Educated Fools - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/156000/educated-fools-democrats-misunderstand-politics-social-class <comment><AUTHOR> I know it's maybe too political for HN but I found this article more interesting than expected.

Its main idea is "the loss of social standing, social claims, the social assets that working people used to have, because, in our time, education is so much more decisive".

<comment><USER3> The authors point about having little meaningful intersection with the bulk of society's high school educated masses reminded me of David Brooks old piece: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/how-we-are- ruinin...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opinion/how-we-are-ruining- america.html)

He details joining a friend of his with a high school education to lunch. He soon recognizes that they jumped a guardrail of sorts in how she was baffled by this fancy world created by elites caught in the microcosm of a gourmet Italian sandwich shop. He reads into the encounter pretty deeply, but backs up a bunch of other elite practices that make elite culture out of reach. It's a pretty interesting read.

Pretty shocking to read this Educated Fools piece where the author basically admits to what are more commonly called unintended consequences.

The authors bit about Trump embracing the poorly educated is interesting. It jibes with something I read once but can't find the source at the moment. It had something to do with his frequent dealings with construction workers and going out to speak and meet the people crafting his buildings. He as a developer supposedly developed a rapport and respect from those working class folks. Also being a landlord in his early days dealing with poor folk. I think I heard about that in this Japanese documentary bit [https://youtu.be/rwNTjlEpJD0?t=443](https://youtu.be/rwNTjlEpJD0?t=443). Kind of interesting to see a Japanese perspective on the guy and how they craft stories. His crazy dealings with professional wrestling too and all that gaudy raucousness also intersects with that other class of people. Seems like its not a recent foray for him, he's been engaging with folks in other classes for sometime by the looks of it. That's probably something that went unnoticed for a long time till folks started to scrutinize what the heck happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for sharing this. The piece makes an urgent point that needs to be appropriately acknowledged. It falls in the vein of arguments I've come to term as "relational poverty" or "relational inequality" arguments (what Popper is presented as terming "moral inequality" in the piece) that most social science research I've come across has failed to or is ill-equipped to account for. I do recall Amartya Sen making a definition of poverty along these grounds (in the sense of dignity, or lack thereof, in what one perceives as their social environment) some years back but haven't been able to trace it down since or see if any further work was done on it. (If someone reading this happens to know more about such work, I'd appreciate being directed towards it).

The point made about Trump expressing a liking for poorly educated folk is also noteworthy. Even if the more sensible in the political class come to acknowledge the paradox we face, the matter of articulating and expressing it appropriately arises. Currently, as the author notes, the "college for all" approach doesn't appear to be resonating electorally (that said, there are a number of confounding factors one could put forth) but rather is serving as a reminder to the once robust (perhaps this is romantic nostalgia) working- and lower-middle-classes of their lowered social standing and relational dignity.

Update: I have found a presentation of the relativistic perspective on poverty by Sen (1983). Apologies for the earlier bit, that was laziness on my part. Worth a read.

[https://are.berkeley.edu/courses/ARE251/fall2008/Papers/sen8...](https://are.berkeley.edu/courses/ARE251/fall2008/Papers/sen83.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Sen's work is closely associated with philosophical and economic concerns about exploitation, not just poverty, and I think it's a shame that's missed out on. J.E. Roemer was the main theorist of post-Marxian theories of exploitation, but I've observed that when the discussion centers around poverty rather than exploitation, the resulting theory is much more tame. Also related is capability theory and the various objections to purely negative liberty (something I've also noticed many people miss out on - to speak of liberty as if it is strictly a concept that belongs to the liberal tradition and no other tradition may use it, and to then claim that the only real kind of liberty is negative liberty).

Poverty is the kind of thing you can fix within the current system, or at least make attempts to alleviate. Exploitation and domination are not, which is why you will never hear an elected official talk about it as a systematic issue inherent to the current system - if they knew about the literature on the topic, they'd know they're powerless to do anything about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm going to break slightly with the authors opinion here and say we do solve every problem with "be more like us" but that doesn't always mean college. Other solutions involve "why don't you just move", better mass transit / fewer cars, some form of retraining (not college per se) etc. There's a whole basket of diverging "elite" values such that even if they stopped telling people to go to college tomorrow they would still be despised by the working class.

Maybe I am being one of those dastardly, snobbish, grating coastal elites. But if you don't like me and my solutions, what else is there? There is literally nothing I could suggest to help the lower class which can't be construed as "just be more like me".

<comment><USER7> Part of the problem is the suggestion that they need help in the first place. So what Joe the garbage truck driver didn't go to college? So what he has a small house in a kinda shitty neighborhood? Maybe he's doing the best he can and maybe he actually has a pretty happy life. The working class doesn't need pity and suggestions to move or go get a degree. Here's something novel: why are the roads in nice neighborhoods always better repaired than roads in poor neighborhoods? Instead of telling the working class to move or get college degrees, maybe advocate for equality in road repair.

<comment><USER8> The situation at that level is far more dire. A non-union garbage truck driver doesn't have a house. Can't afford a family. No health insurance. No retirement plan or pension.

And if you go to any large company, you'll find that it's the same there unless you're in the upper "employee" caste--you're working for a contractor company, and have the same bad deal.

For all the discussion of diversity, any pathway out is pretty much closed. Even if you're in a historically disadvantaged group, the large company doesn't want to set a precedent that would establish the contractor group as employees. So the large company will block training and advancement, extracurricular networking opportunities, etc.

And historically disadvantaged minorities will be overrepresented in the contractor group because of both economic and educational disadvantage.

And to throw salt on it, arbitration agreements that you are forced to sign to work will preclude you using a class action suit to try to fix it, like Microsoft's testing group did in the 1990s. (Thank you Roberts court.)

<comment><USER7> That's a blanket statement that just doesn't hold true. Reality is much more mixed.

Here: [https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Waste- Management-1/reviews?fcount...](https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Waste- Management-1/reviews?fcountry=ALL&fjobtitle=Truck+Driver)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Man, this is gold.

I for long tried to write something along those lines, but I think the author did summarise my thoughts better than I could've done myself.

The class conflict — something that western literati class keep denying acknowledgement, is really the driver of much of social progress. And this holds more even more true in the West than in the East.

The class warfare is there, it exists, and it is what has been responsible for the prime majority of political developments in the West for the last 30 years.

<comment><USER10> >The class conflict [...] is really the driver of much of social progress.

How so?

<comment><USER11> I'm thinking: because it gives people a strong, active, positive goal to pursue. Members of each class want to migrate to the higher one, or at the very least, have their children break into the higher one.

If you're discriminated or treated unfairly by a group of people, the natural reaction would be to separate yourself from that group of people, not fight it. But if for some reason you _really_ want to join that group - <USER2> because they're of higher socioeconomical class - then you have a motivation to fight and reform things.

<comment><USER12> > I'm thinking: because it gives people a strong, active, positive goal to > pursue.

Your statement comes from your philosophical stance. As it happens I share your view about my own motivations. Despite that I recognize that most people do not.

Also: your position sounds American (are you?). The idea of "class" and most of the literature around it is European, where class is not something that people can typically change. Even in the US there is little class mobility.

<comment><USER11> I'm from Europe, though I have enough exposure to US culture that my own thinking does blend European and American ideas (to the extent you can even define "European" vs. "American" thinking).

Anyway, I think class mobility is actually a real thing over here. For one, a good chunk of Europe was under Soviet rule until ~1990, and in the early days of proper market economy, _a lot_ of enterprising individuals moved up a few rungs in the ladder. Secondly, it's hard to not see our industry as a perfect way for easy upward mobility. Myself, I jumped up a level just by virtue of preferring computers to sports as a kid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In my view, education has begun to act like wealth, because education is a form of wealth, and the productivity divide between wealth and work is increasing.

Still, I'm skeptical of the whole idea, because it just seems too convenient for Republicans to drive a wedge between the Democratic party and the working class based on a perceived social division rather than real policy: We took away your unions and safety net, but by golly, we'll protect your "dignity."

<comment><USER14> >We took away your unions and safety net, but by golly, we'll protect your "dignity."

Organized labor may not have been targeted explicitly like by Republicans, but Democrats haven't really been a friend to them either [1]. Both parties have been on board with the neoliberal agenda for 40 years.

[1] [http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/01/democrats-paid-a- huge...](http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/01/democrats-paid-a-huge-price- for-letting-unions-die.html)

<comment><USER15> Yeah, when you expand your scope of analysis to include the labor movements of other nations, it's striking how anemic and disenfranchised organized labor has been in the US.

Unions in other countries have historically been a voice of the people, and don't have a lasting allegiance with any political party or movement. I have no idea why American unions collapsed; perhaps, it was justified in the moment, but the present absence of a strong voice for organized, skilled labor is tragic.

<comment><USER16> > Unions ... don't have a lasting allegiance with any political party or > movement

Not true in the UK - the unions have a strong relationship with the Labour party, in terms of providing funding and endorsement of leadership candidates. Indeed, in its original form [0] the Labour party was created as the political wing of the unions. Many unions automatically took a cut of their members' subscriptions as labour party funding.

Battles between the unions and the Conservative party have been key a feature of UK politics, e.g. the Miners' strike in the 1980s [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners%27_strike_(1984–85)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners%27_strike_\(1984–85\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As a society, a portion of the workforce has to do the plumbing, make the furniture, serve coffee, and do all the jobs that don't require college. The people doing those jobs shouldn't need to spending four of their most productive years not working and accumulating debt. They should just start four years earlier, or get vocational training for a few months to a year.

Instead of college for all, what's needed is an alternative pathway from high school to (optional) industrial training/ apprenticeships to jobs, skipping college altogether for those who don't want/need it. Employers need to be able to hire non-college-graduates without worrying they're getting the dregs of the college system. They should have fine-grained input into getting exactly the sort of skills they want into their workers, and a large portion of this program (for some of the low-req jobs, the entirety) should involve no- strings-attached industry placements to get those employers comfortable with the people they'll be hiring.

<comment><USER18> Those jobs tend not to pay as well as jobs that require a career focused college degree (e.g. business, engineering, computer science, and even teaching).

<comment><USER19> There are plenty of college degrees that pay no more, or considerably less, than several of those jobs.

<comment><USER18> Sure, but those are generally degrees which are well known for having poor employment prospects (philosophy, art, history, etc.). Doesn't that just change the advice from "go to college" to "go to college in one of the majors with a track record or leading to a good career"?

<comment><USER20> Yep, some plumbers are making way more...even than grads in "majors with a track record" (whatever that means).

The issue is that most jobs pay too little. College is not a reasonable way to achieve income equality. You can graduate as many people as you like, it doesn't create more jobs (this is how majors get a track record...by controlling the number of people who apply).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It made me realize that the reason "Learn to Code" was treated as such an insult on social media is exactly its topical proximity to this very discussion.

</comment><comment><USER22> The class analysis is right, but the economic one is a bit bonkers.

1\. The people with college degrees are also debasing their own degree by pushing for more college, not just marginal college grads. That's not self- interest, just naivite.

2\. As others said, college is vastly overrated. The author gets that there is diminishing returns for new college grads, but doesn't see we are _already_ getting little bang for buck because there is a shortage of non-bullshit jobs, and what work doesn't demand society fails to teach.

3\. Author should spend time with the UBI crowd. Contrary to the popular imagination amoung guilty costalites of emasculated coal miners having to find a new line of work, actua poor people understand work is not dignifying and their is no shame in UBI (even if they think there is shame in means-tested welfare!) It's the rich Democrats who cling to education who regurgitate the dribble they were told about work being meaningful.

Gah, the author is sooo close to getting it. Just need to combine with something like [https://medium.com/@alexhowlett/introduction-to-consumer- mon...](https://medium.com/@alexhowlett/introduction-to-consumer-monetary- theory-78905b0606ca) and they'll be there.

</comment><comment><USER23> In Germany, like most places where 'University is free' \- they generally have strict rules on the numbers that can attend, so those with proper Uni degrees hover around 25%. (FYI in America and Canada 'post secondary' can mean something broader).

But they have something called 'Mittelstand' or middle industry - vast numbers of mid-sized firms that employ zillions of people, in particular, the take take in apprentices as part of the education program. Millions of kids pour into these programs wherein they learn one of a myriad of highly specialised trade skills. Said skills are _highly relevant_ to industry, and point right at employment.

There's nothing wrong with a History major, but maybe they're only good for people who really do want to do that, because the debt and cost to society of people who just want to 'tick the Uni' box is too much.

But consider the major social impact of training and employment: _Dignity and a Respected Role in Society_. This to me is the oft overlooked element. These people do something useful, material, gainful, often have unions (with board representation), they can pay for themselves and other people respect them as having an important role to play in society.

Obviously, this system institutionalises class to some degree. The ranks of those going on to higher ed are full of upper/upper-middle class kids, but, at least there's 'something with integrity for everyone'.

If Republicans were smart, they'd pursue this path because it's better for business, but I don't believe their leadership is forward thinking enough. The Democrats could play this angle too, however, it just doesn't have enough 'purity' and doesn't play the progressive angle hard enough.

It might be possible to start doing these things on the state level, or to elected a leader that starts to think in these terms coming from a different angle. We can only hope.

<comment><USER24> Germany also has an issue with its small and medium size enterprises being increasingly outcompeted, relatively weak demography, and a rural to urban hallowing that somewhat mirrors are what is taking place in China and in the states.

I don't want to make this argument, but I get the impression that the German economy looks somewhat similar to the American economy in the 60s and 70s, but has managed to persist longer thanks to its unique position in the EU and some very real competitive advantages, such as the quality of vocational training you mentioned.

I'm worried though that these have only delayed the transition to what you currently see in the US and UK. I'm a big fan of vocational training - most of my extended family came up in the trades - but I don't know if it's the pancia that both parties in the states seem to think it is, or if the German model is feasible or even preferrable in this context.

<comment><USER23> Yes that's a fair point. But Germany still make a lot of machinery and equipment that the rest of the world really needs, moreover, they supply their own auto industry.

Thinking creatively, perhaps there's an opportunity to point the apprentice systems towards 'white collar skills' as much as anything else. Lab workers are apparently in high demand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > This all fits the claim of the French geographer Christophe Guilluy about > his own country in his 2016 book The Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the > Periphery, and the Future of France.

+1 for Christophe Guilluy's book, it's really eye-opening, even more so considering that he wrote/published it even before the "gilets jaunes" movement started.

Not sure there's a solution for this "periphery" problem, but I see it in my parts of the world (Eastern-European country and EU member), it certainly is present in France and I suppose in other Western European countries, and according to the article is also a real problem in the US.

<comment><USER26> God it's rampant in the UK, completely bisected between London and the rest of the country.

<comment><USER27> Not much more than 100 years ago, 40% of world trade passed through Liverpool: _40%_! It's staggering how quickly things can turn around, and I find it just unfathomable how the wealth somehow just leached away to other places over time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The social trend discussed in the article has taken over the world. Not just the USA. I realized this a bit late with the "gillet jaune" uprisings in France. The working class from outside the cities were upset with the increasingly disconnected ruling class and "bobos". [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobo_(socio- economic_group)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobo_\(socio- economic_group\)) (this wikipédia page really should be much longer)

</comment><comment> yoz-y > We don't trust them, and would never vote for one of them. Why should they > trust or vote for one of us?

For the same reason I wouldn't trust a doctor without a degree proving they did due diligence for years. I know this feels different because "anybody can do politics" but without a large worldview the measures taken will be inevitably short sighted.

Now, it works the other way too. As the article states, losing touch with the base leads to problems.

<comment><USER29> I was thinking about this recently. I'm _not_ qualified in politics, and I'm aware that my knowledge is too limited to be properly aware of how limited it is, but the thought was:

Democracy isn't so much the best form of government as the best steering wheel to keep the government aligned with the interests of the people. The best actual form of government is technocracy, but technocracy with no democratic accountability is just going to competently achieve things that the people may not care about or may actively dislike.

<comment><USER30> _> The best actual form of government is technocracy_

In a fantasy world where we actually had sciences for all the things governments are asked to do, sure.

But in the actual world we live in, no way. You can't have experts running government if there are no actual experts.

<comment><USER31> or worse - experts that have an inbuilt bias (which they might not even know they have!). For example, economic experts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think this essay is missing a discussion on the theories of what make university graduates better paid. The two main theories are:

1\. Human capital. People learn stuff at university which makes them more valuable workers.

2\. Credentialism. Universities select (or pass) people who were already going to be valuable.

Now let's look at what we might mean by "valuable":

1\. You can fool hiring managers into thinking you're competent - good resume writing skills, good interview skills, an impressive certificate.

2\. You can fool your manger's manager into thinking you're competent. All the above, plus you're good at churning out superficially credible explanations and justifications. Some critics of university might argue that they've optimised towards teaching students how to fake competence - 4 years of general education isn't enough to produce a truly competent thinker in a field (not reliably for a large fraction of society) but it is enough to teach them to write a clean-looking essay with proper citations, and to churn out paragraphs with "topic sentence, evidence, analysis, transition" (but not enough time that this will get too stale - you'll still be able to grade the students from A-E).

3\. You'll actually be good for your company / society because of your ability to analyze things, domain skills, intelligence, conscientiousness, etc.

We could also talk about general vs domain specific skills, but they're often fairly well correlated. Competence in a domain requires thinking skills, and thinking skills are best built up in some real domain where skills can actually be tested (not just abstract "critical thinking" courses).

<comment><USER21> To an employer, this seems kind of missing the point: you spent your time at college. Did you do real work yet?

<comment><USER5> As someone who's about to graduate with an MEng degree: No, I haven't done real work yet, and I hope that most employers don't share this attitude which gets me in a catch-22. I need to have worked to find work, but to work I need to have found work. The only option seems to be these "graduate jobs", a large percentage of which demand arcane tests modelled after IQ tests and tedious timed calculator tests in order to even consider me.

Graduated with 70%+ with the title "Master of Engineering"? Not good enough, do an IQ test to get the job. Write a compiler for a self-designed embedded language for your final project? Not good enough, you forgot how to concatenate lists in MATLAB. Oh, and you don't get to find out your prospective salary until you have an offer; until then, you'll be happy to know it's "competitive", whatever that means.

At this point, I'm not sure if I'd recommend anyone go to university unless they want to stay in academia or something. I'm not convinced it's worth the hassle if this kind of job search is the end result, and if you're going there for knowledge, you're better off not getting yourself into debt with a 4% interest rate.

<comment><USER33> Who is recommending university for knowledge (at least in STEM?) If knowledge is all you want you're far better off going to Wikipedia, libgen, sci hub or even buying the books. Heck if you really need lectures for the classes (or from researchers even!) you can legally watch them for free on YouTube!

University helps shape you socially and drag you through some cultural stuff that a lot of people would otherwise ignore, that's about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This one really hits home for me. I'm at a cross roads in my life right now and kind of lost. I had a great job working as the number 2 at a small business that I lucked into, but for various reasons beyond the control of the corporation, had to close. I'm in my late 20s, and as this article puts it, merely a high school graduate. I can code and do IT work, coordinate problem solving between businesses, read scientific texts, understand statistics and am very capable of managing others, amongst many other skills. Indeed these were all attributes that allowed me to rapidly rise up the ranks. But trying to find a fulfilling job without a Bachelor's is beginning to feel like a fool's errand. My parents were both college grads and waited a long time to have kids, so I don't have the problems with rationalizing and asking questions that article presupposes—indeed my inability to accept orders and not have intellectual freedom drives me to keep looking for rewarding work, against the odds.

Despite being described as bright my whole life, I've never done well in an academic environment for a few reasons, I could readily absorb the material but I was terribly antagonistic towards teachers who generally desire a sense of authority in their class rooms. I also as an adult have been diagnosed with ADHD, which to me at least explains a good portion of why I struggled in school. I never did my homework and was told endlessly that going to community college was the best financial option, and I was very freaked out by student loans, the problem being that community colleges put much more emphasis on grading coursework, which ended up being my downfall.

Part of me thinks I should just start lying on my resume about having attended a 4 year STEM program, because the credentialism seems so real and absolutely bullshit. I have work experience, if I got an interview they'd probably be blown away with this "high school graduate", but I never get interviews, no matter how qualified I am. I've even been encouraged to do this by people in the "educated elite". They tell me to just study a given schools curriculum, learn some names of professor and call it good enough. But I really hate lying about myself, it feels so contrary to my nature. As the article mentions, I feel very depressed with my life and reading people who say that a degree is a golden indicator is genuinely depressing. I don't know what to do, and I honestly feel victimized by credentialism, which makes me resent the concept of dropping everything and taking on loans to go to school. (At least my interest rate would be good now!)

<comment><USER35> > I could readily absorb the material but I was terribly antagonistic towards > teachers who generally desire a sense of authority in their class rooms. I > also as an adult have been diagnosed with ADHD, which to me at least > explains a good portion of why I struggled in school. I never did my > homework

I'd guess this is the root of your problem. People don't want to hire those that are terribly antagonistic towards authority figures (a.k.a their boss) and don't do their homework (a.k.a work).

<comment><USER34> Being antagonistic to authority is something I left behind in my teenage years. I've learned a lot about social grace since then, to the point that I consider it a strong point. Also, homework (as a rather pointless forced learning aid) is so unlike working given my ADHD it's ridiculous. Moreover, as I've since been diagnosed with ADHD and given the ability to medicate and be cognizant of this weakness it isn't the issue it was when I was a teen in college. At this point in my life I have a body of accomplishments from business, as alluded to in earlier paragraphs.

Really though, how would an employer know either of these things; it's not like I'd put them on a resume or a cover letter. I added it only to give context to why going to college didn't work out for me at the time, not to describe why I think I have trouble finding a job I enjoy. I'm confused by the unconstructive nature of this comment, it seems purposefully derisive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> _Now those of us with postgraduate degrees and who are in the elite of the Democratic Party live in our own Versailles, and we don't know any working- class people either—except perhaps the name of a barista at Starbucks or the woman who comes by at night to clean the office._

I think this is one thing churches did really well; people from all social spheres coming together to serve their God. It didn't matter what job or status you had. Everybody was equal.

I'm sure the same could be achieved today without the religious aspect as well. There's plenty of volunteering opportunities, for example. Being part of a amateur sports team can bring people from all classes together.

<comment><USER37> Right, except that we've rebuilt a world where working-class people don't have time for leisure activities like amateur athletics and volunteerism due to the second full-time job they need to pay the rent.

<comment><USER38> Not to mention we've built great walls separating rich and poor in the form of highways, so the classes never share common ground, literally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I totally agree with the article, but to me the saddest part of all of this is I'm unconvinced that a college education is actually even that useful. (I say that with a four year CS degree). Most majors, to be blunt, are pretty useless in terms of real world skills. The argument is "they teach you how to think". I don't know how you would even measure that, but it doesn't seem that true, especially since colleges are hotbeds of intellectual fads that are easily disproved by reality. The only prerequisite to learning to think is making an effort at it. College used to be a good signal for that, but now its not.

So we essentially created a "virtuous" class of "educated" people that aren't as smart as they think they are, talking down to people that are struggling economically by telling them that they need to spend 100k to "learn to think". It's amazing things have stayed relatively peaceful.

It's funny to me because arguably I am part of this liberal elite, and even I feel a lot of contempt and irritation towards my increasingly smug compatriots. People really need to tone down the "flyover state" and "redneck" rhetoric. I definitely didn't vote for Trump, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't get why people did.

<comment><USER40> >I'm unconvinced that a college education is actually even that useful.

How is this a question? How many high school grads have you interviewed and thought you could spin them up to the usefulness of a graduate from nothing in a reasonable amount of time/effort?

Education is expensive, sure. We can talk about that... but useful? It seems obviously useful to me.

<comment><USER41> Not sure if you're missing the point of the poster above.

Poster is more likely asking whether the education gained in college is actually useful vs the doors opened by having that diploma.

If one dropped out of college right before graduation with 99% of the education, likely that person would end up with worse off job prospects compared to the person who completed their program

<comment><USER40> The diploma is useful in certain fields I'm sure. Although I doubt most CS employers would really hold you to it if you explained you never completed your final quarter but aced the interview.

However, they said college education not college diploma. They're clearly talking about the skills learned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> as Chinese lives in uk, they had been my questions for a long time: why did you guys voted for david cameron, barack obama, (any politician, really) at all? had they ever struggled to pay their bills? do they really feel your pain?

<comment><USER19> Good question. There are certain professions, and really only a very few, that prepare one well for the task of campaigning for office. Lawyer, military officer, business executive, actor, a few others. All of them are from the professional class, nowadays, with the partial exception of military officer.

Once upon a time, a lot more power was held by local politicians, who were often from the working class. Over time, more and more of that became centralized, and the ability to speak well in public is not something that even most professional class jobs prepare you for. Put a programmer up against a lawyer or a CEO, and the programmer will not do well. We not only have mostly professional class politicians, they are overwhelmingly from only a few of those professions, because there are only a few that prepare you to speak, from a script, to a large group of strangers, staying on message and keeping your message short and clear.

<comment><USER42> understand. it turns out to be a marketing problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> salt-licker Great article that exposes many college-educated blind spots, in particular that education is not a panacea for inequality. But the proposed solution of more democratic workplaces — somehow convincing capital-holders that investing in human labor rather than automation is in their own self-interest — feels like swimming against the tide of history.

Meritocracy is a dangerous ideal for humanity to continue to hold so dearly. IQ is partially genetic, and with a low ceiling — sooner than we're ready to accept, nobody's brain will hold a candle to AI. Equating our economic value with moral worth will only lead to further cultural division, despair, and anarcho-primitivism. Instead, let's try to build a culture, society, and government that takes the intrinsic value of human life as an axiom, before it's too late.

<comment><USER43> > nobody's brain will hold a candle to AI

Nobody can outrun a car, either, but cars haven't made humans obsolete. Instead, we use them as tools to accomplish our goals: just as we will with AI.

<comment><USER44> But cars have made horses obsolete. Although horses aren't extinct, owning one is more of a hobby in the western world.

AI is cognitive automation. Not only will blue collar jobs be replaced, but so to will white collar jobs as well. We're approaching the point where capital alone (without labor) will be able to generate wealth in more general cases. When that happens, employing people will be a hobby. When that happens, humans will need other ways to make income than with their labor.

<comment><USER45> Deal with it when it happens.

How much time was spent worrying about what would happen when energy was too cheap too meter? It didn't happen.

It's easy to come up with problems to worry about that don't actually exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> > There is no foothold left in big cities, or anyplace else where the global > winners live, for high school graduates to exercise even a tiny bit of > power. There's no church to slot into as a deacon, no chance on the shop > floor to rise as a foreman, no union in which to become a shop steward or > officeholder, no big-city political machine that in this digital age needs > anyone to go door to door. Our wage workers have been stripped of every way > to exercise the kind of morality or have the opportunities that come so > easily to the top fifth. At least in the case of the Industrial Revolution, > as described by E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, > there was religion—the new Methodist faith that gave the English working > class a sense of moral superiority over their owners. But in the working > class remade and discarded for the postindustrial age, there is an uptick in > drug abuse, one-parent families, and indebtedness. The top fifth of the > country, the most educated, may well be more moral—and, God knows, even more > religious in terms of actual Christian values—than the current white working > class. But that, too, represents another form of class oppression, worse > than in the Industrial Revolution—the top fifth have appropriated all the > morality.

I've never seen an article that is simultaneously semi-self-aware yet contains such a high level of arrogance and condescension. That on its own makes it an interesting piece.

<comment><USER47> It is interestingly skipping period after 1832 (where The Making of the English Working Class ends) and now. The social problems were quite large and very real.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Great article, covering something we should probably keep in mind.

Higher education is often a needless gatekeeper for keeping those with generational wealth wealthy

Often a subtext that I feel is missing here is that in the end people aren't that different on average, and our parent's wealth matter more

Today, zip code is a pretty accurate predictor of success, there's so much embedded in a zip code such as wealth, industry, and safety that affects kid's outcomes.[0]

[0] [https://www.huffpost.com/entry/too-often-student- success_b_1...](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/too-often-student- success_b_10132886)

</comment><comment><USER48> Raw intelligence, by itself, is just that: raw. A wise and learned individual has to go beyond multiple choice exam pedigree and actively seek-out the nuances of history and the real world rather than retreating into a comfortable filter bubble. Furthermore, the lack of quality mentors and parental involvement has contributed to a decline of empathy and decency. Otherwise, the result is plenty of "smart" people who are below average in other life domains including self-awareness, philanthropy and civic participation.

</comment><comment><USER49> Very glad this was written and posted. However, it could have been shorter. If education were indeed the true social value, we could just improve the quality of public education, add an additional year or two to high school, and essentially fold the undergrad syllabus back into the public system. Simply, the purpose of college is to create a culturally separate managerial elite in society.

The basic problem is the legitimacy of the elite it has produced in the eyes of people subject to it. There was always tension, but code changed everything. PhD holding managers today are often functionally illiterate in their domain of responsibility, and that has a huge cultural impact.

There is reliable predictive power in explaining the culture wars of today as the reaction against a managerialist elite using radical cultural change in an attempt to dilute the bargaining power of competent working people, and to insulate itself from a working class from whom they are increasingly undifferentiated.

This is a pet issue of mine, and glad to see it's getting traction, as it's really the defining conflict of today.

</comment><comment><USER50> This raises some good issues but does ramble.

Coming from a country where tertiary education is more accessible and cheaper, there is decent free healthcare and more social welfare, all of which give more people the option of higher education, what ends up happening is people go to University too much. Universities have undergone a huge explosion in headcount and footprint. As publicly funded institutions, they have funded this expansion with a kind of Ponzi scheme where more and more full fee paying international students are required to sustain the machine. At the same time there has been a lot of training institutes and vocational colleges popping up, some with dubious quality and intent. The stimulus for this seems to be that young people can't get enough quality work, and so they try and educate themselves. They can do this partly because of the largesse of their boomer parents. This effect is happening at all levels, including fields where lots of education is already required, like medicine, law and engineering.

So I would agree that pumping education is not a panacea. It is starting to feel almost exploitative around here (Australia). Weddings, healthcare and education are surefire ways to extract money from people even when the economy is in a slump. At least you get cake at a wedding.

</comment><comment><USER51> Funny how being credentialed by a proper institution (using this phrase because it is more precise than just "education") is as important as ever for achieving certain social standing and at the same time there is a constant stream of voices preaching "universities are imploding, college is a waste of money," etc.

<comment><USER52> Both can be true simultaneously, if you expand the concepts. Nobody will disagree that attending an Ivy provides some prestige and social standing. Of the universities imploding, most are smaller liberal arts colleges that can't withstand changing demographics (less college students). College is indeed a waste of money if you don't complete your degree program: you get none of the benefits in the job market, with all the debt you took on-- the worst of both worlds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Yeah, these leaders are trying to get free university. But what if a lot of voters don't want to go to university?

</comment><comment><USER20> The UK is a good example of this...the Labour Party went from solidly working class with good connections to voters to a party of the wealthy, metro elite with no connection to voters.

You can point to individual factors of circumstance (an ill-conceived 2015 leadership election) or big structural issues (rising inequality). But the end result is the same: no empathy, no interest. It is funny the article talks about race...did everyone just suddenly become a racist overnight? Or did they just decide they don't like being talked down to? Which is more likely (bearing in mind that the people talking down do like to talk about race a hell of a lot).

The left will get nowhere by trying to "learn to talk" to these awful poor people (sarcasm). They don't care. Not interested. Give the working class their voice back (Blair and Clinton did just fine). Go back to suburbia, find another job in which you are way overpaid for incompetence, and stop talking. Btw, Trump has done this...he is the worst candidate, the worst president...and still the Dems can't muster anything up...how is this incompetence even possible?

Just generally, as someone who falls firmly into the category of metro elite...I have never understood why other rich people feel the need to always tell poor people what they want. Politics is to help those people but it has gone from helping them to telling them what they should think, how they should live, etc. Is it any wonder that doesn't win votes?

</comment><comment><USER54> I grew up in the author's city in the midst of long term economic abandonment and decline. It was terrifying, to be honest. I think the spread of this across the industrialized Midwest elected Trump. I have had many arguments with fellow liberals about the globalized economy. In a nutshell, I don't believe in it, if the result is an alienated wasteland where the old working class economy used to be. We, the elite (I include myself as I'm a well off and successful engineer), have destroyed the social contract by supporting and implementing outsourcing and automation. The result may well be the destruction of our democracy. Cheap consumer goods from China are not worth this price. The article is only wrong in downplaying the potential of bringing industrial jobs back to this country. That is essential, as a part of the overall change in priorities.

<comment><USER55> >implementing outsourcing

Exactly, this seemed completely missing from the hand-wringing about how what's wrong with the Democratic party is that it is just too elitist for the working classes now. There is in fact a lot of truth to that, but it is the economic policy, or lack thereof, of both parties has allowed capital, controlled by very few, to flow unimpeded overseas. If you want to retain a middle-class economic base, you have to take measures to incentivize capital to remain in the country.

My own employer is aggressively moving to shift all of it's technical knowledge work to India; companies like Accenture and IBM now employ more people there than in the US. There will soon be as little Knowledge Economy work in the US as there is old Industrial Economy work. Where will all of these college (or Denmark-style vocationally trained) end up working? Wal- Mart. Sell the people out twice and you will end up with some kind of revolt. You're not going to convince anybody at that point that it's the grad school gap that's killing America and that we should have a Ph.D. For All program to solve it.

<comment><USER56> > My own employer is aggressively moving to shift all of it's technical > knowledge work to India; companies like Accenture and IBM now employ more > people there than in the US.

Turns out "Beware the behaviors you incentivize" doesn't only apply to scrappy startups, but scales up to whole nations. If profit is the sole metric you judge companies/CEOs/boards by, don't be surprised by the lengths they will go to maximize it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think the title is appropriate. I read more and more content (in what used to be considered the more intelligent news sources) that I could pull to shreds line-by-line, yet the publications are successful and apparently this content is being lapped up. Their seems to be just enough sophistry, pretentious verbosity and reinforcement of existing beliefs to make the reader believe they have read an accurate and objective appraisal of the situation, and to feel confident to regurgitate this speciousness on command as if it's the truth. I'll read some obvious rubbish and can almost predict point-for- point exactly how someone's words will proceed - and these are educated people, supposed to be able to distinguish. It's depressing.

</comment><comment><USER57> This post has some relevant information:

[http://www.andrewlangman.com/articles/class-culture- gap.html](http://www.andrewlangman.com/articles/class-culture-gap.html)

Or just read _What So Many People Don't Get About the U.S. Working Class_ at:

[https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get- about-t...](https://hbr.org/2016/11/what-so-many-people-dont-get-about-the-u- s-working-class)

</comment><comment><USER58> The problem of modern liberal America is not a divide between educated / less- educated, or race, or any of that. Those are just symbols that make it easy for someone to try to pin it on those false issues.

The problem is that many liberal-thinking people, having believed that they (or the country) has solved many of the material and quality of life needs in their little pocket of the world (and told thus by the daily media), find rarer and rarer things to become their problems and occupy their consciousness.

In short, liberals ironically are the one-percenters of America. Because they live in relatively safe cities, with good incomes, and concerns for the distant future, they think that transgender bathrooms are the most important topic that should be discussed in the national priorities. Or that MeToo represents the daily worry of every reasonable American. Or because things are so comfortable and rich, why can't we afford to look the other way at immigration laws that we disagree with? Let's have another KQED segment on Latina artists struggling to keep their rent controlled studios in the Mission!

Well, the other half of the country, the 99%, are not interested in putting those rarified political issues before their daily, material struggles, the kind that don't make it to the front page of the New York Times because they're boring. Their unemployment, or only slightly better, their dead end jobs that have experienced no growth in the last 10 years. Their health plans that cost more and more, or their pension benefits that got cut. Or the rejection letters (or just no letters) that come when they try to apply for a different job, run by some company in the very liberal cities that spurn them, whose medium level execs make 7 figure salaries.

Maybe it's time we confronted the fact that unless you can cut off the coasts of this country, we will have to find a way to make the concerns of the middle of this country, our concerns -- concretely and strategically. Because if we don't, that middle of the country will vote to spite everything, before they vote to help themselves, and we will all go down together.

<comment><USER59> Honestly it sounds like you've been watching too much TV/Twitter. No one I know in real life is concerned with that stuff. Another article on the site talks about the "exhausted majority." Indeed.

<comment><USER60> I agree with you that the majority is exhausted, but unfortunately there is a very vocal minority in the liberal sphere, and they are not particularly known for being reasonable people. It makes it seem like the average person's problems and concerns are getting put on the back-burner, while the liberal favored special interest group of the day gets the spotlight. How can someone not be resentful?

I also want to point out that it's not just twitter/tv. You can see true policy changes happening in the schools and workplaces--at least within the west-coast liberal strongholds.

<comment><USER59> Well that applies to the right as well, doesn't it? I've heard of school districts reducing science education and talk of arming teachers.

<comment><USER60> Absolutely, though this article is focused on the left. The anti-science movement is especially frightening. I think it is related to what the article is talking about. The rejection of science being a kind of blowback

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I'm not sure how no one has figured out that the long-term goal of the Democrats is to eradicate the middle class entirely.

To be fair, it's not a Democrat or Republican thing at all; although, in recent years, the Democrats have become the public face of the (dare I say it) Deep State. Almost everyone in congress is someone else's puppet, controlled through blackmail or bribery. They do the bidding of faceless, nameless, un- elected globalists, who's long-term agenda is, and has always has been, the total control of all aspects of society.

Their mandate is to vote in favor of policies that benefit the elite, not the working class.

It is no accident that the education system in the US has become what it is today. It does not educate, it indoctrinates. It teaches kids _what_ to think, not _how_ to think. And those that do manage to get a four-year degree are often no better equipped to step into high-paying jobs than they were before. So they're not getting the job offers and they now have huge student loans to pay off.

The elite do not want a population of thinking individuals who ask questions. They want people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, but not so smart that they start questioning the system.

As Trump said, "The system is rigged". And as George Carlin said, "It's a big club, and YOU AIN'T IN IT."

</comment><comment><USER62> "If you can't do great big things, do great little things" \--Unknown

</comment><comment><USER63> > But the truth might be something closer to this: "It's only because of race > that we have any part of the working class turning out for us at all."

I've thought a lot about this, and wondered if we'll see a major flip post- Trump (perhaps a few more presidencies past), where the republicans somehow manage to shed their racial baggage and suddenly are the party of the entire working class while the Democrats are left with only the "coastal elites." Five Thirty Eight ran an article on those lines a while back... can't find the link, but that was also a good read.

<comment><USER64> If Republicans lose the racial baggage they are still substantially at odds with a substantial majority of voters on health care [1] and climate change/pollution/environment [2]. I don't see them becoming the party of the entire working class as long as that remains true.

[1] [https://www.kff.org/slideshow/public-opinion-on-single- payer...](https://www.kff.org/slideshow/public-opinion-on-single-payer- national-health-plans-and-expanding-access-to-medicare-coverage/)

[2] [https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public- vi...](https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-views-on- climate-and-energy/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Case in point. CNN segment mocking working class people. [https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1221999373829144578](https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/1221999373829144578)

</comment><comment><USER66> Conservatives are split about the changes the article discribes. Traditional conservatives are glad the labor movement was destroyed, and see the Knowledge Economy as good because it is the latest product of the unrestrained free market.

On the other hand, Trump supporters are very angry, but the problem is that Trump's program won't do anything at all to fix the problems that are making them unhappy.

<comment><USER67> > Trump supporters are very angry, but the problem is that Trump's program > won't do anything at all to fix the problems that are making them unhappy.

There's no way around the fact that more education (doesn't necessarily mean college) and greater labor force mobility (providing people with the ability to move where the jobs are) has to be a significant part of the solution. Stating the facts is not condescension, but I guess it can and does cause politicians to lose elections.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I read this and can't help but think that the real fools are the ones buying into the elitism narrative that the far-right has been peddling for years. It's a deliberate red herring exploiting the very human tendency to chafe at any perceived condescension.

If people in the US primarily voted the issues (that matter and affect them) instead of on the basis of nonsense, Democrats would win by a landslide.

Republican politicians are trading away relatively meaningless concessions (on things they likely don't genuinely care about like guns, LGBT rights, abortion, religion, etc) as a cover for tremendously detrimental policymaking that includes broad spectrum deregulation, huge transfers into the military- industrial complex, and massive cuts to social programs including education, healthcare, welfare, etc.

We know that's the game plan. The real fools are the people who continue to fall for this shit.

Edit: I should add that I don't necessarily believe everything about the Democratic Party's platform is valid. But they are unquestionably the better choice for the vast majority of voters.

<comment><USER69> I don't understand this predilection for believing that other people can't have genuinely held beliefs and values that are vastly different from our own. I hope we can one day come to understand that it's complete lunacy for Mobile Alabama to force Los Angeles to live by its cultural values or vice versa. But today is apparently not that day.

<comment><USER68> I never argued that the people themselves don't genuinely hold different beliefs about gun rights, abortion, religion, LGBT, etc.

I meant two things: 1. in terms of their effect on peoples' lives, these issues pale in comparison to certain other ones AND 2. Republican politicians are using these highly emotionally-charged social issues to induce people to vote against their own interests on dimensions of governance that would meaningfully impact their quality of life.

<comment><USER69> What makes you think you have any insight into what is in their best interest, which of their interests should be most important to them, or how they should measure their quality of life?

<comment><USER68> If you don't have cost-effective access to good healthcare, you could literally die. And if you're poorly educated, you're much more likely to be less financially well off and that could itself lead to all kinds of suffering.

But I get the sense that you're aiming for the presentation of being objectively insightful when really you're quite transparently arguing in bad faith for the sake of provocation, so I'll just leave it at that.

<comment><USER59> The democrats didn't deliver cost-effective healthcare or education or anything they keep trying to subsidize. Prices keep going up. Funny how that works. The smugness is just icing on the cake.

<comment><USER69> I don't think these details about specific policy outcomes is where the battle is. Look at the way he's responding. This isn't about whether your ideas have better outcomes than my ideas. This is about ascribing you with bad motives, disingenuousness, or portraying you as a simpleton who can't understand political manipulation. This is about controlling you, putting you in the bad/stupid box so you can be dismissed and controlled.

Their tactic is to call you stupid, liar, racist, sexist... You know the list. If you argue on their terms, if you start arguing you're not stupid for example, you're accepting their framing. This is a losing battle. Instead I find it's more effective to simply draw attention to their tactic. Once the tactic is revealed it loses efficacy.

If I genuinely believe you to be stupid, evil, disingenuous, etc. I won't be able to genuinely hear you. You're just making noise. I would encourage you to try this experiment out some time. Instead of arguing specific policy, point out the tactic. It's repeatable and quite telling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Education (and inflated government) is a new way of signaling a higher social state, similar to scholastic priesthood of the past.

It is entirely a social construct (aside from practical, concrete-math-based STEM and engineering).

Another real-life aspect is that passing through a really decent schools like MIT or Caltech (or Yale, as an exception) is a proof (by example) that one is capable of self-discipline, concentration, self-improvement, able to do research and learn on by doing.

Aside from that a degree is just and merely a social status certificate, a certificate of belonging to a higher social class (no matter actual skills and abilities).

I myself am from a third-world social shithole and never went to a high school. I could, however, beat a vast majority of so-called liberal arts majors and even some Stanford grads, which I regularly did on this very site before CoCs and bans for use of an "inappropriate" language.

So, there is nothing much to talk about. A crappy degree is a social status certificate, and obsession with language usage, long-words and polit- correctness and fancy abstract terminology is merely a signaling of assumed, self-proclaimed (and almost always absent) virtue.

</comment><comment><USER71> Lost me during the Warren donation paragraph. A learned person wouldn't support Warren so I am certain I've nothing of value to learn from the article. Up to the Warren paragraph I realized socialist-leaning parties suck more than illiberal democracy. No wonder globalists and socialists can no longer win in Europe.

College degree is non-essential for most people, unnecessary for at least 50%.

</comment><comment><USER72> TBH I'm indifferent to the rural working classes plight. I'm LGBT and they've proven time and time again that they aren't my friends (both growing up in flyover country and later after I escaped that wasteland by how they vote and how they treat my brothers and sisters who didn't escape).

If they want to vote against our shared interests and suffer the consequences, so be it. Me and mine will keep building without them and I won't spare a moments thought for their self inflicted suffering (except to be glad it isn't me).

<comment><USER73> I completely understand your position, and sympathize with it, but it seems a bit shortsighted given that you have to live with these people, and things won't improve for your "brothers and sisters who didn't escape" if things don't get better for them. They'll happily drag you and yours down with them. This is all to say that we're all in this together, and while your indifference towards their plight may be justified, it is not productive.

<comment><USER48> In general:

Give hate and antipathy no quarter. Where there is pain, it must our pain, or there will inevitably be revolution and chaos. Love without discrimination, even with those you disagree with, because they cannot be moved if we act like impetuous children by refusing to talk to them. Prejudice also cannot be convenient, or we likely possess internal inconsistencies we must face if we are to be honest and have integrity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Can someone translate this into:

Perceived problem, attempted solutions, potential new solution.

I have no idea what the hell the article is going on about - it reads like a rant by a typical politically active idiot.

<comment><USER75> Same impression

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> After finishing this article I can't help but think that he's writing about himself for himself than anyone else. Not everyone lives in Ivory Towers or is the partner at a prestigious law firm. I truly can't imagine this applying to any of the leftist activists I know; and by activists I mean they organize, protest, and collaborate multiple times a week. They're all working class people -- of the top of my head, off the ones i know personally, there's a retired school teacher, a caretaker for the elderly, a machinist, a waiter, an electrician, a nurse, a mechanic, an engineer, and a janitor. They all have various degrees of involvement in the leadership of the local D party and activist groups.

Just who is this article aimed at? I don't mean the article doesn't have some good points, but the way it treats this as a monolithic generally true problem immediately strikes me as incorrect. Dude's in a bubble of his own to think this is sage advice that can be generally applied.</comment>


Why Let Users Create Passwords At All? - <AUTHOR> https://nxtpass.com/blog.html

<comment><USER2> I have two computers I use on a regular basis, and I don't want to be condemned to having to do the one-time-password dance when I log in to your site from the second PC.

It's true that I'm a geek, but my girlfriend isn't (she's a gamer), yet she also has two computers she uses regularly. And she keeps threatening to get herself an ipad.

For that matter, my dad has a PC and an ipad at home (and he's neither geek nor gamer), and I think this sort of authentication system would irritate him into using a different site instead.

</comment><comment><USER3> My solution to this password issue is illustrated here: <https://www.nucleusdevelopment.com/_account> This is my new account login. (still in alpha testing, no live)

You can login with your password or just your username then click no-password login, an email is sent to your inbox, click the link, and your logged in.

</comment><comment><USER4> Seems like if you want the users to not have to remember/be responsible for passwords this way is a bit far fetched. Why not just OAuth or OpenID? Everyone remembers their Facebook/Google/Twitter credentials anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> If someone gets their Facebook password, your system is at risk as well. You trust someone not to use the same e-mail & password on Facebook that they use on every other site?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not really digging this system. Seems counter-intuitive.</comment>


Presumi – Create trackable resumes and manage your job applications - <AUTHOR> https://presumi.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> We created a product to help applying for multiple jobs (spreadsheets and sticky notes are an outdated and broken system). We just wanted to get your thoughts if possible, and maybe you'll find it helpful / interesting. Thanks :)

</comment><comment><USER2> It doesn't accept email addresses with certain characters (e.g. "+")

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay thanks friend. We've had some other issues with custom domains so we'll have a look into this :)</comment></comment>


Mark Zuckerberg and VCs Invest $100M in Startup Elementary School - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-04/mark-zuckerberg-and-silicon-valley-vcs-invest-100-million-in-a-startup-elementary-school

<comment><USER2> "The country ranks 14th—below Russia and other developed nations—in a Pearson study on global math, science, reading, literacy and graduation rates. One reason for that is a lack of funding for public schools, something Ventilla's hot tech startup no longer needs to worry about."

I don't know the details, but does Russia have better funded schools than the US? Or what does the author try to say by highlighting Russia as being better than the US at education?

</comment><comment><USER3> "Tuition costs about $21,000 a year..."

I love the incentive and ambition, but $21k/year makes this inaccessible to the kids and families this would most benefit.

Maybe the long-term plan is to scale in order to bring costs down? Can anyone shed some light on this?

<comment><USER4> It solves one the problems in the most important class of problems in the world: inconveniences facing young wealthy residents of Northern California.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I want to do this kind of thing for urban schools. Anyone interested in collaborating please let me know.

<comment><USER6> That's what I was just thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Startup Elementary sounds great because entrepreneurship does start young. I like that this environment will encourage young kids to pursue their dreams. Hopefully it doesn't lead to young entrepreneurs quitting school to follow dreams. LOL! Just Kidding…

</comment><comment><USER4> Private schools are now called "startup" school?

</comment><comment><USER8> Would like to see this mirrored in Canada.</comment>


Slackware 14.2 released - <AUTHOR> http://www.slackware.com/announce/14.2.php <comment><USER2> Slackware 3.0 or 3.1 was my first Linux distro. I remember spending many hours tweaking my XF86Config file to get my Diamond Stealth64 video card working, while worrying about the comment in the config about how the Vsync and Hsync params could cause your monitor to smoke if specified incorrectly...

I also remember in 1999, while installing servers with it, that you had to be careful to lot boot it on an open internet connection without first securing it. The number of running network server daemons the distros of the day started with is sort of mind-boggling now, and since inetd made it as simple as writing a shell script, there wasn't necessarily a lot of thought put into security. This, of course, wasn't a problem limited to Slackware.

<comment><USER3> Slackware 2.1 in my case, and the (in)famous SiS 6215C video card. And yes, I too worried about the Vsync/Hsync comment :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congrats to the Slackware team! I've been following the change logs so I was eager to see this release! Still my favorite operating system after many years. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Awesome! I've been using the release candidate for a while now and its been rock solid. Congrats Slackware team!

</comment><comment><USER6> I've worked with a lot of linux distros. I'm a Fedora person myself, but enjoyed Debian and Gentoo also.

For Slackware heads, why should I look at Slackware?

<comment><USER7> I used to run it, and I'm not sure there's value in it anymore. They often don't stay on top of security updates, and compiling anything just got worse and worse.

The last straw was the fanboys at the linuxquestions forum. It was cultish and creeped me out.

<comment><USER8> Three negative comments on this submission, that's some impressive anti-cult thing you've got going.

Slackware doesn't do "security theatre" updates. Whenever there's both a credible risk and a reasonable fix, you'll see an update, and it'll be quicker than distros that are multiple steps downstream from Debian.

<comment><USER7> You know, I felt really troubled to have been using something for 20 years and realize things had changed and it was no longer right and no longer good for me. I felt like a fool for having stuck with it for quite so long.

I realize that sounds like someone talking about a bad marriage, and I suppose we can generalize usefully on relationships of whatever type.

I think we must end up with longer-lasting bad feelings about anything we used to value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congratulations to the Slackware team for their hard work!

</comment><comment><USER10> Would be nice, if slackware went to a public VCS for greater transparency and assistance in the development process.

<comment><USER7> I've certainly wondered why they weren't interested in being more transparent.

<comment><USER11> The development _is_ pretty transparent, if you know where to look. The ChangeLog.txt is the main place where development updates happen (especially the -current ChangeLog, but security updates for stable happen in the respective release's ChangeLog). There's also the mailing lists, and the key people in Slackware hang out on the linuxquestions forums and ##slackware (freenode).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've used Slackware back in the day. Nowadays it feels like it's a terribly outdated distro. Why would anyone still use it?

The packages are pretty much up to date but the distro itself feels dusty.

<comment><USER13> I've used this analogy before, but here goes: Slackware is the muscle car of linux distros. If you own one, you're going to need to know how to get your hands dirty, but once you do the thing is going to be fast, lean, and stable. If you enjoy tinkering, swapping things out, compiling from source, editing configs without GUIs...Slackware is for you. If you just want to spin up a linux, install some packages (including all the default-to-on dependency trash that comes with them), and be on your merry way...I'd stay away.

If you want to learn Ubuntu, get Ubuntu. If you want to learn CentOS, get CentOS. If you want to learn linux, get Slack.

<comment><USER14> Why not use Arch and get the same benefits, along with extremely up to date binary packages and build scripts for basically everything?

\- former Slackware and Gentoo user

<comment><USER15> Because Arch is different and more complex.

A Linux distro is a Linux distro, of course, so differences are subtle and particular. Any distro can be manipulated as much as anyone wants as long as they know how and they can deal with the implications of their changes.

Arch has more scaffolding -- dependency resolution, etc. -- which is all very nice but presents its own Arch-specific learning curve and tends to get in the way if you want to do something that the "Arch Way" does not encompass.

Slack users can build and install the very latest source from upstream if they wish, or they can choose not to.

Dependencies obviously exist in Slackware. They are how Linux is structured. But, for some strange reasons, perhaps, Slackware packages seem to have fewer of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Yes! I have been waiting for this. Awesome!

To the people in this thread that claim Slackware is outdated and has no security updates: what are you on about? Neither is true.

<comment><USER17> I think part of the blame for this impression lays on a lack of communication on the main website. The last news update to the website, prior to the 14.2 release, was nearly three years ago.

I feel that it gives the impression that nothing is happening; at least to those not inclined to seek out Slackware related forums or mailing lists.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Slackware is still my distro of choice.

Simplicity, reliability and everything is still very unixy.

</comment><comment><USER19> Should I pick up Slack as my first distro?

I've tinkered a little with Arch before and liked that bare bone terminal experience, meditations on man pages and wikis, but it turned out that I didn't learned anything from that, except for how to do google search.

I want OS to force me do some dirty work with my bare hands and to thoughtfully grasp the *nix way, while be opened for tuning and flexible modding without enforcing me to do things in one strict manner, and it seems that Slackware is a way to go. I also like that, as I heard, it's is very well documented, old-fashioned and more BSD-like than any other linux distro. What can you guys say about that?

I know that as a newbie I'll suffer a lot, but as long as it's a good pain - I'm ready to live with that c:

</comment><comment><USER20> Does it still fit on 30 3.5in floppies?

</comment><comment><USER21> Well done. Who knew that what basically amounts to a searchable cloud-based chat service could reach a billion dollar valuation. Amazing.

<comment><USER22> You're thinking of Slack. Slackware has been around since the very early days of Linux.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What mailing lists are you part of? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Delphi jobs mailing list - it's pretty quiet [https://www.adug.org.au/delphi- jobs-2/delphi-jobs/](https://www.adug.org.au/delphi-jobs-2/delphi-jobs/)</comment>


Why your Android app doesn't need an exit button - <AUTHOR> http://blog.radioactiveyak.com/2010/05/when-to-include-exit-button-in-android.html

<comment><USER2> As an owner of a Nexus One, I have to say this is one of the downfalls of Android. The lack of an equivalent "Human Interface Guidelines" that there is for iPhone _and_ shockingly, the app approval process leads to a very inconsistent experience (due to ambiguous cases like this) between different applications; resulting in a poorer user-experience.

<comment><USER3> I'm less concerned by the UI. I think the market will gradually sort out; and I don't really mind that my file manager has a distinct look to my twitter feed, etc.

I am more bothered by the chaos on the SD card, and the apparently complete lack of guidance from Google on standard locations. It's just a mess of root directory folders of arbitrary names. You hope that your selected media directory names won't conflict with something that an app may choose in the future. (I personally use _music, _video etc. both to avoid conflict and to come up top in most alphabetical listings.)

<comment><USER4> The SD card in Android is a gibbering nightmare in far more ways than that.

For starters, that it's necessary at all! The first devices all had only 256mb of flash, but then the OS got bigger than that (can't upgrade older devices cleanly!), so they just doubled that to 512mb instead of doing anything sensible. Is there a _single_ "Google Experience" Android device with more built-in Flash than that?

What's worse is that they use it sparingly themselves but essentially force everyone else to -- Apps don't fit in the onboard flash, you can't even run Apps from the SD card, so everyone has to hack together their own asset system. Now the SD card isn't removable without breaking your running apps!

It's a heap of ill-considered shit. Nobody would even propose these idiocies at Apple, much less get them past their manager. Even Windows Mobile wasn't this bad, but mostly just because they didn't try to do very much. The Android team thinks they're clever -- but when the WM diaspora (<http://www.xda- developers.com/>) are the community that fixes up your shit, you're clearly not.

<comment><USER5> Blame Microsoft. If FAT weren't such a trojan horse, the SD-card could be used a lot more effectively, but since FAT is a minefield, the SD card can't be used as a reliable and permanent component in the OS base system ..

<comment><USER4> FAT may be an incredibly shitty lowest common denominator, but that's completely irrelevant here. The SD card can't be used reliably because upstream never provided a common API for all apps to interface with it. They didn't even have the courtesy to encourage apps to use their bundle identifiers to segregate their shit!

They really shouldn't be exposing a shared RW traditional filesystem to apps at all, no matter where it's located. Unfortunately that's the only API they exposed!

They really should be forcing manufacturers to ship with at least 8gb of flash to get the "Google Experience", but instead even their Nexus One ships with as little storage as possible to save a couple dollars!

My whole point is that the SD card SHOULD NOT be used as a permanent component in the OS base system at all. It should be _removable storage_ , but the way apps are forced to use it makes it anything but!

The whole thing is completely incompetent. It would have been hard/impossible for them to implement removable storage to Apple's standards of usability, but they could have at least done better than WinMo! Really they should have just shipped the original devices with a healthy amount of flash and no SD card slot at all, and added removable storage support in a later iteration (which is exactly what Apple did).

<comment><USER5> >My whole point is that the SD card SHOULD NOT be used as a permanent component in the OS base system at all. It should be removable storage, but the way apps are forced to use it makes it anything but!

In the Pandora system, we have PND files, which solve this problem pretty well. Perhaps Google can consider something similar:

<http://pandorawiki.org/Libpnd_hub>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From my perspective, I like having an exit button, particular for services that do some sort of push notifications (e.g. if I'm using Google Talk or Skype, I want to ensure I don't continue to receive messages on my phone after I exit). Pandora is also another example of an app that needs to have an exit button (or 'quit' in their case).

Back and Exit are completely different in my mind. If I hit Back and the app is still running or I continue to get notifications, then that's potentially expected behavior from the app. If I "Exit" out of an app, then I know that if I continue to get notifications, that's on the developer.

<comment><USER7> I agree. Another case is audio players. I have a couple that try to play audiobooks (come on Audible...) and they usually put a play/pause notification or toggle in the status bar. There's no way to get rid of it when I'm not actually using the audiobook player apart from force-killing the app. The notification doesn't hurt anything, but my OCD side says it shouldn't be there if I'm not using it.

<comment><USER8> That doesn't mean it needs an exit button; it just needs to quit putting a notification up when it's not playing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think that the vast majority of applications can be designed without exit buttons.

Safari on the iPhone is a great example (I'm using iPhone applications because I'm more familiar with their behavior). Safari always keeps track of its state on disk. When it's closed, if pages are open it pauses some tasks (e.g. JavaScript timers) but keeps running unless it gets a low memory warning. If no pages are open, it exits completely. The user doesn't think about closing Safari, he thinks about closing web pages.

Mail on the iPhone stays running if the user has set it to check mail in the background.

The same principles can be applied to applications on any mobile OS. Pandora should stay open if music is playing. A Twitter client should stay open if the user has set it to check for Tweets in the background. An IRC client should stay open if there are active connections.

<comment><USER10> But now Android thinks it "knows" when it can kill your task - even if you intended it to continue in the background. This is a perfect illustration of why its a bad idea to take "exit" away from the app and put it in the OS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> interestingly, the comments on advanced task killer (android auto-kill app) show that most users have no idea how android apps work--they are autokilling many apps that autoserialized state to disk and don't consume a single resource until reopened. or, maybe it's me who misunderstands.

<comment><USER12> This may be the way it's supposed to work, but at least on my Devour, it doesn't "feel" that way. The only way to make the device responsive - and to stop apps from hanging - is to use ATK on a regular basis, multiple times a day. I don't mind it - but it's just what I have to do.

<comment><USER13> I suspect placebo effect.

<comment><USER14> No placebo effect; on my N1, in sometimes gets to the point where opening application, scrolling, and so on, lag significantly. Even apps that are part of the OS slow down. After a task kill everything comes back to life and stays that way for quite a while. The before and after speed difference is very noticeable.

<comment><USER15> Well, yeah. Android moves things out of memory when there is memory pressure. You have to wait while this happens, and most currently-existing Android devices are _massively_ underpowered. When you use a task killer, you are spending the time when you press the "kill" button, instead of at some other random time.

Android users that use task killers are like Windows users that disable their pagefiles.

<comment><USER14> Bottom line is that it works. The theory behind how it should work may be nice and dandy, but the reality is that it doesn't work as advertised. Whether it's because I haven't waited enough (why would I need to wait in the first place?) or whatever other reason, the unit slows down over time quite a bit and killing processes brings it back to life.

The fact that current devices are underpowered has nothing to do with the issue. N1 works just fine after a reboot but slowly degrades in performance. If it was "massively underpowered" if would not have worked properly in the first place.

I also don't understand why there is no easy way to disable some applications from auto-starting. For example I've never used the MP3 Store application, but it always starts up. There are a number of similar apps that do this and to my knowledge there's no way to prevent this from happening.

<comment><USER15> The N1 is not one of the underpowered phones; the Dream and Magic are. The fact that you need to kill "processes" (which is not what the task killer does, btw) means that there is a bug in some app you use regularly; narrow it down and fix it, and your phone will be fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Fine, don't have an exit button, but make sure I can stop whatever you're doing. Chat doesn't have an "exit" but it has a "sign out", which is close enough. If you don't have that for _everything_ you have going on in your app, it needs an exit button.

</comment><comment><USER17> > Users: Consider this. If an app needs an exit button because the back button > doesn't properly manage resource use, what do you think the chances are that > this exit button will be implemented properly?

Um, I don't think we can solve the problem of users desiring an unambiguous "exit" button by telling them on developer's blog that this is a bad desire. Might as well tell my mom she doesn't need really need a "save" button when she's writing long emails online because they are auto-saved. It's not going to work because (understandably) she finds the "save" button very reassuring since she really doesn't know how computer work.

</comment><comment><USER18> >> Why your Android app doesn't need an exit button

Please go to the Market and check out how many people downloaded a task killer/manager.

</comment><comment><USER19> The built-in navigation app has an exit button. It will continue speaking directions even when it's running in the background, unless you explicitly exit.

Please explain to me why that is bad design?

<comment><USER20> It's not. When the navigation app is navigating, it has a persistent notification (representing the foreground service). "Exit navigation" exits the foreground service and removes the persistent notification.

This article is talking about apps that don't have a foreground service (and therefore no persistent notification).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Its a noble goal - but Windows Mobile failed to make this work and I think Android will too. Applications claim resources. You need to be able to kill apps to free resources - think open file or locked database.

<comment><USER21> Here is another viewpoint of how applications run and (don't) exit: [http://android- developers.blogspot.com/2010/04/multitasking-...](http://android- developers.blogspot.com/2010/04/multitasking-android-way.html)

"Once Android determines that it needs to remove a process, it does this brutally, simply force-killing it. The kernel can then immediately reclaim all resources needed by the process, without relying on that application being well written and responsive to a polite request to exit. Allowing the kernel to immediately reclaim application resources makes it a lot easier to avoid serious out of memory situations.

"If a user later returns to an application that's been killed, Android needs a way to re-launch it in the same state as it was last seen, to preserve the "all applications are running all of the time" experience. This is done by keeping track of the parts of the application the user is aware of (the Activities), and re-starting them with information about the last state they were seen in. This last state is generated each time the user leaves that part of the application, not when it is killed, so that the kernel can later freely kill it without depending on the application to respond correctly at that point."

It sounds like Android has addressed the locked resource issue. I'm not familiar with WinMo, but I suspect it tries to be cooperative and uncooperative (ornery or crashed) processes will cause the reclamation to fail.

<comment><USER10> Cool - they addresses it. But how does Android know when one app needs to be killed? Does any attempt to open an in-use resource kill the owning task?</comment></comment></comment>


Chinese VC: We don't invest in female CEOs - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/jingbei-investment-female-ceos <comment><USER2> Seems like they're cutting themselves out of a lot of good business deals. Shame on them, but also it's their loss.</comment>


The bandwidth bottleneck that is throttling the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/the-bandwidth-bottleneck-that-is-throttling-the-internet-1.20392 <comment><USER2> This seems like as good a place as any to complain that auctioning off radio frequencies to the highest bidder is unlikely to result in optimal (or nearly optimal) utilization of scarce resources, and is therefore working against the public interest.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I wonder if it would be sufficient to just allow companies to sue each other in case of intentional interference, and otherwise just allow free play. I suspect there is so much value in everyone cooperating that we would more or less sort it out, without needing restrictions on who can operate at which frequencies, by handing out frequency band monopolies to the three highest paying bidders.

<comment><USER4> That's basically how unlicensed wireless (e.g. 802.11 wireless ethernet) works, and it seems to be working okay. I think increased unlicensed spectrum would be great.

Another option would be to have something like a hybrid of the unlicensed and HAM bands with more liberal output power restrictions than unlicensed spectrum where you have to pass a test and get a proper (inexpensive) license to use the band, but you can do more-or-less whatever you want within the band as long as long as you identify your station, stay within output power limits, and don't intentionally interfere with anyone.

<comment><USER5> It does not work OK at all. Try being in any dense area such as an urban apartment building. There are 30 networks I can see on all 11 wifi channels. Its totally unusable.

<comment><USER6> Is that an issue with unlicensed spectrum, or an issue with trying to provide 30 separate encrypted comms channels over a narrow bandwidth in a dense space?

Surely, increasing unlicensed spectrum would _alleviate_ this by providing for more channels...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I suspect that much of the demand for more bandwidth is really a demand for lower latency. It's not that there's a real need for 1Gb/s to the user. It's that the latency is too long under load. Some delay is being inserted by middle boxes near the end user with dumb FIFO queuing. This is sometimes called "bufferbloat", but it's not about how much RAM you have in the router, it's about big FIFO queues.

Just prioritizing empty ACKs in the upstream direction can help a lot. If you can't watch video while uploading a file, that's the problem.

<comment><USER8> Good point. The utility of incremental bandwidth diminishes quickly. [https://www.igvita.com/2012/07/19/latency-the-new-web- perfor...](https://www.igvita.com/2012/07/19/latency-the-new-web-performance- bottleneck/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most bandwidth usage is ads and video. And bloated apps and web pages. What else needs much bandwidth?

Even HDTV only needs about 20mb/s, and can be compressed down to 8mb/s or so without much visible loss.

<comment><USER9> Sending streaming lightfields for viewing in VR (for live sports etc.) Is going to take every bit of bandwidth we can throw at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For a fun look at current fundamental limits on bandwidth I found this wikipedia page [0]. Really puts things in perspective.

0\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bit_rates#Bandw...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bit_rates#Bandwidths)

</comment><comment><USER11> Google, FB, and Microsoft own cables. So I can see that it's data-intensive companies. What does owning the cable do for them? They get to rent it out to other companies?

<comment><USER12> Its a lot cheaper, and you can do fancy things at little to no extra cost.

For example, In the UK if you order a leased line for say 100megs, you'll get some geenric fibre blown into the building. That fibre, and the equipment to run it are all capable of at least 1gig, if not more. However you ISP will charge you a lot more for the full line speed. Why? because they can, that and upstream bandwidth costs more.

If you are interested in point to point, then getting semi decent dark fibre allows you to do DWDM to get 40 gig per strand (most fibre cables are more than on strand.)

a 32 fibre cable (Most of the cost is the physical laying, not the fibre it's self) would give you 1.2tbps theoretical. All for the cost of installing one cable.

Also owning your own cables means you can peer directly with other networks without having to go through a third party. (In the EU, and rest of the world at least, The US have some horrid monopoly system.) This means that the cost of buying bandwidth drops dramatically.

<comment><USER13> DWDM on commercial equipment is up to >24Tbps per fiber, long haul is about 8-12Tbps (trans-oceanic). I haven't looked into the details yet, but earlier this year Nokia announced a system that can do 70Tbps per fiber.

New Sub-sea builds are usually 6 fibers, some large-scale terrestrial builds are up to almost 8000 fibers (euNetworks did this across europe).

<comment><USER14> Why not more fibers sub-sea? I would have guessed when you are going to the expense to lay fiber across an ocean, including a fair amount of dark fiber looks like a good investment.

<comment><USER15> Repeaters and equalizers. They go up to 8 fiber pairs, and are probably the most expensive single component for long cables. You need separate amplifiers/equalizers for each single fiber, so the cost strongly depends on the number of strands.

Since these repeaters are typically placed every 50-80km, there's a significant number of them in long systems and powering them becomes a challenge. These cables usually operate around 10kV DC at 1-2 amps, and I'm not sure how realistic it would be to go higher. The wire resistance losses are probably already more than 70% of the voltage budget, so you can't really use more current (voltage drop = I^2 R). Higher voltages cause other issues such as dielectric breakdown. Deep ocean cables are actually pretty thin, about as thick as a garden hose, and I doubt you could easily pass more than 15kV. You also have to account for ground voltage shift between the continents which may be as high as 1kV and depends on the weather.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Given the headline, I thought it was going to say "Comcast."

</comment><comment><USER17> the size of your pipe is not the speed of your pipe. something I think few people understand.

better compression and less chatty protocols would certainly help with this issue but the overall solution is using superconductors instead of plain wires.

I raise my glass in salute to the day we all have hydrogen superconductors as our pop.

</comment><comment><USER18> > the Internet is still a global patchwork built on top of a century-old > telephone system.

No, it's not.

<comment><USER19> it is in germany.

<comment><USER3> And Denmark.

Of course, the core internet nodes are not connected by old phone lines, but most of the edge nodes (consumers) are.

<comment><USER20> Most edge nodes in Denmark (6.6 million) are mobile phones, 2.4M are fixed lines.

Worldwide, DSL is less than half of all fixed lines. Denmark has decent fibre networks, and cable TV, but i haven't found any numbers for usage.

Statistics from [http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/oecdbroadbandportal.htm](http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/oecdbroadbandportal.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> First thing I did was open the page and try to find the word "Comcast".</comment>


Do you sell a product or service online? - <AUTHOR> http://customerfind.posterous.com/do-you-sell-a-product-or-service-online-start

<comment><USER2> Ok...maybe I'm in the minority here, but I'm having a hard time understanding what makes customerfind 1.0 different from any Twitter follow spam tool. If you're automatically following people by keyword and then unfollowing them if they don't follow you back in 2 days, you're just gaming Twitter and sending annoying spam.

As for 2.0, it doesn't really say what it _does_ , other than that it helps you contact people who mention keywords you're tracking. Does that mean you can now auto-spam with them with an @ reply? I sure hope not. Is it a Twitter app with search built-in?

Full disclosure: I'm one of the co-founders of MightyBrand, a social media monitoring and engagement application. Early on, we made the mistake of mass- following to get followers, and I really regret it. We ended up un-following every single person and then following just a few relevant folks. It's slower, but more authentic, useful, and sustainable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Version 2.0 helps you find precisely relevant people, using AI techniques. And then it helps you do whatever you want with them - follow, @reply, whatever. You get a dashboard of info about them, to help you understand that they really are relevant. And if they aren't, you just hit "ignore" and move on.

It's no longer automated. It's a HUD/sales pipeline for intelligent humans.

<comment><USER3> Hopefully it doesn't cause you to follow spammers like your version 1.0 did. I had to unlink your app's twitter oauth account because I kept getting more and more spam from following the wrong people.

<comment><AUTHOR> indeed, through predictive techniques, we avoid spammers, and auto-follow is now optional (a popular request..)</comment></comment></comment></comment>