotiating protection and sovereignty in exchange for very lax law about oil exploration could make an independent country viable.

How tragic the island of Hi Brazil would be born out of such dirty interests...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This would make a great basis for a video game.

<comment><USER7> It's also the basis for countless books, audio books, etc.

<comment><USER8> E.g. Jack Vance's _Lyonesse_ trilogy, set in the imaginary, soon-to-be-sunken Elder Isles, the largest of which is called Hybras.</comment></comment></comment>


NASA's Hubble Finds Water Vapor on Habitable-Zone Exoplanet for First Time - <AUTHOR> https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-s-hubble-finds-water-vapor-on-habitable-zone-exoplanet-for-1st-time <comment><AUTHOR> And a slickly-produced YouTube video courtesy of NASA Goddard: [https://youtu.be/amOdtYv5G4E](https://youtu.be/amOdtYv5G4E)</comment>


A Basic Income Is Smarter Than a Minimum Wage - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-04-01/a-basic-income-is-smarter-than-minimum-wages <comment><USER2> > No one wants to hire them at a high minimum wage, especially when locals are > readily available

The main drawback to a minimum wage is that it artificially increases the cost of labor, to the point where it's no longer worth it to an employer to hire a low-output employee. I think we'd all agree that increasing employment is a good goal, but an increased minimum wage actually hinders progress on that front. As the minimum wage increases, robots and other non-human investments start to look much, much more attractive. Many businesses would be happy to hire workers for less than minimum wage, but legally cannot, and so do not hire.

Of course, it's a complicated issue. Look at the employment of those with disabilities like Down Syndrome [0], for example. Are these employees worth hiring at $7.50/hour? No, for the most part, they're not. Are some? Sure, but on average there's no way. But are they worth hiring at $2.00/hour? Yes, and they and their families are willing for them to work at that wage, because there are huge benefits to being productively employed.

Recently these programs are coming "under attack" in various states. New Hampshire just made this practice illegal, for example [1]. We'll see how it plays out -- my bet is that a) few news outlets will follow up in a few years and see how many of these disabled workers are able to find new employment, and b) few disabled workers will be able to do so.

[0] [http://www.witf.org/news/2014/07/thousands-of-disabled- worke...](http://www.witf.org/news/2014/07/thousands-of-disabled-workers-in- pa-paid-far-below-minimum-wage.php)

[1] [http://www.care2.com/causes/new-hampshire-bans-subminimum- wa...](http://www.care2.com/causes/new-hampshire-bans-subminimum-wage-for- people-with-disabilities.html)

<comment><USER3> > The main drawback to a minimum wage is that it artificially increases the > cost of labor,

And? Why is that artificial increase a problem. Every law on the books is an artificial act.

I don't see many people wringing their hands over the mortgage interest deduction, another of those artificial changes to the economy.

<comment><USER4> And? It keeps people who want to work from working. People who would be willing to work at less than the minimum wage. Subsiding on government relief can lead to depression, loss of social status, load term mental illness. Not having a job is a very unhealthy thing for most people.

<comment><USER5> > It keeps people who want to work from working.

That doesn't mean the work (the individual is capable of) is valuable enough to justify the position, in the locality.

<comment><USER6> But what are the alternatives, for the people whose productivity is lower than minimum wage?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Besides, Sweden has one of the rich world's biggest gaps between native and > immigrant employment rates. Youth joblessness is 70 percent higher among the > foreign-born than among Swedes. Lowering the minimum wage could draw more of > the new, mainly Middle Eastern population, into the workforce and reduce > social and ethnic tension.

A minimum wage is simply not moral. It prevents me and you from entering into an employment agreement with which we may both benefit. Instead, the government is telling me how I have to interact with you.

The left-wing philosophy of a minimum livable wage is ironically hurting the new immigrants to these countries. The reality is that first-world nations have higher employment standards because citizens are more educated and capable. Instead of giving new immigrants, who are almost certainly less educated and capable (remember, they're trying to move to countries with better opportunities) the ability to work and gain experience, we leave them with little options.

And like the quote says, it's just bad for assimilation into the host society. Being able to work is fantastic for that. You have to learn at least a bit of the language. Interact with the people. Learn to follow the laws and customs of the new country. Without work opportunities, immigrants can often wind up stuck in their segregated ghettos. And high unemployment invariably leads to a lower quality of life.

Abolish the minimum wage. Give new immigrants the opportunities they want.

<comment><USER8> A minimum wage is moral. It ensure that you and I do not enter into an employment agreement where one side excessively benefits. The government as third party is ensuring we have minimum amount of fairness in our interaction.

The right-wing philosophy of wage bargaining is ironically hurting the workers of their countries. The reality is that first-world nations have predatory labor practices because citizens are systemically and by their own lack of resources unable to realize what fair wage is or how to effectively bargain for it. Instead of giving workers, who are almost certainly less educated and capable the ability live off their wage so they may better their lives constructively, we indenture them into subsistence living, where the minorest of life disruption can decimate savings.

It's just bad for the people living in the lower rungs of society. Being able to work at a living wage is fantastic for mitigating these shortcomings. You can actually do things like plan for the future and interact with people without worrying about the next big life problem. You can learn more labor laws to further advocate for yourself and others, and even the customs of other cultures, rather than fear someone cutting even your meager floor from under you. Without fair wage, workers can often find themselves being the "working poor", people whose jobs won't ever let them save enough money to do anything meaningful. And fair employment inevitably leads to high quality of life.

Institute a living wage. Give people the opportunities they want.

<comment><USER9> > [A minimum wage] ensure[s] that you and I do not enter into an employment > agreement where one side excessively benefits.

I don't see how that is a goal of minimum wage. People can be underpaid at any pay level, and a lot of jobs just aren't worth very much to the employer. A sweatshop paying pennies an hour for extremely unskilled labor could be a fair wage for that work.

Minimum wage serves important functions, but I don't see how they include preserving work value : pay level equity. Free counseling to help inform people of an appropriate wage for their skill level and find an employer who would pay that seems like more of a way to meet that goal.

<comment> vertex-four > A sweatshop paying pennies an hour for extremely unskilled labor could be a > fair wage for that work.

Sure - in which case said sweatshop probably shouldn't exist. Sorry, but if you need to pay people _less than they can live on_ to stay in business, and it's "not profitable" to replace them with robots, you can damn well go out of business and be replaced with a company that will automate it, allowing humans to do things that actually matter (and I'm not talking about "find less automatable work" here).

That is - in a perfect world, everyone poor would be given enough money to live on and not have to feel guilty about it. If they find a job that they can survive on, they can take it and drop their benefits. What would be immoral would be to force people to take a job that pays less than they can live on to receive benefits - that's outright punishment for not being able to find a job.

We tried punishing people for being poor/unskilled in the UK, it's called the workhouses, and to some degree our Job Centre wants to bring the concept back.

Of course, if you're calling for both a lack of minimum wage _and_ cutting benefits further than they already are in many places... I think you'll find most would call you immoral. "Let them die so that my ideology wins."

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure you saw the post that I was replying to. I'm disagreeing with that post's argument that the function of minimum wage is to ensure people are paid what the work they do is worth to their employer. Such an argument would condone sweatshops, which I thought would be understood to be a bad thing but I guess something like Poe's Law applies.

<comment> vertex-four I didn't read it as that. "An employment agreement where one side excessively benefits" includes one where the employer gets to stay in business and make a healthy profit, but the employee can't survive on their pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Negative income tax makes more sense to me. (NIT is a system where you either get or give money from/to the governement, depending on your income.)

First it's both a simple welfare and tax system in one package. Basic income as typically understood is only half of the story.

It's also easier to reason about, the money flows are way more obvious, it's immediately clear whether you are a net contributor or receiver and it's easier to set the (few) parameters.

<comment><USER11> NIC is analogous to basic income. At a certain point, the taxes you pay in a basic income scheme are equal to the basic income you earn. Those who earn less than you are earning a NIC, those above are paying income tax.

It is the same thing.

<comment><USER12> No its not in practice.

NIC is generally tied to working. A part time employed person will make less than a full time one.

Under BI it is not tied to working. The incentives are worse.

<comment><USER11> How? A full time employed person will still make more than a part time. Basic Income is flatly applied, everyone gets it; earning more then means you still have more. This isn't some cutoff-if-you-make-too-much thing.

<comment><USER12> > Basic Income is flatly applied

Thats the difference.

Of course it depends on the model used, but generally NIC is applied based on how much you work. Generally a non-working person makes $0 , and a fully employed person makes the BI amount. To get the BI you need to work for it. That's the difference.

To take this argument any further we would need to compare specific models. But NIC and BI are not the same and have similar but different purposes.

<comment><USER13> > Generally a non-working person makes $0

Not according to Milton Friedman.

[https://youtu.be/xtpgkX588nM?t=191](https://youtu.be/xtpgkX588nM?t=191)

<comment><USER12> Good source.

That is of course one valid way to implement it and is essentially BI in calculation.

Still even under miltons NIC, an important difference between NIC and BI is intended purpose. BI proponents want enough to live on with little hardship, NIC implies nothing in that regard and most NIC proponents I imagine would be opposed to that.

I would not be a proponent of BI for that important 'scalar' reason.

<comment><USER14> I agree that the main difference between UBI and NIT is framing, and I prefer UBI for that very reason. It's much simpler to understand, and it separates the notion of creating a social baseline from the tax system.

Also, this framing could also make a practical difference to the interface. If the benefit is administrated separately, you don't need to think about tax until you get a job. Having to submit a tax return to get your money is potentially intimidating, not to mention somewhat degrading if it says $0. With UBI, rich and poor alike get the cheque.

>BI proponents want enough to live on with little hardship

Certainly many do, but I feel this is more of an aspiration than a requirement. I think there are huge economic benefits that will come about from the stability and freedom that even a smaller UBI provides. In the longer term, complete sustenance may become trivial.

<comment><USER12> > In the longer term, complete sustenance may become trivial.

This can already be done easily with the right mindset. We do not need any more technical advancements to achieve this goal. Water is cheap. Agriculture technology is already amazing. Food can be as little as a few dollars a day if you buy cheap foods (beans, rice, bread, ect). Its possible to live rather well on $300 a month or $3600 a year if you live in the right location, and live within your means. Heck, most of the world already does this.

But the problem to living like this in in america is our wealth drives up the cost of certain inherently supply limited resources. The biggest ones being those resources which are tied to land. And the biggest example being shelter.

Shelter prices are mainly determined by people 'one upping' each other. Competing with each other.

Given these obstacles, the biggest beneficiary of UBI may not be the common person, but land owners.

Building skyscrapers is a great partial solution to the problem, but resistance is everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > _some politicians in one of the world 's most socialist countries, Sweden_

I almost stopped reading there. Sweden is _not_ socialist, and never has been.

Public ownership of production, workers control and management, social equality and a democratic plan of production. Nope, none of those. Just as much privatisation and market forces as other economies.

They just chose to fund their welfare state, education, prison reform and pensions rather better than some others. There's been some drawbacks, but you won't be hearing many renditions of the Red Flag.

<comment><USER16> "Socialism" in Western political discourse no longer means owning the means of production. It did, once, but that idea was so obviously discredited during the 20th century that no one takes it seriously anymore.

So "socialism" today (usually used with some variant of "democracy") has been repurposed to mean a political ideology that values government social support programs over low taxation.

<comment><USER15> By Western do you mean US? I have never once heard it used thus in UK and European news and political discussion. Not even by the Tories attempting to discredit some aspect of the discussion. Perhaps the Daily Mail might, but they're bonkers, and have been since inception. :)

You'd probably hear discussion of the Nordic approach use the term "Nordic Model", or rarely "social democracy". They're seeking to remain strictly capitalist but promote more economic security at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> $10,000 * US_POPULATION ~= $3.2T ~= The total annual tax revenue of the US federal government.

Just something to keep in mind when discussing this topic.

<comment><USER18> The top marginal tax rate would have to be dramatically increased to pay for it. Also, you'd have to increase capital gains and estate taxes.

Make no mistake, basic minimum income would be a _massive_ redistribution of wealth. I'm in favor of it, but let's not pretend we can pay for it by shuffling around some social safety net spending.

<comment><USER19> It would completely remove the necessity to be productive. That can't turn out well.

What's preventing me from having as many babies as I can knowing that they too will not have to work or find a job to be supported?

I know this won't work at scale, because I understand math.

<comment><USER20> >It would completely remove the necessity to be productive. That can't turn out well.

As seen in welfare states in Scandinavia or Germany, where almost no one works because of the unemployment benefits.

<comment><USER21> Of course not, but the stability of such a state is becoming a concern with the current migration situation.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/wel...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/02/welfare- state-refugees-europe/463272/)

<comment><USER19> And it's ignoring culture.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Bershidsky really drops the ball when he makes the following point:

"One problem with a universal basic income, of course, is that it will make a country attractive to even more immigrants from poor countries where 550 euros a month looks like a princely amount. Keeping borders open will hardly be an option."

What he's missing here is that the UBI _is only payed to citizens_. If you get rid of the minimum wage (because everyone gets paid the UBI no matter what), then citizens become much more willing to work for low wages, because their basic cost of living is already paid-for.

By contrast, UBI would not be paid to immigrants. Non-citizens would still be working in the US to some extent, but the incentive for people to sneak across the border would be severely reduced if prevailing low-skill wages fell from $10 to, say, $5.

It's also worth mentioning that to the extent that deterring undocumented immigration is the policy of the United States, doing it with economic incentives is (IMO) a much more ethically sound solution than doing it with walls, violence, and incarceration.

<comment><USER2> Fantastic point, I have to admit I missed the consequences of that, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> A Basic Income from Govt comes at a huge price of loss of individual liberty.

If someone gives you free stuff, they will expect controls like where you are allowed to spend your money and time.

This model of taking from the productive sources and rewarding everyone else will have to break at a certain point. how come you get rewarded for enjoying the gossip column and I spend extra effort doing something else which is harder and my earnings are taken away? so lets put a control on how many hours someone else works. The productive people are dragged down and discouraged.

Automation is replacing the labor that humans don't have to do. This frees up human capital so we can focus our endeavors somewhere else. America already provides free education up to high school and with this education why should people of next generation aim for minimum wage jobs?

In a modern capitalistic economy it is very difficult to make money without adding value to society and this equilibrium is reached naturally due to free markets despite of politics meddling with it.

<comment><USER24> The Basic Income is the terminal phase of a democracy, wherein people are rewarded simply for existing, extracting their subsistence from the productive forces in the economy. It is the final vote-buying mechanism of the political elite to create a permanent dependent underclass.

Thanks to our democratically-installed public school system, liberty is a topic which cannot be discussed in polite company. Don't be discouraged when you get down-voted by the Hacker News progressive/socialist hive mind.

<comment><USER25> Your argument could be made about any form of welfare.

"Liberty is not a topic that can be discussed in polite company" seems more likely to be an issue with your definition of liberty rather than an issue with the polite company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> But what about existing entitlement sending, which keeps growing? A UBI without preconditions will only compound that problem, because what is to stop people from wasting their basic income on frivolities while also drawing from existing welfare programs.

 _Many people may agree to work for less than the current minimum wage, and on more flexible terms, if they 're supplementing a guaranteed income, not scrambling to avoid having to beg for food._

But this is not the case. What everyone seems to forget that despite the low labor force participation rate, the poorest are not starving to death; in fact, they're more likely to be obese than higher earners.

The assumption that a UBI, on top of existing welfare programs, will make people more compelled to work seems like a stretch.

<comment><USER27> I would have thought that a UBI would _replace_ most or all existing entitlement programs. But perhaps people have different ideas?

And you're right, of course, that the poor in the U.S. generally are not literally starving. Though their poor health and high obesity rates are themselves symptoms of their limited access to healthy food, and difficulty maintaining a healthy lifestyle that may be due to other poverty-induced stressors.

<comment><USER28> I think it would be politically difficult to replace most or all existing entitlement programs with a basic income.

When you get a bunch of disabled people up on stage and they say, "Wait a minute, we are _genuinely unable_ to work most jobs, and we have special needs to just get through the day, and you propose to just give us the same amount of money you do to some 22 year old healthy slacker from a good family who wants to take a few years to play X-Box?" and you're already trying a very very contentious policy proposal, is that the hill you want to die on? If not, we still have disability.

What about the just genuinely irresponsible mother who blows her income on, whatever, in-app purchases, and then she and her children are homeless and starving. Do you say, "Well, tough break, you could've been more responsible" or do you have programs to keep them fed and off the streets? Food stamps and Section 8 are back.

Healthcare pretty much has to continue to be separately subsidized unless you want anyone who has enough bad luck to have an expensive health condition that exceeds the value of basic income to die.

At that point, is there a really significant entitlement program still off the table?

(Edit: Sorry, yes, of course there is one significant entitlement program not touched on above: Social Security. I think you might somewhat reasonably make a basic income essentially "Social Security for everyone," and avoid having a special carve-out for seniors by saying, "We're not taking away your social security, we're just giving social security to more and more people.")

<comment><USER29> I always thought it would replace existing programs, but you have made me realize this is not true.

I guess in the end it comes up to do we believe in personal responsibility or not, and if the state or parents are responsible for children. (It looks like I am in the camp that does not think children should starve because they have irresponsible parents).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's not just smarter it's the only possible solution out of the two.

Many people wrongly discuss the premise of basic income in the context of whether it's a better solution for for the job market. I.e. as a better way to solve unemployment fluctuations which in this view are still going up.

But the whole point about Basic Income is what we do about there being fewer and fewer jobs that pay a proper salary.

<comment><USER26> Proponents of the UBI make the generous assumption that recipients will be as careful with money as they (the proponents) are . Choosing between food & housing credits vs. cash, the former has less room for abuse.

Its like "I would never use my UBI on alcohol"...well you're not "most people"

<comment><USER31> Given the frankly despair-inducing statistics of what happens to poor people when they acquire a sudden cash windfall (and if you're flat broke and living on the streets, a few hundred every couple weeks is HUGE), I intend to agree.

Most UBI implementations I've seen require gutting existing welfare systems - okay, fine, but what happens to the person who inevitably squanders their money?

<comment><USER18> I think probably the only thing that would have to go along with UBI is _extreme_ restrictions on credit and borrowing for people that are relying on it. It's not really a huge problem for someone to blow all their UBI money for a month or two because they'll have more coming in. If they compound that with high-interest debt, they can dig themselves into a whole they can't get out of of.

<comment><USER32> > extreme restrictions on credit and borrowing for people that are relying on > it

Everyone relies on it. It's an equal amount of cash in pocket for every person.

If you want to talk about restrictions on borrowing- well, what idiot is lending this money to a person with minimum income without checking into their background ? I think we can leave that one up to the banks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There's a non-obvious danger for basic income: rent-seeking behavior. Landlords charge whatever the market will bear, so there's a huge risk of funneling money through the recipients without improving their quality of life. And it isn't just landlords that hold that kind of rentier position - universities, for instance, would also extract more out of their position as employment gatekeepers.

Attacking rent-seeking behavior would likely have a bigger impact on the everyday lives of the poor. Land-value taxes are a good place to start.

<comment><USER34> I think equally a problem with raising the minimum wage as well. If people make more money on average, I can now charge more for my goods with less balking. It would be illogical for me not to raise my prices. In the end quality of life stays the same. Asking people to be illogical is... illogical.

<comment><USER33> People can still shop around, which is a balancing economic force. What makes people balk isn't just how much money they have, but the competing prices in the market. Less competitive markets will react to GBI to a much greater extent. I'd expect mobile phone service, internet service, housing, education, and healthcare to raise prices in response to GBI. I wouldn't expect the price of rice, steel, concrete, or airplane tickets to change much.

<comment><USER34> > I wouldn't expect the price of rice, steel, concrete, or airplane tickets to > change much.

Not at first, but the price of everything is connected eventually.

<comment><USER33> My point is that price is the balancing point between selling for as much as you can find a buyer for, and buying for as little as you can find a seller for. Different goods have a different balance of power between buyers and sellers. Gasoline, for instance, has highly visible prices and little product differentiation. Choosing a different gas station is as easy as crossing the street. Customers will tolerate very little increase in price relative to the competition, so the price of gasoline is approximately equal to the cost of selling people gasoline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It makes sense if-and-only-if that basic income isn't being doled out by the same organization which also runs the military-industrial or prison-industrial worlds. As an American, I think it's safe to say our federal government can't be trusted to not turn into a tyranny if it's everyone's primary employer.

We would get even more massive corruption almost instantly. For example, some people would lobby to get those tax-revenue intended for the basic income to be redirected to other projects. The people wouldn't fight the loss of a $1/year/person here or there. There would also be reams of special cases to give some people more and some people less. And like today, some people would continue to carve out exceptions so they didn't have to pay those taxes to feed the basic income. That money would be divvied up every way except as a basic income and people would spend all their time fighting over who got it instead of generating the value that backs it.

I don't live in the countries trying this so I can't say if it's safe to give their government that much power, but I know the US government is no where near ready for any more power than they already have.

EDIT: Fixed a typo

<comment><USER36> Unfortunately, in the US the alternative to government power is corporate power.

<comment><USER4> Without government power, corporations don't have any power. They only exert their power through the government. What, is Apple coming to my house to tell me what to do, how I can work, or to collect a tax? Just like Disney keeps you from file sharing by using the government, so does the your local health insurance company keep out the competition by excessive government regulations they helped write.

<comment><USER36> Without government intervention, corporations control the labour market. With no minimum wage, no basic income, and increasing automation, do you really think corporations wouldn't drive wages down to zero?

There are countries with little to no government intervention, and countries with lots. The latter are objectively much better places.

<comment><USER4> This is always the response to any libertarian argument of even mild government reform "If you don't like it, then go live in Somalia". As if rolling back government intervention in the economy to something like say the booming 1950's isn't a rational proposal.

<comment><USER36> It's because history shows that more government intervention, especially in the domain of education, health and labour, creates better societies.

Two words: New Deal.

Most of the US' prosperity since has been as a result of this. Then in the 1980's it was rolled back and guess what? Things are going to shit again. Maybe not in NY and California, but large swaths of the US are mired in poverty, poor employment prospects, crumbling infrastructure and shitty education.

How about Europe? Here's a bunch of tiny states with different languages, pretty much zero resources, very little land, who accept unprecedented amounts of immigration (partially to their detriment), who are still able to provide their citizens with the highest standards of living in the world.

Show me a single large, prosperous, libertarian state. Not a city-state that cannibalises their neighbours' resources and acts like a tax haven (Monaco, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Singapore, etc...) - but a large, prosperous, diverse state that is libertarian. The problem is, there are none.

<comment><USER4> Only 6 European countries have a higher GDP than the US's poorest state, and none are close to the US GDP. And the US GDP has grown significantly faster than Europe's since the 1980's.

I don't consider my state that rich, but we're 4 places above Germany.

[https://www.aei.org/publication/us-gdp-per-capita-by- state-v...](https://www.aei.org/publication/us-gdp-per-capita-by-state-vs- european-countries-and-japan-korea-mexico-and-china-and-some-lessons-for-the- donald/)

<comment><USER36> GDP divided by # of people doesn't accurately reflect quality of life... Especially when a good portion of GDP is derived from resources, and not necessarily spread to the population.

There's plenty of indexes that offer better insight.

[http://www.numbeo.com/quality-of- life/rankings_by_country.js...](http://www.numbeo.com/quality-of- life/rankings_by_country.jsp)

[https://www.economist.com/media/pdf/QUALITY_OF_LIFE.pdf](https://www.economist.com/media/pdf/QUALITY_OF_LIFE.pdf)

[http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/11/04/these- countries-h...](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/11/04/these-countries- have-the-best-quality-of-life_n_8470292.html)

Even indexes that do rate the US highly, generally weight income highly. In life expectancy, health, education, and metrics which don't take into account income, the US doesn't do great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> My primary concern about instituting a basic income is that these things have a tendency to always want to rise. It then becomes a voting platform for politicians. Vote for me and I will get your basic income raised. I think anytime you promise a populous something for nothing, you create dangerous precedents that can spin out of control. I'm for increased minimum wage and price caps, but not a minimum income with no commitment.

On the other hand, if the federal government did not give away all of the profits from American natural resources, and instead took a percentage like most developed countries - and the state of Alaska - that money could be turned around into a basic income for all. That I believe is where a basic income should come from: use a nationally produced commodity sold abroad and the profits therein to give back to the citizenry.

</comment><comment><USER38> On the topic of immigrants and minimum wage/basic income. Brussels provided free housing, food, health care, and education to immigrants. And yet their immigrant community was still unable and/or unwilling to integrate.

Basic income and/or higher minimum wage doesn't solve all problems. It even causes some new ones. Which isn't to say it isn't a good idea. But we probably don't discuss the problems as much as we should. I don't think it's the silver bullet many people wish it to be.

<comment><USER39> Yep. I think the biggest problem is the assumption that universal basic income would replace any existing welfare programs. In reality, it seems that this is not going to happen, because one size doesn't fit all, and existing welfare programs cover vastly differing cases at vastly differing cost levels (unemployment, disability, old age, serious and not-so-serious illnesses).

Over here (Finland), the current government is planning a trial for UBI. It looks like pretty much none of the existing benefits can be cut because they are "fundamental human rights" or similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The only way I can see Basic Income working is if the average person has a net income change of $0. That means someone making the average income of ~$45k/yr gets a $10k check from the government every year, but also has their taxes go up by ~$10k. I believe others have referred to this as a negative income tax.

From what I can tell the average salary of a hackernews reader is above $100k. Each of us would probably end up paying ~$800+ per month in additional taxes, maybe up to $1,500/mo for those making that BigCo money. [1]

The first question is, does that sound reasonable? Do you want to subtract $400 from each paycheck for the sake of total strangers? And I guess the second question is, why aren't we doing that now? How much do each of us currently give to support other people in various ways?

I think Basic Income is a good idea. If people have more money, they'll be able to click on internet ads and buy things, and that will help the companies that many of us work for. But it won't be an even exchange and many people here will end up with less disposable income. I think that it will be worth it in the long run, to ensure that the economic engine that produces our paychecks continues to function. But I don't know if every UBI proponent is prepared to deal with the short term costs.

[1] I completely made these numbers up. Could be more, could be less.

<comment><USER41> Well, that's the idea. That's what the UI supporters are arguing for.

In exchange of that money, given to "total strangers" we get to live in a better country, and have the security of knowing we won't end up homeless on the unlikely case we can't find work anymore (yeah, I pay for that safety today - both methods can be either added or replaced, replacing is harder). Here at Brazil the numbers would be lower overall, but the consequences get bigger.

I think any implementation would need to start with a small value and increase slowly. It's not certain that the median wage is either viable or optimum, but might be a sane ceiling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Basic income is dangerous for the society. The basic human being is, unfortunately, almost like an animal, he likes to sleep, eat, do nothing: you have to give him/her a "bone", a prize, to make him/her doing things. This prize is wage. If you give money to human beings for free, nobody will do jobs anymore. Only those who want to be richer, but are far less. You'll see people that will choose for a basic income, instead of a basic_insome+N, to clean dumpsters. Why someone would choose basic_income+N when that N is relatively small to clean dumpsters instead of staying home doing nothing? Give a basic income to everyone and NOBODY will clean dumpsters anymore, unless you set that N relatively high. Or basic income relatively low. Basic income will destroy the entire society in few months. Don't look at those nordic countries which applied basic income and the society is "working" well, because it depends from people, culture, and other factors. I'm from italy, and I can GUARANTEE that if do give basic income to italians, the society will fall badly.

<comment><USER43> >If you give money to human beings for free, nobody will do jobs anymore

All BI proposals I saw only include housing, utilities, healthcare(through central system) and food. People would still want to go out, watch movies, play with the new shiny iPhone, etc.

Most of the society already can get proposed amount from investments. If we talk $1000 monthly and 5% ROR (less than SP500) you have to have $240k in investments. That's easily achievable, especially if you already live on $1000 in preparation to doing nothing.

> NOBODY will clean dumpsters anymore, unless you set that N relatively high

And why should cleaning dumpsters be a low paying job? You said it yourself - it's crucial for society.

And don't forget about elephant in the room - automation. Upward salary pressure puts pressure on making each individual worker more productive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The problem I have articles like these is that they create a false dichotomy. It's possible to have both.

These two policies solve very different problems.

The Basic Income supports the notion that it's not cool to force people to work for food, shelter, etc.

The minimum wage is supported for a bunch of different reasons, most of which I disagree with. But the one I do agree with is that a minimum wage sets a floor on the marginal productivity of labor. This will force employees and employers to improve the productivity of labor - a win all around.

I support the minimum wage because I think low wages are a result of humans behaving irrationally in the market. Employers usually don't think seriously enough about productivity improvements and many employees don't invest sufficiently in training and development to improve their marginal productivity.

The problem I have with minimum wage legislation is that it too often takes place in a vacuum. Look even Marxist economists agree raising the minimum wage can lead to job losses, so let's prepare for that by investing in training programs (vo-tech and community college seem like good bets).

</comment><comment><USER45> Gig work that works would be smarter than both. One of the problems with basic income is that decouples work from income entirely. One of the things paid work accomplishes is encouraging certain kinds of human behaviors. From what I have read, every society that ever tried to promise that "we will take care of everyone, regardless of their contribution or behavior" had to reneg on that when it backfired on them.

Decoupling income from being the work equivalent of "chained to the stove" is a great idea. Gig work that is well designed allows both people of low productivity and of high productivity to participate on their own terms. If someone who isn't very productive is willing to accept a de facto lower than minimum wage hourly rate, they should be allowed to make that choice. It empowers them in ways that welfare programs do not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Gig work doesn't go away with BI.

> One of the problems with basic income is that decouples work from income > entirely

It does, but not entirely. You can still work for _extra_ income. It only breaks the dependency in the other direction. And that's its strength.

The gig economy, while incredible and empowering, is also unstable and largely out of your control. You can have an influx of work at one moment, and near zero another. BI smooths this over by allowing you to survive during the dips. It also reduces the toxic stress contractors can experience even _during_ a wave of work. When the gigs run out (and therefore, the income is less under BI--but not _zero_!), it gives you time to seek out new work without panicking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'm never quite sure what to think about articles (or ideas) like this. I think of my grandfather who served in the air force for 20 years. When he needed more money, what did he do? He picked up a paper route early in the morning. What did he do when the paper route + air force income still wasn't enough? He started driving a taxi during evening hours. And when those three jobs weren't enough? He opened up a service station/gas shop to serve the other taxi drivers, which eventually morphed into a full blown auto service shop which allowed him to quite all his other jobs.

As a software developer I am doing ok. I crawled my way up the ladder though from blue collar work. But I still have plenty of friends that never really went anywhere after high school. Some work fast food, some general labor, but they all make less than $8/hr. What do they do when then need money? Get a second job? No. They get on facebook and whine about it or make a gofundme account. One of my friend's even works at a warehouse 10 hours a day only 4 days a week. On those 3 days off he has does he work another job? No. He just plays video games all day, as does everyone else I mentioned.

It seems that people nowadays seem to think they only need to work one job, and if that job doesn't pay enough, it is the job's fault.

Granted, I know working 70+ hours a week at $6hr won't get you any where... But we all have to learn the climb the ladder. The complete lack of work ethic and skill sets I see today I don't think we can blame on the public schooling or government policies. I'd like to think it is the fault of the parents who never taught their own children to work. Perhaps they don't know how to work either. Yet I go back to thinking about my Grandfather. He lived out in the sticks and didn't really go to school. The family spent the money his dad made (at a brick factory) on buying supplies for gardening so they could have food. For meat they only had chickens and wild rabbits (both of which he refuses to eat to this day). So perhaps formal education isn't the magic bullet either. But something is amiss in our world today.

<comment><USER47> I think there is huge difference between saying someone is personally responsible for their future and saying the only thing preventing the lower class from doing well is laziness.

A minimum wage would definitely not be close to a living wage, and a living wage doesn't include saving for retirement or other less basic expenses.The average income in 2015 in the U.S. for people with some college was around $37,000. That's around $18/hr for a 40 hour week. That is definitely livable in most places, but money would be a little tight.

Sure, maybe most people earning a below average income could improve themselves and do a lot better financially. But the average wage isn't really good, and low income workers will always be below average.

You could make the argument that if most of low income workers became a more valuable by raising their skill level then the average income would also raise. And you might be right, to a point. But I don't think there are enough decent jobs available for everyone. Not everyone is a good fit to work in the medical field or tech. So the increased average skill level would just mean that businesses could be more selective and even lower their pay.

I worked full-time for a short amount of time in a tech related field. I remember looking for entry level work, and it was really competitive. I did get a full-time contract position that was a really good opportunity, but the pay was very low. The job was good, it was at a good company, and it would provide me valuable experience. But I ended up going back to school to finish my degree and change fields. And I ended up applying for internships. And reviewing my offers I noticed that all of the decent offers were in the same range as an entry level full-time position in my old company. One offer was more than my yearly salary in the old field. I could have told my old coworkers that they would do a lot better changing careers, and it would be true. But if everyone in the field did that, there would be no-one applying for entry level work in that field. And I think that indicates a problem with the job market, not just a problem with laziness.

<comment><USER48> > $37,000

> That is definitely livable in most places, but money would be a little > tight.

> Average wage isn't really good

I consider livable to be much under $15,000, probably under $10,000 in most states. I'm not sure how you would spend $37,000 to only consider it livable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> In one of the most flagrantly opportunistic political redefinitions I've ever seen, the UK recently raised the minimum wage and called it Living Wage: sufficiently accurate to be arguable but completely co-opting the concept without even acknowledging the intention.

Several young, intelligent people I know actually believe the fuss about a basic income they've heard is just a minimum wage increase.

I haven't run the numbers per-country but just the idea seems sufficiently interesting to be plausible. Allowing BS political branding to dilute it to "another random budget change" is a total disservice to not just the poorer part of society but also to the future of the social system.

</comment><comment><USER50> I would think that a requisite for a basic income happening would be tax revenues growing faster than the cost of living. Is that happening? I'd be surprised, but maybe somebody who knows better can enlighten me.

</comment><comment><USER51> In addition to universal basic income the government should guarantee a job to anyone who wants to work, which effectively sets a minimum wage[0]

Also, it's stupid to exclude immigrants or to have a "closed border" policy, because more people means more labour and more resources. The economy booms BECAUSE of immigration if handled correctly.

Economics is such a confused profession ... y'all must be embarrassed.

[0] [http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=23719](http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=23719)

</comment><comment><USER52> To give everyone in the US a basic income of $500 a month would cost ~$2 trillion dollars. Plus the cost of the inevitably humongous bureaucracy that will be necessary to administer it.

<comment><USER53> How would there need to be a huge bureaucracy to administer it? The IRS already handles annual funds-transfer (and validation) for citizens.

Moreover, replacing welfare (which has bureaucracy to check eligibility) with a flat "everyone gets paid X" would remove the need for the bureaucracy that _currently_ exists to administer welfare programs.

It seems to me that there would be substantially lower administration costs for such a plan, since there's no need to verify whether people are eligible, other than filing tax returns. Perhaps verifying that someone is actually alive is necessary, but that still seems to be less than the current checks that exist.

<comment><USER52> > The IRS already handles annual funds-transfer (and validation) for citizens.

The IRS is still going to have to do its job, unless the USGov suddenly decides to not collect taxes anymore. So we're going to need a new agency. Or a new department of an existing agency. Either way it's not free.

> since there's no need to verify whether people are eligible, other than > filing tax returns.

What makes you think there wouldn't inevitably have to be eligibility requirements? You'd have both politically-necessary requirements, (would felons be eligible? Even the ones in jail? What about non-citizens?) and also requirements borne from the need to not create perverse incentives. How old do you have to be to get basic income? If there aren't any age requirements then Octomom will be a role model instead of a laughingstock. All of these requirements, including more that neither me nor anyone else will have thought about until a year or two into the rollout, will increase the administrative costs. I don't see why people think it will be easy or free to do this.

The whole thing reminds me of those "Things programmers believe about X" articles. Basic income is a good idea, but please don't pretend that it's going to be somehow different than every other welfare program.

Sure, Basic Income is supposed to replace welfare, but has any of the proponents actually thought through what that actually would entail? There are a lot of welfare programs that address lots of needs. Not all of them are pure cash transfers, some of them do things like provide counseling.

Some of them, like the food stamp program, provide greater value to the people they serve than if you'd just gave them a check. By replacing these programs with BI, you could be actually lowering their quality of life, like those people whose lives suddenly get awful after they get a raise at work because they no longer qualify for government assistance programs they relied on.

I suspect that a few years into replacing welfare with BI, we'll suddenly start appreciating welfare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Someday soon we will have cures for cancers, technology to repair aging, colonies on Mars, unlimited clean power, and maybe even some strong AI. Yet, Humans will still be debating economics, taxes, and the morality of work.

Can I ask you amazingly brilliant, creative and tenacious thinkers to put 'ending work' up in that list somewhere? My kids and grandkids really shouldn't have to work 70-80 hour weeks, should they?

</comment><comment><USER55> Even Milton Friedman argued that a basic income was better than a minimum wage, but a negative income tax would be better than that. Minimum wages cause labor misallocation and hurt small businesses. It's often that larger companies will push for a minimum wage hike because it will destroy the margins of their small competitors; then they can use their pricing power later to offset their margin loss.

</comment><comment><USER56> (Cross-posted from a similar thread) Has anybody studied the outcomes on American Indian reservations from having basic income guaranteed for generations? I'm not an expert or well-read in this field, but I think anybody advocating basic income would be interested to visit a reservation and observe the lifestyles, dreams, goals, and successes found there.

</comment><comment><USER57> Why not both?

<comment><USER14> Because once someone's needs are met by a Basic Income, it's much harder to get them to work for exploitative wages, so the minimum wage is redundant.

If someone is accepting $1/hour for a job when their alternative is enjoying free time, then there's probably a good reason for it. Maybe they're learning skills, maybe the working is really fulfilling, or maybe they just got bored.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Basic income is the most stupid idea presented here. It is basically a new zero.

</comment><comment><USER59> The wages of labour are what _supports_ and _enables_ labour, both in the present, and the future. It is the _cost_ of labour.

A living wage _pays for the maintenance of labour_. Its feeding, housing, clothing, and education. It pays for the upkeep of a family, and the raising and education of children (the next generation of labour).

 _Failing_ to pay a living wage is the same thing as buying _any_ factor of production below cost. While it may return a short-term advantage, it fails to ensure the continuation of supply. Worse, it creates a cascade failure in which ever higher and more skilled ranks of labour find their own wages and compensation falling, that ripples through society.

An enterprise which _cannot afford_ to pay the full cost of its labour isn't a productive economic activity. Or perhaps, it is one which faces significant positive externalities such that its own ability to command compensation is diminished.

An enterprise which _can_ afford to pay the full cost of provisioning labour _but which does not_ is doing nothing more than transferring wealth from that labour pool, or from the public purse if the that purse is then called on to support the labourers, into its owners pockets as profit.

The words are mine, but the ideas are Adam Smiths, very clearly expressed in _The Wealth of Nations_.

I mentioned the cascade failure. Smith talks at length of the conditions of workers in England (middling), the American colonies (quite good), and in China (exceedingly poor). He notes that it's the _growth_ rather than the _size_ of the economy which seems to promote high wages, which is interesting to consider.

Smith _doesn 't_ describe much on how to ensure that labour _does_ earn its fair share, though suggests that the right to organise would be a benefit.

My thoughts are leaning toward not only that but institution of an employer of last resort, with a minimum wage established through same. This would act much as a central bank does as lender of last resourt, but as an endless source of _labour demand_ rather than _currency_.

The demand might be social projects which cannot themselves command market compensation, or as a market broker for labour (effectively the Mother of All Labour Unions), to which companies could bid on work (the difference coming from the public purse via taxation).

More on this and Smith generally:

Why you should read Smith: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4cyroa/adam_sm...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4cyroa/adam_smiths_lost_legacy_or_why_you_should_read/)

Smith on wages: [https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2311mb/adam_sm...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2311mb/adam_smith_on_living_wage_national_wealth_growth/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1z5vfb/thought...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1z5vfb/thoughts_on_minimum_wage_enterprise_viability/)

</comment><comment><USER60> Yes, and a fish is smarter than a snail.

We in the west are oblivious to the damage socialism like this does. Go ask people in former Eastern Bloc countries, they will tell you all you need to know about socialism.</comment>


0h Game Jam EU is tonight - <AUTHOR> http://0hgame.eu/

<comment><USER2> I'll just leave this here for silly entertainment: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n50wnvo3dA></comment>


Show HN: I created a portable lightweight replacement for Microsoft HTML Help - <AUTHOR> https://www.dmitripopov.com/introducing-litehelp/ <comment><USER2> I hated chm because the spec wasn't open. With only 1 reference implementation, it was user-hostile. Unless the spec for helpinator is open, I don't see myself using this.

reverse engineered chm spec and the complexity boggles my mind: [https://www.nongnu.org/chmspec/latest/](https://www.nongnu.org/chmspec/latest/)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a folder with xml files, content is pretty self-explanatory, but I should write a description.

<comment><USER3> Why xml and not simply zipped htmls?

Everybody knows how to author html, if xml is some specific new set of rules, what is the advantage of that approach?

If it is xml, what makes it different from the epub format? Is epub format the subset? What were the advantages of it not being the subset?

<comment><USER4> Why XML? In the context of the CHM format I suspect because the answer to _everything_ around that time was XML. If XML wasn't solving your problem you needed more of it.

<comment><USER3> I've thought what's shown here (and what I've asked about) is a new format that should replace CHM, and not the old "real" CHM?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There should be some punctuation in the title. The tool is named "Help". A quick skim doesn't make it seem like the author is in need of urgent assistance.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, sorry :) Should have quoted "Microsoft HTML Help"

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is awesome, I've been wanting something like this for a decade. But if there's no html inside, does that mean I can't style the content with css (or otherwise)?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not a problem to add styles, especially since LiteHelp is based on structured content, but hey, is that feature so needed? All my client do with HTML templates of Helpinator is to add their own logo and that's it. Content is what matters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have you tried Zeal or Dash?

I think you can convert CHM to ePub using Calibre, then convert from ePub to whatever you want using pandoc, then import that into Zeal?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am well aware of Zeal, and it's cool for docs that people read from cover to cover. My primary objective was to not to create a new format, but rather provide means for authoring and displaying structured technical content, pretty much like DITA or DocBook, but way more simple and targeted at software (e.g. providing a context-sensitive help feature).

<comment><USER7> My use case for Zeal or Dash is searching API documentation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, I understand. My primary objective is on end user manuals, not developer docs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is cool. But I feel like the default styles could use some improvement (if possible).

<comment><AUTHOR> Email me your suggestions, please, I am always open. firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Without exaggerating much, I don't know a single person, technical or not, who ever read a single help file for any Windows software. There's even less sense in these files _now_ as opposed to keeping all documentation online.

So I have to say I don't see a point in this product... though I suspect there _is_ actually a market for it.

<comment><USER10> A lot of early "e-books" were distributed as .chm

You know, back when there were modems, and before the Eternal September spread to the rest of the world (1993 ... 2000)

<comment><USER11> I find chm readers much more friendly for reading books on the desktop than proper ePub readers. It is nice to have a nicely laid out table of contents right next to the text. In addition, chm readers are also much faster than ePub ones.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is your best little-known paid mobile app? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I use Shapr 3D for making 3D models for printing. It's an iPad app, feels like I'm living in the future when I use that. Subscribed for about $200/year.

</comment><comment><USER3> MoneyLover. Budgeting app. I didn't really need to pay for it, but after using it 3 years, I subscribed as a sort of donation.</comment>