Are people who make $200k middle-class? - <AUTHOR> https://theweek.com/articles/851634/are-people-who-make-200k-middle-class <comment><USER3> Lower-class / Middle-class / Upper-class defined as brackets of income seems to be the wrong way to divide things.

There is an ownership class that receives preferential tax treatment and a labor class that doesn't.

A small business owner might only net $80k/year, but their incentives in regards to policy are more aligned with a billionaire startup founder than with an $80k/year middle manager, because their income doesn't come in the form of a W-2 job.

It doesn't really matter the _amount_ of income you're getting, it matters a lot more in what form it comes. People who work for others and have a boss who determines their livelihood have more in common with each other regardless of how much they make than people who own businesses. Even movie stars have a union.

<comment><USER4> Capital gains accruing to people who live primarily off capital gains accounts for too little of total income to be a sensible dividing line.

Total realized capital gains in 2017 was about $650 billion, about 30% of which accrued to people who realized an average of less than $50,000 in capital gains per year: [https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/model- estimates/distribution...](https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/model- estimates/distribution-individual-income-tax-long-term-capital-gains-and- qualified-18). So you're talking about $460 billion in "ownership class" income annually, or 3.5% of all U.S. income. That's actually a very high estimate--because even within the top 1%, realized capital gains doesn't account for even half of total income.

So under your theory, 96.5% of all personal income in the U.S. is earned by the "lower class" or "middle class." It's a very weird definition.

<comment><USER3> I think that makes sense since most wealth is increasingly concentrated among a smaller and smaller proportion of people.

Yes, if you only look at _realized_ capital gains it is a small percentage. Because even if you have $50 billion in stock, you really don't need to be spending $1 billion / year or anything ludicrous. There is a limit to what one person or one family can consume, and the levels of wealth people can achieve are so incredibly far beyond that, that of course they don't need to realize a lot of gains to get the lifestyle they want.

Several years ago my job took me to do some work at the home of someone in the top 10 of the Forbes 400. I was chatting with one of his staff and this person had homes all over the world, one of the largest yachts ever made, private plane, etc. The annual cost for running everything was on the order of $50 million / year. Astronomical, yes, but as a percentage of their net worth practically nothing.

<comment><USER4> Paper net worth that isn't spent is fairly meaningless, though. We care about defining upper class versus lower class because money dictates access to scarce resources. For the most part, you can't buy access to scarce resources (in your example, labor, yachts, private planes), without realizing capital gains.

<comment><USER3> The point is that wealth is distributed along a power law and people making $200k/year from a W-2 job are not in the meaty part of the curve. You seem really invested in shaming them and demanding they pay more in taxes when if you're making that as a wage you're probably already paying close to 50% of your income in Federal and State taxes. At the same time they don't qualify for many of the deductions and subsidies that lower income people would so they're already paying more for the same things. How much more do we need to take from them?

Yes, if they are in any way reasonably responsible they can live comfortably and have all their needs met. That's great. We should work on extending that possibility to more people instead of taking it away from one group of wage slaves and handing it to another. Meanwhile people making orders of magnitude more money are paying 15%, 10% or 0% in taxes. That's the "upper class" for all practical purposes.

<comment><USER4> First, your premise is false: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#In_the_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#In_the_United_States). As of 2007, the top 1% owned 35% of wealth, while the next 19% owned 50%. The top 20% is a net worth of about $500,000 including home equity, which pretty much any household making $200,000 will as they get older. Moreover, the wealth of the top 20% is going to comprise to a much greater extent ownership of scarce resources (housing in desirable areas, etc.) than the paper wealth of the top 1%.

Second, what we care about at the end of the day is the distribution of access to consumption. Income models that better than wealth. Mark Zuckerberg might have an unrealized gain of $1 billion, but he can't out-compete someone else for access to scarce resources unless he realizes that gain. Indeed, Zuckerberg's wealth in particular is just a proxy for the right to receive a portion of Facebook's profits _in the future_ based on the _future labor_ of Facebook's employees. It doesn't represent anything tangible that exists right now. It's realized capital gains, not unrealized paper wealth, that is the proxy for goods and services that could be used to meet peoples' needs in the present.

Third, the folks paying "15%, 10%, or 0% in taxes" represent an extremely small portion of total income. Eliminating the preference for capital gains, for example, would raise just a couple of hundred billion more in taxes (compared to the almost $7 trillion we already raise). It's something that makes a few people very rich, but they don't account for a very large portion of overall income.

Fourth, and finally, someone making $200k/year isn't paying "close to 50%" of income in taxes. In Maryland, it's just over 30%. We're one of the few developed countries that taxes the top 5% so little.

<comment><USER3> > Mark Zuckerberg might have an unrealized gain of $1 billion, but he can't > out-compete someone else for access to scarce resources unless he realizes > that gain.

When 99.99% of people don't even have 0.1% of Zuck's net worth he doesn't need to realize anywhere close to $1 billion of gain to out-compete them. The distribution is so lopsided that he could realize gains encompassing most other people's entire net worth and it would be a rounding error in his accounting. That's without even getting in to the fact that at that level your brokerage will happily give you a low-interest loan to do things like buy a house or whatever you want so realizing gains is not at all necessary to have access to funds for consumption. "Realized capital gains" does not even begin to tell the story of the disparity in access to consumption.

<comment><USER4> The question is whether realizes gains reflects the consumptive access of billionaires as a category than unrealized increases in paper wealth. While an individual billionaire can in fact get a low interest loan against paper wealth for purposes of consumption, that loan will have to be paid back with cash. That cash has to either come from ordinary income, or through realization of capital gains. Unless billionaires as a category as just not paying off those personal loans, the consumption associated with those loans should be reflected in their income and realized gains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem in these types of discussions is the general conflation between income and wealth.

In the US, most people are taught from a young age that they should strive for high-income, high-status jobs (engineer, doctor, lawyer). Yet that was the path to success 50 years ago, not today. As the article mentions, you can have a huge income while still having lots of debt, being unable to afford a home, etc. - especially if you live somewhere with a huge cost of living, like the Bay Area.

When you are reliant on income, your money scales linearly with the effort and/or time that you put into your labor. (Actually, sub-linearly - <USER2> company you work for captures the majority of the value.)

Conversely, to become wealthy, you must build ownership in something. Then, your money accumulates exponentially as a function of your labor input.

One of the most successful people I know worked manual labor jobs, bought a small HVAC business, scaled it up, and now has contracts with most office buildings in one of the largest cities in the US. He is richer than 99% of FAANG engineers.

[https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936](https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936)

<comment><USER6> > you must build ownership in something

You can do this by buying index funds, too. That's sorta the whole idea.

> He is richer than 99% of FAANG engineers

Would he be richer than 99% of FAANG engineers who lived the same lifestyle he did during those years and invested the savings in a standard diversified portfolio?

<comment><USER7> Possibly, but remember, investing in a diversified portfolio doesn't have the same risk profile as starting an HVAC business.

This is essentially an example of survivorship bias. How many people starting HVAC businesses just go out of business within 5 years instead?

It's not much different than a FAANG engineer buying a bunch of Apple stock in 1998. They could have immense wealth or have gone bust if Apple had gone bankrupt as was the most likely outcome at the time.

But with a diversified portfolio we know the outcome, about a 5-10% gain per year over a long-ish period.

<comment><USER6> You're right, my point is that a saving-focused FAANG engineer (SFFE) likely has a better risk-adjusted path to wealth as a "worker" than the "ownership" path described by 'gringoDan.

An SFFE who was similarly "lucky" with a high variance approach (in their case, by eg, investing in AAPL at the right time) like the anecdotal HVAC businessman would be much wealthier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _> "Are people who make $200k middle-class?'_

We have to distinguish what exactly we're asking.

Do economists and social pundits classify $200k income as "middle class"? Clearly some don't. Some sort of meta survey would have to answer who considers them "upper class".

However, do workers in America earning $200k as a salary from a job _self identify_ themselves as "middle class"? Yes, they absolutely do.

This is how many people (in America) self-identify their class:

\- lower class: living on welfare, food stamps, and federal subsidized housing; or including those struggling without any government assistance but working 2+ jobs to make ends meet

\- middle class: workers with jobs in between lower class and upper class

\- upper class: able to live off interest income of investments

<comment><USER9> A family of 4 making 60k a year that has to carefully budget all expenditures should VERY CLEARLY not be lumped together with a single dude in his 20s pulling in 200k a year at a tech job.

That guy might not have quite the fancy apartment he wants but can pretty much pay for anything else he wants (a tesla, fancy vacations, every electronic gadget he wants).

This whole thread is full of rich tech people trying to lump themselves in with people in far different economic circumstances because they are uncomfortable with the fact they they are rich.

It's gross.

<comment><USER8> _> they are uncomfortable with the fact they they are rich._

The issue you're overlooking is that many $200k earners _truly don 't believe_ they are rich. It's not that they "secretly" think they're wealthy upper class and just want to lie to you.

It's not unusual for an employee earning $200k as salary from FAANG to _feel_ like it's a middle class living. However, if that same person earns $200k/year purely as _capital gains interest income_ from US Treasury Bills and therefore _never has to work at a job for the rest of his life_ , that's the magic threshold to feel "rich". I.e. "FU money" means "rich".

(Yes, you can certainly disagree with those boundaries but I'm just trying to explain how people think.)

It's the necessity of _working at a job_ that makes them feel like they are in the "middle class". It doesn't matter if it's a white-collar office job instead of a blue-collar factory gig. They can't be "uncomfortable with being rich" if they don't think they're rich in the first place.

I don't see how we can have productive discussions on social progress if we poison the well by slapping labels on $200k workers that they themselves don't actually believe.

<comment><USER10> I don't understand this argument. I agree that they don't believe they're rich, and they're not intentionally deceiving themselves. But they are also wrong.

<comment><USER11> If I have to work a job to keep a roof over my head, I'm definitely not rich.

<comment><USER10> That's something an investment banker can say as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've spent many years in the US at many income levels, and my conclusion is that the middle class in the US is genuinely very large and includes people making hundreds of thousands of dollars. When someone making $200k says they're still middle class, that's not some rich person nonsense but an accurate description of their life. They're upper-middle class, but still middle class.

If you're a software engineer making $200,000 and talking with a teacher making $39,000, you're making more money but fundamentally you have most things in common. You're living similar lives, it would make sense to be neighbors, friends, date, etc. (Part of this is social class, but not entirely.)

Now consider encountering a hedge fund manager who flies everywhere in a private plane. If you met this person at a party, you'd probably wonder why they were there talking to you. You'd have essentially nothing in common with them. This person is fundamentally in a different class. I'm not sure where upper class starts, but based on personal experience it takes much more than $10 million.

</comment><comment><USER13> The article would have you believe that class is a result of wages. It's not... it's the outcome of social structures. There's a corellation between money and class... but money is not the only factor.

> None of this is to say the Times' "middle class" are the real victims; the > 95 percent of Americans below them are doing even worse.

No, please... tell me who the _real_ victims are. </snide>

Not to get too far off the rails here, but i think this article is too wrapped up in conversations about Lower/Middle/Upper wage-bands. That's a distraction from the more serious conversation we could be having about Class, which is distinct from wage-earning.

Class is about control:

Ruling Class --> Management Class --> Working Class

If the terms of your lifestyle are dictated to you by a boss, you are working class.

If you can't stop working forever, today, you are working class.

If you're not powerful, you are working class.

There's a very slim chance that anybody reading this isn't working class...

When we think about other people "below" us, we're not recognizing that these are our brothers and sisters in a continuing struggle for freedom from oppressive social structures.

Wages come from bosses. If you have a wage, you're probably working class.

We would all do well to remember that most of us are on the same page.

We shouldn't let the Managing Class tell us we're different from each other, because we get different wages.

</comment><comment><USER14> I can see where people are coming from considering themselves middle class making 200k household income. In order to to have the things my parents had growing up in California today (own a decent home, saving for retirement and 2x college funds, go on vacation every couple years), 200k is a reasonable goal. That wouldn't make my household anywhere near median income, but it would meet a the American cultural ideal that many people are working towards.

Incredibly, my Dad was able to provide these things being the sole earner in the family as a construction foreman.

</comment><comment><USER15> There's no correct answer to this. The answer clearly depends on _where_ people live.

<comment><USER16> No, it's not. If you make 200k in the Bay Area you're not middle class.

<comment><USER17> Even in the Bay Area you can get a decent apartment or home mortgage for $40-70k a year. Taxes on $200k are gonna be less than $25k. Parking and gas are a few hundred at most, food might be as high as $1000 if you've got a big family or eat out a lot. Let's guess high and say another few thousand for utilities, phones, etc. Let's also say you've got some family health crises your insurance won't cover that run to $10k out of pocket.

That leaves you at least $90,000 free and clear. If you can't live comfortably and save for retirement with ninety grand a year, you either have some outstanding expenses (severe medical disability, etc.), or you're making some very bad decisions.

<comment><USER18> I literally just looked at home prices in the bay area. I found a literal handful of homes/apartments available in that price range. One was a 300 sq foot apartment, most of the rest were unbuilt lots. I'm not sure if you're talking about auctions or foreclosures, etc. Can you elaborate on that? I can't even get a home in my much lower cost area for that price. I can tell you $1k/month for a family of three in my area is typical grocery expenses before eating out. We can certainly cut back but bargain basement is about $800/month unless we're eating nothing but ramen and cereal.

<comment><USER17> I'm talking about the yearly rental rate/mortgage payment. This is my main source: [https://smartasset.com/mortgage/what-is-the-cost-of- living-i...](https://smartasset.com/mortgage/what-is-the-cost-of-living-in- san-francisco)

It's possible I lowballed some things, but see my other comment. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20415130](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20415130)

<comment><USER19> Taxes and insurance on that 1.3m house are going to be another $2800/mo I say from experience. Living here is much more expensive than you're guessing, cost of living needs to be factored in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The unspoken tragedy of this is how the IRS limits for "wealthy" were developed in 1913 when $250K as upper-limit was equivalent of several million dollars now.

They seem to have zero interest in re-calibrating those high brackets into something more meaningful to account for the 100 years of continually inflation.

<comment><USER21> It certainly doesn't help matters that housing prices have massively outpaced inflation for many years. Cost of living still mattered when the brackets were set, of course, but there weren't the common and enormous differentials that we see now.

At $250k it's perhaps less relevant, but it's basically impossible to assess how "high income" $50k/year is when rent is anywhere from <15% to >50% of that value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> To me the distinction between middle class and upper class is if you can pay a group of people a salary and still accumulate wealth yourself. Also, are you free yourself and do you have to work?

The line between middle and upper middle has more to do with disposable income and which consumer habits they hold.

<comment><USER23> > ... if you can pay a group of people a salary and still accumulate wealth > yourself.

Are you referring to business owners? Or paying for full time help around the house?

<comment><USER22> Owners.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Class is about wealth, not income. Some people have extremely high expenses, for whatever reason: senior care, dependents, disability costs, locked into a shitty mortgage, absurd regional housing prices.

I encourage everyone to stop looking at income as a class-definer :)

<comment><USER18> You forgot healthcare costs. Many businesses either don't offer or have really, really bad healthcare options. Why it's still considered something tied to businesses and not the individual I don't know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No. One of the biggest and most destructive myths in America is that upper class folks are actually middle class. A $200,000 income puts you in the top 10% in every metro area int he country, and in the top 5% most places. That's upper class, not middle class.

This myth is particularly pernicious in the area of taxes. The top 25% minus the top 1% earns half of all income. These people need to be taxed like upper income people, not middle class people. Confiscatory taxes on the "top 1%" (or people making $10,000,000 per year, or wherever the line keeps getting moved to) can't raise sufficient revenue to fund a modern welfare state.

In the U.K. and Germany, the 40%+ tax bracket (both countries have a top bracket of 42-45%) kicks in around $60-70,000 of individual income, or about double the median income. In Sweden and Denmark, the top tax brackets kick in around 1.5x the median income. The second highest tax bracket doesn't kick in until 6-7x the median income.

In Sweden, about 15% of people pay the highest marginal tax rate. If that was the case in the U.S., the top tax bracket would kick in above $120,000 household income. That makes total sense. These people are very well off and should be subsidizing the rest of the country.

<comment><USER25> I think its important to consider that in the Nordic Model, people making more than $200k still benefit from social programs such as health care where in the US generally only the poor benefit from government assistance programs. I would be much more willing to have much higher taxes if I believed that I would benefit from the programs that they pay for.

<comment><USER4> I agree with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's not how much you make, it's how you make it:

\- dependency: allowances, public welfare, UI, grants, bursaries, inheritances and trust funds, scholarships etc.

\- labour: paid for fungible work. (piece work, hours of labour)

\- time: paid for individual time spent. (salary)

\- knowledge: paid for things that can be taken and reused e.g. analysis, opinion, assessment, advice, teaching.

\- performance: paid for outcome only you can deliver. e.g. litigation, sports, music, prizes, bonuses, gambling.

\- risk: paid for taking/holding risk, priced-in compensation for perceived potential loss. e.g. leverage, brokerage, insurance, liquidity.

\- capital: charging rents on a capital asset. e.g. real estate, dividends, loan interest, franchise fees, IP licensing.

\- power: taxation, tributes, bribes, etc.

We can dress up the amounts people make and make up vanity excuses, but these are what you get compensated for, and there is definitely a hierarchy. Everyone likes to think they are middle class, but what really defines social position is how and for what you are compensated.

</comment><comment><USER27> In the US? maybe.

But then race is a large factor, as well as money.

In the UK money rarely buys you class. You are born into your class, and unless you have elocution lessons, or go to a grammar school (or a sink school for the opposite direction) then you stay like that.

<comment><USER28> Yup. It's sickening. What's worse people seem to be comfortable with the status quo. If everyone was of my mindset there'd have been a revolution by now. But people seem to adjust there view point to give themselves a more comfortable life. Better to not think about the inequality of the world or to rationalise it as 'right' than to live your life bitter. Or guilty if you happen to fall in the upper classes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> $200k for a single wage earner is definitely a lot (also for a lot of higher income people, aren't wage earners), but $200k for a household is like in the ~92th percentile. [https://personalfinancedata.com/income-percentile- calculator...](https://personalfinancedata.com/income-percentile- calculator/?min_age=18&max_age=100&income=200000#results)

There are a lot of definitions floating around for the middle class, but a family in the 92th percentile is probably more similar to a family at the 50th percentile than a family in the 97th+ percentile.

</comment><comment><USER30> The strict focus on income and wealth when discussing class is peculiar to my European perspective. To me, there are large overlaps of working class and middle class, as well as of middle class and upper class, if one is only concerned about income and wealth. Culture and values are part of class and I can't understand the discussion where it is completely left out. Passing as something else than what you were brought up as is very hard. People trying to pass is an eternal source of drama and worry. Spending beyond your means in order to pass is a common reason for financial ruin.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you live in the bay area, first you'd need to save $200k for a downpayment on a house. That would probably take 3-5 years at that salary if you can be frugal. After purchasing a house, your mortgage is going to be something like $5k - $6k per month. You will still need to be very frugal and will not have anything left to save or invest. You will not be living "the high life" as someone from the mid-west would assume with that salary, but you would own a home that will probably appreciate.

</comment><comment><USER32> It depends. Class is not about income. It's about net worth, IMHO. If you _need_ to keep working to maintain your lifestyle, you're middle class.

</comment><comment><USER33> I subscribe to the ideas offered by Buffet, Bogle, Dalio, and pretty much the entire Bogleheads community.

To wit: No matter how little is earned, saving and investing a percentage will result in relative wealth over time.

I have seen it work for people. I have not seen it fail. I believe it.

</comment><comment><USER34> In San Francisco, yes... In Topeka, Kansas you have a ranch and 50 acres.

</comment><comment><USER35> In terms of economic class demarcations, I find the Marxists' definitions much easier to follow and reason about. If you own capital, you're a capitalist. If you work for a wage/salary, you're a worker. You might be an extraordinarily affluent worker but your relationship to capital is the same. Also, some might be part-time capitalists and part-time workers.

<comment><USER6> Most engineers in tech will have the majority of their net worth growth come from returns to capital and imputed rent as they approach retirement age.

Does that mean they shift from "worker" to "capitalist" over the course of their life? I'd say there's some value in having a term distinguishing those who will predictably be in that state from those who will not be, no?

<comment><USER36> Is that meaningfully different than being a "pensioner"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> That is why we use the term "middle-income", because it is defined in relatively straightforward ways.

The whole reason for this discussion is the lack of sharp categories when talking about class.

</comment><comment><USER38> :-/ I make $300k / yr.

I live in a 10 x 18 room, in an apartment with 3 room mates that has an acceptable kitchen and a cramped living room.

I save > 50% of my income, which is nice.

But I also spend ~ 80k / yr on medical expenses.

I guess I'm upper class if "hoping to retire to a remote part of the world at around 35, and live off ~20k / yr til I die" is a reasonable hope. But also that's just ... ill.

I hate the "upper / lower / middle class" model because I don't think it really is a meaningful way of slicing society anymore? It's a very post-WW2 idea of how our society is organized and what's desirable.

I'd tend to start slicing along a set of lines like: \-- urban / rural \-- race \-- age \-- degree of community support / culture \-- type of labor (knowledge, service, manual, ...)

I'm working on building long term community structures (one of my low-key goals is to buy and convert a church into a community space). Because the "I'm X class!!!" is dumb; it treats people as totally not dependent on their community. Unless you're willing to pay for community builders to do their work, you're not going to have any real community.

(btw, this is why I can't stand people skeptical of affordable housing and the like: why do you think it's pleasant to live in neighborhoods with a robust variety of people? because often people that aren't working all the time can do things like maintain a community garden. Which is only possible if they can live in your community.)</comment>


Sencha Touch 2 Allows Developers to Code iOS Apps With Windows PCs - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2012/03/sencha-touch-2-allows-develope.php#.T1YYKdgaIcs.hackernews <comment><USER2> > 'Sencha Touch 2 Allows Developers to Code iOS Apps With Windows PCs'

Stupid title. It's been a JS framework all along, it obviously can be coded on Windows/Linux.

I got the point though, Sencha Touch aims to look as native as possible. Well, that is really far fetched. I am working on a Sencha app, and Sencha Touch sucks. Especially the Sencha Touch docs are BS, single line descriptions, very pissing off.

But no other framework is as good as it, yet. Stuck with it for now.

<comment><USER3> No the title is correct, you can now create an iOS IPA for the App Store on Windows.

Did you encounter any other issues apart from the bad documentation? We're considering Sencha Touch for a new project and - as you said - no other framework seems to be as good as it.

<comment><USER4> I tried Sencha Touch. Light years better than JQuery Mobile and other platforms. But I agree - documentation is HORRIBLE. Both the standard ones and the ones you find in forums - hardly anyone discussing their problems in StackOverflow also. It was so horrible I decided to cut my losses and just make a native app.

<comment><USER5> Same here. The doc provided contains very few _working_ examples. Support on forums is nearly non-existent. They have good tutorials videos but once you start adding functionality it hits the fan. I originally wanted to save dev time but unless you're making a static app, or a RSS feed you better go with java or objective-c.

<comment><USER3> Oh dear... I'm looking forward to build a prototype soon then. Indeed when searching through their forums for a spreadsheet style grid component I found plenty of unanswered topics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _So, we spent time with device manufacturers understanding their implementations of WebKit and what we ended up doing is building specific implementations of our core performance APIs for each specific platform._

This is the problem with Android in a nutshell. Having to tune an HTML framework for _each platform_ is just nuts.

</comment><comment><USER7> The important question is: have the fixed their awful documentation and clunky demo apps?

<comment><AUTHOR> Some of the demo apps are better, some basically the same. Overall improvement, I would say but kind of subjective.

<comment><USER5> "The new layout engine in Sencha Touch 2.0 is so fast we had to use a high speed camera to measure it." source <http://vimeo.com/30296006>. Read "the improvement is so tiny you couldn't see it, so we slowed it down for you to see". The responsiveness on Android was horrible (check forums). Seems like the only real improvement so far.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Uber clone demo with RethinkDB - <AUTHOR> http://nearby-cabs.param.xyz

<comment><USER2> It's pretty neat, nice example on what you can do with change feeds :)

One of the websocket fails though: WebSocket connection to 'ws://nearby- cabs.param.xyz/socket.io/?EIO=3&transport=websocket&sid=E00UJLl1JkxBXlhmAAAG' failed: Error during WebSocket handshake: Unexpected response code: 400</comment>


Foreign Policy Led to the Biggest Covid-19 Outbreak Among US Troops - tren-hard https://www.thenation.com/article/world/iran-coronavirus-sanctions/ <comment> tren-hard [http://archive.md/1nluA](http://archive.md/1nluA)</comment>


Everyone Has an Accent - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/14/opinion/sunday/everyone-has-an-accent.html <comment><USER2> The article focuses on how standard an accent is, but to me the main factor is whether it's familiar enough to the listener for nuanced conversation to be understood. All English speakers are familiar with the Western US accent and British RP. But faced with an accent they haven't heard before, they miss nuances.

By 'nuances', I'm not talking about literary subtleties. For instance, when you ask if someone can do something and they say "Okaaaaaay...", there's a lot of content in the inflection of the aaaaaay that tells you how likely it is to happen. That content is different for different accents.

Since it's a hopeless cause that everyone will learn to speak with the same accent, people working in global businesses should learn to understand the major world accents. It seems like an order of magnitude less work to understand an accent than to speak it.

In the tech world, it's pretty useful to be able to understand Hindi, Mandarin, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Australian, Singapore, Israeli, and Filipino accents.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is definitely useful to keep in mind, but I think one point that might not be represented adequately is the utility of a standard. I understand that there are difficulties for people speaking in a nonnative accent, but there is also actual value in being close to standard and having less accents considered standard. When many people are specializing in many things, having a standard way of speaking allows us to more quickly understand one another and skip the basics. The judgement that I personally make when I hear a non- standard accent is not that they are lower in status; it's simply that it will take more work on my end to understand them, and thus I'm less inclined to deal with them in particular because of the language barrier and my being lazy.

<comment><USER4> > but there is also actual value in being close to standard and having less > accents considered standard

So who gets to decide what is standard and what isn't and why?

<comment><USER5> We do this by consensus, instinctively choosing whatever is most typical for the powerful, or perhaps a slightly exaggerated version of that.

So: doctors, lawyers, politicians, rich people, random TV personalities, CEOs, generals...

<comment><USER4> So the same accent as Malcolm Turnbull, Jacinta Ardern, The Queen, Donald Trump, Leo Varadkar, my Polish GP, my Italian dentist, Elon Musk, Alan Sugar and Duncan Bannatyne.

I'm not sure that works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a child I had a strong South African accent, although I could not hear it. I remember visiting some relatives in the north of England and being very surprised by their accents - and saying to my mother, "thank goodness we don't have accents!". I now have an American accent and equally don't hear my accent when I talk, and laughed at a recording I recently heard of my childhood accent.

<comment><USER7> My mother is Australian and my father is American. We (my two sisters and I) had a distinct Australian tinge to our speech which was obvious in elementary school. This caused me to actually miss test questions on syllabification in class, since a more typical US accent would say e.g. i-de-a but our mother broke it into i-dea. Mom actually protested that one to the teacher.

I've lost most of that except for a residual tendency to say eye-ther (either) and tomahto (tomato), which my Strine wife smirks at.

<comment><USER8> I'm Australian born and bred, lived here my entire life, and I say 'tomahto' and 'eye-ther'. I'm also firmly on the right-hand-side of the trap/bath split.

It's a mistake to think that there is a single Australian accent.

<comment><USER9> There's definitely a few different Aussie accents.

I live in central Melbourne, and most people I meet have an accent very similar to a Kiwi accent, close enough that after only a year since I came from NZ, most people think I'm an Aussie. The accent has been easy to pick up, just say 'feesh and cheeps' and use a high rising terminal (like you're asking a question), and you're good to go.

However, go to the outer suburbs, or rural Australia, or up the coast to NSW or QLD, and you get a whole array of different accents. You've got the ocker accents, the wog accent, the aboriginals have their own accent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _My family back in Madrid would have a hard time understanding the Spanish of my English-speaking students in my first-semester classroom._

There's good reason for this. In English, if you pronounce a vowel wrong or leave it out, you have an accent. If you pronounce a consonant wrong or leave it out, you're unintelligible. Spanish is closer to the reverse, where the vowels are essential and the consonants are supplemental. If you're native to one language you'll need a lot of pronunciation drills to get good at the other.

<comment><USER11> > If you pronounce a consonant wrong or leave it out, you're unintelligible

I don't know anything about Spanish but this seems like an overgeneralization for English. There's rhotic and non-rhotic accents. Public figures start dropping their gs to appear folksy. My dad's side of the family says "the" as "da" and they're understood if occasionally lightly mocked.

<comment><USER10> I'm overgeneralizing both on the English side and the Spanish side. But there's enough truth in my description to cause speakers of one language to focus on the wrong parts of pronouncing the other language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not just foreign accents that might lead to discrimination. After 25 years in the US I still have a German accent but I'm pretty sure that's less of a liability than a southern or african american accent (or vernacular, probably), at least on the coasts where I'd be likely to job-hunt.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> > Worldwide, nonnative speakers of English outnumber natives by a ratio of > three to one.

I was vaguely aware of this, but hadn't really thought about the numbers.

<comment><USER13> For reference: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers)

In the event it's not obvious, English is 3rd in terms of native speakers, but you'll need to calculate all the others to compare with _all_ non-native speakers of English.

<comment> jake-low Of the languages on this list, here are the subset where non-native (L2) speakers outnumber native (L1) speakers by a factor of two or more:

\- English (378m L1, 744m L2)

\- French (77m L1, 208m L2)

\- Malay (77m L1, 204m L2)

\- Swahili (16m L1, 82m L2)

\- Thai (21m L1, 40m L2)

Technically Thai isn't _quite_ 2x, but the error bars on these numbers are generally big.

Some languages have an opposite distribution, where nearly all of the language's speakers are L1 speakers. Bengali, Japanese, Portuguese, and Wu/Shanghainese are in this category, as well as perhaps Spanish (only ~14% of speakers are L2, which surprised me). Many others fall somewhere in between.

This would make an interesting data visualization.

<comment><USER14> Thailand's population is around 68 million. So they are saying that only about a third of Thais are L1 speakers of Thai? That seems quite strange.

<comment> jake-low About 20 million people in northeastern Thailand speak Isan, a dialect of Lao. There's also a long tail of languages spoken in minority communities. Thai is widely spoken in Bangkok but the rural areas are much more of a patchwork in terms of languages used. As I said though, these numbers have large error bars so it's hard to be very certain of what the actual distribution looks like today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I consider it a point of pride that I can understand virtually anyone speaking English no matter how strong their accent is. I assume it's from being around a lot of people that learned English as a second language.

It would make sense that one of the factors that has made English successful is that it's very forgiving of varying pronunciations. Some other languages are much more precise.

But it does often require a lot more effort to understand someone speaking with a heavy accent. A really great podcast, History on Fire, is hard for me to listen to because the author has a strong Italian accent. I can understand it perfectly well but it's mentally exhausting so I don't listen regularly. I consider it a shame because I like the content.

</comment><comment><USER16> Accents are also a class signal. Given that it's easier to adjust your accent than to change people's opinion on them, it's probably worth maki g the effort to soften up the accent.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've been trying to make my own accent. I sometimes hear people pronounce things differently and prefer that way so I start trying to say it that way. I guess less of an accent more just preferred pronunciations.

<comment><USER18> I also do this. There are some words that I prefer to pronounce as Brittish English for emphasis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> As much as I agree, let's obviously not judge people based on accents, I find this a bit ridiculous. I can't help but raise an eyebrow at the idea of visiting let's say France, completely butchering pronunciations, and then claiming that anybody who corrects me just has a different accent. There's obviously more or less correct ways to speak a language...

</comment><comment><USER20> [https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/is-there-a-place-in- am...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/is-there-a-place-in-america- where-people-speak-without-accents)

</comment><comment><USER21> I've lived in enough different parts of the U.S. that I've lost track of what sounds the vowels are supposed to make. I sound odd wherever I am.

<comment><USER22> I can relate. I've lived in many areas of the US, and picked up bits and pieces of accents from here and there. I'll even pronounce the same word differently at times without even realizing it, the most notable word being creek, pronounced either "creek" or "crik". I'm liable to pronounce it both ways in the same sentence!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> >that nobody hearing their American accents presumes that they are less capable, less ambitious or less honest than if their R's had a nicer trill

I don't know if i'd say...less capable personally, but I'm a Urban-Modern- Australian english speaker, as distinct from what I'll call the lower-class suburban australian, rural-strine, or "snooty adeladian-recieved". I've included 4 accents there where most older australian academic literature seems to recognise 3, and I'm not including the various ethno-tinges based on how you might pronounce the phrase "fully-sick sub-woofer" for example.

I've been personally told my accent sounds "upper-class and educated" from an american perspective, which I find hilarious considering I think i sound like an absolute bogan whenever in the presence of americans/english. However, I've also been told by non-english speaking persons that they really like the way myself and my wife speak: something to do with clear annunciation or something.

Anyway, back to the main point: I question whether this is true, because you can bet I pick up on and have various aesthetic opinions on the various english accents. I find it very hard to believe that there are not connotations attached to how various english speakers speak and pronounce other languages. This would make english some kind of "magical" language that overcomes social-regional-contextual interpretation, and I simply do not believe that can be the case. And i know enough american friend's experiences overseas. I know there were parts/towns of the middle east while travelling I was advised not to stay in for very long with my accent, and I am well aware of the general advice for certain american accents to take advantage of the ambiguity and identify as canadian while travelling.

For the record, the non-exhaustive list of accents I identify and their subjective opinion are something along the lines of (keeping in mind, I'm not saying these are my explicit-acted on opinions, they're the subjective- connotations I recognise them as carrying in my own subculture):

> Californian: loud, extroverted, a little bit of extroverted stupidity, > annoying.

> New-york: loud, extroverted, annoying in a different way.

> Boston-twang: personally, a bit humorous, not exactly intellectual (park the > car in the harvard yard)

> Various-southern US: slow, naive but friendly

> English-RP: snooty, but never hear anyone who actually talks like this, > except on some BBC programs, where sometimes it comes across as a bit > comical like someone's taking the piss.

> English-other: pretty friendly/approachable in general, obviously can't list > all the many english-native accents

> Scottish: cool, though stronger ones border on unintelligible until you get > used to it

> Irish: extremely cool + attractive

> New Zealand: its practically urban-australian except for a handful of fish > and chips-esque give-aways, basically one of us

> Wog-english (using the term in a friendly way, not as a put-down): generally > to cover the greek, lebanese, italian accents. Does have lower-middle class > connotations for better or worse.

<comment><USER24> I think the point there is that an English speaker who learns a second language doesn't suffer the social stigma of a someone who learns English as a subsequent language.

(I have a pseudo-scientific theory that the Australian accent's more piercing qualities are a consequence of having to carry clearly through dense bush. But a more compelling explanation is that it's an accent of expedience that accelerated some of the phonetic changes in British English once a small and socially-mixed group of speakers split off from the main pack.)

<comment><USER23> Is that true though?

I mean, there's the obvious point that if you're coming from the in-power group, its very hard to be "meaningfully stigmatised" by the out-power group no matter what. You will be identified, but if the other group has little power, no one from the in-power group really cares. And for better or worse in the majority of contexts, native english speakers are coming from in-power groups, and the context of them meeting with people with english as a second language is going to be usually in the context of dealing with low power groups and stereotypes.

I, of course, recognise that happens, and that it will be a common occurence in east/west coast america.

But take the "baka gaijin" phenomenon as a contrasting stereotype for example. I don't accept that english speakers learning a second language, outside of the context where the english speaker is just authoritatively in the positive- power relationship, suffers no social stigma or consequences when trying to learn a second language.

See also connotations around gringo, bule, laowai, gweilo, etc.

Given that WITHIN english and context there are disparate and conflicting connotations of having various accents, and that we (and others) can discern various ethnic and regional cross-language influences, i think its either a very localised-specific phenomenon (i.e. with the caveat as long as you're power dominant white english speaking person in the coastal US cities) or something that can't just generally be held to be true.</comment></comment></comment>


Dropbox CEO Drew Houston Opens The Door To Samsung's Competitors - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/27/dropbox-ceo-drew-houston-opens-the-door-to-samsungs-competitors-wed-love-to-work-with-you/

<comment><USER2> Today's TechCrunch whine: they should know that it's spelled the "Apple II"; I failed to understand what the "Apple 2 phase" referred to until they explained it.

<comment><USER3> It must be pretty good reporting if that's the worst thing in the article.

<comment><USER2> Heh, yeah, but I didn't claim it to be the worst thing.

It was the first thing that annoyed me enough to sort of start questioning "why am I reading this?". Then I sort of re-realized the source (a site with "tech" in its name) and got annoyed, so I quit reading and went back here to ... whine. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's really confusing to have capitalized title with name that is also a verb (and the surname being a city name didn't help). I had to read it several times before it clicked.

> Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to Samsung's competitors:

would be much better.

<comment><USER5> Since "Drew Houston" is an appositive and not essential information (there's only one CEO of Dropbox), the name can be surrounded by commas (or even omitted) which adds further clarity:

> Dropbox CEO, Drew Houston, to Samsung's competitors

<comment><USER6> That sentence structure works well in a paragraph but I think it affects the flow of the phrase negatively when used in a title. (imo)

I abuse the <noun>, <appositive>, structure heavily in my own prose :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's very shrewd/dishonest to say that your company is in its Apple ][ phase. It leads the audience to believe that in the future, you will be as successful as Apple is today.</comment>


Opa – An open-source, general-purpose policy engine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/open-policy-agent/opa <comment><USER2> Co-author of OPA here. I'm happy to answer any questions about the project!

<comment><USER3> Is one of you Greek?

<comment><USER2> There are no Greeks among the core contributors :-(

<comment><USER3> Was curious if the OPA acronym for the project is an allusion to a often used word among Greeks.. an exclamation during celebration or when lighting this deep fried goat cheese called saganaki after it's been sprayed with alcohol.

Technically asking a question about the authors is a project question, so I'm not sure why I got downvoted :/.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Came here for the expanse reference, found a really cool product awesome work!

</comment><comment><USER5> If you just want to know what language was used to write this, I can spare you the visit to github: it is go.

</comment><comment><USER6> Unfortunate name conflict with [http://opalang.org/](http://opalang.org/)

<comment><USER7> Get used to it. After 40+ years in this industry, every single 2,3 and 4 letter acronyms are already used by Something else.

<comment><USER8> But it's annoying when a popular name is used for new projects. Like elm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> OPA is also a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) sandbox project: [https://www.cncf.io/blog/2018/03/29/cncf-to-host-open- policy...](https://www.cncf.io/blog/2018/03/29/cncf-to-host-open-policy-agent- opa/)</comment>


One of the 520 people laid off by Zynga yesterday doing an AMA on Reddit. - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1fpbv1/i_was_one_of_the_520_people_laid_off_by_zynga/

<comment><USER2> One of the only companies around which almost always come into limelight because of something going amiss.</comment>


Nanorods: water-oozing material could help quench thirst - <AUTHOR> http://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=4282 <comment><USER2> That is a really fascinating result. It would also explain the mechanism of graphene sieves. One of the really amazing behaviors of graphene is that you can pour water on top of it, and pure water pops out of the bottom[1].

[1] [http://phys.org/news/2016-03-revolutionary-graphene- filter-c...](http://phys.org/news/2016-03-revolutionary-graphene-filter- crisis.html)

<comment><USER3> So it deionizes the water too? Wow. If this technology does the same, doesn't that imply we'd need to supply people using this as a source of water with electrolytes and minerals for the water?

<comment><USER4> I often wonder if this matters anymore, since food has a high amount of salt, and minerals.

<comment><USER3> The food in developing countries doesn't necessarily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty exciting, and the applications are almost unlimited, and many of them highly marketable. Athletics clothing alone is billions of dollars around the world, but this a key too:

 _" "But before we can put these nanorods to good use, we need to be able to control and perfect their size and shape," added Nune, the paper's other corresponding author."_

It seems to me that could be a long process, along with the challenges of scaling up manufacturing. Still, at some point, this is going to be a very useful material.

</comment><comment><USER6> _These papers also noted the process was theorized as early as the 1990s by scientists examining crystallized proteins. Back then, scientists noticed they only saw water vapor surrounding hydrophobic sections of protein, while liquid water would surround other areas. The researchers proposed that there was some sort of process that enabled the water caught between hydrophobic protein sections to suddenly vaporize._

This seems reasonably obvious, at least in retrospect. Trap a very small number of water molecules in a region where they can't combine with others to form a liquid, and it's reasonable to expect those molecules to simply waft away. A molecule made from two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom weighs much less than the diatomic oxygen molecules in the air, so why wouldn't they displace those molecules?

</comment><comment><USER7> Could someone with appropriate background explain where does the energy to evaporate the water come from?

</comment><comment><USER8> Can they work the other way - could you build a solid state dehumidifier with these?

<comment><USER9> Activated charcoal is already a pretty good dehumidifier; this just seems to take the adsorptive properties of high-surface-area carbon one step further by giving the water an easy path "out" once it's adhered and amassed, keeping the carbon from getting "used up."

I wonder if a similar thing could be done with silicon nanorods, given the similarity between activated charcoal and silica gel. "Silicon nano rods" sounds a lot like asbestos—and apparently asbestos _is_ adsorptive, just not of water—but asbestos is micro-scale at best. Meanwhile, SiO2 nano _tubes_ apparently exist[1], but don't show any particular adsorptive properties.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_nanotube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_nanotube)</comment></comment>


Kirsten Gillibrand's Ambitious Plan to Turn the Post Office into a Bank - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/business/2018/04/kirsten-gillibrands-ambitious-postal-banking-bill.html <comment><AUTHOR> The market gives us Wells Fargo. The most profitable way to run a bank is to steal from your most vulnerable customers -- no executives go to jail, and the shareholders are perfectly happy destroying lives so long as the returns are good.

So then we get a government solution. Sigh.</comment>


A Warning about Microsoft Internet Explorer and too-short custom 404 error pages - <AUTHOR> http://www.404-error-page.com/404-error-page-too-short-problem-microsoft-ie.shtml <comment><USER2> Thanks for the heads-up.</comment>