Dear Startups: Stop Asking Me Math Puzzles to Figure Out If I Can Code (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://countaleph.wordpress.com/2013/10/20/dear-startups-stop-asking-me-math-puzzles-to-figure-out-if-i-can-code/?HN2 <comment><AUTHOR> When I'm hiring I don't ask math stuff, puzzle stuff, and architectural stuff, to see if you can code. I ask you these things to see if you can do anything other than code. Coding is usually a relatively small part of the job. The ability to grok and manipulate the problem setting is more important, so how you react to puzzles tells me something.

Not being able to do the math, or the puzzles, or whatever, is not a "no hire" \- it's a place to start talking about other strengths, abilities, interests, and potential contributions.

But I will also ask you to code.

<comment><USER2> During my last round of interviews last fall, places that required knowledge of major math theorems in the interview resulted in rejections 100% of the time. Interviews that either provided a definition of the math required or provided some of the steps to solve the problem resulted in job offers 100% of the time.

Oddly, while I didn't need to be able to reference the language I was using exactly (pseudocode was good enough), they wouldn't help me out with the math knowledge, implying that it was "Algebra I stuff" and that "Everyone knows that."

The interviews (and my job as an Ops guy) in general don't require advanced math knowledge. Places that require memorized knowledge about things during an interview that are not part of the job field pull crappy things. I saw this in at least half of the interviews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Needs 2013 tacked on the end of the title. Here's the discussion from last time around:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583580](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6583580)

</comment><comment><USER4> I see a bit of this on the devops world, any employer that does this sort of egotistical dick swagger I drop immediately. There are TONS of good opportunities out there where you don't need to play dumb little games.

And don't get me started on those who use those equally dumb Google questions. "You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender..." Its not a creative question its basic physics, stop asking things you don't understand or aren't relevant

</comment><comment><USER5> As someone who recently interviewed for a major internet company, I can report that every interview I took included the requirement for me to write code (real code, with semicolons) on the white board, in front of the interviewers. Every coding problem involved some degree of "maths" problem solving as well. I guess the question is, since 2013, how much has this filtered down into the startup scene. That I cannot report.

<comment><USER2> I haven't seen any difference. I interviewed late last year for a bunch of positions.

Many of the programming problems required knowledge of major math theorems and proofs. My education didn't include these things (things that aren't normally dependencies of the job) and as a result, I failed those interviews.

Interviews that did not include this dependency resulted in offer letters 100% of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think puzzles are common at the interviews because hiring based on abilities is a bit looked upon (see for example this advice attributed to John Ousterhout: [http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-profound-life- lessons...](http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-profound-life-lessons-from- Stanford-Professor-John-Ousterhout/answer/Eric-Conner)). Thinking goes that if you are going to build next google you obviously need to hire the smartest people and their abilities are irrelevant - they will figure it along the way. There is some truth in it but in practice even the smartest beginning programmer needs extensive coaching in minutiae of the craft and ramp-up projects of the right caliber (that is challenging but allowing sloppy execution and having essentially no deadline). And this coaching is going to take a big chunk of your senior engineers' time. So there is a big trade-off to consider.

I suspect the main value of puzzles at the interview is to determine cultural fit - a guy who just codes will be uncomfortable among the types who enjoy puzzles (discuss them at lunch etc.).

</comment><comment><USER7> Yeap, I've dealt with this issue.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9107657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9107657)</comment>


Games, girls, onions - <AUTHOR> http://www.dead-reckon.com/post/60762312852/games-girls-onions

<comment><USER2> Whitney's is the most precise account of problems minorities (women among them) face in technology, starting with "Anger does not accurately describe my true feelings, and so I don't feel angry.". Thank you for providing a good template for speaking about the issue.

I've even been a bit shaken by how accurate she can describe the typical every-day experiences: "You've met a lot of great people, and you have a lot of friends that you like to work with. Sometimes you don't feel lonely or like a novelty, like when you're sitting around the lunch table, cracking jokes with your coworkers. You feel happy and included. But when one of your coworkers makes a joke that is crude, even though it doesn't offend you at all and you haven't even had time to laugh, he turns to you and apologizes, because you are the only woman at the table and your delicate sensibilities must have been affronted. (...)

After that, when you meet new people in the game industry, sometimes you go out of your way to swear or say something off-color as quickly as possible, so your new male acquaintances will feel comfortable and won't feel the need to walk on eggshells. You feel unnatural."

(I had to resort to this strategy a number of times. It didn't seem to work).

Interestingly enough, I never had this problems in Germany (where I'm originally from, and where I graduated university while working part-time as a developer). Hanging out with your typical geeks in high school and then university, the only attitude towards me was joy at finding one more person who shared their interests. I like the way John Scalzi put it:

"Many people believe geekdom is defined by a love of a thing, but I think — and my experience of geekdom bears on this thinking — that the true sign of a geek is a delight in sharing a thing. It's the major difference between a geek and a hipster, you know: When a hipster sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say "Oh, crap, now the wrong people like the thing I love." When a geek sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say "ZOMG YOU LOVE WHAT I LOVE COME WITH ME AND LET US LOVE IT TOGETHER.""

(he clarifies, in a later post I think, that it is not meant to be an attack on hipster culture, but rather him using these words to describe these two different attitudes. there're "geeks" among hipsters and "hipsters" among geeks, too). It was only after I have moved to another country have I experienced the apologies for crude jokes during late-night bar outings, and the rest of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting to read this. I'm a guy that played sports in HS and was very far from what one would classify as a 'geek'. Now I am learning programming and the reception from other more experienced programmers has been icy at times. It's interesting to see this - I would chalk it up to sexism, insecurity, and being territorial. If you're an outsider in any way, you will be told one way or another. Keep going!

On that note, my friends and I are working on a game that teaches game design, analytical thinking and programming. We're aiming to teach the skills needed to work in tech to people of all stripes. Check it out at www.betathegame.com</comment>


OneTrueFan Shifts Horizontal Network to Horizontal Bar - <AUTHOR> http://blog.louisgray.com/2011/05/onetruefan-shifts-horizontal-social.html <comment><USER2> I know the team behind this app. I'm not sold on it, myself, but I think if anyone can do it these guys can. They created MyBlogLog before it was bought, languished, and killed by Yahoo. The platforms they've built are amazing, and the sheer amount of data is insane. Glad to see them getting some press.</comment>


Social Security: The Biggest Ponzi Scheme on Earth (By Milton Friedman) - <AUTHOR> http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3512061.html <comment><USER2> It's not really a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme pays interest to attract investors so it needs significantly more customers with each iteration. Madoff's infamous one paid out 12% annually, so it needed to grow by 12% each year just to achieve stasis (or it would have if cash outs equaled profits anyway, some years it was probably more or less).

Social Security isn't a Ponzi scheme because it would work perfectly well if the population remained stable over time, or shrank. And it would even be alright if it grew slowly and linearly.

What really throws a wrench in the cogs is when the generation retiring is much larger than the ones still working, especially the one or two before it. This is why the Baby Boomers leaving the work force is so problematic.

The good news (in a sick sort of way) is that our diet and health care are so bad that we save a little due to lifespans actually shrinking. People mistakenly attribute the problem to longer lifespans, but the expectancy of a working-age adult (the only group that matters for the purposes of entitlements) has barely budged since before Social Security was invented, and is now quite possibly shrinking. Lifespan from birth (as it is typically expressed) has risen almost entirely due to lower infant mortality.

<comment><AUTHOR> the main problem with Social Security isn't really changes in population size (though it still is a problem). The core problem of Social Security is this:

"Taxes paid by today's workers are used to pay today's retirees. If money is left over, it finances other government spending—though, to maintain the insurance fiction, paper entries are created in a "trust fund" that is simultaneously an asset and a liability of the government. When the benefits that are due exceed the proceeds from payroll taxes, as they will in the not very distant future, the difference will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing, creating money, or reducing other government spending."

Basically politicians (of both parties) raid the Social Security fund and just leave IOU notes behind to fund their pork projects. If the money was untouchable and only used for Social Security, the problems we'd see with just population changes wouldn't be nearly as bad... hence (I could be wrong but I feel) this is one of the core arguments that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.

<comment><USER2> No, that is entirely incorrect. The government borrowing from SS is no different than them borrowing from the Chinese, either way it has to be repaid. At least this way the interest is going to Americans. Government borrowing itself may be a problem, but it's an entirely separate one.

The kicker is the first sentence. Today's workers pay today's retirees. The payments are designed to ensure a consistent, inflation adjusted standard of living for retirees. If the ratio of retirees to workers stayed the same, the payments would. But when there fewer retirees per worker, workers pay less, and when there are more, they pay more. It's the system's fatal flaw.

The problem now is that baby boomers paid much lower Social Security taxes than us, but they still need to receive the same standard of living that we will. You can see the historical rates here:

[http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/Content/PDF/ssrate_h...](http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/Content/PDF/ssrate_historical.pdf)

They paid a lower % with a much lower cap, even adjusted for inflation. They did so because the retiree to worker ratio was lower. If they paid the same percentage and cap that we do now, Social Security would be sitting on enough money to cover the shortfall in the future.

In 20 years, that ratio will be much higher than today, meaning the workers of 2018 would have to pay far higher taxes still for the system to fund itself. This would, of course, be unbearable (it's already close) so the government will have to seek other solutions, such as borrowing money or printing.

<comment><USER3> _The government borrowing from SS is no different than them borrowing from the Chinese, either way it has to be repaid._

I'd like to offer you an annuity. Here's how it works: you give me about 15% of your paycheck every year, and I spend the money on whatever I feel like. I replace it with a piece of paper that says "Dear Byrneseyeview: Please tender to the bearer -- Byrneseyeview -- an amount equal to the sum borrowed)." See how this 100% foolproof scheme might break down?

<comment><USER2> Here's 2 scenarios.

a) Government borrows $4 trillion from the Chinese at 2% annually.

b) Government borrows $4 trillion from Americans, by way of Social Security, at 2% annually.

What's the difference in what the government owes after 10 years? Either way the government has to raise $4 trillion (plus interest) in taxes, borrow it, or print it to pay it off. Either way everyone is in the exact same boat, except in boat b, Americans get the interest. In boat a the Chinese do. (Unless you count borrowing from the Chinese, leaving the Social Security money in a CD, and defaulting to on the borrowed money while paying out SS an option, which it isn't.)

I wasn't suggesting that government borrowing is not a problem. It is. They probably should just not borrow the $4 trillion from anywhere. But that's just a different issue that has nothing to do with Social Security, as many economists have pointed out.

<comment><USER3> The problem is not with the borrowing; the problem is that Social Security's asset base consists of the government's ability to borrow money. It is usually a really bad sign when someone says "I totally can't pay off this loan, but I know this guy who is willing to lend me more money because he has no idea how financially irresponsible I am."

<comment><USER2> No, the problem is with the borrowing. When our nation borrows that much, everyone's asset base consists of the government's further ability to get money (by borrowing, printing, etc.). That's the way free floating currency works. Having to print $4 trillion to put the money back in Social Security is the same to every American as having to print $4 trillion to give to China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a long-time entrepreneur, I'm concerned most about a market: are there people able and willing to buy what I'm selling?

Social Security helps with the "able" part, by making sure that no American lives in abject poverty if they're old or crippled.

Before Social Security, this was a big problem. About a quarter of Americans lived in poverty, and about half of old people.

More people with more money to spend means a bigger market for whatever I'm selling. That's why Social Security is good. That's why markets are bigger in places with lots of Social Security-type programs (Europe, the U.S.) than in places without them (South America, Africa).

Social Security also helps make it possible for me to be an entrepreneur. I know that I can take risks and not plunge my family into abject poverty if I'm crippled and can't work.

Why did I write about Conservatism in relation to this article? Because when someone is attacking Social Security, it's almost always as part of a larger political agenda they're promoting: Conservatism.

This article was from the Hoover Institution, a politically Conservative organization that pushes to eliminate New Deal programs like Social Security (not just SS). They also push for unregulated markets, and flat or regressive taxes. So does the American Enterprise Institute. So does the Heritage Foundation.

These groups call themselves "think tanks," which implies objective research. Unfortunately, they aren't averse to pushing false information or abandoning their principles to promote their interests.

For example, For example, the Heritage Foundation sharply criticized Malaysia's government for years. After a consulting firm owned by Heritage's president began representing Malaysian business interests, Heritage assessments of Malaysia turned positive. (<http://thinkprogress.org/2005/04/17/money-talks-at-heritage/>)

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure why you are writing about the Heritage Foundation or "Conservatism": Milton Friedman is a classic liberal (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism>), so it's a strange vicarious ad hominem attack.

His laissez-faire ideas have been extremely influential and have a stunning track record of success where they have been used.

<comment><USER6> I don't think you can, with any intellectual honesty, call Milton Friedman a "liberal" economist without pointing out that you're using a different definition of the term than the mainstream. If he's a "classic liberal", he's also an "anti-progressive".

<comment><USER5> Isn't that what I did by busting out with the wikipedia link?

<comment><USER6> No.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It may not technically be a Ponzi scheme but it is in effect. If you're not able to take out what you put in, you're losing money. If you work 40 years, putting in 12% of your salary (companies have to pay it, otherwise it would be part of your salary) you should get all that 12% back for 40 years. Since most people don't live to 108, SS pays very low monthly payments and pays back about half of a lifetime.

If you die however, you don't. Sure there's exceptions but... you can do better on our own. Mutual funds, Money Market accounts... heck, even bonds and CD's would enable you to pass it down. In addition, from 15 on, 12% of your income even if you only make $8 an hour for 52 years and only invest it in something that nets 10% would easily make you a multi-millionaire. You could retire comfortably and still pass it down.

Since we're facing massive shortfalls, isn't that about the same as a Ponzi scheme?

Also, I've been reading this site for probably close to a year. I greatly appreciate having intelligent people post comments. Sites like Digg or Reddit not only have very biased commenters, they also usually only parrot whatever HuffingtonPost or Keith Olbermann said the night before. It's mindless.

Intellectual comments, even if they're not ones I agree with are interesting to read. Kudos to you guys!

<comment><USER6> First, the words "ponzi scheme" don't mean "anything where you put X in and get X - n out."

Second, Social Security isn't an investment program. The goal of Social Security is to provide each generation of retirees with a baseline level of income. It has succeeded at this task.

Third, we're not facing massive shortfalls. We raised taxes on the baby boomers in the early '80s to build up the social security trust fund to pay for their retirement. As it stands, social security is a small part of the entitlements problem moving forward --- Medicare has more than 7 times its liabilities in the projected future.

Fourth, this "small payments" thing is a myth. 2/3rds of Social Security beneficiaries derive more than half their income from Social Security; more than 1/3rd of them derive the overwhelming majority of their income from it.

<comment><USER8> There is no such thing as a social security trust fund. The government uses that money to fund other programs and puts IOUs in there; that means when more are receiving than contributing there will be a massive tax burden on those contributing they get hit with both their normal SS tax, plus the taxes to cover the shortfall.

<comment><USER6> If there's no such thing as a social security trust fund --- in which case, Reagan and Greenspan's baby boomer FICA tax hike was a huge scam --- then there's no social security crisis. There's just a general budget issue. But in the general budget, Social Security is dwarfed both by other entitlement programs and by a host of other programs.

If you don't believe in the Social Security trust fund, then we should be discussing Medicare. Or out-of-control defense spending. Social Security is irrelevant.

<comment><USER7> Well, SS and Medicare are over 40% of the annual Federal budget and will quickly rise as the funding issues start appearing.

SS is actually the biggest program and percentage of the annual budget we have. Medicare is second, defense is the third.

<comment><USER6> [citation needed]

Social Security is 21% of the budget currently. That's:

* at par with Medicare and related medical entitlements.

* rapidly going to be outpaced by Medicare liabilities

* less than we spend on defense

* funded from the Social Security trust fund, unlike those other two

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "The present discounted value of the promises embedded in the Social Security law greatly exceeds the present discounted value of the expected proceeds from the payroll tax. The difference is an unfunded liability variously estimated at from $4 trillion to $11 trillion--or from slightly larger than the funded federal debt that is in the hands of the public to three times as large."

The mismatch between the promised benefits that many voters think they have "earned" by "saving" money in their personal "Social Security accounts" and the actual funding capacity of the Social Security system is why it looks like Mr. Ponzi was the designer of the system. The overall societal effect of Social Security as it is currently funded is a massive wealth transfer from the working young to the nonworking old, which is excellent politics but rather poor economics.

<comment><USER2> Even if it wasn't for the anomalous population boom that is causing the problem, you would essentially be being forced by the government to put a portion of your salary into an investment with a 0% interest rate. Which granted, would look good to a lot of people right now, but is bad financial planning on the whole.

On the other hand, I reject his cries of paternalism for the simple reason that other people's poverty has a negative effect on my life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Poor people have incredibly high rates of criminal activity, drug use, etc. Granted, I don't see a lot of retirees selling crack or robbing banks, but the effect it could have on their families, who sometimes they support or sometimes support them, could create a serious ripple down through generations.

Which doesn't necessarily mean I'm for Social Security or forced savings of any kind, but the issue is not nearly so simple as paternalism.

<comment><USER10> In defense of social security:

It pays significant disability and survives benefits which has little to do with investing and everything to do with insurance. So consider SS as insurance in case of a long life.

Some people will live well over 100 so finding the "correct" amount of money to save is overkill for most people who die far younger than that. If you invested a portion of your savings each year and pooled you money with 10,000 other people your age then paid dividends from that to the survivors you could save less money and still not worry about running out. Granted if to many people lived until retirement age you might need to reduce benefits. Granted you would not be able to give people money at the time of your death but if your single what's the point?

Now the implementation of social security is broken in several ways but minor changes in retirement age will fix the "benefit gap" long before it runs out of money. The basic problem is people are living longer so they need to increase average retirement age. The surplus was also invested in government bonds with terrible long term returns etc, but when you consider how much more important the first 20k/year is over the next you might consider guaranteed benefits even at high cost are worth a lot more than the simple math would suggest.

PS: There are a lot of things I hate about SS, but it's not really a Ponzi scheme.

<comment><USER6> This was one of the intellectual flaws of the Bush privatization scheme; they calibrated returns from individual private accounts to the average lifespan, without noting that a pretty large contingent of social security beneficiaries would outlive the average.

Current estimates are that many of us will be long retired before there even is a "gap" between Social Security funding and Social Security benefits. The trust fund, for instance, doesn't run out until the 2040's.

<comment><USER11> The privatization plan would give the beneficiary ownership over the investment, so there is not a problem, it just means that the investment has longer to grow. Ideally someone doesn't just build up a pile of money and intend to die with $0, he/she intends to leave some to the next generation or to charity.

<comment><USER10> I am single why should I give my money to charity, my will is going to say take it out into the forest and burn it.

Only slightly kidding. A close friend of mine had a trust fund worth a little over 6 million and was looking to inherent a lot more when his grandmother died. He is dead now and imo money really messed up his life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems like there's an awful lot of polemical posts on Hacker News lately from Conservative political organizations. Guess they figured out that here they could promote their agenda for free.

Is that really what Hacker News wants to be? A political forum? If so, I'll encourage the folks at Media Matters, Center for American Progress, and Campaign for America's Future to start posting here.

It's bad enough that Conservative political groups are hijacking a startup news aggregator. It's worse that the ideas they're pushing don't work.

Conservatism--the political philosophy promoted by AEI, Hoover, Heritage et al --is the flip side of Communism. With Communism, the purpose of people is to serve The State. In Conservatism, the purpose of people is to serve The Market. Thus, popular New Deal programs such as Social Security are anathema to them.

Both Communism and Conservatism work badly, producing similar effects. Our unregulated Conservative markets have crashed and burned just as badly as the Russians' hyper-regulated Communist markets did. States and countries run on Conservative principles are typically backward and stagnant:

\--Mississippi and Alabama have Conservative state governments, and have practically no startup activity. Massachusetts and New York are not Conservative, which makes them capable of spawning MIT and Silicon Alley.

\--Conservatives say that the keys to a strong economy is low taxes on rich people and unregulated markets. We've had them for the past decade, just as we did in the 1920s, and just as it did in the 1920s, our economy has melted down. What happened when we had sky-high taxes on rich people, and highly regulated markets? We got the U.S. economic boom of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, and built the world's biggest middle class.

The fact that their political philosophy has produced poor results doesn't give the folks at AEI/Hoover/Heritage pause, however. Just like the old Communists, these Conservatives are now complaining that "Conservatism DOES work! It's just never been tried!" Just as with Communism, Conservatism never fails, it is only failed.

As for the ideas of Milton Friedman that these Hacker News Hijackers are pushing, we may want to read what a Nobel Prize-winning economist has to say about them:

<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19857>

<comment><USER12> In a site populated by hackers and entrepreneurs, you're going to get people with a strong preference for individualism over collectivism - that's the nature of the beast here. People are going to be very free action-oriented, anti-paternalistic, and not too many of us are going to like the government. We've also got the smart people thing going on where we think politicians are numbskills that spend more time politicking than doing anything intelligent.

So you've got that. But past that, it's hard to find intelligent discussion on economics, government, and society, and a bit coming into HN is healthy for the discussion.

What I'm impressed about is that we get practically no political current events here - and that's pretty cool. Most of the ideas we talk about in terms of economics, society, and government are pretty broad, intellectual strokes instead of inflamed stuff. And for the record, I'm all up for talking about market failure, monopolozation, and unfair initial distribution of resources. And we can have some good discussion.

Edit: This was originally a reply to someone who said HN was being invaded by Conservative lobbyists getting free publicity or some such. byrneseyeview replied to the same guy quoting some of it before he deleted it if you're curious as to the gist of it.

<comment><USER6> A social safety net isn't "collectivism". "Collectivism" is an emotional button hard libertarians try to push. Agree or disagree with Social Security, but please don't tar "hackers and entrepreneurs" with a single political brush.

<comment><USER12> Pardon me, I didn't know it was a politically-loaded term these days. I meant it as a more general term the way people would make the broad statement that "Eastern societies are more collectivist, and Western societies are more individualist." More responsibility to the group, with the associated pros and cons of that.

I was making the point to the original poster who said HN has a conservative lean. My point was you're going to tend to see more individualistic people on the whole here, and more individualistic people tend to dislike the government having a larger role in their lives. That's true on the whole in my experience, but certainly not for everyone.

Anyway, thanks for pointing that out. I'm just here for good discussion and the free cookies, not to push any emotional buttons or tar people I respect with a single political brush :)

<comment><USER6> Every time people write sentences that start with "Hackers tend to" and involve "the government", I throw up a little in my mouth. You could use the same logic about "individualist hackers" to argue against gun control. But then you'd be Eric Raymond.

Hackers are people who like to build things. That's all. They don't all think like you. Some of our country's greatest entrepreneurs are also its strongest believers in the social safety net. You might consider starting with Warren Buffett.

<comment><USER12> No worries, I feel like I've learned an important lesson here about generalizing. For the record, you don't need to talk about being tarred, throwing up in your mouth, for me to get your point - but it does get across that how you feel about this. I'll be more careful about broad generalizations going forwards, and best wishes.

<comment><USER6> Sokay. You're being nicer than I am at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> patrickg-zill SS started as a scam and will end as a scam.

SS was set up with rules based on actuarial tables, used by all insurance companies.

The rules for 65 as the start of collection were because the actuarial tables at the time showed that only about 25% of the population would reach that age. And since white women live the longest, black men were paying for a benefit it was unlikely they would ever receive.

SS did not originally have survivor benefits and disability either, those were added by FDR in the years after SS originally passed.

Unlike either term or whole life insurance, SS pays nothing if you die before your time for payments to start. With term, you would get paid, with whole life, there would be other investment benefits involved, like the ability to borrow against a certain amount of the policy while still alive.

</comment><comment><USER13> "In 1964, Barry Goldwater was much reviled for suggesting that participation in Social Security be voluntary. I thought it was a good idea then. I still think so."

A guess why Goldwater was reviled? Voluntary Social Security would be DOA. It doesn't make fiscal sense for the upper class to pay social security, so they wouldn't. That leaves the lower class' taxes going to pay for it--somehow I don't think there's enough there.

.

Yes, Social Security as is sucks.

No, we shouldn't kick it while it's down.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why it would only make sense for one class to buy into Social Security. If it's a good investment, it's a good investment; 'rich' means less than 'has a particular set of risk/return preferences'.

And I think you validate his point if you claim that social security is only solvent because it redistributes money from the rich to the poor. If the system is unsustainable without giving some people a lower return to subsidize other investors (i.e. soaking the rich to pay off the electorate), it's a ponzi scheme.

<comment><USER2> Social Security isn't a good investment for anyone and it never has been. It wasn't meant to be. It was meant to prevent our seniors from plunging into poverty because that would have many negative effects on society as a whole.

If you made it opt out, people would fall into two categories. One would be smart enough to manage their own money and opt out because they can get a better rate of return putting it in a money market. One would be too dumb to manage their own money and opt out because they don't want to pay 12.4% extra income tax. Either way, Social Security would be opted out by almost everyone and totally fail to accomplish the objectives it was created for. At least the way it is, it has a chance, assuming it can remain adequately funded.

I'm actually against Social Security (at least in its current incarnation) but recognize the need for some form of it that is forced.

<comment><USER8> Why can't we let people live with their decisions? Obviously those who opt out have better things to do with their money @ least from thier pov?

<comment><USER6> Because pooling risk and providing a baseline standard of living helps everyone, not just the direct beneficiaries of entitlements; for instance, current entrepreneurs aren't paralyzed in steady corporate jobs out of fear that they will need to supplement their parents income to prevent them from eating cat food.

Again: of course it is true that skilled investors can net a better return on their FICA dollars than Social Security can. Social Security isn't an investment program.

<comment><USER8> I'm still going to have to disagree. You are only looking at one side of the equation, those receiving the benefits and ignoring those who are harmed. How many companies go out of business because they can't compete due to these taxes, how much investment is lost/misdirected since an individual cannot decide where to invest their funds. I could have invested in a store in my neighborhood, but instead the money will be spent by someone in some other area. It's hard to know exactly what we're missing out on because of the massive amount of wealth redirection.

<comment><USER6> I don't know how many businesses fail because of FICA taxes, but I'm not super sympathetic to the argument, since me and my partners make W2 payroll for a decent sized group of people, and we're doing OK. Relative to much of the industrialized world, the US has an attractive tax rate and an attractive standard of living.

What I do know is that prior to Social Security, young workers being a prisoner to the financial circumstances of their aging extended family was a real problem, and it's not one we think about that much anymore. So I'm pretty happy with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Once every couple years, a "new" group of people gets all huffy about the fact that Social Security taxes "aren't really invested at all", but rather pay off current retirees. It's a false controversy. _That's the intent of the system._ The people collecting Social Security today paid for the previous generation's baseline defined benefit retirement.

Social security isn't an investment plan, and it isn't a welfare plan. It's not a sports car either. It's an easy, cheap, intellectually flimsy argument to snipe at it by saying it's bad at being something it isn't intended to be.

<comment><USER11> You may be right, but the intent of the system doesn't really matter. When SS began the tax was 1%, now it's 12.5% and benefits have been decreasing every year.

Sadly, the planners didn't anticipate just how population trends would play out, and so the initial idea -- that everyone pays 1% and then no old folks have to worry about poverty if they choose to retire -- just doesn't quite work out any longer.

The trouble is that people can't really rely on social security for (guess what?) security!

Will congress increase the payroll tax to 30%? Will it decrease social security benefits drastically? Will it fund SS out of general revenue at the expense of other programs? Will American taxpayers decide that SS is worth a middle class income tax rate of 55%?

The answer to all of these things is the same: maybe.

But that's not security. Obama has wisely advocated converting SS into a welfare program, but that hasn't gotten much traction.

The point is, with population trends doing what they are, somthing has to give. When people running for office talk aobut "saving Social Security" they are not honest about the impending outcome of obvious demographic trends. Meanwhile, all of us pay 12.5% of every paycheck into something that will probably offer us ZERO security in retirement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A shame it is impossible to down-vote stories.</comment>


Remote work can also be a source of socioeconomic inequality - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/remote-work-worsens-inequality-by-mostly-helping-high-income-earners-136160 <comment><USER3> All: this article deserves a better discussion than it's gotten so far. It's a rare thing: a new angle on one of the absolutely most-discussed topics here. That's interesting, regardless of where our reactions all land on agree/disagree, like/dislike, us/them and so on.

If you're going to add comments to this thread, can you please engage with the specifics of the article?

<comment><USER4> This article got its central point not only wrong but patently wrong.

Remote work puts downward pressure on the highest salaries [think globalisation but on a smaller scale — poor countries are main beneficiaries of globalisation]. People with a low amount of opportunities will have more opportunities [upward pressure] and the highest earners will need to compete with higher number of people [downward pressure].

It literally decreases inequality.

The article points out that there is a difference in earnings and higher- earning jobs can be done remotely more often, which is not that valuable insight itself but it is meaningless in the context of inequality. People that have jobs that can't be done remotely are 'constant' in this equation — their situation won't change meaningfully.

<comment><USER5> Why is it meaningless in the context of inequality? Inequality is a relative measure, so if higher-paying jobs become more lucrative, while lower-paying remain the same, inequality has increased.

You can argue that inequality stemming from that doesn't actually matter, because nobody is worse off - but that's a different argument from whether remote work creates inequality or not.

<comment><USER4> But that is not what is going to happen. Jobs that can't be done remotely will be +/\- constant — that's a simplification as there will be some second-order consequences like movements in real estate prices in both directions. Jobs that can be done remotely will become less lucrative [reasons above]. [There may be some second-order consequences like the unlocking of innovation, but that's speculative and hard to estimate economic impact here].

I have a personal, sad and rather extreme theory — anything that can be done remotely will be commoditized. But that's another story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not all work is equally valuable. Not all work is equally doable. Some work requires decades patience and sacrifice before one is competent enough to perform it. Some work is physically or cognitively beyond the vast majority of the population.

It doesn't make sense to expect all jobs to have all the same benefits and privelegdes. Even if we pretend that all humans are fundamentally equal in ability, inequality will always exist, so long as humans are free to make choices in a world of finite resources and time.

Moreso, inequality is not intrinsically bad, for it is a great motivator for the kind of innovation that raises the common floor, which is the more important measure.

If you're able to eat, drink, and shelter during a global pandemic, while your entire country is on lockdown, and your economy has crawled to a standstill, then you're in a pretty good place.

<comment><USER7> I really can't understand this mindset, it views the system that we have as fundamentally meritocratic and that only hard work matters. This is demonstrably false with a cursory review of how our (the US) education system, economy, and geographic distributions reward and punish people.

<comment><USER8> This idea is false. Intra-generational mobility in the US is quite strong. Half of people in the 1% are not in the 1% a decade later. About 50% of people move up 1 quintile from their starting quintile of income. I don't have stats on how this compares to EU or other countries, but this shows a majority American people can move between income quantiles in their lifetime.

[1] [https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/inside-the- vault/spr...](https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/inside-the- vault/spring-2010/us-income-inequality-its-not-so-bad)

<comment><USER9> This. The US has an abnormally high social mobility, even compared to the EU. You have a better chance of moving to the top 1% here than anywhere else. I'm a Tier 1 FAANG engineer and worked very hard to get here, coming from a middle income family. By first studying hard and building projects to get into a Tier 1 university.

Tier 1 top-talent engineers are just worth multiples more than lower talent people and deserve to reap from their hard work and expertise. It's unfair to me and other FAANGs to say we don't deserve our lifestyle and are silver spoon.

<comment><USER5> It can be better than EU while still being dismal. Although I'd love to see some _stats_ (not anecdotes) showing that it's better on the whole, because that's certainly not the case for those I know of.

More importantly, measuring it as a single number for the entire country hides a lot of nuance that matters. It's rarely constant across the spectrum, and those at the bottom of it usually see far less social mobility than those higher up. US is pretty good at social mobility for middle class specifically, but really bad for those below that.

Regarding the "silver spoon" bit - why do you take a complaint about inequality to mean that _you_ should be earning less? The way I see it, others should be earning more, and have quality of life closer to mine. And they would, if all that money wasn't collected as economic rent by their employers (in case of small businesses, the chain goes a bit further up, but there's always somebody skimming of wealth generated by other people at the end of it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >> "Benefits not available to low-income workers"

A more accurate statement would be "Benefits not available to low-income _jobs_ "

There are plenty of jobs that simply cannot be done remotely. The more physical the job, the less it can be done remotely. A meat packer at a meat packing plant cannot work from home. A construction worker cannot build houses from a desk. (I'd add nursing, but a large amount of those jobs is paperwork that often can be done remotely.) And there are some very highly-paid jobs that cannot be done from home. Pilots cannot pilot from home (of the few that still have jobs). Surgeons cannot cut. Mechanics cannot turn their wrenches from afar.

And all the IT people. Some of them can login remotely to diagnose network and service problems, but someone always has to have hands on hardware. There is yet to be a robot that can replace a failed cooling fan on a law firm's NAS device. Some, many, of these people are in fact making trips to _other peoples ' homes_ to service the equipment that allows them to work at home.

<comment><USER11> Even more accurate is "most low income jobs" call centers aren't exactly high income.

Anyway technically the physical jobs can be done remotely if latency isn't a concern but if it is sufficient to remote work the question usually becomes "Why not do the last 10% and fully automate it?"

<comment><USER10> >> Anyway technically the physical jobs can be done remotely if latency isn't a concern

We all talk about robots, but I have yet to see ANY robot remotely capable of the simplest jobs. At my work, an exaust fan failed overnight. Replacing it is a simple task: a few screws and some basic wiring. Latency isn't the issue. There are no robots with the dexterity to even consider such a job. I'd be amazed if one exists that is capable of navigating the ladders and corners needed to get to the fan. (Flying isn't an option. We are near an airport.)

<comment><USER12> What you describe is not a "simplest job", definitely not for a robot, but also for an unskilled labour.

I see the way to handle this sort of situation is to embrace "whole node replacement" tactic. I suppose this is already happening in some cases. "Repair robots" is one possible way to accomplish that, but it's not the only way, and in most cases not the cheapest available way.

For example, if a fan has failed in your work laptop, you don't call the technician to fix it in place, you request a replacement laptop and post your failed laptop to your IT support facility.

<comment><USER13> Node replacement isn't generally a practical option with large machinery or commercial facilities. And even where it could be possible, robots won't be up to the job for many decades. Show me a robot that can extract a badly rusted bolt.

<comment><USER10> Show me a robot that can FIND a rusty bolt. The act of cleaning, of scrubbing away the dust and dirt from a work area, is beyond AI at the moment. If that rusty bolt has been painted over it might as well not exist.

<comment><USER14> The robot doesn't need to see it if it has the plans in it's head.

<comment><USER15> Does the planned schematic reflect the reality of the installation?

Does the wiring diagram show how the cable bends under its own tension?

<comment><USER16> Yes, current infrastructure is not designed for automated maintenance, I'm dealing with that in the software world. It will take more time to retrofit the physical world, but it will happen. If things are remote, they get documented better then onsite people running around with their asses on fire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One thing that I find curious about the initial chart of data from Canadian workers (percent who worked some hours at home by income group) is that while the trend is clearly more hours worked at home with more income, I'm not so sure that's an unambiguously good thing.

"Are you able to work an entire day of your 40-hour workweek from home?" is a very different question from "Are you able to work your 45th through 60th hour of work from your home?"

Pre-pandemic, if I'd been asked whether I could work some of my scheduled hours from home, I'd have answered "yes, absolutely" despite _additionally_ spending 40-50 hours per week in the office.

Sometimes, I think it would be refreshing to do something like airline pilot where I'd probably enjoy the job overall but that it was pretty clear there's no expectation that I'd fly an airliner in my non-work time.

<comment><USER18> > Sometimes, I think it would be refreshing to do something like airline pilot > where I'd probably enjoy the job overall but that it was pretty clear > there's no expectation that I'd fly an airliner in my non-work time.

Yeah, I've only had jobs that can be done anywhere, which is both good and bad. It gives me flexibility but also expectations.

Sometimes I envy my dentist friends. They make great money, but when they leave at 5:30pm, they are done for the day. Even their continuing education is scheduled into their in-office work day, as one of their benefits. On the flip side, they have to be in that office every day from 8:30 to 5:30. There is very little flexibility.

<comment><USER19> I sometimes -- well, I used to, heh -- share an office with a labor rep (i.e. someone who works for a union). I sometimes over hear their calls, and one of the last conversations I overheard before the pandemic really stuck with me.

In reference to some kind of changing circumstance that was going to compel their rank and file to spend more time doing some work-related task, the labor rep said, "They're entitled to their time" with a kind of finality I envy.

Absolutely no wiggle room around the question of, "should they be paid for every minute they spend on the clock for someone else's business." The ubiquity of salaried work really gets me sometimes.

<comment><USER20> That's a very common situation in a shipyard. It always makes me a little envious to know that the trades get paid every single minute here and often work 6 days a week. I do some work items that require a start 2 hours after sunset. The pay is the same 40 hours or 60 hours. You can guess how many engineering hours are post-40....

<comment><USER17> OTOH, would you rather be paid for every single minute at $40/hour and time- and-a-half for hours over 40 per week, or paid $3000/wk no matter how many hours you actually work? There are tradeoffs on both sides.

<comment><USER20> I have never once been able to leave my salaried job without reaching 40 hours while still receiving the same pay.

<comment><USER17> Conversely, I've never once had to punch a time clock at any of my salaried positions.

None of my employers would ever be able to tell the difference between 38, 39, 40, or 41 hours in any given week (nor has any given any indication they'd care even if I _told them_ the difference).

<comment><USER20> I have worked primarily for the prime contractor on Department of Navy work. Either at a prime ship repair yard or an AIT. They take time cards very seriously. I'd suspect you might get some wiggle room in the public realm/software, but as someone mentioned below I'd prefer my time/money trade to be explicitly laid out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It seems from the comments that a lot of the readers here equate "let's look at socioeconomic inequality" with "let's make sure everyone has the same socioeconomic outcome by bringing down the people who earn more." This is... a leap not found in this article. The idea is to make sure that we realize the knock-on effects of changes in the workforce / society and take measures to make sure people who have the ability to succeed aren't sidelined because of it. Seriously, some of these remedies should be fairly uncontroversial here:

-Giving people computers

-Making sure people have access to broadband

-Looking at industries with low income workers and seeing if the governments can nudge them into the WFH model, so they can start to realize some of the positive outcomes that presents, which in some cases would be _far more valuable to low-income workers_. Imagine if a single mother working for $20k a year at an office could do that work from home?

This topic is ripe for inventive ways to use technology to raise up individuals who have been traditionally left out. But for some reason the 6-fig crowd is reacting negative to a headline that uses the term "socioeconomic inequality."

<comment><USER22> > -Giving people computers

> -Making sure people have access to broadband

There should be a Rural Broadbandification Project set into motion so everybody gets fiber. This also has the advantage that it requires lots of labor like digging ditches.

It also has the advantage that it would allow some of these high earners to move from turbo-high cost of living areas to much lower ones.

<comment><USER23> Everyone probably doesn't need fiber to their homes. Good 5G access without onerous caps is probably a reasonable alternative.

<comment><USER22> Tech has been stymied by the fact that bandwidth has been constrained at 10Mbps or less for 2 decades. My 10 year old computer is more than powerful enough to handle any networking in the last decade. Without that impetus, there is nothing driving computers forward.

Every time we jump in consumer bandwidth by an order of magnitude, we launch some new technology that we couldn't even dream of before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The most interesting part (to me) is not touched on in the article - <USER2> expensive jobs can be done remotely from Gary, Indiana, they're not going to go to Gary natives who are currently underemployed, but to the same small crowd of well-off people who are just going to _move_ to Gary, driving prices there up. I think this is the inequality that is interesting and matters.

<comment><USER25> But Gary, Indiana has a lot more room. In addition, the new well-off people will need coffee, and cars, and groceries, and be able to pay for them. This will rejuvenate other jobs. With more people with money who can now afford tickets and buy merchandise, maybe more bands will start playing in Gary, Indiana, improving the music scene. With more people with more disposable income, maybe some of them will be interested in local artwork. Now artists can move and live in Gary, Indiana.

In addition, well-off people are interested in making sure their kids get a good education. So maybe they start pushing the city to improve public education. In addition, the increased home values and increased businesses are likely to result in greater increase in tax revenue, allowing more money to go to education.

And the nice part is that Gary, Indiana got these benefits without having to try to bribe a large corporation to open an office with tax giveaways.

You may or may not have more inequality, but I would argue that the people in Gary would be better off.

<comment><USER26> How is it different than trickle down economics? Won't those coffee shops just be starbucks and grocery stores be Whole Foods and all the profit from them returned to shareholders?

<comment><USER27> "Trickle down economics" is just an internet slur for supply side economics. It certainly can work out well. A job at Whole Foods would pay a currently unemployed resident of Gary, Indiana a good amount more than he is making at present.

<comment><USER28> That's a pretty limited perspective. Economic growth doesn't benefit every business and every individual proportionally.

I know people in the Bay Area who are worse off now than they were in first dotcom burst because while software engineers might make 300% now of what they made in 2002, an auto mechanic doesn't. For many, wage growth didn't even keep up with the cost of living.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The suggestion that governments can close the remote working gap is not very well thought out. A large percentage of low income work is service work that requires physical presence. You can't make the typical burger joint remote friendly without automating all the jobs away.

<comment><USER30> They are miserable people who want to make things worse for remote workers because if everybody can't have something then nobody can.

<comment><USER31> ... even if letting the people who can work remotely do so is a net win overall for everybody when you consider the reduced environmental impact.

<comment><USER29> And if continued forever, reduced pressure on high housing costs, which currently hit lower income earners very hard.

<comment><USER32> That's purely a regulation issue. We could easily have more affordable housing by increasing supply. If you move people from one area to another without changing supply, you're just gonna cause issues in the next area.

<comment><USER33> But if the "one area" is one of ~10 expensive cities and the "another" is 100s of smaller cities, suburbs and large towns, it's much easier to build to meet the change.

<comment><USER32> Theoretically but that's just a burueacratic hurdle. Struggling towns would likely build if they knew people would come in but could get stonewalled by local people too. (Don't let in them city slickers!)

The issue is regulation. And I think it'd be better if we just allowed for taller buildings in some of these areas rather than sprawling out everything. Many people don't want a SFH with a little yard and are happy with an apartment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Since there is no limit on the ceiling, but there is a limit to the floor, things that increase economic opportunity tend to decrease equality. Things that reduce economic opportunity tend to increase equality.

See e.g. Steven Pinker:

"...the most effective ways of reducing inequality are epidemics, massive wars, violent revolutions and state collapse."

[https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/twenty-questions- steven-p...](https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/twenty-questions-steven- pinker/)

<comment><USER29> I always argue caution about revolution to help the poor, as there are plenty of examples where revolution killed as many poor people as it did aristocrats.

Possibly the least flame war worthy example is the French Revolution. While the popular image is of the great terror killing off nobles, the reality is that most of the killings in Paris were either politicians or unfortunate merchants who refused to sell their goods at state mandated prices (at a loss) and were denounced.

And that's not even including the 160,000 mostly poor soldiers killed in the Vendée after peasants revolted against forced conscription, nor the extra 40,000 civilians killed in the brutal reprisals after the war was over.

And the kicker? Not only did France eventually get a different king, but most nobles were able re-buy their old estates, and the government even went deeper into debt to compensate various nobles for their confiscated land.

<comment><USER35> I'd say it's very hard to find _any_ violent revolutions that improved a society. It's pretty much a long line of tragedies.

I count throwing out a foreign oppressor, like the American revolution or the Czech "velvet revolution" as a separate category. Those can be good.

<comment><USER36> Vietnam gained independence from France, might not be much better but I would say colonialism in general follows this. Or would that fall under "violent revolutions that throwing out a foreign oppressor".

<comment><USER35> Yeah, I don't count sending the French home as the kind of revolution I talk about.

If the decades of war and communism that followed were an improvement can be debated, but it's a quite separate issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Would it be similar to say "factories worsen inequality by mostly helping high-income earners" (consider England during the Industrial Revolution)? New technology increases our productivity.

<comment><USER38> Historically, that's what happened. The average wage went down because less training was required despite more people being employed. Revenues went way up, quickly.

<comment><USER17> Many (now) mass-produced goods also became much cheaper than when they were artisanally hand-crafted.

<comment><USER37> Further, the extent to which material quality of life has improved since the industrial revolution implies that the drop in prices has exceeded the drop in wages by orders of magnitude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Looking at it just now, this appears to be the money quote:

 _Given its potential benefits, telecommuting is an attractive option to many. Studies have shown a substantial number of workers would even agree to a lower salary for a job that would allow them to work from home. The appeal of remote work can be especially strong during times of crisis, but also exists under more normal circumstances.

The ongoing crisis therefore amplifies inequalities when it comes to financial and work-life balance benefits._

This seems to be saying that workers often prefer remote work, and perhaps even more so at present. But, they're trading salary away for a work environment they prefer, which (by definition) lowers their monetary compensation, which is bad.

Not sure what to make of that.

<comment><USER40> These sort of people see every trade-off or compromise a person might make in life as systemic oppression. If someone decides they don't mind earning less if they get to work from home that's their decision! No one is making them do this.

No one goes to the car dealership expecting the premium trim for the standard trim price. This is no different. Like it or not we sell our time, attention, and effort in exchange for money. Different types and manner of work are worth different amounts.

Our culture (sans pandemic) has begun to place more value on their life than their work so they make choices like this. It is a good thing to let me people do what works best for them.

<comment><USER39> I agree that most of the time, people should be regarded as the final experts on what is best for them. In that context, do-gooders swooping in to "help" can seem rather presumptive.

That said, sometimes we as a society _do_ need to "swoop in". The obvious cases would be things like loan sharks, dealers of highly addictive drugs, etc. Right now remote work doesn't seem like one of those cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I wonder how much money would be saved by governments encouraging remote work. Less road repairs and widening highways for commuters, less concentration of consumer spending in cities that double in population during daytime.

My small city's trying to revitalize itself, but the small number of well- paying jobs is starving new businesses of customers.

The problem is, my small city would only benefit if it can convince _outside_ corps to offer remote. But what leverage would my city have?

</comment><comment><USER42> I have yet to hear the phrase "making city money while living in the country", but we should see an uptick in personal utopias as the 21st century workforce matures in this new era.

In the age of logistics, it is not inconceivable that manufacturing labor will also have the opportunity to have autonomous vehicles deliver the inventory needed to support the livelihood of residents such as garment workers and others with WFH options.

"Work on Demand" has probably been accelerated by decades and would be a more viable option than many of the UBI proposals floating around to reverse mass unemployment in the long-term.

All it takes is one IKEA set to start a chain reaction. Send it to worker 1 to assemble, worker 2 to disassemble and worker 3 to refurb/repackage and send it out again.

I say that in jest, but they could have the white collar, blue collar and t-shirt (creatives) workers all on a positive financial trajectory at the same time if they manage the next wave of innovation and any real or manufactured crises well.

</comment><comment> papaver-somnamb Alright, narrower spreads in economic inequality appears to connote greater overall happiness in the measured society. Perhaps attributable to the averaging and not representative of the outliers, or demonstrable of modality, but that might be a separate argument. Northern European countries are famed for ranking near the top. The degree to which a society is advanced can be measured in part by how it treats its most disadvantaged members. And in the long run, we help ourselves by helping each other.

But (playing the devil's advocate here) I'm interested in equalizing opportunity, not in equal outcome and artificial fairness.

If this notion is ridiculous, would somebody care to enlighten / disillusion?

<comment><USER7> Because structurally one cannot do the first without doing the latter. If I have 100bn, my leverage over the people who help generated that is disproportionate.

I can set up a self perpetuating lobby to government to make laws that make generations stuck in a cyclical system of poverty. Thus it's easier to exploit and make more money. Rinse. Repeat.

By better maintaining a relatively tight "artificial fairness" it prevents the system from falling into one of the two extremes - everyone poor and struggling and one extremely powerful elite and the serfs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I can definitely see this. I barely missed a beat while a couple months like this presumably wiped out a ton of 3 month rainy day funds out there.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is more evidence that the market clearing price for labor is irrational and inefficient.

Most workers are not compensated for (a) the surplus value they generate, or (b) the risk they bear in work activities.

This article goes to point (b). Point (a) is evident in [1], and is far more problematic as it leads to consolidated control over resources (physical and the ability to direct the daily activities of others).

[1] [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jofi.12909](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jofi.12909)

<comment><USER45> I would argue that market rationality and efficiency described in economics textbooks does not exist, nor has ever existed.

<comment><USER46> Then it should be pretty easy to make a ton of money in the market, no? What's great about finance is that if you believe there are persistent inefficiencies in the market, you can put your money where you mouth is and exploit them. As market participants might tell you though, the market is much more efficient than you might expect.

But let's talk more about the efficient market hypothesis (EMH). Many have the misunderstanding that EMH is some sort of axiom that people actually believe. No one actually believes it to be literally true, but without EMH as a guiding principle, modern finance could not exist. The actions of many market participants creates the mostly/sometimes efficient market we have today.

Put another way, in order for a market to be efficient, it needs participants who are arbitraging away the inefficiency. But because they are profiting off the (temporary) inefficiency, clearly the market isn't efficient!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> It seems that for the most part these jobs require: low technical skill, physical presence, and low amounts of flexibility. These also seem like the types of jobs where a longer work week leads to more productivity, in that more "widgets" are produced (length of the work week is another hot topic here on HN). But these also seem like the jobs that are more vulnerable to automation.

I'll give some examples. I'm seeing entire movie theaters remove the box office and use touch screens. This can reduce the number of needed staff by 20%. We see similar things at grocery stores (a single person can man 6+ registers, just needing to check an ID, which this can probably be automated soon). Clothing sales are moving online to places like Amazon. Etc.

So how do we create a more fair economy? One where everyone has the opportunity to rise into jobs that they want? Get the education they need for that job? Do we let X% of the population just not be productive but still get a basic income? What's that do for mental health? Do we create meaningless jobs that are just jobs for the sake of a job? What's that do for mental health? How do we provide equal opportunities (not equal outcomes) for everyone? More importantly, how do we develop that kind of culture?

<comment><USER48> > So how do we create a more fair economy?

Well the easiest way would be to forbid private capital.

<comment><USER49> That's an easy way to create a different kind of unfair economy, but not a way (by itself) to create a fair one. If there is no private capital there is no private ownership. If there is no private ownership then you're back in _The Republic_ ignoring the fact that Aristotle already pointed out the crucial flaw in that desire - people care more for what is their own than for what is held in common

> For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed > upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common > interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For > besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty > which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are > often less useful than a few. Each citizen will have a thousand sons who > will not be his sons individually but anybody will be equally the son of > anybody, and will therefore be neglected by all alike.

[http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.2.two.html](http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.2.two.html)

Or perhaps you're looking for the angels that Madison writes about in Federalist #51 to distribute all capital fairly without assigning ownership of any of it to those to whom it is distributed?

> It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be > necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government > itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were > angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, > neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In > framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great > difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the > governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

[https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed51.asp](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed51.asp)

<comment><USER48> I would imagine the societies we have well documented are better cases for exploring abolishing private property than Aristotle—decent at constructing ontologies, not exactly a sociologist.

I place my heart in writers far more relevant to today than Madison, of all people—the federal government has never looked so sick, the non-representation of our politicians so obvious. I agree that government is fallible; the answer to that is not to revert to locke (or, more likely, a thin veneer of locke over malthus and hobbes).

<comment><USER47> This comment did not add to your argument. It can be summarized as "I like different philosophers than you" and misses the point. I'll remind you that one's ideas should be based on the merit of those ideas and not where they lie in history or along a political spectrum. Also, to have a discussion you need to bring something more than "I'm right, you're wrong, your guys are old." Otherwise you will continue to not be taken seriously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Is there some sort of advantage to high income workers being forced to drive to an office every day?

<comment><USER15> They buy lunch downtown?

<comment><USER50> Is that really it though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> TFARE (The Following Are Roughly Equivalent):

\- (a) Jobs that can be done over the Internet

\- (b) Jobs that require specialized education and/or high general intelligence (so not everyone can do them)

\- (c) Jobs that pay high salaries

Proof: (a) <-> (b) because both of these describe jobs dealing with information-like stuff (writing, websites, software). (b) <-> (c) by law of supply and demand. QED

Question is, what's our society going to do with the masses of people who _just aren 't capable_ of doing the kind of job many of us have?

</comment><comment><USER52> The whole thing is biased.

If the so called "low-income workers" don't have this benefit (imagine: workers on system relevant jobs such as medicine, bakery, logistics, grocery), it means they deserve a higher pay than the actual one they receive.

These jobs are equally-if-not-more-relevant than jobs in other fields and must not be always labelled as "poor jobs".

Not all the jobs require a computer in this world. The ones who have to stay on place must receive a higher raise.

</comment><comment><USER53> Can someone help me understand this? The thesis is that remote work is making inequality worse, but all they show is an association between working remote and income. Where's the thesis coming from? Even if it was a causal association, with more remote work causing higher incomes, that seems like a good thing.

<comment><USER54> > The higher a person's salary, the most likely they are to be able to work > from home

and

> employees unable to work from home, such as restaurant servers, personal > trainers or manufacturing workers, may be laid off temporarily or > permanently, a burden that seems to be falling disproportionately on low- > income workers.

People with higher salaries are more likely to be able to still work, whereas people with lower salaries in different sectors are far more likely to have been laid off due to the physical nature of the job. Hence poor people have been disproportionately hit, increasing income inequality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> What? On the contrary, remote work levels inequality by allowing workers from low-income regions to take high-income remote positions.

</comment><comment><USER56> this is a poorly thought article and full of strawmen

Inequality between White collar work and blue collar work has existed for centuries and there is no evidence that remote work is making it either better or worse. Their interpretation of their graph is a strawman: office work is obviously easier to remotize.

Inequality stems from supply/demand . There are non-remote workers on the high end of the spectrum (doctors, athletes etc) and there is a vast crowd of low paid workers that work remotely (freelancers, support phone centers etc). The fact that globalization increasing inequality is not news but, if anything, it affects remote workers more.

Remote workers are also facing inequality, e.g. they are paid less if they live outside the bay area.

If anything, by reducing the disparities in cost of living and housing everywhere, remote work is probably helping to reduce overall inequality. It will also move businesses (and their blue collar workers) away from traffic- heavy city centers and closer to where the remote workers are (their homes).

Remote work can also be more costly in many ways: e.g. heating and A/C for houses is costlier than heating a shared office building during work hours. Personally, i spend more on food because i have no office cafeteria nearby. The benefits are mostly in quality of life and in having control of your life.

</comment><comment><USER57> > The possibility of working remotely isn't available to everyone, with one > Canadian study estimating that only 44 per cent of jobs are compatible with > telecommuting. Remote work is particularly common among university > graduates, managers and professionals, but its practice also depends on the > sector and the nature of the job. Finance, for example, compared to > manufacturing, is more suitable to remote work. Consequently, many workers > are deprived of an alternative that allows them to continue working during > crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is due to a couple of different things. Our system for organizing production is outdated. The joint stock corporation is an outdated system. We need something more akin to DAOs. Then employees will be as equally empowered.

Additionally, the fiat monetary system encourages parasitism and inefficiency. With sound money, everyone can benefit. Unlike the current monetary system we have in place.

Cryptocurrency is a poor store of value, but I think is valuable in denoting ownership of something. If you're given tokens in a DAO, it should be a token or coin that denotes ownership rather than a store of value. This way those who take on the lion's share of risk, whether they are early investors or employees, will be rewarded the most. It also flattens the management structure substantially. Not much room in a DAO for parasites. Because you need to put your money where your mouth is, so to speak.

In summary, this inequality stems from outdated systems that need to be replaced. As I've stated in many previous comments, capitalism is the purest filter with which to perceive reality. There is no bullshit allowed. DAOs > corporations, crypto > stock ownership agreement.

</comment><comment><USER58> The word inequality is an oxymoron. If you were to wave a magic wand and redistribute wealth you would by definition make inequality because you would transfer wealth from those who create more value to those who don't. Your end result would be "inequality".

</comment><comment><USER59> Twitter encourages wfh. Let's do as much as we can from home.

</comment><comment><USER60> All economic activity is a source of socioeconomic inequality.

</comment><comment><USER61> Seems like it'd do the opposite.

</comment><comment><USER62> It's a highly _political_ angle though, and the dynamics of HN (both the culture, but also the technology here - threaded with a simple up/down vote and a low engagement reply mechanism) don't handle those sort of discussions well.

There are three levels on which to have an honest disagreement. Other than 0) plain misunderstanding (which I'm not counting), there's 1) a difference in philosophy, a 2) difference in information, and 3) difference in interpretation of said information. (Eg two people observing an interaction; one person could say it was rudely handled, and the other could say that it was totally fine.)

In having a text input free-for-all, all 3 of those disagreements happen at once, as well as the 0th, plain misunderstanding.

I've noticed that perceived or projected disagreement over fundamental philosophy seems to drive low-value threads (Eg "Covid-19's just like the flu."), with responses that are very, very hard to read charitably, dead comments, and snarky/throwaway/drive-by replies.

There are half-baked experiments I wish I could run in order to fix it (like comment required to downvote; or downvoting requires a reason, eg: "-1; unnecessarily insulting." or "-1; trolling"), but; this isn't my forum to run those experiments on.

Ultimately what I'm saying though is moderating this forum must be tiresome work sometimes, so thank you, Dang for the work you do trying to promote thoughtful discussion, especially during these unprecedented times. Especially since being a moderator doesn't scale!

<comment><USER3> Political discussions can't ever be very high-quality when they're open to literally anyone who wants to create an account. All it takes is enough activation energy to start flaming. But there are still many topics here with political overlap ([https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20political%20overlap&sort=byDate&type=comment)) that it doesn't make sense, or wouldn't work, to exclude.

Thanks for the kind words about moderation.

(We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23158853](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23158853))

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Disclaimer: I have just read the title of the article, looked at the first chart within it and read your comment.

Your comment could basically be copy-pasted in any popular thread on HN and seem relevant. Much like a horoscope. Why don't you engage with the specifics of the article yourself so that we have an example of what properly engaging with the specifics entails?

In fact, I'd find it interesting to read why you believe that others haven't.

<comment><USER3> It's not true that all HN threads are like that, though it can be fun to make general claims about that. In reality there's a lot of variation in thread quality, and also in article quality. This is a case where the thread/article quality seemed particularly low; hence I posted that admonition. Funnily enough there was an inverse case at the same time ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23159028](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23159028)).

(I detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23158853](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23158853))

</comment></comment><comment> y-c-o-m-b This is a dangerous title and I hate it because the implication is remote work = bad. These stupid titles are what people (e.g. Marissa Mayer) refer to as evidence when trying to enforce non-telecommute cultures.

The article itself is good and raises some serious questions worth discussing and even encourages finding ways to allow remote work for lower-income jobs, so I would have preferred "Remote work and solving inequality" or even "Remote work and inequality" as a title.

I really wish "journalists" would stop writing opinionated and click-bait titles like this because it's really damaging to those of us that have livelihoods built around these things. If you're trying to bring attention to inequality so we can better the lives of more people then that's great, but don't do it at the expense of destroying other lives. I'm seeing more and more articles attacking remote work like this and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little anxious.

</comment><comment><USER64> This is a pretty awful, clickbaity title. The implication is that remote work is _bad_ for low-income earners, but that's not the case. Inequality isn't bad by itself. If some people are doing better without others being impacted, how could that be bad?

<comment><USER65> Inequality is only bad for low-income earners if you've been convinced that the economy is a zero-sum game. Nobody actually _believes_ this, it just makes good copy for purposes of rabble-rousing.

If you think that wealth inequality is, itself, a bad thing, then ask yourself a simple question: If you create a software company that employs 200 employees making a median income of 125K, is that a good thing? But how can it be, when it has exacerbated wealth inequality?

In my humble opinion, inequality is bad only in the minds of people who want to fund their political wishlists with other people's money, and need to spin a narrative where _not_ taking other people's money is morally wrong.

<comment><USER66> Inequality itself is bad for many reasons. It creates a rift between people, causing feelings of envy and unfairness, increasing crime. It concentrates powers into fewer hands, and concentration of power rarely results in something good for the general population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I taught myself IT skills while sleeping in a tent.

If anyone wants it bad enough, they can also teach themselves IT skills.

No need to bring classism into it-- Once someone teaches their self IT skills (while living homelessly, as I did), apparently suddenly they're part of a separate class? How ironic.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm waiting for _Nuclear Winter improves inequality by eliminating high-income earners_.

</comment><comment><USER68> There are no equals.

</comment><comment><USER69> Are farmers considered to be "working from home"?

<comment><USER70> A lot of farmers live many miles away from the properties they farm in. Modern farming is very different in America than it was 100+ years ago.

<comment><USER69> The article is about Canada not America.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I'm afraid of these socialist trends and statements.

Hopefully, there will not be any new "revolution" where 'low-income' will vote for some populist who will make everyone "equal".

And by "everyone" they normally mean middle/upper middle class because ultra- wealthy people operate in a bit different world than the rest of people.

AND:

Can't low earners take those high-earners who work remotely (programmers, for example) as an example and follow their path rather than complain about inequality? I had a mate who was a good example for me at some point which allowed me to progress in life. What would happen if i metaphorically i asked the government to get part of his salary to help me to be "equal"? Is this discovered life path not a valuable resource and example?

<comment><USER72> The West will go full communism, and it will make life better for all of us - no more rent, work or paying for groceries and everything will be taken care of so we can be creative in our time

<comment><USER73> If you think that the groceries are going to continue to show up on shelves in a world where nobody has to work, reality is going to hand you a very nasty surprise. If we're going to give stuff to everybody, _somebody has to make the stuff_. Merely redistributing money isn't going to solve that problem.

<comment><USER71> i thought it was sarcasm, but apparently, based on downvotes, HN is full of left-leaning comrades.

<comment> non-entity Yes the incredibly libertarian leaning, created by a VC, site is full of leftists.

<comment><USER71> exactly, this is what surprises me! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> There is no situation where those with more resources don't have more resources. The best we can achieve is that each rightfully earns their resources.

</comment><comment><USER75> Laptops and smart phones are everywhere these days, regardless of income level, so accessing remote work is not a problem. I think the only reason remote work might hurt low income people is due to lack of business owners taking advantage of available remote workers.

<comment><USER76> I know that I want remote workers stocking my shelves, driving my buses, and building things in my factories...

Access to technology is not the issue. Low income jobs are as a general rule more physical than higher paying jobs. You can't remotely do physical labor.

<comment><USER31> You're being sarcastic, but humans controlling robots from a distance has actually been tried before, and was promisingly successful: [https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/11/26/national/cafe-o...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/11/26/national/cafe- opens-robot-waiters-remotely-controlled-people-disabilities/#.XrsaixNKg00).

<comment><USER75> I am not being sarcastic! The threshold for human controlled robots is much lower than fully autonomous robots.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Equality is not a thing I ever care to have a society optimized for.

If you give me a planet, I don't care that everyone else has a galaxy. Simply optimize for the leading edge and the rest will get dragged along.

<comment><USER78> Right, this is why the US GDP has grown by a factor of 20 in the past half century while adjusted average hourly wages haven't budged. What a frightfully naive point of view.

<comment><USER77> Life for the below-middle-class is _way_ better than before. Maternal mortality, infant mortality, calories consumed, appliances in the home, life expectancy all trending in the right direction. Life now for the average American is stupendously better than half a century ago. Over the last twenty years (over which the ATUS was active), time spent sleeping, time spent on leisure, and percent of people engaged in sports and recreation each day are also trending well.

I don't care if I make a dollar and you make a billion if one dollar will provide for my entire life, and if that life is pleasant in an absolute sense.

Equality is a false god.

<comment><USER7> Why is it a false god? "QoL Trending in the right direction" seems to be a very myopic way to view the world. When it's clear concentration of wealth has slowly eroded the dignity of many peoples lives, encouraging them to work longer and longer hours in jobs with less benefits "gigs/contracts" while being jerked around by increasingly powerful and untouchable classes of people.

I've experienced this phenomenon very prominently in the life sciences industry where short term precarious contracts are handed out to lower income lab workers. Recently it has become more obvious as all of management has moved to remotely monitoring and dictating the worker's day to day activities while becoming increasingly out of touch with the realities of the people doing the actual work. This is real and also representative.

When there is a culture of respect and dignity of all members of a society sharing similar goals, this sort of thing doesn't happen. Exploitation isn't expedited. Wages and equality are a form of that respect.

It's not a false god when it performs a function of cultural cohesiveness, you could argue that is what a god does..

Final note: Keeping you're livestock healthy doesn't alleviate them from being livestock.

<comment><USER77> All societies that primarily aimed at equality have harmed their members. All societies that have aimed at top-quartile growth have their bottom-quartile more prosperous than those who've aimed at minimizing Gini.

Empirically, it has not led to happy people.

<comment><USER7> Well doesn't that counteract pleasantness in an absolute sense? I would argue there has never truly been a society aimed at equality on a large scale. I don't consider the implementation of communism to have been truly aimed at equality and certainly didn't end that way.

<comment><USER77> In a POSIWID sense, systems that claim to be equality systems are actually aiming at Gini 1. Therefore, my priors on the outcomes likely if I am to go along with an equality-optimizer are high that I will end up a serf and near zero that I will end up equal participant in the commune.

My priors on the outcomes likely if I am to go along with a top-line optimizer are high that he will make out like a bandit, I will make out like a bandit's brother's mechanic, and low that he will eat me.

Merely empirically, optimizing for happiness of the bottom quartile, I should never choose the guy who claims to be an equality-optimizer. America is prosperous and peaceful and a veritable font of innovation. Her poorest are wealthy. Her hungriest are satiated. It's working. I'm going to double down. And double down again. It's going to keep working.

<comment><USER7> Wouldn't it be Gini 0?

<comment><USER77> No, that's the point. Everyone claiming to minimize Gini gets Gini 1, so in a POSIWID sense, the system that claims to minimize Gini is aiming at maximizing Gini.

<comment><USER7> Citation?

<comment><USER77> Probably not going to look for one, sorry. You may prefix "From what I can see" wherever necessary should you wish to soften the claims.

<comment><USER7> I happily offer you a birth on Skid Row LA.

<comment><USER77> Better than where I started out. Rewind me to childhood and I'll take the trade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> "Governments should encourage the adoption of telecommuting by employers where it's possible but not yet implemented. They could, for instance, provide information to organizations about how it works."

This seems a bit delusional. Who actually believes the government knows how to run a business? If you think remote work should be encouraged by the government, all they need to do is use taxes/tax breaks to incentivize it.</comment>


Best language for low level graphics manipulation - <AUTHOR>

I'm about to start prototyping an application that will do a lot of low level graphics manipulation. What is in your opinion the best platform to interactively play around with software that manipulates images and that will have to show the results of the manipulations after each of several stages ?
Performance is somewhat important but since this is the prototype stage not paramount, I'd rather have a very good 'workbench' at the expense of performance.
Is there an open source framework for such projects ? <comment><USER2> Depends on what do you mean low level graphics manipulation - if you think about image manipulation and you wan't to do it interactively, best bet would be to try out Adobe Hydra aka Pixel Bender Toolkit at <http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIF_Toolkit>

You can try GIL (Hydra is built on top of it) for your own stuff [http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/gil/Generic+Image+L...](http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/gil/Generic+Image+Library) \- but it requires C++ knowledge (not much, templates mostly)

Those are two best options for quick image manipulation IMO. If you want to have only a framebuffer and do all of it on your own, try out Pixeltoaster (or write your own) - <http://www.pixeltoaster.com/></comment>


Show HN: Paperworks.io – All your receipts, invoices, and payments in one place - <AUTHOR> https://paperworks.io <comment><USER2> Can you import AMEX transactions? AMEX automatically provides receipts for all transactions.

<comment><USER3> Wait, you're saying AMEX gets an itemized receipt from every place I use my it? I'm going to be pretty pissed off if I find out my finance department makes me take pictures of receipts for no reason.

<comment><USER4> IME not all but many.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> feature-request: be able to add receipts from offline sources like a scanned receipt

<comment><AUTHOR> that's definitely on my todo: [https://github.com/pqvst/paperworks- talk/issues/3](https://github.com/pqvst/paperworks-talk/issues/3)</comment></comment>


Did anyone else notice the YouTube player update? - <AUTHOR>

Watch any video on YouTube, and you will notice it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4U1vO-lMS0 <comment><USER2> I'm totally not seeing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm going to make a wild guess that they didn't roll it out to everyone yet.</comment></comment>


Executive Order 14-14 – Governor Jay Nixon - <AUTHOR> http://governor.mo.gov/news/executive-orders/executive-order-14-14 <comment><AUTHOR> This is quite legally weird - the Governor of Missouri just declared a state of emergency. However, nothing is happening right now - this order is preemptive for response to the upcoming grand jury decision.</comment>