Bugger: Maybe spies aren't very good at their jobs (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460 <comment><USER2> The output of the intelligence community is surprisingly low. One director of the NSA said, pre-9/11, that the whole organization generated about one important result every two days, one that was acted upon.

The output of the US's domestic anti-terrorism effort is low for the resources invested. Most of the FBI's terrorism arrests are wannabes. They get a report of somebody mouthing off in a bar or mosque, crank up a sting operation, get some dummy to go through the motions of trying something, and claim they've stopped a terrorist.

The DoD/CIA operation to find foreign terrorist leaders and kill them seems to have paid off. Anybody identified as a major leader in Al-Queda has a short life expectancy.

<comment><USER3> I find it amusing to consider the NSA/FBI thinks various terrorist groups have masterminded a plan and are closing in, while terrorist groups think similarly about the NSA/FBI's SIGINT infrastructure and capability; when in fact they're both hilariously unorganised and just trying really, really hard, like a real- life parallel to Spy Vs Spy

<comment><USER4> And so it seems that the currently effective terrorists attacks are the simplest ones, where you don't have to communicate or coordinate too much, or acquire some very unusual hardware (like explosives).

<comment><USER5> I wonder why a more common tactic isn't to simply ride a lot of busses until one of them is packed full while driving on the highway at full speed, then launching at the steering wheel to turn it basically any direction...Sounds like a pretty good chance of a pile up and lots of casualties, with no evidence the perpetrator is anything other than a normal passenger until it's too late.

<comment><USER6> because the goal of terrorism is awareness that there are evil assholes out there.

they want to get caught. the casualties are a means to an end. if you just kill a bunch of people without anyone noticing it, nothings been gained in terms of effective terrorizing.

terrorists want to be freddy krueger, not the rollercoaster from final destination.

<comment><USER5> How is it any different from suicide bombing tho? The terrorist organizations can still take credit for the bus-on-highway-terror just like they take credit posthumously for the suicide bombings.

<comment><USER6> They could already do that for random accidents not actually caused by them. Why don't they?

Why not try to claim they made the malaysian air flight disappear?

I'm not sure, but it doesnt seem to be on their agenda.

Terrorist code of conduct. "Thou shall not claim casualties you didn't cause."

<comment><USER4> > _Terrorist code of conduct. "Thou shall not claim casualties you didn't > cause."_

That's because if you are ever disproved, you lose credibility for future claims.

That's orthogonal to the merit of using such "mundane-looking" tactics _and then_ rightfully claiming involvement.

<comment><USER6> youd think that its incredibly easy for a terrorist to regain lost credibility.

duh?

remember what happened last time nobody took them seriously? a generation of conspiracy nutters was born.

<comment><USER4> Nobody taking them seriously is the only way to stop them. Compare with people starting to take them seriously, which brought us at least three country- destroying wars, trillions of dollars of waste, and the erosion of citizen rights in the whole western world - all within last two decades.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recently finished reading Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner, a history of the CIA. He basically argues that the entire organization has been marked by incompetence and politics throughout history. It was really eye-opening to me to hear that the mysterious organization behind all conspiracy theories is mostly smoke and mirrors. Cue the old adage regarding malice and stupidity.

<comment><USER8> I read Tim Weiner's book 10 years ago...it was great. Am currently reading his book on the FBI. To my delight Audible managed to get the same narrator.

At the time I was pretty shocked how bad it was at the COA, but then I realized...the CIA is really just a metaphor for how large organizations everywhere run. A good example is how assignments are given out in the CIA. Your career progression very much depends on which region you get assigned to, or which embassy you get official cover wth. Very similar to say how sales territories are handed out and fought over at regular corporations.

Having just left a 100k+ person company, I can tell you it's a miracle of organization that a company that big can function. It's kind of like seeing a person weighing 1000 pounds trying to walk, or a 125 yr old man try to cross the street. The fact that they can exist / operate is awe-inspiring, expecting them to do anywhere near a good job seems to be out of the question. Obviously there are exceptions to this, and I hope more of them appear later on.

If you work at a big company though please don't be discouraged. It's almost impossible to have good processes for a company that big as mentioned above, so things are, ironically, even more dependent on people's actions and personal leadership.

<comment><USER9> > To my delight Audible managed to get the same narrator.

Stefan Rudnicki (the narrator) is an absurdly good narrator. He regularly narrates the Lightspeed Magazine podcast, a sci-fi short story podcast, if that perchance interests you.

<comment><USER10> Sometimes he and Wayne June just go too deep though. All you can hear on certain words is a bass rumble...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes, of their actual job they probably do very little. This is already part of being secret and fighting secrets. Being secret means there is no way you need to follow any standards or reviews. So your work ethic must not be very high. And fighting secrets is hard. You can even see that when working in a team of considerable size (e.g. 10+ people). It's hard even to track all the open, important and even marketed information. Think about how many actual secrets there are that are kept by people who really try.

But there are other things these agencies do wonderfully.

A) When you have a real hint, and even if it is just a competitor, you can employ lots of fighting power, technology etc to track them. This in itself is already worth much. Think about bugging another country's chancelor's phone. Awesome!

B) Scaring your own population into behaving. If you think you are observed all day by CIA, FBI and NSA you are more likely to do stupid things that harm the common piece.

C) Doing things that would be illegal for the government, like funding dictatorships delivering weapons to drug lords, etc.

So I think even if everybody knows that spies don't really succeed as much as people thought we will still continue to have spy agencies.

<comment><USER12> > Being secret means there is no way you need to follow any standards or > reviews. So your work ethic must not be very high.

I don't know if you are right or wrong, but your statement sounds to me almost exactly like the one that I hear from religious zealots about atheists: "No one to answer to, therefore, no morals or ethics".

There is a point of view from which this makes sense: Since there is no standard code, everyone is free to choose their own; It's a question of what likelihood you assign a-priori for ethics and morals to be chosen, and a question of empirical data as well, which likely no one has, so no statement can be disproved and everything is "equally right". (Was this paragraph about spies or about atheists?)

<comment><USER13> > _I don 't know if you are right or wrong, but your statement sounds to me > almost exactly like the one that I hear from religious zealots about > atheists: "No one to answer to, therefore, no morals or ethics"._

Which is not far from true.

Morals one makes for themselves ("personal moral code") are not morals proper. They could just as well include that's its ok to kill kittens for fun (to give a silly example) -- that they don't is mostly thanks to their idiosyncrasy.

> _There is a point of view from which this makes sense: Since there is no > standard code, everyone is free to choose their own;_

Ha, haven't read your second paragraph while replying to the first, but basically, yes, this.

<comment><USER14> Actually I would argue that the only "morals proper" are those that one makes for themselves.

Externally enforced behavior is not "morals".

<comment><USER13> > _Externally enforced behavior is not "morals"._

That's a new definition then, because for millennia morals were derived from exactly those "externally enforced behaviours": from religion, society, culture, etc.

The personal codes someones makes on their own can be anything and everything ("shit on everybody to get rich" is a perfectly valid code that millions use). Nobody would call that "moral" though -- because precisely morals are those beyond the individual whims (though whether an individual follows them its their choice).

Personal principles someone follows are only fit to be called morals if they follow an extended, external, moral code. Which might change over time, and be culture-specific, but it's not "whatever I say".

<comment><USER12> As far as one can tell, social animals show something equivalent to morals in every experiment we can devise -- and in the vast majority of cases, it is not a learned trait (elephants being the best known counterexample in that their cultural norms and morals are indeed learned).

We can't really experiment with humans, but the few experiments that have cleared ethical committees, it appears that babies as young as 6 months have a sense of equality and justice, see e.g. [0]

[0] [http://www.wired.co.uk/article/babies-understand-hero- action...](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/babies-understand-hero-actions)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This comment is more amusing than educational, but for anyone who hasn't already, I recommend watching the Coen Brothers movie Burn After Reading.

When you watch it, you get the strong sense that this, rather than Jason Bourne or James Bond, is the movie that comes the closest to depicting what the intelligence community is actually like: nobody knows anything and everyone's bumbling about helplessly while they pretend to be omniscient, except they have a lot of leeway to (figuratively and literally) bury the bodies when things go sideways.

<comment><USER16> Similarly: Politics is Veep not House of Cards.

<comment><USER17> Rather, politics is Veep while thinking they're as clever and devious as House of Cards.

<comment><USER18> Generously, politics is _The Thick of It_. All kinds of scheming and malice, but none of it ever amounting to anything.

<comment><USER16> Same creator as Veep! I think he left Veep though and the show is becoming more cartoonish as a result.

<comment><USER18> I had no idea! That's reason enough for me to watch the first part of Veep then. The commercials had implied it was all cartoonish, but I should have known that's always the way of commercials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The older I get, the more I realize: pretty much every organization everywhere is highly flawed in some (usually many) ways. This has been an extremely useful observation in my career and life, and I have found exactly zero exceptions.

<comment><USER20> Primary reason that I don't buy into elaborate conspiracy theories right here.

<comment><USER21> Snowden's leaks didn't reveal somewhat of a conspiracy? Was that behavior not both secret and unconstitutional?

<comment><USER22> conspiracy <> secret + unconstitutional

i think to reach the level of a conspiracy theory, you need a lot of people doing something outrageous. for instance, if you have the army, the navy and fbi and the russian kgb (or whatever they're called nowadays) in cahoots without a single leak for twenty-five years, that's improbable.

i tend not to buy conspiracy theories because they usually need a leak which doesn't exist. for instance, my brother is a 911 truther. in his opinion, a civil engineer saying "that's impossible" establishes it as a conspiracy. in mine, the fact that no-one from the pentagon has said "haha, and we cut up that plane and put it in the building, it was amazing, look come here check out my emails" when he was drunk establishes it as the real deal.

<comment><USER12> I have no horse in this race, but you are not more logical than your brother.

First of all, "conspiracy theory" is often taken to mean one of the tinfoil variety ("government and gay aliens experiment with mind control beams" style, or "immortality treatment hidden by pharma for the last 100 years in attempt to increase profits and for eugenic purposes"). But a "conspiracy" simply means an act of collusion done secretly which contrasts with public statements or the law (or is generally harmful). Thousands of these happen every day in various scales. Assuming that you can trust government statements is, based on history, naive. So, do you have a different term for "small conspiracy I accept happens all the time"? Because your rhetoric seems to exclude these from existing.

With respect to the (missing) 9/11 leak, there are countless stories that came out decades after happening. "Establishing it as the real deal" based on the lack of a leak makes to me about as much sense as a statement from a fellow truther (however well informed in his subject matter) establishing it as a lie.

<comment><USER23> A conspiracy theory typically involves a pretty large group of people doing something big to deceive a massive group of people.

Like a faked moon landing, a large false flag operation like 9/11, or a hillary clinton/democratic party death squad murdering leakers.

Has anything like this ever happened in all of history? The whole snowden thing is the best example I can think of but I don't remember actually being surprised when that came out. Maybe if hitler burned down the reichstag? I don't think that was ever proved though and I'm not sure how many people would really need to be involved in something like that.

<comment><USER12> > A conspiracy theory typically involves a pretty large group of people doing > something big to deceive a massive group of people.

> ... death squad murdering leakers.

Two people are enough to conspire. And to claim (as you did, if I understand correctly) that you need a "large group of people" to hire an assassin to take out one person is irrational, and I believe contradicts a lot of well documented court cases involving organized crime.

> Has anything like this ever happened in all of history? The whole snowden > thing is the best example I can think of but I don't remember actually being > surprised when that came out.

I wasn't surprised either; but I do remember tens of people I interact with changing, practically overnight, from telling me "you are paranoid, they only listen to bad guys" to "of course, we've always known that". Most people remember always being on the right side of history, even when they demonstrably weren't.

It has happened countless times. The Enigma code breaking story involved tens, perhaps hundreds, deceiving hundreds of millions, for over 30 years; When the secret did get out (officially; no leaks involved), it was a huge surprise.

Also, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers)

There are tens of others if you care (I don't have time to list), but ... do you really believe that whatever Snowden informed the world of ONLY started with the things documented in his leaks, and that it ONLY concerned the NSA? That would be the irrational position. (Stated another way: the snowden leak might be unprecedented in depth and breath. But the operations it exposes aren't)

<comment><USER23> > Two people are enough to conspire. And to claim (as you did, if I understand > correctly) that you need a "large group of people" to hire an assassin to > take out one person is irrational, and I believe contradicts a lot of well > documented court cases involving organized crime.

No this coverup would have to include the DC police with his laptop and many others to bury all the other connections that would exist with wikileaks.

<comment><USER12> He might not have left anything visible. The police in this case would not have to be in on it, just not very enthusiastic - which they often are.

<comment><USER23> So he wouldn't have tor installed? His computer wouldn't be encrypted? This is ridiculous, the laptop would be full of all the software required for being a leaker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Between Flash video and geographic restrictions, the BBC does an excellent job of making sure I'm unable to see Adam Curtis' video output.

</comment><comment><USER25> I worked as a technician for GCHQ twenty years ago and heard some good stories in the London Office at Palmer Street (loose lips guys!) it was so obvious that wearing the right tie or being a Freemason would get you further than any degree in this circle.

But lets face it, it's the same at the top levels of all civil service they are all really just job clubs for people with Latin and History degrees.

<comment><USER26> As much crap as people give the civil servants in the US, I feel like our government does a pretty reasonable job at finding competent employees. I'm from Chicago, so I definitely know how false that statement can be, but most other places in the world seem a lot more about who your parents were and who you know.

I mean, the social stratification of the public/private school thing is somewhat baffling to me, as someone who attended school in one of the best community-run school districts in the US.

<comment><USER27> In Britain we have state schools, private schools and most expensive of all the old 'public schools', with a name almost designed to confuse. Most of them are ancient, and look a bit like Hogwarts. The real power of the schools is the 'old boys network'. When you need help getting into university, or beginning a career, there will be an old boy of your school you can write to for help. It seems daft in 2017, but ex public school boys still seem to dominate public life. What still surprises me is the willingness of brits to 'doff their caps' at them like they are still Lord of the manor. I see it daily where there is still a feeling that they are somehow better, because they had an expensive education.

This is one of the huge things that holds Britain back. So many 'businessmen' in the UK were in fact set up in business by their father, or family. They then run their business with a sense of entitlement, and not a hint of maybe sharing equity with founders. Private Equity is dominated in the same way. If you want to meet a VC in Britain, you would do much better if you had the right old school tie. Access to capital for ordinary people with a good idea seems impossible, unless it is via some kind of research funding. It is the same thing that makes UK business so male dominated.

It will carry on too, until Brits stop believing in the Downton Abbey model of British identity. I thought the article was really good too. Thanks for sharing

<comment><USER28> Nameless resumes are a good way to counter the inefficiencies of a system not based on merit.

<comment><USER29> How does a nameless resume help if you haven't removed schools, class, year of graduation, grades and all the other signifiers correlated with free-time and networks.

And that's smoothing over the little problems of the jobs not being open for competition in the first place, not being item for competition once they've been appointed, and that no one has yet to come up with an agreed upon definition for what meritocracy even is...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> And doesn't it fit neatly that we're force-fed the narrative of Islamic extremism as public enemy number one... Poor religious radicals are the only foe our intelligence services are likely to outwit

<comment><USER31> There was a suggestion going around that some of the recent London attackers had at one time been recruited by MI5 to fight in Libya. My google-fu is failing to find me the alleged details, though.

<comment><USER31> [https://twitter.com/markcurtis30/status/872365671434379265](https://twitter.com/markcurtis30/status/872365671434379265)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Most of them. The good ones you rarely if ever read about. Only learn about them later on when docs are declassified, books are written, or they're shafted for politics.

<comment><USER33> or never

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Not sure what the author's point is. That all spies are incompetent? KGB infiltrated UK's intelligence establishment successfully, got the plans for the nuclear bomb and the space shuttle etc. etc. So clearly at least one organization is not completely without merit. Maybe he means specifically UK's spies? If so his anecdotes are not very convincing.

<comment><USER35> I would say rather than KGB infiltrating it was a case of British socialists fearing an imbalance of power reaching out to the Soviets. And yes he is poking fun at old Johnny English. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melita_Norwood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melita_Norwood) was the most important of these atomic spies, was never prosecuted and ended her days in a cottage in Bournemouth I think it was, the nice little old lady next door. The BBC itself is heavy with British spooks so this piece may not be the jolly little fna-fna it purports to be. I even suspect OP (no offense old chap).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is why I love _Get Smart_ and am bored by _James Bond_.

<comment><USER37> It does rather imply that Get Smart was more of a documentary doesn't it

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The Human Factor, by Ishmael Jones.

Required reading on this topic. Tl;dr - Salesmanship, cold calling, closing and relationships are worth a LOT more than acronyms, budgets and bugs.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is all covered in _great_ detail in "The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5", by Christopher Anderw: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defence_of_the_Realm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defence_of_the_Realm) \- this article is a nice summary of that book.

The book goes into _lots_ more detail, including the CIA/Angleton side of all this.

</comment><comment><USER40> Covert intelligence is important, because it is a channel of information which cannot be seen or controlled as easily by adversaries as open source information does.

But the very covertness also means these intelligence services are highly intransparent and poorly supervised. And poor supervision usually leads to poor results, as viewed by those who should be doing the supervision.

</comment><comment><USER41> And here I thought this was saying something:

[http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-...](http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2014/04/02/297839429/-so- you-think-youre-smarter-than-a-cia-agent)

Is this article for real? Or does it cherry-pick only the failures?

<comment><USER18> This is for real, although we should acknowledge that some successes would be much harder to see than failures. (Some should be much more obvious, though... The FBI loudly celebrates terrorist attacks it prevents, and yet all the self- described wins turn out to be pretty lame.)

SIGINT sometimes does really well. Enigma is the obvious example, but I'm sure the recently-revealed wiretaps on international conferences produced some politically valuable stuff.

There are even occasional wins on analysis. The German tank problem was a major statistical breakthrough, and Abraham Wald pioneered operations research doing air force design analysis. But... both of those were unconventional, marking breaks from normal intelligence work.

Moreover, almost all the wins I've outlined here came during wartime, a setting where a very clear 'they' is undeniably out to hide secrets and attack you. Things tend to get way less impressive during peacetime.

I can't find it at the moment, but John le Carre tells a brilliant story about this. He was an MI6 man in the cold war, before he was a writer. And the beginning of _Tinker, Tailor_ , a mission to Hungary to meet a defecting general, was inspired by a real experience. But in real life, there was no general - le Carre's superior had made him up. His boss led him on a dangerous covert mission across the Iron Curtain for _no reason_ , simply because real Cold War spy work was so aimless and boring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> The real problem with spy agencies is that their compartmentalized nature is ripe for abuse from the top down, which is why I theorize they have been compromized from the top down. Also, so tired of hearing the trite ol hanlons razor (a logical fallacy on it's face) trotted out, or the inevitable follow up of "but how could so many people keep X a secret? No conspiracies are possible..." That shit has been debunked time and time again and it's utter tripe.

The only commentor here that even gets close is the one who said something about freemasonry. I would add secret societies in general, such as Knights of Malta and Jesuits in there as well. But that's stuff the public dismisses as crazy conspiracy theory and the agencies themselves don't like to talk about...

So tired of being dismissed as cookoo and then a few years later saying "I told you so".

Couple of people use the cambridge 5 as an example. First of all, it was the cambridge _6_ , and they were triples who were always ultimately loyal to the crown.

The middle men of spying are never allowed to be too good because if they were they would realize the top of their own orgs are the problem. Even the one group that used to be allowed to be good, the analysts, who told truth to power, have been slowly being ousted so it's easier to manufacture intel for whatever geopolitical/strategic purposes those at the top want.

The technological revolution has scared them though because they are afraid of being outed, which is why they are quickening the pace to turn the key of the totalitarian dystopian surveillance society. The information revolution is a threat to the powers that be, which is why we will continue to see nothing but an increase in attack tempo on the internet and it's freedoms.

<comment><USER43> >So tired of being dismissed as cookoo and then a few years later saying "I told you so".

Which theories are you thinking about here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Am I the only one unable to read anything about spies these days and not draw parallels with the series The Americans?

</comment><comment><USER45> So manny parallels that even occur today.

</comment><comment><USER46> Maybe their jobs are also absurdly hard.

<comment><USER33> "sit at this desk, and tell us what will happen tomorrow."

sounds pretty hard to me

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Oh God. That was long winded and contained a lot of namecalling backed by very little evidence :/

</comment><comment><USER48> pretty funny having this posted after the resulting cluster$#!& with Reality Winner.

</comment><comment><USER49> Silly article, the revelations of Edward Snowden shouldn't really tell anyone much about the capability of spies, nothing we didn't already know. If you're interested in a good book about the technical history of the CIA check out 'The Wizards of Langley'. It gives a pretty accurate history of the technical ability of spies throughout the years, and the bureaucracy which limited them. [https://www.amazon.com/Wizards-Langley-Directorate- Science-T...](https://www.amazon.com/Wizards-Langley-Directorate-Science- Technology/dp/0813340594)

<comment><USER50> >Silly article, the revelations of Edward Snowden shouldn't really tell anyone much about the capability of spies

i absolutely loathe when people say things like this. people would _nearly without exception_ treat you like a lunatic if you talked about the kinds of capabilities revealed by snowden prior to 2013. making references to ECHELON made plenty of people write me off as a paranoid crank.

the ex post facto 'everyone knew this' is a fucking crock.

<comment><USER51> Everybody had _heard_ of this, maybe. Everybody in the tech community at least. Or let's just say enough people that some people feel like everybody did.

However when I heard of this, everybody also knew this was just a conspiracy theory. The NSA records everything -- Hello, NSA person who inevitably reads this -- sure, but c'mon they wouldn't _actually_ store any of it or even pay attention as long as you didn't use trigger words. And even then you knew they wouldn't _actually_ listen to _your_ conversation because why would they care about some rando on the internet.

So, no, everyone _didn 't_ know the NSA was doing what Snowden said they were doing. It just sounded familiar enough that it seemed like it wasn't news. I think the conspiracy theories (or leaks?) may have actually softened the blow of the revelations. "Oh, I guess the conspiracy theories were right. Huh, who'd have thought. Anyway, how's your sex life?". People carried on as if nothing happened.

I swear if we somehow found out that there really were aliens in Area 51 all along, techies would derail every conversation about it by pointing out how _everyone_ already _knew_ this. And the common man probably wouldn't even freak out because it doesn't sound like news.

<comment><USER52> > sure, but c'mon they wouldn't actually store any of it or even pay attention > as long as you didn't use trigger words

How did you think they were listening for the trigger words?

<comment><USER51> First of all, you stated the same thing twice in separate comments.

Secondly, I wasn't making an argument, I was describing how people at the time would think about claims like "the NSA records every conversation".

There are flaws in the argument (well, duh) but that's not even the point. The full extent of NSA surveillance was so absurdly unthinkable that people would go out of their way to rationalize anything as long as it was less preposterous than claiming the NSA literally taps, records and stores all Internet traffic.

* The NSA doesn't spy on people, that's absurd

* The NSA doesn't spy on people outside the US, that's absurd

* The NSA doesn't spy on innocent, law-abiding people, that's absurd

* The NSA doesn't spy on _me_ , that's absurd

* The NSA doesn't spy on _me_ as long as I don't act suspiciously, that's absurd

* The NSA doesn't spy on _me_ all the time, that's absurd

* The NSA doesn't record everything I do, that's absurd

* The NSA doesn't store information it collects about me, that's absurd

* The NSA doesn't store all information it can collect about me, that's absurd

etc etc

Also, the way I recall it, at the time the conspiracy theory was (likely due to the popularity of the X-Files at the time) "the FBI is reading our IRC chatlogs", which is a far cry from "the NSA is rerouting all internet traffic", which is what we now know to be true. Not only does it seem less nefarious (law enforcement vs literally spies) but the scope was far more plausible (the network operators might cooperate with law enforcement).

Heck, even Guantanamo and drone strike assassinations seemed implausible back then.

<comment><USER52> > you stated the same thing twice in separate comments.

Weirdly when I posted the comment that you replied to HN said "please try again", which made me think the comment hadn't posted. Thus the re-wording.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the best way to reach out to Angel/pre-seed investors in the US? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN, I'm currently working on technical product for developers and am thinking of raising an angel/pre-seed round from US investors to help me get to the first users.
I'm currently based in Berlin, Germany. Here, it's hard to find investors, who are interested in developer-related products, especially at this early stage (1 founder + MVP).
I'm already talking to local investors but am curious about other options.
I was advised to create a US-company via Stripe Atlas. Will this help?
Anyone went through similar challenges? Curious to know!
Thank you! <comment><USER2> Not to rain on anyone's parade, but it is hard to raise an angel/seed round anywhere, including the US. I would think this would be doubly true for someone based outside the US (trying to raise in the US) working on a developer-related product. Just my 2-cents.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for answering. True, it's definitely not easy but statically possible. This is why I'm asking for advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you could move to San Francisco that could greatly increase your odds. The Bay Area is a tech mecca and there are lots of meetups, accelerators and people that culturally match your passion. You could go to demo days, parties and network + pitch. It's a hustle to raise funding and you'll need a great team, idea and traction to show that you're worthy.

You can find relatively low cost housing here as long as you don't mind renting a shared room: [https://www.facebook.com/groups/390478684333910/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/390478684333910/)</comment>


Who actually votes stuff onto the front page of Hacker News? - <AUTHOR> Just wondering who actually spends the time to go through the (presumably) lower quality "New" tab of Hacker News, finds the good stuff, and upvotes it onto the front page. Seems like a waste of time if "New" has a lot of crap in it. Or are there already pretty high quality links over there? <comment><USER2> The actual answer is that insider networks are used to upvote stories. If you don't have a network of people you know on HN to upvote your article, it is very unlikely to ever get seen or noticed. This is a wart of HN that people don't want to talk about. Traffic isn't organic; it's a popularity contest at best. It would be naive to think that people wouldn't game a system that can drive so much traffic to any site.

<comment><USER3> This is true, but shouldn't it be fairly easy to develop a system that looks for these groups of voters and discounts the total volume of their votes, rendering their gaming of the system as moot?

Also, seeing as discussion is so important to HN, I assume that active discussion is just as valuable as votes. I'll often comment on an article but forget to upvote it.

<comment><USER4> Actually, hn has a "controversy" penalty that automatically downgrades posts with more comments than votes (kicks in at 40 comments) and pushes them down or off the front page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I usually spend some time in /newest after reading the front page.

</comment><comment><USER6> You miss a lot of interesting stuff if you don't check the new page regularly. I probably have that open more often than the main page.

</comment><comment><USER7> Well, one advantage of looking at the new page is that you can kick off the discussion for an article. It's kind of fun to have the top-level comment once in a while. It's nothing I seek out, but it's fun when it happens.

You can also catch some things that relate to one of your interests, but don't have enough immediate appeal to make it to the front page.

</comment><comment><USER8> Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe when multiple people submit the same link, it generates an upvote automatically.

So if ten people submit the same story, it gets ten upvotes. For plenty of stories I imagine that eliminates the need to derive upvotes from people browsing "new."

</comment><comment><USER9> I look at the new tab all the time (right after every time I look at the front page) and I upvote the stuff that gratifies my curiosity and I think will be of value to the community. Hmm, what do I think of this question?

<comment><USER10> Hmmm, it is a fair question, but one of the reasons I continue to visit HN is because of the quality of postings. It is a discerning audience, tough crowd. So, find interesting things to post and try to be thought provoking. There are a lot of influential people that frequent this site so it is worth your time to try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I do. I go through new 1-2x a day, usually the first page or first two pages so that I can "do my part". It's our community thus it's up to us to flag/vote up stories that we would like to see in our community. pg + team have been great at making new better and better w/ less junk.

</comment><comment><USER12> Me. I usually read the newest page after reading the front page. There's a lot of crap and I flag the worst. But from time to time I found an interesting story and upvote it, it makes me happy to find them before they disappear, and I'm happier when they later get more upvotes.

</comment><comment><USER13> A lot of the stuff I see on the front page tends to be simply what is "popular" at the time, not necessarily what is relevant to my interests, I find that the new tab has a more balanced view, in general.

</comment><comment><USER14> And here I was ready to see an analysis that showed the voter statistics and show some interesting information about it.

I monitor the new and ask pages and vote rarely, often just forgetting to vote after I saw the article...

</comment><comment><USER15> I read (and upvote interesting stories) on /newest a hell of a lot more than I ever go to page 2 on the main page.

</comment><comment><USER16> Yep, I read and upvote from New every so often. The ratio of quality stuff to junk in New is still surprisingly high.

</comment><comment><USER17> I read, and upvote the deserving posts.

</comment><comment><USER18> I just check the front page, the first ask page, and the first new page. Usually doesn't take more than 30 seconds if there's nothing good on it.</comment>


We Need to Design Health Care Reform That Puts Patients Before Profits - <AUTHOR> https://rooseveltinstitute.org/why-we-need-to-design-health-care-reform-that-puts-patients-before-profits/ <comment><USER2> The U.S. spends $3.5 trillion annually on healthcare. _Worldwide_ profits for the 112 publicly traded healthcare industry companies amount to $50 billion per quarter: [https://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2018/11/12/Chart-Day-Big- Phar...](https://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2018/11/12/Chart-Day-Big-Pharmas- Profits). Even if all those profits are allocated to the U.S., that's about 5.7% of healthcare spending. (And completely consistent with most other industries.)

Hyper-focusing on profits is misguided. Many countries with costs much lower than ours have for-profit hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, etc. Public operation of the health system would surely eliminate the profit, but why do we have reason to believe it will reduce the other $3.3 billion? We can point to European countries that have much lower costs overall, but those countries seem to provide many public services at much lower cost than we do (education, transit, etc.). Canada's government expenditures (excluding defense for both countries), is somehow slightly lower than the U.S., even though Canada offers universal healthcare.

The public rhetoric frustrates me as someone who favors universal healthcare. Demonizing corporations and rich people is red meat for partisans, but it's not a solution. How do we pay for this system? How do we cut costs? Making healthcare into a public service in the US risks turning into the same thing we have with education, transit, and infrastructure. We spend tons of money, often more than European countries, and get very little in return. And the only solutions folks offer are to dismantle the public system (on the right), or to demand even more funding (on the left).

<comment><USER3> > The public rhetoric frustrates me as someone who favors universal > healthcare. Demonizing corporations and rich people is red meat for > partisans, but it's not a solution. How do we pay for this system? How do we > cut costs?

There are already two pieces of legislation, the Jayapal and Sanders bills, they account for their costs. Tim Faust's new book likewise walks through all of these concerns in detail:

[https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/health-justice- now/](https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/health-justice-now/)

And I don't think people are "demonizing" corporations, so much as they are being more and more exposed to fundamental cruelty and parasitism of the American healthcare system. As costs spiral out of control and inequality compounds in the US, a far greater swathe of people are finding themselves on the receiving end of its violence and deprivation. I'd suggest you look at the work of disability activists like Ady Barkan to get a better picture.

<comment><USER4> You're using "account for their costs" in a different sense than I think Rayiner meant. When Sanders "accounts for his costs", he means that they've added up the total projected costs of their plan and then accounted for it with tax revenue.

That's fine, but it doesn't address the fundamental problem of US health care costs, which is --- regardless of "who pays" \--- "why does it cost so fucking much". If all we do is move our exorbitant costs off customer bills and invoices and into our tax code, we haven't actually solved anything; in fact, in some sense, we've provided cover to the inefficiencies and incompetencies in the system that are overcharging us.

Single payer or private system or something in between, I don't much care, but I'd like to see a proposal about US health care that is serious about _reducing cost_ , not about accounting for existing costs differently.

<comment><USER3> As I mentioned to Raiyner, you should really read Tim Faust's book to understand how single-payer can drive down costs, but I'll highlight this from one of his articles:

" As the sole purchaser, the federal government is immediately able to set just prices for health care services (for example, by negotiating the cost of drugs). With the weight of the full cost of health care falling squarely on its shoulders, it has an incentive to develop infrastructure and provide accessible primary care for all people, diverting money from low-frequency crisis care to high-frequency primary and preventive medicine.

It can also create evidence-driven guidelines for how to handle episodes of complex care and adjust payments based on adherence to these guidelines. This promotes good care for all patients and respects providers' agency to provide the best care they can, instead of the current mess, where payment per-service can incentivize unscrupulous providers to bilk payers by either ratcheting up individual unnecessary services (when paid per-service) or providing less care (when paid per-patient)."

[https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/10/single-payer-medicare- for...](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/10/single-payer-medicare-for-all- bernie-sanders)

<comment><USER2> These are just general concepts. It's on the same level as "the market will drive down prices because hospitals and insurers will compete." What I'm talking about is actual data about what is entailed, for example in "bilk[ing] payers."

<comment><USER3> Then see thaumaturgy's comment above about how suppliers and insurances do this in the current system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem with US health care is that it costs too much.

The elephant in the room in US health care costs is inefficiency on the provider side. Payer-side reforms have limited impact, because contrary to rhetoric from both sides of the debate, we could probably zero out administrative costs entirely and still deliver little more than a grocery store discount to American consumers.

However we structure payment, we're still going to have overprescription of outpatient procedures, a shortage of doctors who as a result make drastically more than their counterparts in Europe, bed vacancies in inefficiently provisioned hospitals, diagnostic procedures that vary wildly between providers just a few miles from each other, and a total lack of price transparency to enable consumers (and their doctors) to collaborate and make decisions about care.

There's not much evidence that our government-run health programs (Medicare in particular) is up to the task of solving these problems; Medicare has a central role in how the current health care system is organized, and some of these problems stem directly from decisions made by Medicare.

<comment><USER5> There's always room for critique, but millions of Americans need something to change. How can we get coverage to the poorest people effectively?

<comment><USER4> I think it's easy to misread what I wrote as saying that the current system is OK, or there aren't giant, urgent problems that need to be addressed. There are huge problems. The concern I have is that payer-side reforms are a sideshow.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that you had taken this position. I just really want to move the conversation forward. So there are problems with Medicare, but you seem to know about this so I'm curious what you would suggest we do to provide coverage to millions of poor Americans currently going without. I'm no policy expert and I thought M4A is a great idea. Thanks!

<comment><USER4> I don't know. What I'm advocating is that any discussion of the US health care problem start with a breakdown of where the money is going in our system. There are competing breakdowns, but _any_ of them would be better than the default presumption we seem to have that the problem with health care is "insurance companies and prescription drugs". No breakdown I've seen on any side of this debate shows that either of those things are the true driver of costs in our system.

I'm not defending either the current private health insurance system, which I think needs drastic reform, or the market for prescription drugs, which is dysfunctional in a bunch of ways. But I am unconvinced that the public intuition about the overall health care problem is well informed.

<comment><USER5> Ah I see. Thanks for sharing that. It's all so vague to me. There's so many different analyses and so many experts who will attest to competing facts.

My priorities are just:

1) Ensure universal coverage for all Americans.

2) Structure it so costs are at least as reasonable as those in other countries with similar systems.

So for me, universal coverage immediately is a hard requirement and of course it must be done as fiscally responsible as we can manage. But we can always refine the system to lower cost later. We can't replace the lives lost due to inadequate coverage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As an American with 2 rare immune-mediated neurological diseases, that affect my peripheral nervous system, I can almost guarantee you that decent health care reform will not happen in the foreseeable future.

By the way, both of these diseases are in pharmaceutical remission, due to taking a blood product that has immunomodulatory properties. I will have to take it for life. My medical insurance literally pays hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, under contract, for it.

The Affordable Care Act is practically guaranteed to be either partially or completely overturned next year (Summer 2020), based on previous rare cases in modern history where the Solicitor General did not defend a case at the Supreme Court.

My whole life is literally riding on whatever the Supreme Court churns out next year, due to the complexity of my care. In the case of a partial or complete overturn, I will most likely have to leave the US. But, I am fortunate to be an EU citizen.

I have been making plans for leaving the US for a couple of years now. The matter is extremely complicated with my health care needs, and I literally cannot afford to make a mistake.

Frankly, I do not feel welcome anymore in my homeland (the United States) either.

<comment><USER7> Do be sure to check that any new country will pay for the same thing.

Single-payer/socialized healthcare can mean "Just Saying No" to expensive interventions.

<comment><USER6> Yes, and this is one of the main issues. Overall it is a logistical disaster. But, I have to say that engineering school helps you tackle logistical nightmares like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I know a medical provider who works for a small family medicine practice recently purchased by a large hospital group in our area. They're being told, "You guys need to be sending more people to our hospitals."

So for these organizations, patients who are sick and suffering are seen as a product.

A day of reckoning is coming for these organizations because the sick and suffering are getting fed up with being treated like a product.

<comment><USER9> Large hospitals systems have been forming regional monopolies for the last few decades. First they would buy other hospitals to increase negotiating leverage with insurers, then they started buying outpatient clinics to control patient flow. They can also increase the amount they charge at outpatient clinics once the larger hospital system buys them.

Hospital spend represents 30% of US healthcare spend, and physician spend represents 20%. Physician employment by hospitals is at an all-time high. Busting local healthcare monopolies would do a ton to lower healthcare costs

Unfortunately that is difficult. The hospital lobby spends about as much as the pharma lobby. But the hospital industry has much more "soft" political power. Hospitals are one of the biggest employers in almost every county. So for a politician to fight hospitals would mean fighting their largest employers.

Hopefully more people become aware of this behavior by hospitals. You dont read much about it in the media. I'd imagine this has is because no one is incentivized to call out this behavior by hospitals

<comment><USER10> Healthcare stocks comprise a not insignificant part of many Americans' 401k portfolios, the downstream economic effects of dismantling healthcare would extend way beyond the hospital/pharma industry.

<comment> bad-joke That 401k isn't going to be very useful if you can't afford healthcare.

<comment><USER11> And even less useful if you're bankrupted by it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Until Americans find Physicians (and Pharmacists) as the enemy, it will never happen.

They(AMA and APA) are top lobbyists that entrench themselves using monopolistic practices.

Sure school can cost 500k, but with 200 to 300k+ per year salaries, they can kill that debt. (This is their common defense)

<comment><USER13> With my skillset (software engineer) I can easily pull low six figures. And I'm confident that doctors provide more value than I do. I'm pretty sure I've never saved anyone's life. So I have zero problem paying doctors 2 or 3 times my pay, which is about what you're saying they get paid.

Health insurance CEOs make, in some cases, literally hundreds of times my salary, while literally killing people for profit.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say you've misidentified the problem.

Now, certainly bringing down the cost of medical education, and allowing people with less education (i.e. nurse practitioners) to do more, would both help lower the cost of healthcare. But if we're talking about who we should consider "the enemy", it's certainly not doctors.

The entire _raison d 'être_ of capitalism is that it's supposedly meritocratic. Are you really claiming that curing illness and sometimes saving people's lives isn't meritable?

<comment><USER14> not sure what kind of work you do, but if you make tools that save people time and you have many users, it could add up to many lifetimes not spent on some menial task. not quite the same, but I would argue that helping many people allocate their time towards activities they actually value is just as important as saving individual lives.

<comment><USER15> >I would argue that helping many people allocate their time towards activities they actually value is just as important as saving individual lives.

I think you'd pretty easily get trounced making that argument. People would much rather be alive to do something less efficiently than to... not be alive at all. This argument is a bit insane to me.

<comment><USER14> think about the people you care about. would you rather live more years or spend more time with them over a shorter life? what would they prefer? it's an inherently subjective question, and I don't think the answer is obvious. I certainly don't think one of the answers is "insane".

<comment><USER15> Why are you assuming that I would spend less time with e.g. my wife if she were less efficient in performing some menial task? It would take her longer _to complete_, but that doesn't mean she wouldn't still quit working at 5. Besides, most of the software we write is pretty inconsequential as far as most people are concerned.

<comment><USER14> > Why are you assuming that I would spend less time with e.g. my wife if she > were less efficient in performing some menial task?

because "helping many people allocate their time towards activities they actually value" was an important premise I stated in the post you originally replied to? I deliberately excluded stuff that merely improves productivity at work (although not everyone is fortunate enough to have a job where they can just leave at five if the work isn't done).

<comment><USER15> Then you're going to have to give me some examples. All in all I think doctors and medical scientists are more important to the world than the vast majority of us (since we have to make it an either/or for the sake of argument), so get specific.

<comment><USER14> I for one am quite grateful to the engineers who implement electronic automatic billing. when I was a kid, it seemed like my dad spent a lot of time sorting through mail and writing/mailing individual checks for services. now it's automatically billed to the credit card, the credit card gets autopaid from checking, and he just has to make sure there's enough in his checking at the end of the month. that's not a huge amount of time and thought saved, but it's not nothing either. there's a lot of this stuff that we take advantage of in our lives without really noticing, I think.

<comment><USER15> Automatic billing...

Meanwhile, median life expectancy has skyrocketed, in large part due to new medical treatments and early detection methods. Unless your father was spending 20-30% of each day paying bills, I don't think that's going to do it. I remain unconvinced.

Let's also not forget the drain on interpersonal relations that software has brought about. If your father would have spent that time ok on FB instead I'm not sure we gained anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One of the key steps that needs to happen is to ditch Intellectual Monopoly laws. If you have a system that provides 100x+ the financial incentive to sell patented drugs, regardless of efficacy, then you will have many more people out hawking harmful drugs than the boring mainstream alternatives. See Purdue for a great case study on this.

Anyone who talks about "drug development cost is expensive" yadada has no clue what they are talking about. The only reason it's expensive is because people are on a fishing expedition for novelties that have at least some contrived way of demonstrating efficacy (you only need to hoodwink the public with your drug long enough for you and your reps(dealers?) to make short run monopoly profits). In the age of big pharma Americans have gotten _less healthy_. Time for Intellectual Monopoly laws to go.

</comment><comment><USER3> > We can and must design the next round of insurance reforms with patients as > a priority. With low deductibles that actually facilitate the consumption of > care, our health care system can directly benefit the well-being of low- and > middle-income people—not just the holders of for-profit hospital stock.

No, we need to get rid of private insurance with Medicare for All. The amount of money, corruption, and lobbying insurance companies engage in is staggering, especially given that their whole profit model is designed around limiting or denying access to healthcare. Denying access to treatment for the disabled, the chronically ill, and others, often unto their deaths or bankruptcy.

In a more civilized country, corporations that have behaved like US insurance companies have would have been done away with along time ago.

<comment><USER17> >No, we need to get rid of private insurance

Insurance works well for rare events. Using insurance for an annual physical (or any other routine thing) is just pissing money away.

Cutting insurance out of routine and preventative care will require far less political capital and should have a massive impact on costs. No need to go all the way to eliminating private insurance. A government option would have benefits but there's no reason private insurance can't exist also.

<comment><USER18> Seems like a reasonable ask. Gov't pays for preventative care like physicals, flu shots, and STI testing (sort of already happening on the last bit through Planned Parenthood), insurance takes care of traumatic events.

Seems to me though the greatest cost in healthcare, and thus causing the greatest amount of contention, are chronic ailments that can't really be classified as preventative or traumatic, and require constant doctor visits to treat.

Care for the elderly is a similar story since they make up most doctor visits and are the biggest consumers of medications overall.

<comment><USER19> What if we pay for affordable preventative care, and the government covers the cost of traumatic events?

<comment><USER13> What about chronic diseases that require frequent treatment?

<comment><USER11> What about them? The point of collaborative health care is that risks, benefits, and costs are spread out, to everyone's benefit.

There is no magic market finger threatening to push you into bankruptcy and/or an early grave just because cancer picked you instead of someone else, and your co-pays are higher than you can afford. Ditto for chronic congenital conditions. It's all the same.

Yes, you're probably contributing to someone else's care, especially when you're young and healthy.

So what? You won't be young forever, and you probably won't be healthy forever either. Meanwhile whatever care you need is provided to you _at lower individual cost than a privatised system_ \- with the added benefit that it also provides significant employment, supports medical research, and provides private-sector opportunities for specialised suppliers of technology, consulting, and other solutions.

The only people who appear to lose out are shareholders. They have to make their money elsewhere. In fact their opportunities are enhanced rather than diminished, because affordable low-risk public health care leaves more money on the table for investment and new business development.

<comment><USER13> It seems you've interpreted my comment as being against public healthcare, when in fact I am rabidly for public healthcare.

I was pointing out that a part-private, part-public solution still doesn't really handle medical care well. We need a fully-public healthcare system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > We can and must design the next round of insurance reforms with patients as > a priority. With low deductibles that actually facilitate the consumption of > care, our health care system can directly benefit the well-being of low- and > middle-income people—not just the holders of for-profit hospital stock.

We have this already to an extent with managed care. The old system of fee for service incentivizes healthcare providers to treat the symptom and not the root cause. As of 2016 over 80% of Medicaid and Medicare patients patients are on a form of managed care plan instead of a fee for service. And Medicaid and Medicare are responsible for about 40% of Americans. Additionally there are systems like Kaiser that have similar incentives in the private market.

<comment><USER21> There are still plenty of abuses in managed care plans that I've seen (I'm closely related to several healthcare professionals working in home healthcare and in/outpatient service providers).

For example, often times, healthcare professionals are encouraged/pressured to report improvements during the managed care plan at ambiguous levels (lie) to continue regimes to the allowable extent before they're discharged. Those patients are frequently then readmitted for the same or other health problems after new hospital visits. Healthcare providers are often pressured to not report their judgement tells them a specific treatment program won't help a patient much in their professional opinion.

Ultimately, the incentive for continued treatment to maximize profit is still there, the approaches just change/adapt to fit within new rule systems.

It's really down to individual healthcare professionals to resist continual unethical business pressures concerned with profit over patient outcome which can put their employment/livelihood at risk if they don't have their own practice. This happens in large and small healthcare providers from my sample pool of 3 huge national providers, 3 local/regional hospitals, and several in home healthcare from varied business size.

The only leverage healthcare professionals have is that they're in such high demand and under supplied that they can often resist these pressures. If that changes, their hours are often reduced or they're replaced by people with more ethical flexibility.

So we (our society) still don't care about patient outcomes. We can pretend we do and often the healthcare professional working directly with you probably does care about your outcomes (most people aren't sociopaths) but they may have to frequently weight milking you and your insurance provider against their livelihoods which shouldn't be the case (healthcare will always have continual demand, pretty much guaranteed business).

<comment><USER20> Most of the managed healthcare plans base the patient outcomes on a number of factors, and the doctors report is either not a factor at all or a small factor. If the patients are being readmitted multiple times that will outweigh what is misreported.

But more generally I agree that there will always be financial pressure weighing against ethical issues or patient outcomes. But a managed care plan is strictly better than fee for service in aligning patient outcomes and incentives for healthcare providers. And there is market pressure going the other way, patients can switch healthcare plans or switch providers if they have a better alternative with better outcomes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Contrarian viewpoint: NOT focusing on the profits is the cause of the problem.

Hypothesis: Prices are high because of inefficiencies in the markets caused by bad laws attempting to subsidize one class of people by another. Hospitals aren't able to refuse treatment by law to those that can't afford to pay for their services and insurance companies are coerced to insure unprofitable people by law and the net effect is to try and coerce people into a redistribution of money from people that require more care from those that require less care to cover these expenditures.

Because there is no mechanism to coerce people to do this willingly that's efficient enough for the increasing demands of those requiring care, both industries to give the invoices to the government (who created the problem) thereby getting rid of the requirement to think about how they will fund their expenditures - making it the governments problem to figure out.

This thereby allows them to continue uncontrolled expenditure resulting in exuberant prices in an ever increasing downward spiral to catastrophe as in effect they are spending 'other peoples money' in the hopes that "eventually these invoices will be paid" through some sort of government sponsored coercion mechanism forcing socialized heath care or some other such method with the same result.

Its really quite simple and clever and funny how it still works.

-5% of the population accounts for more than half of all health spending.

-50% of the population with the lowest spending accounts for only 3% of all total health spending.

Edit: Anytime I share this viewpoint, a bunch of either misguided or prejudiced people downvote me. I'm guessing its because they don't understand the argument completely, or see its logic, but disagree with its implications.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't understand the American obsession with designing new systems yourselves when there's already plenty of alternatives out there that have been tried and true for generations. Health care that's affordable, offers longer life expectancy, costs less as a percentage of GDP and available to even the poorest citizens have already been implemented in countries across the globe, in Europe and East Asia in particular but also in Canada and Australia.

Why is it that if a US politician says "our system is bad, the system from France/Germany/UK/Sweden/Japan is beating us in almost every metric, let's switch" is met with boos but someone who says "I have an completely untested idea that's our old system with some quirks that looks like it was designed by a committee without a vision, let's try it" is met with cheers?

</comment><comment><USER24> I have a non-profit healthcare plan and go to a non-profit hospital. It costs the same.

This completely misses the issue.

</comment><comment><USER25> Honestly, I'm not gonna read this thing. This is just the usual weekly "health care is fucked" HN post. They always say the same thing, they always show the same data, rarely suggest any real path forward (one that works in the context of lobbies, corruption, for-profit institutions, etc). In my book (and I'm not an expert even though I've worked in the benefits industry), 2 things are completely fucked up in this domain: 1) insurance being tied to your employer, 2) not being able to know the cost of a procedure before hand. Fix that, and you're done.

</comment><comment><USER26> More than that, we need to design a system that puts general health/wellness before health care. That is, we need to live a more healthy and have a prevention mindset.

If we prevent the preventable those resources can be used for the unpreventable. But if overall demand drops, so will price/cost.

</comment><comment><USER27> Like Japan, reward doctors when they _cure_ patients.

<comment><USER28> I don't like this because they may unknowingly introduce a biased form of triage.

<comment><USER27> Don't let the providing doctor triage.

They should be providing care anyways.

Nurses triage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It maybe is obvious, or maybe it's controversial, but patients will never be put before profits by for profit corporations.

<comment><USER4> Is it obvious? I went to a fancy Japanese dinner last night. It was, obviously, a for-profit venture. At any point during that dinner, was anyone in the restaurant worried about the restaurant putting its "profits" above its patrons?

<comment><USER30> They weren't worried about it, but it was happening anyway.

<comment><USER4> Your argument is that a nonprofit Japanese restaurant could have delivered a better experience to me?

<comment><USER31> I'd wager a nonprofit Japanese restaurant could have provided your meal at a lower cost.

<comment><USER4> How? Why doesn't anyone open a nonprofit restaurant and outcompete the for- profit ones?

<comment><USER30> Clearly, because profit-seeking infiltrators would sneak in and corrupt the whole affair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> You don't need to design anything because that already exists in Europe. It's called public health care.

</comment><comment><USER33> The situation is slightly more complex than this article recognizes.

1\. When a hospital, either for-profit or not-for-profit, must provide free care to a patient, it comes out of their hide. Enough of this free care can force the hospital to demand higher rates. See [https://hmsa.com/portal/provider/zav_pel.fh.DIA.650.htm](https://hmsa.com/portal/provider/zav_pel.fh.DIA.650.htm) Medicare and Medicaid foots part of the free care bill. And, yes, patients who turn up at emergency departments get some free care. It makes the news when a hospital kicks patients to the curb because they can't pay.

2\. Enough free care can bankrupt a hospital or force it to close. In under- served areas (rural) this is, umm, not good for the community served by the hospital.

3\. Corporations -- hey fellow HN readers, our employers -- must offer private health insurance. This is a HUGE pain in the neck for executives (some HN readers, that's you and me). They have to scare up health plans their companies and employees can afford, so they must waste their time doing that instead of, I dunno, designing products or calling on prospective customers. Sure, we get entrepreneurs trying to help with this. Zenefits. Need I say more? It's time-wasting madness.

4\. Corporations must pay insane amounts of money for health plans for their people. And it's compound insanity. That's like compound interest, but worse.

5\. Employees (that's you and me, HN readers) have to waste our time and spend our money on our part of health insurance costs.

6\. "Medicare for all" invokes a health-care payment system that's proven to work at scale, and is reasonably accountable to all its stakeholders. (Except for part D / drugs / the subject of another rant for another day.)

My point: in the long run, being business-centric is the SAME THING as being patient-centric. In this area, Mitt Romney was right: "corporations are people."

I am baffled by politicians' complaints that some kind of government option for paying for health care is bad because it will raise taxes. Don't they know what we know? Paying for health care is already a massive tax on both employers and employees.

It's just hidden by a shell game. It's not actually a tax, it's a tax deduction. If you believe this, maybe I can rent you a some space in the huge dirigible hangar at Moffett Field. Cheap. Send me your bitcoin.

Can you imagine how much more successful a YC company might be if they didn't have to sweat this health-insurance stuff? Can you imagine how much more successful GM and Tesla would be if they knew their workers' health care was covered?

How come captains of industry and bigshot VCs aren't demanding better?

Yeah, some companies will suffer when this changes. But almost all companies suffer now.

</comment><comment><USER34> <yowling about free markets and capitalism>

the profit motive is what has driven healthcare to what is possible today. if there is an uncoupling of health outcomes and profit motive, the solution is not to delete the profit motive! the government needs to enact only the necessary and sufficient regulation to realign making money with the desired results. avoid regulatory capture, make the information transparent and available.

i dont understand this demonization of capitalism. the world involved in (and adjacent to) capitalism is, by almost _every.single.measure_, vastly better than even as recently as 50 years ago. communist china sure didnt do that.

its capable of corruption! lets fix that corruption and not throw the baby out with the bathwater

public schools and subsidized, inflated, university tuition are examples of roads we dont want to travel down.

</comment><comment><USER35> This can be done by converting "for profit" corporations into "not for profit" corporations and having them finance investments with debt instead of equity.

<comment><USER36> And what about the rights of the stakeholders of those for-profit corporations?

<comment><USER37> If those stakeholders are sponsoring the cash grab mentality that has the health industry so messed up right now, then screw em.

Sell off every private company involved and legally mandate that they can only sell to non-profit entities, and let every shareholder that's gouging everyone else scream or cry or whine however they want. The more noise they make, the more harm you know they were causing.

Sick and tired of greed making all these layers of corporate corruption, market lockup, government process tailoring, and outright deception the status quo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm really not sure why this isn't mentioned:

USA should commission a study of health care systems in other countries. Include costs, challenges, issues of bringing it to scale in US, etc.

Then we can implement something based on real world experience and data.

It seems that these highly complex topics are dealt at the ideological level only. Which is absurd, as details can make anything from any ideology horrible. It makes me think of times when other common sense issues that should be data driven were treated in such a way. In the end, the curvature of the world is really independent of any ideological constructs that were created, but the ideological constructs made discussing the data virtually impossible at the time.

<comment><USER9> There is plenty of data on this available. It isn't perfect but it's there. The problem isn't lack of data, its lack of awareness of the data. Most people learn about the healthcare system by reading newspapers and other media, and from what I've seen coverage of healthcare in most US media is very political and seldom data-driven

Check out here to start, there are plenty of other resources: [https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health- spending.htm](https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm)

<comment><USER38> Raw data there is.

I'm talking about a report that says:

After analyzing the health care systems of X, Y and Z countries, a commission suggest A, B and C changes to the US healthcare system. A major commission organized and created by an organization that has proven capable of developing long term, large scale plans for the greater good of the country (think the army corp of engineers, but it doesn't have to be them, just something that is as objective as possible)

I'm also a bit surprised that the ideological bend is so strong, even on 'hacker' news, that net-net I'm getting down-voted on a what I think is essentially a call to look at data and create cohesive reporting to guide public policy.

Maybe there is such a study. I'd be glad to know about it.

<comment><USER9> That's fair, there are think tanks that do this sort of work, but I think it is a hard problem.

Yes even on HN I find that most people are pretty dogmatic about healthcare. People tend to react rationally to the data when presented, but are also happy to make aggressive statements that are unsupported by data

<comment><USER38> I don't have much experience with Think Tanks, but I've found the ones I've looked at to be highly partial to those funding them.

This country is very capable of smart, logical thinking. We've basically eradicated the issues of flooding. If we apply that type of thinking/organization, the issue could be tackled. But both sides, left and right, would have to want truth over vindication. We need to demand commissions to investigate, instead of trying to validate pre-conceived ideological notions.

If people reading the article asked for it, politicians would take note and would likely commission a good study. That's the beauty of our system (despite it's glaring flaws)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: How bloated is your favorite app? - <AUTHOR> https://segment.com/mobile-app-size-calculator <comment><USER2> What are these apps that have 50+ MB in code built with? Or what counts as code in that regard?

Snapchat for example is 95MB, 77MB code, and on my phone (Android, so not directly linked, but probably similar) the most unresponsive, crashy and painful-to-use app right along with Skype.

<comment><USER3> I was amazed to find a C++ "Hello, World" program was several megabytes. It turned out that it was due to statically linking in all of Unicode support. In the particular build environment it was invisible to the programmer; i.e., you wouldn't even realize it unless you went looking for it.

I'm wondering if the same kinds of things happen with Facebook, Skype, etc. It's not the actual Facebook or Skype code that's so huge, but that they've been around for so long and so many people worked on them that they have a very complex build procedure and they're linking in all kinds of unnecessary junk, but no one has the responsibility or desire to go prune it.

<comment><USER2> Thank you, that's a good point, actually. Keeping things lean can be quite tedious and tricky in some cases.

The first thing I had in mind was frameworks like PhoneGap, Exponent and the likes. I wonder if these have a big impact on app size.

But it's certainly true that it's not always extra stuff to slap on that makes things bloated. Could just as well be the stuff you don't go out of your way to keep out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a pretty cool break down you do, but you should consider not including hearthstone in your demo, as most of its image, video and audio assets are placed in the "other" category. So it is a bad example of how your service can help me understand my app, since your demo doesn't help me understand this game.

<comment><USER5> When I got my first smartphone, the guy in the shop installed Whatsapp for me without really asking. It was around 80mb, and chewed through a fair chunk of my data allowance on the first day. Made me paranoid to use the data connection for the first few weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Facebook Messenger is 130MB. That's the very definition of "kitchen sink".

<comment><USER7> Maybe someone can clear this up for me. I'm struggling to understand why it is that size. I'm not going to be silly and say it would it be a simple app because I don't know enough about mobile to make that assumption.

However, I see plenty of other apps that appear to have way more complexity than the Facebook app. They are all significantly smaller. I don't understand what's happening there that requires that much bloat. The UI appears fairly minimal. From an outside perspective (probably an ignorant one), it just appears to be making API calls and throwing out the data.

Genuine question. Where is this bloat coming from? Is it just a pile of thrown on band-aid fixes and kitchen sinks, or is there something that I'm missing. Even third party applications do the same job, yet treat my battery and storage with respect. They seem to be fully capable of the same things that the official app is capable of.

Part of me wants to assume it's the whole, "move fast and break things" approach.

<comment><USER8> Facebook is known for having fairly bad code standards in their mobile apps. It's mostly a product of overengineering and feature creep.

This is a good blog post about it: [http://www.darkcoding.net/software/facebooks-code-quality- pr...](http://www.darkcoding.net/software/facebooks-code-quality-problem/)

And Facebook's own blog post about their Dalvik hacks and how clever they are, which speaks volumes of their development culture: [https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under- th...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood- dalvik-patch-for-facebook-for-android/10151345597798920)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This seems like a very "woo woo" theory, because few users know how big their apps are, or what a "good" size or a "bad" size for a particular app is.

So, let's assume Segment is right and there's a causal relationship between app size and downloads. What am I missing?

<comment><AUTHOR> @CharlesW we mostly focused on the facts and running as controlled of an experiment as possible without bias or drawing conclusion on exactly _why_ heavier apps get downloaded less. Though my personal guess from working years in the mobile app space is that users are surprisingly conscious of data & disk usage. Not everyone has unlimited data or 128GB storage iPhones.

<comment><USER10> If you are not modeling causality, then why do you have an "Impact on Installs" metric next to each asset size?

<comment><AUTHOR> Impact can exist regardless of the underlying cause for impact. It may be because someone's device is full, or does not want to download over cellular, or any other myriad of factors. But you'll still lose an install statistically speaking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Would like to see this for web apps.

<comment><USER12> There is some good research already on how page load times can impact conversions.

[https://www.quora.com/How-do-page-load-times-affect-e- commer...](https://www.quora.com/How-do-page-load-times-affect-e-commerce- conversion-rates)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd like to see that for desktop apps too. Particularly browsers and productivity ones.

</comment><comment><USER14> Oh my gosh - this so, SO much. I think there's a lot of 'designers' thinking they're 'developers', I've seen that first hand and that's how you get rubbish like Drupal.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is the second or third time in about a month that a site posted to HN has been blocked by my ad blocker.

According to Wikipedia, segment.com's sole purpose is to aggregate data for marketing and advertising. Not a company I want to give page views to.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there something I'm missing here? Why wouldn't a larger app take longer to install?

<comment><USER17> Install rate is referring to the percentage of users who install the app at all, versus those who choose not to because the app is too big.</comment></comment>


Agreeing a coin toss remotely - <AUTHOR>

I've just had reason to use this, so I thought I'd share it here.  You can find similar stuff, and generalisations, all over the web, but I've put it here so you can read and discard, or read and research, as you choose.
Suppose you and I need to toss a coin, but we're separated physically and can only communicate by phone or email.  How can we do that?
Obviously I can toss, you can call, and I can tell you whether you win or lose, but you might not trust me.  How can we add some verification?
Simple.  I toss the coin and write the sentence "HEADwibblewibblerandomrandomXX$&*HmmWhat?" into a file, where the random stuff is actually random.  I then compute a hash such as sha-256 or similar, and send that to you.
Now you call heads or tails, and tell me.  If you win then there's unlikely to be an argument, but if you lose I can "prove" it by sending you the original sentence for you to hash and compare.
So there you are, remote coin tossing.  Sadly, I can't tell you why I needed it, but it was rather useful. <comment><USER2> Bit commitment is a core concept in crypto -- this is also a piss-poor commitment protocol. After I flip the coin and say tails you can claim to have "won" and when I dispute the result you just pull out a sentence that has TAIL at the front and claim that this is what you sent to me. How can either party prove the claim? If you build a good bit commitment scheme you can get by with a very small number of message exchanges and still have both parties accept the results.

Start with the wikipedia entry for bit commitment, read Blum's coin flipping over the telephone paper and work your way up to zero knowledge protocols...

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate you taking the time to reply, but I'm not sure I understand you. You seem to be claiming that what I've outlined has a flaw, but I don't understand your objection. I don't just pull out any sentence with (for example) "tail" at the front, I have to find one that has the hash I sent you.

Could you expand a little further as to why the scheme I've described doesn't work?

Thanks.

<comment><USER2> I think we have a difference in threat models. It sounds like you are dealing with a non-adversarial model in which neither party has much of an incentive to cheat. If this is the case then your system works fine. If either party gains much by cheating then your system is insufficient to solve the problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> You might be right, but I don't understand how either party could cheat.

Let's assume that the hash is computationally secure, so that it's effectively impossible to compute a file to match a given hash. SHA-256 seems to me to meet that assumption.

I decide whether I want heads or tails, and create a file that starts with my choice, then has random padding. I compute the hash and send it to you.

You now tell me openly your call. I believe you have no way to compute from my hash what I've chosen, so to you, my choice is hidden. Whether you guess right is effectively random.

Now I reveal the file from which the hash was computed. Again, I can't compute a different file with the same hash, so I'm forced to reveal the choice I made. If you were right we both know it. If you were wrong we both know it.

Can you explain how it's possible for either of us to cheat?

I appreciate your time - thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> As said above, this is well known in crypto circles. There's even a quantum coin flipping protocol to address the possible future case where these sorts of factoring-based bit commitment schemes are insecure. (see the seminal BB84 quantum cryptography paper or a recent experimental demonstration of a "fair" quantum coin flipping protocol by F. Bussieres.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Two observations:

evgen above seems to think it's wrong, and yet you seem to be saying it's right (implicitly, because it's "well known in crypto circles.") So, is it right or wrong? Obviously I believe it to be right ...

Secondly, I know that it's well known in crypto circles. I read about it, refined it (I hope without breaking it as evgen suggests but does not prove) and reproduce it here because it does not seem to be well known outside of them. I find that this is about the most accessible non-obvious result, and yet it rarely seems to be described in simple, clear terms. I've tried to do so here, but if you know of a better, clearer explanation I'd genuinely appreciate the pointer.

Thanks.

(small edits for clarity)

<comment><USER4> Near as I can tell (no expert mind you) it seems right. Given that SHA is secure (cannot calculate a plaintext that will result in the same SHA result) then only the original text could have reasonably generated it. Sending the SHA result to your friend does not help him in determining your original plaintext. Only with random text can he determine the plaintext that generated the SHA result. Seems good enough.</comment></comment></comment>


German Federal Prosecutor's office gets involved in the NSA data scandal - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Fpolitik%2Fdeutschland%2Fbundesanwaltschaft-ueberprueft-nsa-ueberwachung-a-908617.html

<comment><USER2> Surveillance of Germany: Federal Prosecutor's office gets involved in the NSA data scandal

By Jörg Schindler

Central NSA offices in Fort Meade: spy programs are a case for German jurisprudence

According to SPIEGEL's sources, surveillance by the the American spy service NSA has now also come to the attention of the Federal Prosecutor's office. Information is being gathered in Karlsruhe about the American and British spy programs – a suit against unknown parties has already been filed.

Berlin – the spy affair involving the American spy service NSA has now reached the Federal Prosecutor's office. Located in Karlsruhe and responsible for criminal acts against domestic security, according to SPIEGEL sources the agency is investigating whether the systematic data surveillance of German citizens is a crime involving national security.

A spokeswoman for the Federal Prosecutor's office confirmed that all available and relevant information about the Prism, Tempora, and Boundless Informant is currently being evaluated. An attempt is being made to construct a "reliable basis in fact". Whether and when the Federal Prosecutor may issue a formal finding is a question that remains open.

However, she stated that even now "criminal prosecutation can be expected in this context." According to SPIEGEL sources, one such suit has already been filed: A resident of Hessen filed suit against unknown parties this week with the State Attorney in Giessen. That makes the NSA scandal an official matter for the German judiciary for the first time.

According to SPIEGEL sources, the surveillance of Germany by the US spy service NSA is more extensive than heretofore assumed. Secret NSA documents reveal that the agency systematically inspects and store a large part of telephone and Internet connection data. According to internal statistics at the spy agency, about 500 million communications connections are monitored in the Federal Republic of Germany each month. The NSA has categorized Germany as a target.

SPIEGEL also reports that the NSA has bugged EU representatives and infiltrated computer systems. The disclosures about the NSA Prism program and the British Tempora program originated from material gathered by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Videoconference with London on Tempora

The British government, whose spy service Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) hosts the data vacuum cleaner Tempora that is aimed at Germany, has in the meantime deviated from their strict policy of silence. In the past week, London responded to a request for information from the German government with the sparse note that communications service operations are never the subject of open discussion. Anyone who wants to know something should contact the British spy service directly – at the appropriate level.

In particular Minister of Justice Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger seemed rather taken aback. "Three measly lines", said the FDP party member, are not enough to patch up a scandal of these dimensions.

Now the Foreign Office of the federal government has received an invitation from the Brits to a video conference to be held tomorrow at 4 PM in the British Embassy in Berlin. According to SPIEGEL sources, the Germans will be represented by experts from the Ministries of the Interior and Justice, the Foreign Office, and the Federal Communications Service, among others. In light of the latest revelations, it's said internally, hard questions can be anticipated.

534 words. My invoice will be in the mail. After all the discussion, I went with "target" for "Angriffsziel". In context it really is the best translation.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the translation, it was so good that I didn't realize I was reading a _translation_ of an article until right at the end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's so funny to see all this railing up against NSA and PRISM, while tomorrow, the first of July 2013, the "Bestandsdatenauskunft" will be implemented as law in Germany. A commentator from _Die Zeit_ newspaper tersely summed up the intentionally abstruse wording of the new rules. The law means, "that police and intelligence services will in the future be allowed to obtain extremely personal information about mobile phone users, and do so with the press of a button and without having to face any major legal hurdles".

Crudely translated it would mean something similar to "Inventory Data Information Act". Parts of the new law are the following:

> With respect to the obligations of the access providers, ISPs with more than > 100,000 customers are now required to maintain a "secure electronic > interface" in order to minimise the time needed for certain agencies to > retrieve information.

The innocuous sounding term, "inventory data", should not detract from the fact that the issue involves direct access to people's private lives. "Not only names, addresses and bank account details will be sent to the police. But also the PINs of the mobile phones, and passwords blocking e-mail inboxes and accessing services like Dropbox and dynamic IP addresses", warned Die Zeit .

Proper english article (I don't know about this source in general, but this one is accurate): [https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/11/germ-a11.html](https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/11/germ-a11.html)

Google translated german articles:

 _Die Zeit_ : [http://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_...](http://translate.google.de/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zeit.de%2Fdigital%2Fdatenschutz%2F2013-03%2Fbestandsdaten- breyer-bundestag)

 _Der Spiegel_ : [http://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=htt...](http://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Fnetzwelt%2Fnetzpolitik%2Fnrw- beschwor-horrorszenarien-fuer-bestandsdatenauskunft-a-899421.html)

 _Netzpolitik.org_ : [http://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=htt...](http://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fnetzpolitik.org%2F2013%2Fwie- fur-die-bestandsdatenauskunft-getrickst-wurde%2F)

The debate about this is astonishing mute on its own, but compared to the NSA, PRISM and TEMPORA public outcry, the debate about the Bestandsdatenauskunft is basically non-existent at the moment.

<comment><USER5> I'm surprised Germans are not up in arms about it given the Stasi history. They should know better.

Similar-minded agencies in other nations most likely will try to _catch up_ with NSA/PRISM. It is a serious issue and I hope people will not let the NSA scandal be a cover for those initiatives, but an aid to expose them.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I saw a demonstration in Stuttgart once against the _census_ \- and now they're fine with Bestandsdatenauskunft?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised, and also quite disappointed, that only Germany (that I know of) takes the spying on its citizens so seriously. I wish more governments would inquire the legality of the NSA programs, and would dare to take action in case it is ruled illegal.

<comment><USER7> The government may publicly take a stance against the NSA programs but in reality it not only wishes to, but is actually implementing simmilar programs in Germany (see "Bestandsdatenauskunft"). I doubt that any real action will be taken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> An English article on these issues. Today from Spiegel Online:

[http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/eu-officials- furi...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/eu-officials-furious-at- nsa-spying-in-brussels-and-germany-a-908614.html)

<comment><USER2> _Some have called for a suspension of talks on the trans-Atlantic free trade agreement._

And now we start talking about costs to the United States.

<comment><USER9> And Germany. Free trade is win-win, definitely when two countries are similarity developed.

Not going forward with this would be stupid and benefit no one. It's not even a threat.

<comment><USER10> I'm not so sure. What if one of those countries is not actually sovereign? What if there is also one-sided industrial espionage happening on a massive scale?

I'm not convinced it's win-win when the game is rigged.

Maybe my reasoning is overly simplistic. Maybe I'm being paranoid. But I'm wary now of every agenda the US is pushing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Now my (naive?) hopes are a tiny bit higher that the American espionage suspects will get extradited from USA to Germany to face charges and possible punishments.

Edit: has such action EVER taken place?

<comment><USER2> Hahaha. Ask Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, and a whole host of other American bad actors who hesitate to leave the safe confines of the United States nowadays.

<comment><USER12> Kissinger was in Germany to watch his favourite soccer club play (Fürth). I'd say that counts as "leave the safe confines of the United States".

He also celebrated his birthday in Fürth in 2012.

<comment><USER2> I wasn't actually talking about Germany. He does have to avoid countries that have declared him (accurately, in my opinion) a war criminal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Its nice that at least something happens, but the German Supreme Prosecution Service is not independent from the government as the supreme court is. So if the German government is involved somehow its only eyewash for the crowd and nothing will happen.

At least more media coverage, that is good for mobilizing more people to protest against it.

<comment><USER14> Keep in mind that the current minister of justice Sabine Leutheusser- Schnarrenberger already held this position under Helmut Kohl, resigned due to her opposition to electronic eavesdropping and submitted a constitutional complaint[1].

Elections will be held in September, though, so it's anyone's guess who'll hold this position a few months from now.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verfassungsbeschwerde](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verfassungsbeschwerde)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> der Spiegel is one of the major German news publications and it has an English site:

[http://www.spiegel.de/international/search/index.html?suchbe...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/search/index.html?suchbegriff=NSA&pageNumber=1&suchbereich=dokumenttext&suchzeitraum=&fromDate=&toDate=)

but it might be a couple days behind.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there any hope that something tangible is going to come out of that? Given its history it seems more than unlikely that Germany has any abilities of severe actions. Oh well, I am sure they are going to send a detailed list of issues that need to be addressed through "diplomatic channels"...

<comment><USER17> Germany for obvious reasons has significant power in the EU, killing the free trade agreement and blocking further cooperation on any levels would certainly be possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's time to stop global US cyberfascism

<comment><USER19> Ok. How?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> oh, the irony of using Google to translate these....</comment>


Canonical and Red Hat, collaborating on Gnome 4K, multimonitor support - <AUTHOR> http://blog.3v1n0.net/informatica/linux/gnome-fractional-and-multi-monitor-scaling-hackfest-the-report/ <comment><AUTHOR> This collaboration was one of the key results of the AskH thread back in March!

\- [https://ubu.one/AskHN](https://ubu.one/AskHN)

\- [http://bit.ly/thankHN](http://bit.ly/thankHN)</comment>