Modern software is at its worst - <AUTHOR> http://weeb.ddns.net/0/articles/modern_software_is_at_its_worst.txt <comment><USER2> Ah yes, the good old days: When cars had carburetors (and none of that fancy electronic stuff), maintenance was so much simpler. Cold weather sometimes got in the way of starting up, but once you were running, the joy!

Using punch cards and mainframes really forced the programmer to think his solution through and optimize the hell out of it. Once in a while your cards would not get entered properly, but in the end this made you a better programmer even if you are still in therapy for it.

When games had less than 16 colors, and all you needed were a few pixels on a cathod ray tube. Playing Pong, and Tennis and hockey all on the same machine! Sometimes you'd forget which one you where playing, but that was also part of the fun!

Progress entails transitions, and we are now transitioning. It is sometimes painful and ugly, but it's always necessary unless you stay static forever ...

<comment><USER3> The way I remember it, carburetors were finicky, needed tuning, and could fail in all sorts of interesting ways.

<comment><USER2> Yes, my post was meant to be sarcastic, clearly the 'old' is not always 'good'. It's a counter point to the OP's rant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This. I spend probably 4GB+ RAM only to send IMs to people. (I run WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack and Chrome/Facebook)

The sad fact is that the general public only seems to care about the fancy buttons. And from a business standpoint, cheap software (high level langs/tools that are bad for perf) and following current design trends are more important than CPU cycles.

Perhaps we'll see some kind of "back to the basics" movement in the future where UI and software becomes much more simpler.

<comment><USER5> There used to be little animated gifs that we'd put on our Geocities pages with flashing "thank you for not using AOL" or "don't surf and AOL" slogans.

IMHO the web needs a movement akin to "nosql", but for bloated crap like JavaScript.

My web browsing experience has only improved after installing noscript.

<comment><USER6> I think the world is starting down this path, this is the second link to a .txt file in my news feed today :) I've recently been longing for a way to easily filter the internet to text/plain only content, not only is there no bloat, the content tends to have actual substance.

Edit: Holy smokes, the site hosting the content is what I'm talking about [http://weeb.ddns.net/1/gopher](http://weeb.ddns.net/1/gopher) I'd still like a text/plain only Google though, I'd be willing to POST the search request for such a thing via cURL.

<comment><USER7> This was also the second link I followed to a text file today, both on this domain (same author?). I went through the hassle of pinch-zooming to make the first one sort-of legible on my phone, because the content (C without the stdlib) was worth it, but I immediately hit the back button on this one. I really don't understand the inclination to make things harder to use, for what purpose, nostalgia?

<comment><USER8> Same here. Tried to read the "C without the stdlib" article on my phone, it was only readable in landscape mode and i gave up after the third time the screen rotated and i lost the line where i was reading. I tried it later on my desktop with 27" screen and all the content was aligned to left, keeping 80% of the screen black. I opened developer tools to align the content to the middle and wondered where the layout came from, there was almost no css. Then i realised that the author did every linebreak manually with a <br> in html. Yeah that's oldschool... _facepalm_

<comment><USER9> According to the bit at the top, it's proxied from gopher. The column width limit is probably automatically inserted by the intermediary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So this is just a txt file on a server... why is it completely blank when I open it? I could understand if there was a SQL database and a heavy PHP application serving requests and the system ran out of memory or Apache ran out of open connections... but it's a txt file. I could even see there being an incompatibility between my browser and the site's coding. Maybe they're using fancy new Javascript techniques or their CSS doesn't play well with Safari... but it's a txt file.

I guess it's modern software at its worst: we can't even display a plaintext file in the browser reliably.

<comment><USER11> From what I understood it's actually a proxy to some gopher server. And it returns an HTML page with css etc and not just a txt file. Funny stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Author complains of UI design degrading, later goes on to mention "(the URL is actually one line, had to split it to fit into 67 char width)".

Fantastic.

<comment><USER13> It's like he reacted to overly complicated websites by going to another extreme of making a text document on gopher. Simple HTML on www would have made his point beautifully and been functional so that I didn't have to copy paste the URL.

<comment><USER14> Philip Greenspun's site has always been my golden standard of what you can do with minimal, hand-edited HTML. [http://philip.greenspun.com/writing/](http://philip.greenspun.com/writing/)

<comment><USER15> Is it, though? I find it extremely difficult to read paragraphs that are that wide.

<comment><USER13> You could always shrink your window.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd prefer it if most web sites were textual. Also, disabling JavaScript can have some hilarious effects for some web pages :D

<comment><USER17> I agree. Most blogs should not require Javascript to read - that includes GA. Just a little bit of styling to aid readability and you should be set.

Related:

motherfuckingwebsite.com & bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the main reason for worse performance is not adding unnecessary features or covering lazyness. It's due to additional complexity introduced by additional layers like VMs, sandboxes and frameworks. These things make development more fun, quicker, cheaper and easier to target more platforms. I think software wouldn't have evolved so fast if every dev was still doing manual memory management in C.

Don't get me wrong, close-to-metal coding and native, fast UIs are wonderful where appropriate, but there's no sense in doing it for every small cookie bakery website.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think the sacrifice is worth it. Frameworks and ever growing abstractions mean more people with less experience can implement more ideas faster. We get faster iterations which means more features that help real people get stuff done.

This trend actually helps more people than ever use computers for an ever growing array of purposes. Back in the good old days you had to hire developers from a very small group of qualified individuals and then have them spend months on optimizing new code they just wrote instead of using an existing framework. Today you can just read a tutorial online and create a usable POC yourself. This opens so many doors to both developers and new users.

The resource heavy UI practices actually attract more users. Average users don't want dense console UIs or old fashioned native Windows forms. They want a touch app on their mobile that just works. All the tools we have today allow easily sharing and customizing UI components. This in turn fuels fast iteration and improvement of UI so that actual users actually want to use it.

All this doesn't mean you have to be lazy and just freely consume as many resources as you can. It also doesn't mean you shouldn't shame applications for being slow (I'm looking at you Slack for desktop...) or resource hungry like the examples in the article. But overall I think we are definitely going in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER20> Ironically, the text is too small to read on my Android HN client. No zooming either.

</comment><comment><USER21> This debate will never end. Money. It's money. Start talking to the guy who pays the pipers, not the pipers. Although, unfortunately they won't read your blog because it isn't on Facebook.

<comment><USER22> The guy that actually pays the piper doesn't even have an opinion on stuff like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Archived copy: [https://web.archive.org/web/20161129135442/http://weeb.ddns....](https://web.archive.org/web/20161129135442/http://weeb.ddns.net/0/articles/modern_software_is_at_its_worst.txt)

I guess this might explain why it broke: _Hello there! You are currently visiting gopherspace through a proxy._

</comment><comment><USER22> The modern software industry can't even come up with a coherent mechanism to evaluate what it produces. It's factionalized according to everyone's path through life.

</comment><comment><USER24> Kind of ironic complaining about UX, given the website...

<comment><USER22> I prefer that sort of UX. It places the principle of least surprise first. But then again, I'm not defending a budget for "doing UX." I just wanna be able to read the thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hacker News is at its worst.</comment>


Show HN: A Bitbucket administration tool - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/daeMOn63/bitadmin <comment><AUTHOR> Made myself a little cli tool to speed up administration of Bitbucket and permission management on daily work. Using it since a couple of months now and still adding more commands as I need them. Maybe someone else will find it helpful ;)

<comment><USER2> Looks like a good project. You should probably mention very, very early on in your docs, though, that this is for Bitbucket Server (self-hosted) and not for Bitbucket Cloud (bitbucket.org).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup you're right, I'll add that. Thanks !</comment></comment></comment>


Epic will mock Apple's most iconic ad as possible revenge for App Store ban - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21367904/epic-parody-apple-1984-ad-fortnite-removal-app-store <comment><USER4> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24148204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24148204)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24148548](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24148548)

There a zillion more related to Epic/Apple, but those are about the ad.

</comment><comment><USER5> We are not in 2001 anymore. App Stores are a growing part of the real economy and Apple 30% makes no sense. Big tech has been under the radar of many because it started small and had little impact on the economy. To let tech companies grow revolutionized the world. That revolution is over, tech companies are the new car companies. Apple is not a new innovative company, it is a monopoly that churns the same product year after year and profits from its dominance and the natural tendency of technology to create monopolies.

Many businesses cannot survive if you cut 10% of their income. 30% is mind- blowing and unsustainable.

I hope that the popularity of Epic brand helps on this fight. This level of legal battle is not only won in the court, but also in the public discussion domain.

<comment><USER6> > _Apple 30% makes no sense_

Apple provides useful services with its App Store: filtration and curation. The degree to which this is effective is debatable. But that it has an effect is not.

Apple also extracts socially useless rents from its App Store. The degree to which this exists is debatable. But its existence, given Apple's dominance in app industry profits, is not.

The first costs Apple in terms of labor, tools and research. The second is a result of their independently-profitable devices business. These costs are roughly the same from app to app, review to review.

One solution might be to charge a fixed fee per review. This scales perfectly with Apple's costs. But it's prohibitive for small players. A scaling fee structure relative to revenues promotes first movers, thereby keeping the app ecosystem fresh. Apple came up with a 30% flat rate. This made sense when apps made hundreds of thousands of dollars. It does not make sense when they make hundreds of millions.

A simple answer is a sliding scale. 30% for the first $20mm in a year. 20% for the next $40mm. 10% after $60mm. This is _more_ than generous to Apple. It beats Epic's request for a 12% flat fee at $400mm. And it continues letting Apple give new entrants, who are both more sensitive to costs and more needing filtration and curation, a field to play on. As a bonus to Apple, it reduces the incentive for developers to litigate as a function of their capacity to sue.

<comment><USER7> I don't think the issue is the raw numbers, it's a question of market forces. Processing payments has costs and risks; if Apple solves that problem so well that a developer thinks their fee is worthwhile, that's all well and good regardless of what the fee is.

But by prohibiting apps from even _telling_ the user about alternate payments, Apple is effectively trying to dictate how everyone on their platform can and can't do business. That seems problematic regardless of whether what numbers they dictate.

<comment><USER8> It's also problematic when it means that Apple takes competitor revenues - <USER2> instance in the streaming audio market Apple is Spotify's biggest competitor, while forcing Spotify to give them a bigger % of iOS revenues than their own margin. Apple ends up making more money out of Spotify on iOS than Spotify does, and then continues to spend money investing in a competing product.

<comment><USER9> Would it be feasible for Apple to discount their 30% developer/iap fees in app categories in which they compete with developers commensurate with Apple's dominance in that category? As though they themselves had to pay the same 30% fees, but to developers in the category, rather than to themselves. Would that level the playing field?

<comment><USER8> It would be more straightforward if they waived fees in those categories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> IMO the Google vs Apple, Apple vs Epic Games and all other similar cases are secondary. My main issue with Apple is that it is violating user rights - <USER3> users, who _owns_ the device - should have the freedom of doing any thing they want (including installing any app they want) with the device. It's not Apple's place to arbitrarily decide what I can or cannot do with _my_ phone.

<comment><USER11> I think so too but I don't buy Apple in that case. I have spend < 10$ on apps from stores and it was mostly just a test for me. I don't like smartphones as software platforms at all, I think we could have done much better than what the market supplies but I have niche expectations the common companies cannot fulfill. That said, the casual users in my circle don't spend anything on apps either. That isn't a good solution as well, since the alternatives finance themselves via adds.

Before app stores, you could actually get real free software that didn't use customer data to finance themselves. Sustainable as a business? Perhaps not, but certainly an advantage to users.

<comment><USER12> I don't buy Apple either but its getting frustrating when they take the best talent to build the best chips. Good for them but what if the trend continues such that the alternatives are at a serious hardware disadvantage?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I hope Epic wins this. I would buy from Apple again if they would open their platforms. I think it's ridiculous that when I was working on an app, the app would expire after a week unless I paid them more money for the privilege of keeping an app I wrote on a phone I paid for. Nevermind software other people made that I should be free to choose to run.

<comment><USER14> You can distribute an app for free if you are part of their developer program - which is something like $99 for all the needed software and tooling (perhaps one of the lowest SDK prices historically?). They will actually subsidize all your bandwidth / storage / distribution costs in that case.

<comment><USER15> I should tell you that Android SDK takes $0.

<comment><USER16> And $25 for distribution on the store.

So what, if those $100 prevent shitty copy-cats, the more the better.

<comment><USER17> It does not in fact prevent anything. There are hundreds of shitty apps in both iOS and Android.

<comment><USER16> Which proves the point that $100 is quite affordable.

<comment><USER18> For first world professionals, it's nothing.

For others it's steep. And maybe that was the point.

<comment><USER16> Others tend to have an Android dominated market, so....

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The existence of this video demonstrates that Epic Games anticipated the App Store ban long before they made their recent update to bypass Apple's payment system.

The entire thing looks like a thinly-veiled attempt to abandon the Fortnite mobile apps, and direct community blame on Apple.

<comment><USER20> The entire thing looks like a successful attempt to get standing to sue Apple for their anti-competitive actions, and you know, get some free PR while you do what you need to do to make millions more dollars because why not.

<comment><USER21> I don't get how any of this relates to anti-competition, since Fortnite doesn't compete with Apple, and is using and capitalizing on the money making potential of the app store (and refusing to pay the fees). Meanwhile Apple's actual competition in the App store market does the exact same ban... In an actual court of law (rather than court of public opinion) there is no way Epic will win especially since Google took the same stance.

At the end of the day Fortnite/Epic is just trying to maximize their shareholder value in leveraging lower/no fees from Apple for a revenue source for them that is frankly optional (iOS/Google Play are just two platforms they can choose to offer their app, and there is competition from the Windows and macOS platforms as well which do not charge these fees). Even if Epic wins you're still not going to jailbreak your phone and install malware the way you really want to.

The "anti-competition" platform is great because consumers just want to install random apps on their phones, but we bought our iPhones/Google phones knowing the app store was restricted to those who paid... we still did it.

<comment><USER20> > Meanwhile Apple's actual competition in the App store market does the exact > same ban

Google Play doesn't compete with Apple's app store or Apple's payment processing... since you can't install Google Play on IPhones.

Fortnite does compete with Apple, in terms of payment processing. Fortnite chose to do it themselves (to get standing), and were promptly banned from operating on IPhones. Epic Games distributes Fortnite themselves in their own app store, but apple has prevented that app store from being installed on IPhones.

> In an actual court of law (rather than court of public opinion) there is no > way Epic will win especially since Google took the same stance.

You _definitely_ shouldn't be stating this this strongly. You might think it's a weak argument (I don't), but it's certainly far from hopeless.

If you'll excuse the appeal to authority (since repeating the fine legal arguments in the brief seems pointless, you can read them better written there). Look at who has signed onto this complaint for a moment. The lawyers representing Epic Games include a former Federal Trade Commissioner and senate confirmed assistant Attorney General heading the anti-trust division ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_A._Varney](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_A._Varney)) and a former judge ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_B._Forrest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_B._Forrest)). You don't get people like this to represent you if they don't agree with you.

<comment><USER21> Google Play does compete with the App store. Both on the developer side (choosing which platform to support) and on the consumer side (choosing which phone/ecosystem to enter).

<comment><USER22> Choosing one App store (for either developer or consumer) doesn't prevent you from also choosing the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This reads as pre-planned and co-ordinated to me. My guess is Apple will soon introduce some reduction of platform fees as long as you comply to certain editorial standards in your app, and everybody will be happy.

<comment><USER24> I don't believe so.. As part of Epics business strategy since the Tencent investment they have been working to reduce license and distribution costs across the industry to the benefit of a lot of developers; and themselves of course.

Now Epic is worth over $18b, has some VERY big name investors, and controls the most popular game on the planet. They have the power to sway public sentiment against Apple, a legal leg to stand on as far as anti-trust, deep pockets, and powerful friends.

My guess, and hope, is that Epic takes Apple to the cleaners.

<comment><USER25> Apple is worth 2 trillion if we are looking at market cap. They can literally buy out epic if they wanted to.

<comment><USER20> Not necessarily. Tim Sweeney owns more than half of Epic Games, and (presumably, I'm obviously not privy to what contracts he has signed) has no obligation to sell for any amount of money. He is also rich enough to have "fuck the world money" and not accept a price that is _far_ above what his share in Epic Games is actually worth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is huge. And a much bigger threat than a DOJ monopoly lawsuit.

<comment><USER27> You mean, this is _Epic_.

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

<comment><USER26> Well played.

Can't believe I missed that opportunity for so much pun. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The worm in the apple is a nice touch.

<comment><USER29> That must be a metaphor for Tim Cook, I guess?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It looks like Epic expected this to happen. It could even have been waiting for it.

I don't know why the application developers don't develop their own OS/phones. If this is the only way we can have an open Linux phone, I am all for it.

<comment><USER31> Every battle is won or lost before it is even fought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm not against 30% Apple tax. It's their service and they can argue about it. But, the fact that there are no alternative app stores for IOS users, makes it wrong.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wish EPIC win for this case to get the free of AppStore, not free of AppStore's payment provider.

Free of computer is very important but free of payment provider is not so much.

</comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone know how much of a cut Playstation, Switch, and XBox take for their in-app purchases?

<comment><USER34> A better question would be what cut Epic takes for theirs...

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Fortnite's primary demo is people in their teens and early 20s. They are all too young to get the cultural reference of this ad. This isn't directed at them - hell, how many of them have actually read 1984? (Honest question, is that book still taught in high school?)

This ad is targeted _at us_. I'm inclined to agree with others in this thread who think this entire episode was some kind of product operation, designed to exit the (probably failing) mobile market and gin up some controversy as a convenient excuse.

<comment><USER36> 1984 is still a very popular book to assign in schools.

It's both. The cleverness of this ad isn't just that those that get the reference think it's a great riff but if you don't get the reference that means your first time seeing this legendary ad is not for the Mac but about this issue. In either case it's a great success for awareness and the hashtag at the end doesn't hurt either. Also it's not just an ad they put on YouTube this plays as a cinematic when players launch Fortnite right now.

And of course it's all planned. Not only is it perfect timing to do this but mere minutes after getting banned they posted legal action and pushed a cinematic in game. You can't just do that instantly without having known.</comment></comment>


Visually Impaired Turn to Smartphones to See Their World - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/disruptions-guided-by-touch-screens-blind-turn-to-smartphones-for-sight/ <comment><USER2> Being legally blind, myself, I found a way to use my iPhone to help with my distance vision a while back. -- I point it at the thing I'm trying to see, zoom in, take a picture, hold said picture close to my face, and zoom in on the photo to see the thing I was after. This sometimes gets blurry, but is often still an improvement.</comment>


Raspberry Pi releases an OS to breathe new life into old PCs - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2016/12/22/raspberry-pi-releases-an-os-to-breathe-new-life-into-old-pcs/ <comment><USER3> This will be an interesting one to watch. There's a huge number of tiny Linux distros, but most of them couldn't compete with something released by the Raspberry Pi foundation.

I think their biggest competitor is lubuntu. It's just a stripped down Ubuntu with the LXDE desktop. PIXEL also uses LXDE, and it looks like they've made a few design tweaks to the file manager. They both have Chromium as the default browser. Right now I think lubuntu supports way more machines.

I'm wondering why they didn't just use lubuntu, or just fork it and make a few changes. I've been using lubuntu on a small media PC, and I've been very happy with it.

<comment><USER4> > I'm wondering why they didn't just use lubuntu

Ubuntu is compiled for ARMv7, so it doesn't run on the RPi 1 and 0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lubuntu is worth mentioning as something that has been breathing life into old PCs while being noobie-friendly and with the access to current ubuntu software repos.

<comment><USER6> The next step above Lubuntu is Xubuntu. If it will fit, use it. I buy old ASUS subnotebooks on eBay for about $40 and put Xubuntu on them when I need a little machine for something.

Drivers can be a problem. However, [UXL]buntu finally fixed the years-old bug where the cursor goes away on devices using built-in Intel graphics. (You could make the cursor come back with CTL-ALT-F1, CTL-ALT-F7, which switches the display to text mode and back.) That prevented anyone not heavily into Linux from using the thing.

<comment><USER7> It's not just for old machines either!

I've used XFCE for years and prefer it, even on my well-equipped machines (4-core laptop w/ 32 GB RAM and a new 16-core workstation w/ 128 GB RAM).

It looks "nice enough" and is still flexible enough that I can customize it exactly how I want. I really liked Gnome back in the "good ol' days" (2.x) but I can't stand to use it anymore.

<comment><USER8> You made me curious.. 128GB RAM on Xubuntu! Why? Which usage would require so much memory? Found 16cores quite a lot as well. Really wondering what you do?

<comment><USER9> Not the person you're replying to, but we have lots of 64gb workstations at work for database and BI work, such a testing large queries in Apache Drill. With the right query, you can use up the 64gb quite quickly. Our servers run 384gb and have 16C/32T.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm surprised they ship with chromium, I have had a much better experience with firefox than Chrome on my low end laptop.

Does chromium have a smaller memory footprint than Chrome?

<comment><USER11> Chrome and chromium should have about the same footprint.

But IIRC chrom(ium|e) modifies it's memory usage quite a lot depending on the hardware it's running on.

If it's a low spec machine, it will disable many of the memory-hungry features and speed improvements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Puppy Linux has already been breathing new new life into old PCs. I have an IBM ThinkPad just like the one featured in the article running Puppy Linux.

<comment><USER13> Headlines like these are always mind bogglin.

I always wished the Puppy project would allow better browsing on the raspberry pi.

I really dislike the new Raspberry pi toolbar / desktop

<comment><USER14> It's sad that they're using the RPI brand to distort reality. Even though in a way the RPI project was already twisting things (GPIO + python isn't computing education but I'm nitpicking).

<comment><USER15> Yeah, it'd be cool if they also taught Linux fundamentals, the way the internet works, networking in general, etc.

<comment><USER16> I think that may be looking at it in a different way that doesn't necessarily reflect the impact of all this, in the UK at least.

The way many of my generation was taught IT was Office (with maybe some Macros), a largely useless high-level overview of networking, an out-of-date comparison of "client-server", "mainframe" and "peer-to-peer" computing etc.

It was dry. Unless you already had an interest in the field, it was boring.

It taught you enough about Microsoft Office to do your other school work, it taught you enough about the web and email to get by, and it taught out-dated terminology that you would unlearn in the real world.

It didn't teach troubleshooting of any kind. It wasn't engaging.

Many of us were already ahead of the teachers. If the teacher had a problem, it was usually a student that could give the answer. (I only had one IT teacher who wasn't below the level of a teenager with an active interest in IT.)

But the worst thing was that it didn't get people interested and didn't teach the mindsets required. The underlying logic. The basics of troubleshooting. Binary exclusion. Shit, how to deal with a paper jam!

Nowadays everyone has a smartphone, can follow a YouTube tutorial, can Google stuff, before they're in their teens.

The Pi and the teaching around it gets kids exposed to the lower levels of hardware (or at least a simplified version of). It's interesting and engaging.

There's a far bigger pay-off than "my spreadsheet looks nice". A blinking light gives a greater sense of accomplishment than a ".ppt" file.

The Pi gives the tools and motivation to actually learn the stuff you are talking about. Hook 'em with the fun stuff while still being useful.

Most kids won't need to know "ls" or "mount". They're never going to "modprobe" anything.

They are already taught the very high-level basics of the Internet and networking. But they're never going to use variable length subnet masks.

But many more kids will hopefully be interested enough to pursue careers in IT. And those who don't will at least have an appreciation for it, and will have been taught skills and a mindset invaluable in the increasingly digitally connected world in which we live.

<comment><USER14> Good point. Anything is better than the office driven computer classes. The PI does indeed provide strong educational benefits to improve insights at the electronic level.

My only complaint, and weighted by the fact that the rpi team did deliver on most feature, quality and cost while so many ventures failed to even finish prototypes, is that the SoC is a monster. So no kid will ever use it to go further than python and gpio. A stupid forth CPU would be as good for electronics, but also teach some mathematical programming ideas (recursion, trees), basically the whole computing fundamentals.

Maybe my idea would have failed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> SSDs are what breathe new life into old PCs. And they are quite cheap. My wife's laptop turned from extremely annoying to decent, almost pleasant to use.

<comment><USER18> OA uses a Thinkpad X40 as the target machine. A 1.8 inch Hitachi drive with PATA interface and with 256 or 512Mb of RAM soldered to board with a socket for one further RAM stick. This is a 12 year old design. Probably best used with what it has rather than spending any money upgrading. A good test target for a 'light' OS.

A Thinkpad X60 or later (dual core) with 2Gb RAM can run a 'full fat' Linux (e.g. Ubuntu or CentOS/Fedora) OK if not slick in my experience (and yes I did once compile a kernel from source on an X61s - took a few hours). An SSD makes a difference in that kind of machine.

<comment><USER19> Your comment about the kenrel taking a few hours to compile made me chuckle. I went through a Gentoo phase. Nothing like compiling your compiler to compile your compiler to compile your system. Took days.

And before that I had a machine with 24 MB RAM and a terrible habit of recompiling the kernel or running BSD with ports.

<comment><USER20> > Took days.

at least yours _finished_. Mine would run just long enough to waste most of my day, only to error out because one lib wanted python-3.2.785.2.r58 but could only find python-3.2.1435.214.r3

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> With 512 MB, there's hardly an Internet browsing experience here. The biggest reason why old hardware have gone out of use (relatively quickly) is mostly due to Internet browsers and their need for more memory. So even if you have a computer with 2-4 GB laying around, and you attempt to revive it seeing the news here, it will be soon before you give up the idea altogether.

<comment><USER22> A lot of Chromebooks are still shipping with 2GB of RAM and they do a perfectly sufficient job of running the "Internet" for most everyday users. I would argue your lower limit of a reasonable Internet browsing experience is higher than average because of your technical background. 512MB would be limiting for sure, but a machine with 2GB of RAM running a Linux desktop, especially with an SSD if possible, would make a fine everyday laptop.

*edit: Forgot to mention also that ad blocking aids tremendously in making the internet more usable on underpowered machines.

<comment><USER21> Well, I'd argue that Internet browsing with 2GB is only suitable for reading news and email. This then is a common denominator for layman user, who then wouldn't be using Linux or Pi to begin with. However, this thread is not about Chromebook (and I agree with you there about Chromebook - my wife uses it for email/youtube browsing, and it works perfectly fine).

There's a big difference between Chromebook and Linux/Pi/etc world of hardware/software experience for any person. You can throw a Chromebook to anyone and you wouldn't have to care about it. But try imagining the idea of giving Linux type OS to anyone...we know what happens next.

This is one reason why tablets (particularly starting with iPad) became popular among average crowd.

<comment><USER23> What happens next? I've given Ubuntu laptops (2010 laptops) to my dad, mom, girlfriend and sister, and they're liking it a lot, especially the fact that they don't have to worry about malware. They're fine with it, it's not like people are born with an innate understanding of the Windows UI and are incapable of learning anything else.

<comment><USER24> Curious, for the "Ubuntu for Grandma" box, do you use the default partition plan? Because I find that stock Ubuntu has the infuriating habit of filling the boot partition with linux kernels and then freaking out unhelpfully during later updates about the lack of space.

<comment><USER15> Run purge-old-kernels on an @reboot crontab: [http://news.softpedia.com/news/here-s-how-to-remove-old- kern...](http://news.softpedia.com/news/here-s-how-to-remove-old-kernels-from- ubuntu-16-04-lts-and-free-disk-space-505348.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's wonderful how the RaspberryPi foundation achieved everything the OLPC initiative--backed by huge names--tried and failed to do.

<comment><USER26> The details around the commercial relationship between Qualcomm and the Raspberry Pi foundation is lacking quite a bit in transparency in my mind.

I guess that one of my suspicions here is that some people are making lots of money on something that is billed and marketed as a selfless charity.

([https://www.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFoundatio...](https://www.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFoundationReport2015.pdf) is not nearly detailed enough.)

OLPC is a whole other kind of (a very academic kind of) disaster.

<comment><USER27> Any specific allegations you'd like to make, despite having got the related company name wrong, or just nebulous smears?

<comment><USER26> (Yeah; I meant Broadcom, not Qualcomm.)

No specific allegations. I just find it odd that Broadcom apparently still sell these chips at a low price only (?) to the RasPi foundation - <USER2> because of a personal relationship - someone who worked at Broadcom then created the RasPi foundation.

What does Broadcom get out of this exclusive relationship? (Is it still exclusive?) It just smelled odd when I first heard about this way back in 2012 or so when it first launched. Four years later there's lots of volume, but the same arrangement is still going strong. I find this peculiar.

<comment><USER28> Well, what _do_ you think Broadcom gets out of this?

And more importantly, what do I (as a RPi user) lose out?

<comment><USER29> >"And more importantly, what do I (as a RPi user) lose out?"

If nothing else, you miss out from the benefits of stronger competition. The Odroid-W is one example of a product that appeared to be cancelled because of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's close ties with Broadcom:

[https://liliputing.com/2014/08/hardkernels-raspberry-pi- like...](https://liliputing.com/2014/08/hardkernels-raspberry-pi-like-odroid- w-discontinued-month-launch.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The more lightweight OSes, the better as far as I'm concerned. I've tried all the usual suspects over the years and each has pros and cons. I'm sure this fits the use case for some people out there that others don't.

</comment><comment><USER31> Clean, simple PIXEL UI is attractive...

<comment><USER22> Just installed it on a Zero I had laying around and I'm surprised by the general responsiveness of the UI. Of course, now that I played with it for five minutes I'll turn off the GUI and go direct to CLI like every other Pi I have. Trying to get weewx up and going on my Zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I installed PIXEL on my Raspberry Pi a few days ago. It looked really good, and I was impressed how clearly everything comes out over the composite video output.

</comment><comment><USER33> I bought an old PC with an Intel Atom 330 @ 1.6 GHz. I equipped it immediately with a SSD and 4 GB RAM but found out that the second bottleneck is really the CPU. It's most obvious when using Firefox. Opening a tab takes a second or two. Even scrolling and clicking a link is a bit exasperating.

What browser does the Raspberry Pi use?

</comment><comment><USER34> DietPI (.com) already runs on a lot of embedded platforms and is incredibly fast (despite its terrible webpage). Sadly there is no x86 image and it seems it will never be due to excessive hardware fragmentation, but the VM image is so fast that it makes one wonder how good it would be if run natively. It has become my choice for very small systems, followed by Armbian for ones with less constraints.

</comment><comment><USER28> Practically, what's the difference between this and Debian+LXDE/fvwm/icewm?

Is it only eye-candy or more substantial advantages?

</comment><comment><USER35> Do the power equation before you get your old PC out and include kWh for your future TCO.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks great.

Not sure I like the name though. I can see people newer to the ecosystem and other consumers getting confused between this OS and Google's line of Pixel devices.

</comment><comment><USER36> im looking at [https://www.neverware.com/#introtext-3](https://www.neverware.com/#introtext-3) to breathe new life into my older laptop. Anyone use it yet? I'm curious if it is as slim as ChromeOS.</comment>


Economists are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization - <AUTHOR> https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/22/economists-globalization-trade-paul-krugman-china/ <comment><USER2> > But after the Cold War ended, the debate over trade (Krugman's Nobel-winning > specialty) became a proxy for a larger intellectual struggle over free > markets versus government intervention.

This is the crux of it. The notion that economics, as a field, was blindsided by the rapidity and extent of economic dislocation doesn't match the history. Such a narrative is a whitewashing of a particular clique of superstar economists, which explains why Krugman is so committed to it despite his current policy views.

I was studying International Affairs as an undergraduate in Washington, D.C. in the late 1990s. These issues were well known and heavily discussed, domestically and internationally. By the late 1990s the notion of controlled, incremental trade expansion as espoused by people like Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia was already on the upswing in the international community and cemented after the 1997 Asian financial crisis. That is, while mainstream economists were highly skeptical about the efficacy and unintended consequences of such industrial strategies, not to mention of the leaders like Mahathir who espoused them, it was impossible to deny the fundamental premise that the existential risks of too-rapid global trade expansion were very real.

The problem in the U.S. was much the same problem we've always had: free trade became synonymous to opposition to government intervention. All the free trade bills in the U.S. invariably included funding for re-education and R&D to help manage dislocation and build competitive advantages, but they were meager financially and suffocated by neglect. And that's because these measures were considered "government intervention" and hedges to preserve "big government", which as we all know as Americans (and, to a slightly lesser extent, everybody else in the Anglosphere) meant naivety, ineffectiveness, and corruption. So it's no surprise that the American public and politicians drifted toward a fundamentally broken policy situation.

This is no less true today even as we've soured on the notion of free trade. We'll put up trade barriers, but we _still_ refuse to heavily invest in re- education and R&D, and not even our most liberal policymakers have proposed an industrial policy aimed at _managing_ globalization. Just the same 20-30 years ago, these things are synonymous with big government, corporate subsidies, etc. Instead, we limit free trade presuming that the domestic industrial economy will naturally restore more equitable employment and wealth distribution.

Nothing about free markets guarantees "equitable" distribution; indeed, history has proven that they often tend to distributions that are untenable democratically. But we're even less prepared to effectively manage this stuff for our domestic economy than we are for international trade. Anybody expecting our social equities to substantially improve simply because we're limiting free trade is delusional, though they're in good company.

The thing is, we can never put the free trade genie back in the bottle. And the truth is, on balance free trade _is_ better for the world and for every nation in it; just as with free markets more generally. The problem as always is managing dislocation and wealth distribution. We need to learn, as a society and as economists (armchair or otherwise--I'm not an economist), to stop equivocating industrial policy with government control. Until we do that, we'll never be able to discover and identify the levers and strategies available for mitigating the disruptive aspects of free markets while minimizing the risks of corruption.

<comment><USER3> "The problem in the U.S. was much the same problem we've always had: free trade became synonymous to opposition to government intervention. All the free trade bills in the U.S. invariably included funding for re-education and R&D to help manage dislocation and build competitive advantages, but they were meager financially and suffocated by neglect. And that's because these measures were considered "government intervention" and hedges to preserve "big government", which as well know as Americans (and, to a slightly lesser extent, everybody else in the Anglosphere) meant naivety, ineffectiveness, and corruption. So it's no surprise that the American public and politicians drifted toward a fundamentally broken policy situation."

But this hinges on the premise that employers are receptive to older retrained workers. In my life time I have never seen this, and I have long considered it to be one of the biggest lies in economics. This has never happened on a large scale, and is an academic theory. Whats more, this would only be possible with a some kind of glut of jobs. Starting at the bottom of another career hierarchy at the age of 40 is a complete disaster, you will be out-competed by 22 year olds who cost alot less, are easier to train, have less grievances about a low salary, are okay with the bottom rung, and do not have huge expectations. Even more than that, shifting X00,000 people from one career to another would flood the labor market and destroy wages. The whole thing makes literally no sense.

<comment><USER4> I read an article once, that claimed when a Scandinavian country joined the EU, they expected significant job distortion as a result of free trade. So they literally moved government agencies from their current locations, to locations that they expected would be hardest hit. The end result was the shifting of thousands of government jobs from one location to another. Highly trained people in the old government centers were still in really competitive markets with significant government opportunities. But those communities that were about to be devastated by free trade (usually smaller backwater communities) suddenly saw federal agencies appear that required thousands of jobs overnight, and whom had a mandate to hire those affected by free trade, thereby saving the economy for those workers in the area.

My point is that creative solutions are possible, if we dispense with the notion that the only solution possible is the free market.

<comment><USER5> Such a strategy failed utterly in Canada. They moved a government department from Ottawa to Miramichi, New Brunswick for similar reasons. All the skilled bureaucrats used their reputations to get transfers to a different department so they wouldn't have to uproot their family, and the department was rebuilt around a core of incompetents. I'm sure the locals they hired weren't so incompetent, but rot starts from the top. That move caused the failure of the long-gun registry and a waste of $2B. After the long gun registry was cancelled they used the same department to rewrite the pay system (code name Phoenix) and have managed to waste about $5B so far, and growing.

That's about $50 million wasted per job.

<comment><USER6> I don't think the good people of Miramichi are to blame for this. It's the people in Ottawa who wrote a blank check to Oracle/IBM for attempting to migrate a large part of the government software infrastructure to their incompatible system. Somehow, the contract was that billions would be disbursed to IBM/Oracle whether their system worked or not (it didn't).

Also I don't think Oracle should be allowed to hide behind the Phoenix name. This was Oracle PeopleSoft. Why would you pay billions for a piece of software when the maker isn't even willing to put it's name on it?

<comment><USER7> The Phoenix failure wasn't really a software failure, if I recall correctly. It was more that when everything moved to Miramichi the people who understood the byzantine government pay systems basically didn't follow and the result was people with no clue of what they wanted or how to do it being heavily involved. No software firm can succeed in those conditions.

<comment><USER8> Oracle / IBM had an existing working payroll system to copy. All they had to do was reimplement it in modern hardware and software. Some government employee in Miramichi might not have been happy because oracle didn't listen to what they thought they wanted but if the contract has been to deliver a system that produced the exact same output as the old one oracle/ibm would have no excuse for not having a successful project.

It is astounding nobody was fired for this.

<comment><USER9> I'm not so sure it's easy to represent the exact behavior of a complex system.

What would your estimate be to: "rewrite facebook in language L, with the same behavior, bugs and all".

<comment><USER10> Doing an incremental approximation is very much possible. And it's up to the customer to say when to stop. And also to judge the sufficiency of the speed of convergence.

<comment><USER11> An incremental approximation is unacceptable for payroll. It legally has to be 100% accurate.

<comment><USER10> No, you misunderstood. It means you have two systems, Old and New. You use Old and start development of New. And you do the payroll on both, and if there's a difference you debug that and modify New. After a while it's good enough. And you stop using Old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The big question I've been struggling with in regards to the free trade debate is this:

Is cheap labor a legitimate source of comparative advantage?

I increasingly don't think that it is. Yes, we get products more cheaply. But those products are made in countries with fewer labor restrictions, often in places that are not democratic, where workers cannot vote for changing laws. We're effectively saying we want democracy where we live, for our own white collar professions, but we don't want to be shackled by those restrictions for how we get rich, or how we enjoy our wealth. We're effectively telling local blue collar workers that we're okay with their level of work being taken over by people with less rights than themselves.

That increasingly doesn't feel just. Comparative advantage makes sense for natural differences between countries, such as availability of natural resources or favorable weather for certain types of crops. But not for fundamental human rights.

<comment><USER13> Let me play the devil's advocate: you buying those products is measurably better for those disadvantaged blue collar workers, than you not buying it (on a 10 year horizon IIRC - There are some UN studies on this, on phone and can't find them right now).

So you are damned if you don't enjoy them, damned if you do (but a bit less). Obviously, it is better if you could improve their situation to the point where their labor stops being cheap.... but how can you do that?

<comment><USER14> > Let me play the devil's advocate: you buying those products is measurably > better for those disadvantaged blue collar workers, than you not buying it > (on a 10 year horizon IIRC - There are some UN studies on this, on phone and > can't find them right now).

Maybe in some cases.

However, you then have labor in those countries trying to struggle for the same protections and advances in wages that workers in the US struggled for, but they are struggling against a far more powerful corporate entity that has the backing of a more corrupt/disfunctional government while also having diversified options to break and weather strikes.

Then you have to add to that all the non blue collar workers who have had their subsistence livelihoods destroyed through land seizures for resource extraction.

Most of the benefits of globalization roll uphill (richer citizens, especially in richer countries extract most of the benefits) the trickle down is minuscule to non-existent.

<comment><USER15> Yes people still have challenges and problems. But at the end of day, there are hundreds of millions fewer people in poverty than there were just a few decades ago. None of what you're saying justifies that the alternative would have been better, where most of these people remained poor subsistance farmers.

<comment><USER14> > , there are hundreds of millions fewer people in poverty than there were > just a few decades ago.

And how much of that is due to globalization and how much of that is due to the growth of local economies? How much faster would those local economies have grown if wealth was not being siphoned out by multi-nationals? (These are not honest inquiries, not rhetorical questions.)

> None of what you're saying justifies that the alternative would have been > better, where most of these people remained poor subsistance farmers.

The people who were poor subsistence farm who had their lands given away are generally not those who have been lifted out of poverty.

<comment> barry-cotter In China it's almost all due to globalization. Multinationals doing siphon out wealth. They invest huge amounts of money in foreign direct investment, enabling faster growth than if all capital had to be domestically sourced and they take some of those profits and repatriate them, but the wages they pay and the capital investment they make stay in country.

In China the people who were poor subsistence farmers absolutely are those lifted out of poverty. The numbers are just too great for it to work any other way, with urbanization going from ~20% in 1980 to 70 or 80% now. Similarly in Korea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What really made globalization work was containers and faxes. Before containerization, shipping was kind of an iffy business. Sometimes it showed up, sometimes it got lost or stolen, and sometimes it got broken. After containers, if you ordered a container load, it usually showed up intact.

The importance of faxes to trade is underestimated. Not only was it faster, faxes work well across language barriers. An invoice still looks like an invoice, a purchase order still looks like a purchase order, and a bill of lading still looks like a bill of lading. For the normal cases, the info in the blanks, the info that matters, matches up, and that's all you need most of the time. Especially since everybody uses the same number symbols. Business forms became an international language. You've almost certainly received some package that came with a bill of lading in a foreign language, recognized it as a bill of lading, and could probably make out the list of items. Even if the descriptions were unreadable, the part numbers matched.

Economists did not get that these rather banal mechanical improvements had a far bigger effect than their economic theory. This is embarrassing, since everybody in shipping, and then everyone in business, had figured out how to deal across borders thirty years ago.

<comment><USER17> These things are so fundamental that you don't see economists writing articles about them. Macroeconomics generally lumps those things under "productivity".

Container ships were almost the poster child of globalization.

Faxes (and telex, etc) had been around for decades. We have the alphabet we use today because international Phonecian traders (phonetics, see?) used it for exactly the type of documents you're talking about.

<comment><USER16> _Macroeconomics generally lumps those things under "productivity"._

Which is the problem. Those things were bigger than Government economic policy, as we can see them having affected trade across a large number of countries with varied policies.

It's not "productivity", anyway. It's "relative cost advantage" and "reduction of trade friction".

The giant mistake of macroeconomics is claiming that free markets are a self- perpetuating condition. In the absence of trade friction and the presence of network effects, consolidation tends to occur. It continues to the point of monopoly or oligopoly. The end state, for now, seems to be having three or less providers who don't compete very hard on price.

There's an EU study that indicates prices drop from competition only with four or more players. "Free markets" seem to have a minimum size in practice.

The US has three big banks, three big drugstore chains, and will soon have three big cellular providers. Two big agriculture companies. Five big film studios, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Like most articles referring to economists as a group, now admitting whatever you, dear wise reader, have always known, this one does not contain any kind of survey, but simply quotes a few economists, as if they spoke for the entire economics profession.

<comment><USER19> When some of the economists mentioned are the president of the International Economic Association, a a chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and a Nobel Prize winner who also happens to be the economics columnist for one of the largest U.S. newspapers -- I think it's fair to say that these are representative of mainstream economic thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > globalization would lead to "hyperglobalization" and huge economic and > social upheaval, particularly of the industrial middle class in America.

This line reminded me of the joke that the worst part of the US invading your country is that 20 years later they'll return to make films about how killing your civilians made their soldiers really sad.

<comment><USER21> Hyperglobalization is happening right now as manufacturers move out of China and into Vietnam and Indonesia to circumvent the US-China trade war.

We will see this continuing, rolling from one low-cost country to the next as companies try to maximize profits.

Unless some controls are put into place, this will continue for the next 300 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> To be clear this article isn't whether globalization is good or bad but about how it affects "American workers". Its pretty clear it has been on average very good for America and the world, but bad for say factory workers or coal miners. The response should have been to tax the wider benefits and subsidize the people who lost out, but that money got lost somewhere en-route...

Most of the world is far better off in nearly every measure than 20 years ago.

<comment><USER23> It's been fantastic for the 400 people that own more wealth then the entire country.

<comment><USER24> An extreme exaggeration that ignores the extraordinary wealth holdings of the US middle class, which is wealthier than their peers in Germany or Sweden. That is despite heavy middle class demographic change from Latin America immigration the past ~45 years, they're still wealthier than those elite nations.

The 50% to 90% bracket in the US for example holds $31-$35 trillion in household wealth. The 90% to 99% bracket holds another $39-$44 trillion. So 50-99% holds $80+ trillion.

The Forbes 400 is worth $3 trillion.

<comment><USER25> > The 50% to 90% bracket

what percentage of the u.s population fits into that bracket?

<comment><USER26> 90%-50%=40%

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can we please get Paul Krugman off the New York Times editorial board? Or at least include a disclaimer that he doesn't know much about most of the things he writes about. He got his Nobel prize from a career working in a pretty specific scope. I am tired of people taking his articles as works of a god.

<comment><USER28> _at least include a disclaimer that he doesn 't know much about most of the things he writes about_

This is true of most journalists.

<comment><USER27> And I do think Krugman is qualified to write about the economy (less so about other things). I just don't like him (or people quoting him) using his Nobel Prize as some kind of ethos cudgel to hit me over the head with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I doubt that there was ever any illusion that if financiers could arbitrage labor rates between nations that they would. Hence the expectation always was that living standards among nations would tend to equalize.

Post WW II the US had about 50% of the global GDP. The situation was huge inequality between nations. That was politically untenable and the solution was seen to be development of other nations' economies. Some of this was accomplished with things like the Marshall Plan and some with programs of foreign aid to underdeveloped countries.

However, the US taxpayer would never support a large enough foreign aid budget to really solve the problem. On the other hand, free trade could be sold politically, companies would export capital and know how to lesser developed countries, and the problem of inequality between nations could be ameliorated. Of course, it was at the expense of the US worker whose standard of living stagnated from the '70s onward. But the bet was that other nations would develop slowly enough, US consumers would enjoy cheap goods, business would make lots of money, and that US standard of living wouldn't actually decrease significantly for a politically potent group.

Of course, there aren't enough resources in the world for all 7.5 billion people to enjoy US standard of living. Therefore, the implication of greater equality of standards of living between nations is less equality of standards of living within nations. Less inequality internationally implies greater inequality intra-nationally.

And that is exactly what has happened. The world, including the US, will tend towards the situation in India where there is extreme wealth and extreme poverty side by side.

<comment><USER30> It was sold as "rising tide lifts all boats" (implication: boat = person, and "all" = "nearly all, at least") and "everyone benefits under free trade, trade barriers always make people worse off, it's just a fact, what don't you even know Ricardo?"

Never mind that "all boats" was, in the best case, "all GDPs", not individual incomes, and "everyone" was... well, the average of all GDPs, actually, so also not actually every individual, and _still_ with a pile of caveats for even that to be true. In point of fact nothing about all this said that even _most_ people would benefit, if you either 1) applied common sense, or 2) actually looked at their sources.

source: figured out the common sense reasons this was BS when I was in like 4th or 5th grade watching the China-MFN debate & vote on CSPAN (god I was a nerd); later did the reading and learned that yes, my elementary school intuition mapped closer to reality than the crap they sold us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Of course they were bláse about it, it didn't affect their livelihood one way or the other.

Do you get paid for saying fancy sounding things, or do you get paid because you did fancy sounding things?

Economists are all talk and no stones and they should be ignored unless they can demonstrate that their portfolio represents the ideas that they espouse.

</comment><comment><USER32> They knew the effects of globalization. It's going exactly as intended, exactly the effects I learned about during my econ studies, they just didn't think there'd be as much political blowback. It's easier for them to claim ignorance than to admit they willfully deceived the public.

</comment><comment><USER33> Plenty of economists always knew. But economics is not the clean uncontroversial hard science it would like to present itself as. It's a political battleground shaped by wealth, influence, trends. And so it should be no shock there was neoliberal economics to go along with neoliberal politics.

</comment><comment><USER34> I remember that in my Econ class, so many years, the idea that we could close manufacturing plants and transfer them to low cost labor countries and not have a replacement job in the US was a very big discussion that my professor could never answer with clarity. He would always say that the US economy would develop other ways to employ the people that lost their jobs. So even then there was a lot of dought on the idea of globalization.

Ok fine, there was a mistake in thinking but there's no one that has a satisfactory answer on what to do to fix the problem.

I for one think that we can't go back to the way things were so we need to start by separating benefits, health care ins. and such, from employment. Once that's done people will be freer to take on jobs that are not high paying but are being created by the gig economy. We also need to cut the workweek to fewer hours lets say 30hrs vs 40hrs now.

The last part is automation. As a country we need to embrace it. They say that automation brings on more jobs than it destroys but nothing says that those jobs will be in the US. Whether we like it or not it's coming so we need to be the country that controls it.

<comment><USER35> I agree completely.

One other aspect that often gets lost in these conversations is that manufacturing capacity is a huge part of what wins wars. The US won World War II largely because we could produce planes and ships faster than our enemies could destroy them. When we shipped our manufacturing capabilities overseas, we also undermined a key wartime advantage.

It is within our national interest to have a strong industrial base. The only way I can see that happening from here is automation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The article cherry picks a few words from the original Krugman essay in a way that would make Maximilien Robespierre proud.

So while we're at it:

> major disruptions now would be more likely to come from an attempt to > reverse globalization than from leaving the current trade regime in place. > At this point, millions of decisions about where to put plants, and where to > move and take jobs, have been made on the assumption that the open world > trading system will continue. Making that assumption false, by raising > tariffs and forcing a contraction of world trade, would set off a whole new > wave of disruption along with a whole new set of winners and losers.

</comment><comment><USER37> Mobility of capital without mobility of labour. Surprise, it's not just.

</comment><comment><USER38> To be fair, it elected BHO as well. But the tone, culture and mainstream media then was different. When "Yes we can" and "Hope you can believe in" didn't pan out those emotions took a u-turn.

It's easier to see the direct line to DJT, but that historic line passes through eight years of BHO.

</comment><comment><USER39> Free market only works when everyone follows the same rules. When you have a player like China who is dead set on taking advantages of the rules but never taking the responsibility, you create an one-sided situation.

Trade is not just an economic issue. It's a political issue when you have China in the game.

<comment><USER40> The "free market", as it's often portrayed, is a magical idea that exists only in text books. It's not real. The real market is a mess of information asymmetry, unpriced negative externalities and govern emend subsidies.

Economic theory is great for determining the direction of economic policy but not defining policy itself.

<comment><USER29> There are only a limited number of markets where large numbers of buyers and sellers transact for commodities of well understood characteristics.

The fundamental transaction of capitalistic societies is the "deal", where sellers vary the benefits of their products and conceal their deficits and where buyers conceal their willingness to pay as well as the exact thing they want to buy. Typically there are no more than two or three sellers (e.g. Airbus and Boeing) or two or three buyers (e.g. the market for very advanced fighter aircraft).

The first thing you learn in business school is that you must have product differentiation and must at all costs avoid being in a commodity business..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> For being so critical of those full of themselves this article is taking a pretty big unfounded victory lap. Just because someone else is wrong that doesn't make you right...

Just because Krugman thought globalization would turn out better does _not_ mean isolationist policy would have improved things.

</comment><comment><USER42> Isn't that common knowledge that China devaluating its currency allows them to take advantage of their big worker population to develop their economy and make the entire world dependent on China's industry?

It really sounds like china is being the smartest one here.

<comment> barry-cotter How? They're paying more than ten percent of GDP to keep the value of their currency down in a massive subsidy to their export sector at the expense of everyone else in China. They're subsidizing the rest of the world's consumption.

<comment><USER42> Sure, but it's massive advantage for the future of china. It's an investment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Well paid workers, OSHA, and the EPA vs countries with dirt cheap labor and no worker or environmental protections... which do you think will win?

The big question for me is how in the world so many smart people convinced themselves it would turn out otherwise?

</comment><comment><USER44> But I thought economists have known this for a long time (at least since 2013). Basically, the Elephant Graph [1] summarizes the effects of globalization. Most of the economic gains of the past few decades went to the super-wealthy and the middle class in the developing world. Meanwhile, the middle class in wealthy countries and the poor in developing countries were left behind.

[https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2018/2/2/16868838/el...](https://www.vox.com/policy-and- politics/2018/2/2/16868838/elephant-graph-chart-global-inequality-economic- growth)

</comment><comment><USER45> Perot was right. He knew what the deal was. He warned us. Did we listen? No, we have good old Bill Clinton to "thank".

Thanks a lot Bill for selling out blue collar workers in America and those around the globe who followed your "leadership".

</comment><comment><USER46> Paul Krugman is much more of a pundit than he is an economist.

</comment><comment><USER47> A giant sucking sound

<comment><USER48> Funny that the article tries to portray Al Gore as the guy that could have stopped free trade if he won the election in 2000, when he was the figurehead of free trade, and really helped lock in the free trade policy when he beat up Ross Perot in the NAFTA debate.

<comment><USER47> We picked the wrong guy in 92.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> One thing I notice about Trade now is the perverse power we've given to groups which fundamentally don't have other countries or individuals interests in minds.

One thing I notice is that left wingers are essentially universally aghast over what's happening to Hong Kong. They will hold to the idea that a trade war with China is the stupidest thing ever that causes economic damage to yourself and incurs great risk. Which is true. However you can't have it both ways and you have to choose between economic vitality and essentially having no say in a situation like Hong Kong.

I've seen countries hunger for trade being used as a lever for international legal reform. A condition of signing trade deals with the united states where countries essentially have to agree to give multinational corporations more government enforced rights or not have free trade. Specifically "intellectual property harmonization". If you want to have trade with the united states you appearantly need to agree that for every idea a corporation comes up with, they have an exclusive right to using that idea for more and more years, and consequently governments need to agree to punish people for not giving corporations money for those ideas for longer and longer periods of time. This is effectively a system that redistributes wealth towards corporate interests in an era of striking wealth inequality, on the reasonable sounding grounds they need that money to "develop new medications", but then it's ignoring the reality on the ground of poor health spreading like a contagion due to economic inequality. As the average person is unable to afford things like medications more and more... the economic vitality of all society... including the very companies who lobbied for these laws will suffer. Yet there's no effective way to push back against these laws without giving up free trade and shooting yourself in the foot economically.

I think at some point we're going to start realizing how many costs free trade have that haven't really been accounted for. It's very easy to portray it as a positive if you don't account for all the externalities.

<comment><USER50> This is true in a discussion where the relative value you place on international trade is either infinite or zero.

You can oppose an ill-considered trade war without opposing all actions that would impact trade. This is not an either/or proposition. It's not hypocritical to suggest that, in the real world, sometimes you might have to weigh competing goods.

<comment><USER49> I just see a status quo where Trump would openly abandon HK in a heartbeat for a good trade deal. Whereas the left can stomach talking about boycotting a company like Blizzard but they're violently opposed to action with any teeth because that action will likely have more real negative consequences for theirselves than not being able to play SOME video games. I'm not saying it's hypocritical but is sure as shit is weak.

In the end trade is valued higher than democracy by both Trump and his detractors. It just makes me sad and cynical. I wonder if we will ever have a "Nixon goes to China" moment in reverse?

P.S. Don't know what you're on about saying how my position is only true if trade has no or infinite value. My position would be utterly incoherent if I thought it had infinite value. My position would be coherent if I believed Trade had no value but it's also coherent if I believe it's overvalued.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Of course, the other side of this is billions of people outside the United States raised out of extreme poverty. Eventually, globalization means that everyone in the world has access to the same opportunities. The nationalist argument that workers in the us are better or more deserving of that high standard of living and those opportunities doesn't really stand up to much scrutiny here.

<comment><USER52> > The nationalist argument that workers in the us are better or more deserving > of that high standard of living and those opportunities doesn't really stand > up to much scrutiny here.

This might be too simplistic of a take on it. If you don't consider your own interests first then your good will can be exploited. If the whole world embraced free trade then you might have a point, but as it stands countries such as China are not playing fair. I'd also have to question wherever the moral good of Chinese workers being lifted out of poverty is worth the growth of China as a global superpower. If we're embracing free trade for charitable reasons don't you think we need to be sure our money isn't ending up in the hands of governments like the CPC?

I also think that even if you were right from a morally objective point of view you're employing a kind of "for the greater good" reasoning here that many would find objectionable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Free trade is being scapegoated for the failure of laws violating contract liberty to empower unions, and social democracy. Giving unions a stranglehold over industries, and redistributing 30 percent of national output for formulaic social welfare programs administered by central authorities, is not conducive to economic development, and guarantees that the country becomes uncompetitive on the global stage in most industries.

Since the 1960s, social welfare spending has increased on average by over 4 percent per year. The last 50 years have seen a dramatic shift to a more centrally managed economy that favors social safety nets provided by governments over market forces based on private property and individual responsibility.

The labor laws passed in the 1930s and 50s meanwhile guarantee that any industry that does start to become a significant contributor to national output, whether it's the Big Three Auto Makers and the big steel manufacturers in the 1950s, or Tesla, Amazon and Google today, becomes the target of rent- seeking unions who are impossible to effectively resist thanks to the free- market undermining labor laws in place.

The decline in productivity growth, particularly in globally competitive markets like manufacturing, is a predictable consequence of that.

</comment><comment><USER54> The Council on Foreign Relations (publisher of Foreign Policy) sure is quick to point the finger at economists.

</comment><comment><USER55> I think the logic here also applies to the challenges and relevance the EU faces going forward. A useful EU information site I visit often [https://euobserver.com](https://euobserver.com)

</comment><comment><USER56> > Yet it has taken an awful long time for economists to admit that their > profession has been far too sure of itself

I think that's something where diversity in the field could have helped.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's strange to me how anyone can have such arrogance about a complex system -- especially a social system -- that they "lacerate" those who question them.

</comment><comment><USER57> Same deal with neo-liberalism actually. It wrecked New Zealand in the 80s and most politicians will at best admit it was flawed, yet it still continues to this very day because it's become institutionalised and utterly entrenched in our political system.

</comment><comment><USER58> Economics is, and has always been, formalised ideology. In other words, Economics is not a science and Economists are not scientists.

</comment><comment><USER59> Wow. Krugman is a free trade economist now... and most people in the comments seem to agree with that.

The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

</comment><comment><USER60> they knew it all along, but kept bs peddling(Taleb's term) anyway because everyone(even paul krugman) needs to eat

<comment><USER31> And it costs them nothing (except maybe a new book deal, so win win) to write the paper explaining why they were wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> >> The U.S. president has effectively discarded modern economics, reembraced crude protectionism, and, like the mercantilists of the pre-Adam Smith era, appears to see trade as a zero-sum game

Trump is right.

Almost all business activity today is a zero-sum game. Americans have all the abilities and skills to produce everything they need on their own. If (hypothetically) the US were to start banning foreign companies, new US companies which are just as good would pop up in their place. This would create better, high-paying jobs for Americans and more opportunities for entrepreneurs and technologists.

This is true for pretty much any developed country with respect to foreign goods and services. For example, if France blocked Facebook, within a matter of weeks, better alternatives would pop up to cater for the French market. This is not speculation BTW, it's pretty much what happened in China with respect to all major US tech companies.

China knows exactly what kind of zero-sum game they're playing. Ability is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is human attention. Governments have to leverage their laws and regulations to maintain control over the attention of their citizens so that they can focus it to benefit local businesses.

Free markets only make sense at the small scale; for example, I'm a builder and I want to focus all my time and energy on building houses so that I can gain more experience to fine-tune my skills and become more efficient over time - but I have a problem: While I'm busy becoming an expert in construction, I need to eat bread to survive... The solution to this problem is a free market; it will allow me to use the money that I earn from building houses to buy bread from a baker (who is an expert in baking). The efficiency gains here are obvious.

When you look at the same problem at a global scale, it doesn't make sense because, taken as a whole, a country (especially one with a large population) can focus on many things at once whilst being an expert at all of them. Being really good in one area does not prevent a country from also being really good in a different area.

Applying a microeconomic solution (in this case, a free market) to a macroeconomic problem doesn't work. It's like if you were a plumber and your kitchen sink was leaking and instead of fixing it yourself (which would take 5 minutes and cost you $0), you decide to call another plumber to come to your house and fix it (which would take 1 hour of travel time extra and cost you $100). It makes no sense. If you have the skills to do something on your own, and you have an unlimited ability to multi-task you'd have to be an idiot to pay someone else to do it.

</comment><comment><USER62> I don't get why "Equitable rules to play by" is a concept so hard for everyone to understand.

The free market is about creating a level playing field. Globalization was shit because because it did not create a level playing field, it created a subsidy for "developing" countries, at the expense of "developed" ones.

Its hilarious that people think that somehow free markets and libertarians are responsible

<comment><USER63> Was about to upvote you until your last sentence.

Reason being, yes, I agree that a huge problem with globalization is that, while developed countries have spent many decades building things like labor rights, environmental protections, IP protections, etc., globalization essentially allows an out for companies to undermine all of these base-level rules.

But there is a very good reason people are blaming "free markets" and "libertarians" \- lots of the cheerleading behind globalization was based on people espousing their love for free markets and libertarianism. The fact that you may disagree with their _definition_ of free markets and libertarianism doesn't change the fact that their definition is the one that is most widely acknowledged.

<comment><USER62> Which is why I deliberately left that sentence in there. Its because there is a profound misunderstanding of the definition "free market". I also disagree with the contention that what the most number of people mistakenly define to be true is justification for miscategorizing and dismissing something.

The "cheerleaders" you are talking about clearly did not understand these concepts, and the result is mis-association, and thereby in effect dismissal of the idea of freedom as absurd.

Even though "ideally", "In a free market, the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government or other authority", In practice to achieve this end, this means creating a level playing field which take things into account such as "IP protections, environmental costs, etc."

From a libertarian perspective, in order to eliminate a "government or other authority from all forms of economic privilege" in the long term, is to in the short term work to better define property rights and rules to play by to force more accountability with the individuals involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> _Paul Krugman and other mainstream trade experts are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization: It hurt American workers far more than they thought it would. Did America's free market economists help put a protectionist demagogue in the White House?_

Even if you didn't vote for Trump or don't like him, Trump has been critiquing globalization for years before he came to office especially with regards to China. Yet their conclusion is that he is a demagogue. The very people who cheered on the very globalization that made some of us rich but left many of our fellow citizens in the dust.

I assume they agree that the purpose of globalization was to make everyone better of not just some and that those that would benefit from it most should be paying back their fair share to the communities.

Today we have a situation where it's impossible to save your way to retirement, where the cost of living has increased and the middle class decreased and we did so while increasing the deficit of the country.

<comment><USER50> I think most economists would say that the purpose of globalization was to make the _nation_ better off, and that the nation's values, systems and leadership would be called on to distribute those gains in a way consistent with that nation's values.

Perhaps the real issue here is not one of trade, but of the collapse of unions, the dramatic change in the nature of our media, broken leadership structures, and a lazy mindset that views capital and markets as the goal rather than the tool.

<comment><USER64> Well, nations are part of everyone in globalization no? Not sure I understand the distinction.

The issue wasn't of trade but of a small group of people who benefitted from exporting jobs abroad to sell products at home and then still avoid paying the taxes.

<comment><USER50> Increasing the wealth of a nation doesn't mean increasing the wealth of everyone in that nation. A nation can distribute those gains in wealth and power in a way that provides no utility to many of its citizens.

Trade has made nations richer. Economists were not wrong about this. What many were wrong about is the thesis that the social & market structures in developed, "stable" democracies would ensure that those gains eventually improved the utility of everyone—the proverbial "rising tide that lifts all boats."

The standard claim is that markets may not immediately fix issues, but over time they will converge on an efficient distribution of resources.

Yes, this is a late reply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The odd part about capitalist based policies on trade and skilled work force immigration is how much the left has supported them. The right has long held a "capitalist laissez-faire" approach to economic policy, and has been open about that. But what I cannot wrap my head around is the paradoxical message of the left. On the one hand they have long been known for supporting and using government intervention to protect and bolster the common working man in the United States, but on the other hand have continuously and audaciously supported and put forwards free trade and ultra capitalist ideas. The outcome of which has been a disaster and is only getting started. Even more paradoxically, the most pro American Worker campaign ever ran, was run by Donald Trump, a quasi republican, who in turn won the election by stealing support from democrats in key states (Michigan, Ohio, Florida, etc).

<comment><USER2> 1) The American left has always been suspicious of government and comfortable with the market economy. The range of policies that look acceptable to the social left skew much more to the right than the social left in other countries.

2) Beginning with Goldwater and culminating with Reagan, the American public internalized economic libertarian ideas.[1] (See, e.g., [https://www.nytimes.com/1964/10/25/archives/the-case- against...](https://www.nytimes.com/1964/10/25/archives/the-case-against- goldwaters-economics.html)) By the 1990s the Democratic Party had lost their multi-generational primacy, and the only politicians able to stem the loses were politicians like Bill Clinton (see also Tony Blaire in the U.K.), whose strategy was to co-opt libertarian economics.

[1] The _reasons_ for this are complex. For example, Southern conservative politics becoming vociferous advocates for deregulation and free trade obviously has more than a little to do with Nixon's infamous "Southern strategy". Republicans promised southern states a larger share of industrial manufacturing by 1) shifting it from the North and 2) extracting concessions from foreign manufacturers to build domestic manufacturing plants as part of trade negotiations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I think a big reason it hurt so much is not globalization, but globalization without requiring human rights minimums or guarantees, and without actual open markets.

Cheap labor that rests on a foundation of abuse only creates a whole world that depends on there being people to plunder while the abuser accretes an armor of indispensability.

Allowing the participation of countries who operate by separate rules that are inherently advantaged or abusive does the same.

If the US hadn't been obsessed with industry and consumer-driven realpolitik and killing the faintest whiff of "communism" at any cost it might have been able to use its post-WW2 clout to create a globalization that worked, but to the surprise of no-one, greed was too good and functional globalization ultimately wasn't even much of a dream.

</comment><comment><USER66> Krugman and his ilk are to the economy are what Ansel Keys was to nutrition. And they appear to be getting off rather lightly considering the devastation they've wreaked on peoples lives.

</comment><comment><USER67> This is ridiculous. Trump's economic policy is a near exact copy of what Krugman has been advocating for years. See my previous comment with an itemized list of op-ed pieces by Krugman linked with major themes of Trump's economic rhetoric:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20647721](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20647721)

<comment><USER68> > Trump's economic policy is a near exact copy of what Krugman has been > advocating for years:

No, it's not.

Let's start with the major area of economic policy called taxation:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/opinion/alexandria- ocasio...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/05/opinion/alexandria-ocasio- cortez-tax-policy-dance.html)

<comment><USER67> > Let's start with the major area of economic policy called taxation

How about if we start with the ones I listed in the linked comment. The link you cite is Krugman aggressively trying to signal something anti-Trump after it was already too late.

I've been reading Krugman's op eds for years and nearly everything Trump says about economic policy is practically verbatim Krugman.

Also, one could argue that Trump's massive increase in deficit spending will likely result in increases to future income tax rates to the levels AOC advocates, but with the beneficiaries (unfortunately) being defense contractors rather than the poor and middle class.

Krugman has advocated closed borders for years as well:

 _The New Deal made America a vastly better place, yet it probably wouldn't have been possible without the immigration restrictions that went into effect after World War I. For one thing, absent those restrictions, there would have been many claims, justified or not, about people flocking to America to take advantage of welfare programs._

([https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/21/opinion/paul-krugman- immi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/21/opinion/paul-krugman-immigration- children.html?_r=0))

To be clear, Krugman is a respectable person unlike Trump, but he shares the same ideology of economic populism and framing of rust belt workers as victims of modernization, globalization, and trade.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> "Paul Krugman has never suffered fools gladly."

Paul Krugman has never suffered disagreement gladly.

</comment><comment><USER70> What difference does it make whether globalization hurt "the american worker" more than some people estimated? What really matters is whether it hurt them more than it helped.

That may well be the case, but it isn't obvious.

Also, what about "the non-american worker"? Did it hurt _them_ more than it helped? Is there a comparative _disadvantage_?

Also, why the focus on workers? What about the young, the sick, the elderly? Could an aging society's welfare be improved by being shielded economically from younger societies?

</comment><comment><USER71> Outside hardline libertarian and establishment wall street circles, no serious intelectualls fell for the new free trade religion. Seeing Krugman admit as much in order to preserve a shred of credibility is a good sign. Dont be confused though, Krugman is stil a hack intellectual for hire.

<comment><USER72> The establishment of both major US policies have been pretty staunchly neoliberal and pro free trade up until recently. I don't think it's fair to say "no one fell for it"

<comment><USER73> That was largely driven by bankers and the finance industry moreso than academic economists. It's all about incentives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> It seems to me that the big problem with Globalization is that we're only doing half of it. If we exported work but also exported working conditions then globalization would be a good thing.

Bringing all of the people of the world up to the first world standards. But instead we outsource only the work and not the working conditions so there's an enormous gap between what you can expect in the first world vs. third world. That gap ends up mostly as profit that is absorbed by the ultra-rich.

Globalization ends up being impossible in practice because there is no central world government dictating standards for all countries of the world, and opens up the system to exploit poor countries as they race to the bottom.

<comment><USER53> >>That gap ends up mostly as profit that is absorbed by the ultra-rich.

The statistics don't bear this pessimistic hypothesis out. Global wages have increased faster over the last 20 years than at any point in history, and the global poverty rate has declined at similarly unprecedented rates.

Globally there has been no change in income inequality either.

<comment><USER74> Interesting premise, but the data doesn't support it very well.

[https://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-full- report...](https://wir2018.wid.world/files/download/wir2018-full-report- english.pdf)

<comment><USER53> I don't want to download a pdf from a random website. Do you have source that I would recognize?</comment></comment></comment></comment>