Researchers: Artificial Sweeteners Prevent Weight Loss - <AUTHOR> http://www.dw.com/en/sugar-free-products-stop-us-getting-slimmer/a-36504096 <comment><USER2> Phenylalanine is one of the 20 amino acids required for life as we know it. You are exposed to many times more phenylalanine when you eat high-protein foods compared to an entire 12 pack of diet soda.

Phenylketonurics have to track their phenylalanine consumption, so there are several easy-to-use look-up tables for the amount of phenylalanine in various foods (1).

Diet soda (2) is a rounding error compared to soy, legumes, and meats. Show me a healthy diet without soy, cheese, whole grains, eggs, or legumes and I'll show you someone who's trying too hard to show me something.

(1) [https://www.healthaliciousness.com/articles/high- phenylalani...](https://www.healthaliciousness.com/articles/high- phenylalanine-foods.php)

(2) [http://static.diabetesselfmanagement.com/pdfs/DSM0310_012.pd...](http://static.diabetesselfmanagement.com/pdfs/DSM0310_012.pdf)

<comment><USER3> The article just states that the researchers suspected a mechanism of action that involves phenylalanine, but the experiment doesn't actually say anything about what the actual mechanism is. Anyway, aspartame isn't even phenylalanine or anything else that can be found in nature.

<comment><USER4> Aspartame is composed of aspartate, phenylalanine (two amino acids) and a methyl group.

After you ingest it, it's easily broken down. What your body actually absorbs are the component parts, all of which are ubiquitous in nature.

<comment><USER5> Forgive my ignorance, but it's not like that methyl group just becomes a free radical, right? Does it stick to either the aspartate or the phenylalanine, and if so, wouldn't that potentially change the body's reaction?

<comment><USER6> From a quick google search, it appears the methyl group gets converted to methanol.

<comment><USER7> Which we all know has no ill effects whatsoever.

/s

<comment><USER4> In very high quantities, yeah, it's bad. Just like everything, including water and oxygen.

In small amounts, your body can handle methanol just fine. Which is fortunate, because it's present in many foods at much higher levels than what you'd get from drinking a can of Diet Coke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Related thought: Before I switched majors to CS, I was taking pre-med classes. I remember my anatomy and physiology professor telling us that the pancreas produces insulin the moment the tongue tastes something sweet. One of my fears is that these "diet" sodas are causing the drinkers' bodies to release insulin needlessly; in other words, lots of insulin in the bloodstream but no sugar to digest. I wonder if this could lead to insulin resistance and diabetes.

The article hints at this [1], but I haven't researched the issue very deeply. I'd be curious if other HNers know something about this.

[1] "We previously showed [this enzyme] can prevent obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome [a disease characterized by a combination of obesity, high blood pressure, a metabolic disorder and insulin resistence]. So, we think that aspartame might not work because, even as it is substituting for sugar, it blocks the beneficial aspects of IAP."

<comment><USER9> It might be interesting to get a blood glucose monitor and see if someone's blood sugar level changes after drinking a diet soda.

<comment><USER10> It's worth noting that diabetics often do this almost as a matter of course. If diet soda were spiking diabetic people's insulin, they would almost certainly know.

Some of the most avoid consumers of diet soda I've known are diabetics who checked their blood sugar multiple times a day at least.

<comment><USER11> Avid|Avoid makes for a pretty big difference here :-)

<comment><USER10> Avid is what I meant. My cell phone keyboard apparently disagreed. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They seem to work hard to hint that aspartame can prevent weight loss, but are there actually any studies that show that? There are plenty that show that it has the same effect as drinking water.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12324283](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12324283)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2349932](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2349932)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7146134](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7146134)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20303371](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20303371)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9022524](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9022524)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2178391](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2178391)

And the same for rats

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11890951](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11890951)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3190217](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3190217)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15159141](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15159141)

 _edit_ Found an overview of the evidence for: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892765/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892765/)

<comment><USER13> In the paper they list two studies.

Stellman et al. 1988 : [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00917435869...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0091743586900897)

Fowler et al. 2008 : [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18535548](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18535548)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the abstract [0]: "Conclusions: Endogenous IAP's protective effects in regard to the metabolic syndrome may be inhibited by PHE, a metabolite of aspartame, perhaps explaining the lack of expected weight loss and metabolic improvements associated with diet drinks."

Can someone explain to me what I'm missing here? What is the "expected weight loss," and what are the expected "metabolic improvements associated with diet drinks"? As far as I'm concerned, one should expect neither metabolic improvements nor weight loss simply from consuming diet soda.

[0] [http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/apnm-2016-03...](http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/apnm-2016-0346#.WDotQaIrKHp)

edit: forgot footnote link

<comment><USER15> the title we've been given and the abstract you just quoted fits with my prior that the sugar industry pays for such studies. after all it's obvious that someone who drinks diet sodas isn't getting more Calories than on the packaging, whereas if they drank sugared drinks it would be a huge source.

maybe water would be better as far as "expected weight loss" but it's obviously false that diet soda can prevent weight loss. (unless it takes away a person's will to exercise and takes away a person's ability to make correct calorie-related choices.) If someone is active and eating less than they're using, or exercising heavily and especially building muscle, it's obvious that drinking any amount of diet soda won't inhibit these processes, since people do it all the time.

since you've read and quoted the abstract, could you suggest a title for the mods that's even vaguely true?

<comment><USER16> " among the groups that received a high-fat diet, the mice that drank the sweetener solution became considerably heavier than those who drank plain water. However, the blood sugar level was higher than normal in all of the mice that received sweetener solution. "

In mice, at least, it seems that the artificial sweetener helped them accumulate more fat than mice who were given water and the same diet. So, aspartame may act like an obesogen[1] in mice.

If you think this is hard to believe and that calories in are calories in, consider diabetics. If untreated, they excrete sugars to the point where they have difficulty maintaining weight on a diet that would make somebody else quite fat. The body's chemistry is complex and, as far as I can tell, not well understood at all, especially when it comes to diet. There seems to be a lot more funding available to develop drugs and procedures to treat illness than there is to optimize (relatively) healthy peoples' diets.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesogen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesogen)

<comment><USER15> I still didn't click through but you do not suggest a title. Can you summarize in a neutral way? Maybe "on a high-fat diet, artificial sweeteners may exacerbate weight gain?" Is that fair?

<comment><USER15> While I was downvoted, 12 hours later Reddit managed to post a much more accurate title (which made its front page). This is Reddit's title:

>Low-calorie sweetener use is independently associated with heavier relative weight, larger waist, and higher prevalence and incidence of abdominal obesity, suggesting that low-calorie sweetener use may not be an effective means of weight control, based on a study of 1,454 participants over 10 years.

This makes total sense to me. It is not fair to summarize this as "prevents weight loss."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Most people are bewildered when I tell them I stopped eating sugar. I gave up sweets and sweeteners about two years ago. I cannot say that it has drastically changed my life.

I read one of the many articles on HN about the dangers of sugar and began to ask myself why I felt the need to "treat" myself with sweets? Ultimately I decided that I didn't need it and learning to exercise discipline would likely help me in other areas of my life. I believe it has.

Edit, related articles:

[http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/cutting-sugar- impro...](http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/cutting-sugar-improves- childrens-health-in-just-10-days/)

[http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/the- sugar-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/the-sugar- addiction-taboo/282699/)

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3050319/lessons-learned/how- givi...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3050319/lessons-learned/how-giving-up- refined-sugar-changed-my-brain)

[https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar- co...](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy- robert-lustig-john-yudkin?CMP=share_btn_tw)

[https://www.wired.com/2014/08/what-makes-us- fat](https://www.wired.com/2014/08/what-makes-us-fat)

<comment><USER18> More silly questions. What do you do on Halloween? What would you do if you went to the Cheesecake Factory? I really feel compelled to order cheesecake there :-(

<comment><USER19> As part of my weight loss, I was already on a track to stop eating as much refined sugar. I found that when I cut down on carbs, I got fewer migraines. I now find that when I eat refined sugars, I'm pretty much guaranteed to get a migraine soon after. Naturally, I've stopped.

I still eat carbs. Probably more than is wise, even. But I absolutely avoid cake, ice cream, candy, and anything else with refined sugar. Yes, it was hard even after I realized the migraine thing, but I've been off it long enough (6 months?) that I no longer crave it like I use to. I put Stevia on my cereal (instead of the sugar I used to put on it) and it's good enough. Other than that, I basically avoid sweets. (Oh, I do drink Diet Mt Dew. So there's that.)

And I'm happier for it, in the end. I don't gain weight from it, I don't feel compelled to eat crappy cheap-ass cake from grocery stores at birthday parties, and (of course) I get fewer and less-severe migraines.

I heartily recommend getting off sugar long-term.

<comment><USER20> Sound like my diet.

You don't really miss it.

Only annoyance is how many foods sneak in sugar. But I guess that is the whole point of this, to limit what we eat.

Current ban in my diet is sugar and fried stuff, dairy is in the emergency only line..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Link to the paper's publication : [http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/apnm-2016-03...](http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/apnm-2016-0346)

Haven't picked up the actual paper yet.

</comment><comment><USER22> A few problems with the rather sensationalist headline:

1.) As others have said, mice are not people. Mouse metabolism is quite a bit faster than humans, so let's not get too hasty about conclusions. It might be real, but this is suggestive of further research, no more.

2.) The concentration of aspartame in soda is quite low (aspartame is many fold sweeter than sugar). From the article:

"However, aspartame does not block the enzyme directly. It does so through one of its intestinal breakdown products called phenylalanine."

Phenylalanine is a regular old amino acid. I'd have loved to see whether the same effects are recapitulated when you feed high-phenylalanine foods, an alternative test of the hypothesis.

3.) From the article:

"The amount of sweetener solution given to the normal diet group was equivalent to a human drinking three-and-a-half cans of soda a day. For the high-fat group it amounted to the equivalent of two cans."

"In the end, there were hardly any noticeable differences between the two groups of mice that were fed a normal diet."

They go on to mention that there were some possible glucose sensitivity and inflammation differences, but these are hardly conclusive findings. Again, more research, particularly in humans, is warranted.

They also talk about effects on the high-fat mice, which is fine as far as it goes, but again, see number 1.)

All in all, I think deep breath, some caution, and looking at studies that actually involve humans might be warranted before such strong claims are believed.

Here's a few (some open, some closed) that look at aspartame and human diet:

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00319384909...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0031938490902542)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24595225](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24595225)

And here's a fascinating article on a new human hormone that has been found the old fashioned way (genetic anomaly) in regulating appetite and metabolism:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/opinion/sunday/the-thin- ge...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/25/opinion/sunday/the-thin- gene.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER22> Small edit: I should have made clearer what I meant by metabolic rate. Metabolic rate in terms of heat produced per day increases as a function of mass, so humans have a higher metabolic rate by a good bit than mice. See Kleiber's law:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber's_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber's_law)

However, this relationship scales sub linearly (exponent is ~3/4), so a human is actually more efficient (in terms of converting food to energy for living whose waste then gets radiated as heat). Essentially the concept stands, a mouse's metabolism works differently (apparently generating more heat) than a human's, and we should be careful about how we compare the two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Minimizing (going from 3-4 cans of diet soda a day to 1-2 a week, on average) my artificial sweetener consumption has made it considerably easier for me to control my appetite.

I've finally been able to lose weight after years of being pretty much stuck. I'm following pretty much the same dietary guidelines (eat lots of fruits and veggies, minimize starches, make sure to get enough fat), but it's working this time because I have so much more control of my appetite. I just don't crave food, especially sweets, the way I used to. And when I do eat poorly, I feel much worse afterwords.

Cutting out diet soda was very hard though, I didn't realize how reliant on the 'sweet' I was until I tried to quit.

<comment><USER24> I am sure your personal journey has a great deal of value to you, but why do you share this with us? It should be clear that there are _thousands_ of variables at play in your story, and the suggestion that artificial sweetener is responsible for your inability to lose weight seems like a completely unsupported leap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Websites like this should be forced to actually link to the original study. No credits given that day (and still making money with other peoples content...).

<comment><USER17> And who would do the forcing?

<comment><USER26> The audience. By not sharing the content, at least. (Though, that's just a fantasy, admittedly.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This was a study in mice.

That doesn't mean it's not legit research, but one should put this in perspective. At best this can give hints for further research. It's very far fetched to make statements about effects in humans based on mice studies.

</comment><comment><USER28> The title here on HN is misleading. The article is not talking about all sorts of sweeteners, it is talking about one specific sweetener — aspartame — in sugar-free products.

</comment><comment><USER29> There's at least one study which said that artificial sweeteners led you to eat more because your body had the impression to get sugar while having none, leading to compensate by eating more. So there's that.

Sorry I don't have a link to the source but I saw this on HN at some point this year.

</comment><comment><USER30> Anecdotal evidence here. Throughout my life I have been on diets various time, never because of extreme obesity but like a lot of people in IT, I do not get enough movement and over time gain weight. Thus every 2 years or so I end up going on a diet to lose the weight that I have gained, and in the past I used to mainly drink (sparkling) water when I did this, and always had positive results.

Now I have been trying to diet again but instead of replacing my sugary drinks with the "zero" version of them (coke zero to be specific) I _seem_ to lose weight slower.

Could be a lot more factors in play, but my wife has been suggestion that even those zero drinks have a negative effect on the diet, so she will enjoy this article :-)

<comment><USER31> Look into whether you might have anterior pelvic tilt (APT), what I call "sitting disease," which causes your hips to tilt forward, making you look like you have a big ol' gut. This is caused by the sitting position (simplified) stretching out your backside and not stretching your frontside. When you have a more neutral posture, your silhouette is much less "heavy" looking. That is, it may not be that you have weight to lose so much as you at a normal weight looks worse than it is.

At any rate, dieting will involve more than switching to coke zero. :)

<comment><USER30> Oh I was unaware of that, but the way I set when working is far from ergonomically good I fear.

My diet was never just switching my drinks luckily! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> No fucking kidding. I'm exhausted by people who say they heard a rumor that maybe aspartame has some secret hidden effect maybe- so it's better to suck down gallons of syrup water we KNOW kills more people than... anything.

<comment><USER33> Those people and their R tuples of personal biometric data you're asked to normalize! They should just mount scratch retinas and feet, and half of their measurements would be logged without so much as a cellphone lens and IR webcam to bother. If they came with instruments.

<comment><USER34> So true!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The study found that mice who had aspartame-laced water _and_ ate a high-fat diet (HFD) gained more weight than mice who had pure water but also ate a HFD. All mice on HFD gained weight, though.

It also found that mice who eat a nutritionally balanced diet did _not_ gain more weight whether or not they had aspartame.

We already know that people who are eating HFDs and hoping that diet soda will magically cause them to lose weight are wrong.

But, it is possibly useful to know that aspartame may have a confounding effect when combined with a high-fat diet.

</comment><comment><USER36> Is it possible/likely that other sweeteners like sucralose and acesulfame potassium do the same thing?

</comment><comment><USER37> My problem isn't that I choose diet coke for the 'health' benefits. I choose it because its delicious.

<comment><USER38> You called it right - problem. If you do fasting (no food, just water) for 72h and after fasting put on the table your "delicious" Diet Coke and, let's say V8 veggie juice and try both your body will tell you what's good. You won't be able to drink sweetened drink.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Does anyone know if this also applies to stevia and erythritol?

<comment><USER40> The effect seems to be caused by a metabolite of aspartame, called PHE. So you could check whether stevia or erythritol produces the same metabolite.

<comment><USER41> PHE? That was not mentioned in the article. What was mentioned was _phenylalanine_, which is one of the essential amino acids that the human body needs but cannot synthesize itself. We MUST get it from food. It is present in practically all the food (protein) we eat. Particularly good sources of phenylalanine include eggs, chicken, liver, beef, milk, and soybeans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> "Researchers..." "...expert says" "A growing body of evidence..." "How Russia hacked the election" and other ambiguities :

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word#Forms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word#Forms)

</comment><comment><USER43> Is this a nod in the direction that its not specifically sugar that is the problem, but the products that have either table sugar or artificial sweeteners in them?

</comment><comment><USER44> Hopefully these results can be put to a good use in hospital, where extreme weight loss is a problem for many diseases

</comment><comment><USER18> Any chance this applies to erythritol, xylitol, or Splenda?

<comment><USER45> [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070820175426.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070820175426.htm)

maybe?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'd like to see them explain how this defies thermodynamics. If you aren't ingesting the food energy you simply can't get fat from it.

Specifically I'd like to see this reproduced in humans.

<comment><USER47> I don't understand why so many people have difficulty accepting that the chemical environment can mediate appetite, and appetite is a key driver of food consumption. Thermodynamics holds. What doesn't hold is the idea that you exist as a consciousness independent of chemical inputs.

<comment><USER48> What you missed out on is feedback loops that affect your basal metabolism. So: eat less, your body decides it is starving and reduces your basal metabolism, you continue to eat less (better-than average willpower!), and... you gain weight.

I'm a physicist, and I roll my eyes whenever anyone starts up with simplistic arguments about humans, food, and thermodynamics. Thermodynamics holds, but the system doesn't work the way you think it does.

<comment><USER47> Can your body just "reduce your basal metabolism"? Where are the energy savings? Is your body temperature lowered? I'm skeptical of the idea that differences in "metabolism" can account for different results arising from the same energy inputs.

<comment><USER49> Yes, your body temperature can be lowered, somewhat. Your temperature actually varies over a pretty wide range all of the time, with daily cycles and in response with your activities and things like fighting infections. But your average temperature can trend higher or lower, corresponding to a higher or lower basal metabolism.

Other things that can happen when your metabolism slows down are that you get tired more often and more easily, your thought processes slow down, you sleep more. This happens to everyone as they age, and it can also happen from chronic stress, calorie restriction sufficient to trigger 'starvation mode', and anything else that causes your body to try to conserve energy for survival.

<comment><USER47> What can be done to boost basal metabolism? A safer DNP? The current approach, diet and exercise, although it may work in individual cases, is not effective at the scale of public health.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Feedback needed for early stage Green tech startup - wht-wnf-gw I would really appreciate feedback for GreenWise: https://www.greenwise.tech/
GreenWise is a SaaS aiming to automate carbon emissions accounting for ICT sector companies. This is just a first step, but important one in the path of companies towards carbon neutrality, and carbon responsibility.
You can also check our product offering on Product Hunt!  https://www.producthunt.com/posts/greenwise
All feedbacks appreciated, there's so much to say and criticise, so just go ahead, I'll answer. <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting idea. Just looking at the landing page, I feel like you're describing a solution without making people feel the pain of the problem.

Why would a company pay you for this? What's in it for them? Once you get good at explaining that you can show how GreenWise is the solution to the problem.

<comment> wht-wnf-gw Interesting feedback! Thanks. I had a few similar feedback as well, and we're going to address it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> The best way to get actionable feedback is to ask ICT companies to pay you money for your product.

<comment> wht-wnf-gw We're already doing it ;) But SMBs is a new audience for us so we're looking into feedback for this part.</comment></comment>


Y Combinator in JavaScript: Memoizing recursive functions - <AUTHOR> http://matt.might.net/articles/implementation-of-recursive-fixed-point-y-combinator-in-javascript-for-memoization/?

<comment><USER2> Some discussion on this already: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2962632></comment>


Sending Jobs Overseas - <AUTHOR> http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/sending-jobs-overseas/ <comment><USER4> I thought this article was very good - not perfect, but a fairly reasonable high level description of what possibly is, or may come to be an extremely large problem for western nations.

The interesting thing to me is, whenever an article of any kind on this topic comes up (on HN and elsewhere), those who disagree seem to disagree _entirely_ , as if the entire premise is completely wrong, and there is literally no negative effects of globalization.

To me, simple thought experiments show several areas of risk both short and long term, and if you look at actual on the ground reality, there sure seems to be a lot of visible damage as well as a large increase in risk and "precariousness" where there used to be security. I don't by any means believe that globalization is a complete disaster or the end of the world, indeed it has been beneficial in many ways to both sides. But this seemingly very popular opinion that there is _literally nothing at all_ to worry about, that when China with a combination of technical sophistication, developed local economy, and sheer population reaches parity and then surpasses the US as the new leader of the world, that all will be well. I think there are many good reasons to believe that China might be a better steward of the world, but there are also many reasons to think otherwise.

As it is now, "the west" enjoys world leadership, a high standard of living, and control their own destiny. I would rather pay a little more for manufactured goods and retain at least that last item.

I probably didn't communicate this very well, but this accelerating new world order seems at least worthy of public discussion, rather than being dismissed as racist conspiracy theory. If more people could at least even consider some of the mentioned risks as _plausible_ it would make me feel better, but even that seems unlikely.

<comment><USER5> You think China, an authoritarian government run by a dictator and billionaire party members, that farm its own people out for cheap wages and horrendous pollution, and suppresses free speech, silences reporters and jails people without trials, is A BETTER STEWARD OF THE WORLD???!!

My god, what has this world become

<comment><USER4> Actually yes, I think they very well might be a better steward of the world. I don't think it would be terribly difficult to put their historical behavior on the world stage up against that of others and conclude that they are a more ~moral culture.

Indeed, they are in many ways sacrificing (working to death and discarding) a couple generations of people in exchange for world dominance, but they are doing an incredible job of it in my opinion.

During the last election in /r/the_donald there was this recurring them of Donald playing chess while everyone else was playing checkers. Whether or not that was true (he did win the election), I feel the very same thing is playing out on the world stage. But really, it isn't that complicated when everything in the west is run by corporations that have no concern for anything but themselves, and a typical time horizon of a few quarters. Western society seems to me to have the tendency to completely ignore long term ramifications in exchange for short term benefits (see: the environment). Meanwhile, "racial guilt" from past transgressions is such that it's near impossible _to even have a conversation_ about some of these issues.

Despite what the majority of the west believes, the people running China are _fucking smart_ , but you don't even need that when you're taking candy from a baby.

<comment><USER5> yeah people running China are so smart. SO SMART that they

\- have destroyed their water/air/land for money that was printed out of thin air by other countries, and those money are now fleeing China to US, Canada, Australia, etc.

\- have leveraged their debt level to 300+%. not including shadow lending

\- have built rails to nowhere or barely used, built cities that are not lived, or barely lived, and have to maintain them all

\- have managed to piss off most of their neighbors (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, etc)

\- have a crashing economy that needs capital outflow restrictions just to barely survive

\- have not managed to create any global brands

\- have managed to not create any innovations

\- encourage its members to flee to US, Canada, Australia

<comment><USER4> \- have destroyed their water/air/land for money that was printed out of thin air by other countries, and those money are now fleeing China to US, Canada, Australia, etc.

Everyone "destroys" their environment while they develop. The earth is incredibly resilient.

\- have leveraged their debt level to 300+%. not including shadow lending

Yawn.

\- have built rails to nowhere or barely used, built cities that are not lived, or barely lived, and have to maintain them all

Let's see how it turns out, I suspect they know what they're doing.

\- have managed to piss off most of their neighbors (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, India, etc)

Because they don't have to care what they think, they only have to manage opinions of Americans. Managing others would be polite but inefficient.

\- have a crashing economy that needs capital outflow restrictions just to barely survive

Where have I heard this before?

\- have not managed to create any global brands

Let's revisit this in 10 years.

\- have managed to not create any innovations

True, but why innovate when 90% of the innovators deliver their technology directly to you?

\- encourage its members to flee to US, Canada, Australia

Wouldn't you? Even if I move to China, I am going to retain a _very_ strong allegiance to Canada. Despite what the PC crowd tells you, this is natural and normal. China's leadership acts quickly, but also thinks very long term.

One of us will be proven right in the end, your extreme confidence to me suggests you perhaps don't have a terribly open mind on the topic, which tends not to be beneficial when predicting how the future unfolds.

<comment><USER6> I'm not taking sides here, but when people respond with stuff like this

> Yawn.

It makes _you_ look bad, not the person you're debating, because while you might be bored of hearing what they have to say, to observers it just looks like you have no argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The great betrayal of the unions by the Democrats starting with NAFTA by Bill Clinton, and the national unions acquiesence in this is made more dramatic by the populist right's take up of the anti free trade cause. Clinton's and Obama's business friendly "third way" has ended up completely flipping American politics.

<comment><USER8> NAFTA was begun as a Bush 1.0 initiative. Clinton just signed off on it.

<comment><USER7> NAFTA was a big issue in the 1992 election with Ross Perot basing his 3rd party run on it. Clinton stood with HW Bush as pro-NAFTA. In 1988 Dukakis had been much more protectionist. But since Dukakis and Mondale before him had lost badly Clinton was espousing himself as a New Democrat moving to the right and taking some of Reagan's positions such as tax cuts, welfare cuts and free trade.

<comment><USER9> If the political environment was shifting right, and Democrats were forced to make compromises, how is that considered a hyperbolic "great betrayal" instead of acknowledging political reality? Additionally, globalism was well under way before either Clinton/Obama held office.

As far betraying unions, statistics for union membership are first available starting in 1983. The biggest declines for recorded data in private union membership happened before Clinton, and held steady under Clinton until Bush took office where it declined again. In summary, Republicans have consistently tried to undermine the political influence of unions, while Democrats tried to prevent that.

[https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2016/union-membership-in- the-u...](https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2016/union-membership-in-the-united- states/pdf/union-membership-in-the-united-states.pdf)

This is just one tiny part of a complicated issue. Boiling it down to "Democrats betrayed unions" isn't a useful contribution and is more of a rant in terms of how honest it is.

Protectionism isn't a solution either. Manufacturing output has increased under Obama, but it has largely been increased through use of automation instead of blue collar labor. Manufacturing is coming back in the form of robotics.

<comment><USER7> The point is that by shifting to the right they moved away from being the defenders of unions and the working class and that has now come around to bite them in the rear as the electorate is shifting against free trade. Whether that was politically expedient at the time is neither here nor there. I'm sure the union's calculations at the time were also short-sighted political self interest.

<comment><USER9> It's a little too pat as "Democrats got what they deserved". It also ignores the shift of the political landscape toward the right and dismissing it as "whether it was politically expedient etc." is just flat out ignoring political history. It also ignores that there are net economic gains that could benefit everyone in society.

You don't get to look at economic history and ignore political history because it fits your narrative. It's not honest and is only done to score political argument points.

The problem isn't free trade itself, it's how the benefits should be distributed.

<comment><USER7> You don't know if your cause and effect is backwards, maybe the electorate shifted to the right because the Democrats shifted to the right, no one was advocating the ideas of the left anymore.

As far as how the benefits should be distributed, the Democrats completely gave up on trying to do any redistribution of wealth, Clinton pushed through the biggest welfare cuts in a generation and criminalized the poor. It didn't take a magic ball to figure out who was going to benefit from free trade.

<comment><USER10> > As far as how the benefits should be distributed, the Democrats completely > gave up on trying to do any redistribution of wealth

The neoliberal faction (Clinton's Third Way) has never been the whole of the party (even in government—many of the neoliberal policies Clinton pushed through or followed Congress on were opposed by most Democrats in Congress but supported by Republicans.)

And the neoliberal faction's dominance of the party has been waning over the last several years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It wasn't computers and information that fueled globalization in goods trade. It was containers and fax machines.

Containers made trade both cheap and reliable. It costs about $1000 to move a container from China to the US. (Yes, port charges, trucking, etc. add to that. But that's true of any transport. The long-distance transport is not expensive.)

Fax machines made it much easier to do business across language barriers. Purchase orders and invoices on forms can usually be puzzled out by both parties. The paperwork now preceded the merchandise, so you knew the shipment was coming when it started transit. It used to take weeks to track missing rail and ship shipments.

</comment><comment><USER12> There are two points in the article which placed next to each other might seem contradictory but they aren't.

First,

> Globalization seems to have delivered up to private parties hard-won > competitive advantages that were really the common property of American > society.

Second,

> In order to work, free-trade systems must be frictionless and immune to > interruption, forever. This means a program of intellectual property > protection, zero tariffs, and cross-border traffic in everything, including > migrants. This can be assured only in a system that is veto-proof and non- > consultative—in short, undemocratic. That is why it is those who have > benefited most from globalization who have been leading the counterattack > against the democracy movements arising all over the West.

Most people I've heard from or met accept one of these two points but not both.

<comment><USER13> Why is asymmetric intellectual property protection a form of friction here?

<comment><USER14> Suppose an American company spends $2 billion developing a new drug (or microchip, etc) and an Indian (Chinese, Brazilian...) company starts selling unauthorized copies at a 95% discount. (And then, the news media and politicians cite that price differential as evidence for how extremely evil your company is).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Most serious issue facing the US - period.

Why? Because without economic growth, serious economic growth, the near insurmountable entitlement debts facing Municipalities, States and the Federal Government will result in massive tax increases, huge cuts in services, social unrest, and perhaps the largest sale of public assets to foreign investors - ever.

While Democrats and Republicans in Congress allocate 99% of their time to undermining each other, the new President, and infighting in their party, the US hanging by an economic thread. They do this because its the divisions that stimulate campaign donations, not common ground.

Our political-economic system is broken because the short and medium term incentives are aligned to rhetoric and action that tears people apart - <USER2> both sides of the isle.

</comment><comment><USER16> There is great risk of 'creative' and 'knowledge worker' type jobs leaving the rich countries. But, that wave won't appear for another 5-10 years.

Why? Because there's just too much free capital floating around.

It's the same reason why a upper-end software engineer can ask for $175k in salary and get dozens of job offers, but if that same engineer asks for $200k or to work remotely, most companies will look away. Or, in other words, there's an imbalance of capital to competition. Currently, most companies can get away with shunning financial analysis.

There are many weak, unserious products out there that are still making lots of money. There are lots of mediocre companies that are worth $150M. That demonstrates that there is too much floating capital in the system. But, eventually, things will bounce the opposite way, and it's gonna HURT, HURT, HURT.

</comment><comment><USER17> The only Chinese company that is managing its own future is DJI, the drone company. DJI designs, manufactures and sells its own drones for a global market. They even have their own store in downtown SF. Its a sign of the times when middlemen (US designers and marketers) are taken out of the equation. The same will happen with more Chinese made goods.

<comment><USER18> As Western wages collapse further, wouldn't this then become the kick in the pants developed countries need to motivate the rebuilding and reseeding of their decrepit and aging industrial bases?

<comment><USER19> > decrepit and aging industrial base

This is such a common canard that seems to lack any foundation. The United States manufacturers more "stuff" than at any point in history, for any reasonable definition of "stuff" (dollar value, inflation-adjusted dollar value, number of items, etc). Employment in manufacturing is way down, in large part because of automation -- for example, high-technology production lines replaced hand-welding with welding robots.

By contrast, developing markets tend to employ a lot of people doing manual tasks that would be automated in the United States (or Germany, Japan, etc.). A Foxconn assembly factory is far from high-tech; it's usually a long line of people in matching uniforms using tweezers to put parts together.

Sources, among many: [http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-manufacturing-dead- outpu...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-manufacturing-dead-output-has- doubled-in-three-decades-2016-03-28)

<comment><USER20> I hate this counterpoint quite a bit. It's vastly different in terms of employment and who is able to be employed selling 1,000,000 widgets for $10 or 1 widget for $1 million dollars.

It's simply not interesting to me to know we've increased the total dollar amount of production - largely based around extremely large ticket items to the detriment of everything else. This is even without getting into the fact rent-seeking is much more profitable the larger the deals get. A single 737 sold for $50M is not equivalent to $50M spread around 10 small manufacturing suppliers building tens of thousands of devices. I would argue anyone saying otherwise is missing the forest through the trees.

It's in-your-face obvious if you actually try to manufacturer or design/build anything as a small company in the US. The velocity and simple ability to do so is an order of magnitude better in China - where design shops can literally run down the street to have a custom part made for deliver that afternoon. If you are directly competing with anyone from China in such a space - you simply are going to lose. The competitive advantages this gives cannot be overstated - and HN should really understand the network effect here.

Simply put I think manufacturing base is something you either build up, keep, and continue to think is important - or it's something you lose. As you lose that base, you also slowly bleed the design talent that went along with it, as it naturally migrates to where the manufacturing happens. I just don't find it interesting that the US can assemble components made in china into high-margin complex devices. It's simply a matter of time until other economies move up the value chain. And there aren't many places for the US to move even further up - we're already at the top and have completely lost our ability to compete any lower. I would posit this is an extremely dangerous place to be, and if it continues makes the US existing largely at the sufferance of others.

<comment><USER21> > A single 737 sold for $50M is not equivalent to $50M spread around 10 small > manufacturing suppliers building tens of thousands of devices.

Correct - it's many more than 10 suppliers: [http://www.b737.org.uk/suppliers.htm](http://www.b737.org.uk/suppliers.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Several issues with statements in this article. Example:

"In all Western societies, the new formula for prosperity is inconsistent with the old formula for democracy."

This statement is not explained, just made as a de facto truth. It's a pretty sweeping statement that I find difficult to accept based on what I understand it to mean. So I am thinking I don't understand it, but there is no explanation.

"Once a complex manufacturing process could be supervised from afar"

true one can 'order up' a production run of a million units, however, many small and mid-sized companies have failed simply because they could not make this work. Pleo being the first example that comes to mind: The CEO flew between the US and their Asian mfr 20 times in a year, couldn't get the product built and wound up selling the company to the manufacturer. Apple successfully operates with distributed manufacturing, but still requires many (thousands?) of engineers to shuttle between the US and Asia-based factories in order to ensure that base materials, components, quality, design, lead time, and many other aspects of manufacturing are done per their requirements. It turns out that the dance between design engineers and the manufacturing team is much more involved than companies realized and the challenges of communicating all of that across an ocean has been the death of many products.

"A lot of what Americans think of as valuable service-sector know-how is actually mere prestige."

It's not know-how. It's 'know customer'. Americans are great consumers but to sell to them you have to know what they want and how they want it delivered. The non-US companies that succeed are the ones that tap into US-based design for things like, um, cars. Many foreign products are designed in LA.

Moreover, innovation is the true source of value. Nations that are more innovative will ultimately prevail. That is where one should focus in order to understand where the threats and opportunities are.

<comment><USER23> Our democratic structure doesn't work in a society with vast wealth differences. Over the last 10 years, has the prosperity and freedom of average Americans increased or decreased? Increasing wealth inequality in the long term is almost a guarantee of a broken democracy because who wants to be less prosperous?

That statement does expect some background in this. Potential resources include the Iron Law of Oligarchy on wikipedia, rules for rulers, or google :)

<comment><USER24> Is that a rhetorical question with a foregone conclusion?

As an average American, whether prosperity increased or decreased, I feel grateful and prosperous every day. I can walk outside without fear of bombs dropping from overhead; I can run, bike, drive, or fly anywhere within this vast, beautiful land without encumbrance; I have uncensored access to the internet at-large; I get to watch some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world build amazing things; I can communicate and interact with any one of the 300 million+ people here; and I can make money as I please when I please without anyone blocking me. And I can start doing all this with a minimum wage job (like I did).

That's just to name a few things.

No one is owed anything except for equality of opportunity. Are we wishing for equality of outcome? On its face, I can't understand why that would ever make sense.

Do I think we're fully at equality of opportunity yet? No. But I feel that's what we should be working on. That's what we should be protecting. I don't give a hoot who made $10B as long as I have the opportunity to as well.

<comment><USER25> > No one is owed anything except for equality of opportunity. Are we wishing > for equality of outcome? On its face, I can't understand why that would ever > make sense.

I hear this frequently, but it's sorta missing the point.

Nearly all people want equality of opportunity, and not outcome.

What people are concerned about is:

1) The bad outcomes don't need to be Kafkaesque or medieval (e.g. "too poor to be sick" doesn't need to be a thing).

2) If bad outcomes are becoming more and more frequent (as we see with e.g. wealth inequality becoming more pronounced), it's a smell that something systemically bad is happening. It's probably a sign that equality of opportunity is being reduced over time.

> Do I think we're fully at equality of opportunity yet? No. But I feel that's > what we should be working on. That's what we should be protecting.

As I noted above, if outcomes are becoming more and more polarized over time, it's a likely sign that equality of opportunity is ceasing to exist.

Outcomes are the dependent variable we kinda have to use for measuring equality of opportunity, because we don't really have anything else to measure.

<comment><USER26> I think the key thing people miss when they go on about 'equality of opportunity not equality of outcome' is that by making some of the outcomes intolerable (dying of cancer because you can't afford care, for example), you actually deny opportunity.

If the route to wealth and satisfaction in life was russian roulette, would that be considered 'equality of opportunity' and thus fine? I doubt it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if the sort of people who produce these sorts of thought-pieces have ever considered the societal consequences of tossing out entire skillsets. Pre-colonization, an Indian craftsman could carve an entire complicated scene in a single elephant tusk with his bare hands. Who can do that now? What about the sense of pride one feels when they see their output admired by others - <USER3> major part of the human condition.

Nah, the world's proto-bureaucrats have decided that the world's middle class must buy Ikea, iPhones, drink Starbucks and drive to and from a white-collar job in a Toyota.

Everything and everyone must be assimilated!

<comment><USER28> > an Indian craftsman could carve an entire complicated scene in a single > elephant tusk with his bare hands

The carved elephant tusks you see nowadays in museums were created by top craftsman, or his entire workshop, was ordered by the king or a noble and cost a fortune. There were plenty of average or poor craftsmen whose work simply didn't survive. Most likely, most craftsmen had poor skills or average at most.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> He's right about one thing:

The global trading economy is one revolution away from collapse. Imagine a military coup in China. Imagine protectionism makes a dramatic rise across the west.

I also wonder how long western consumers can sustain this shell game.

</comment><comment><USER30> You can sum up this whole article with this quote:

 _...which is more likely? That Asian manufacturing powerhouses will learn to market their own products, or that Western P.R. spivs and window-treatment consultants and professional espresso-tasters will learn to rebuild an industrial base from scratch?_

A lot of emotional invective around a fundamentally faulty premise. Which is harder, building a successful brand or building a clothing factory? The _brand_ , unquestionably.

EDIT: /s/easier/harder. Somehow my fingers typed the exact opposite of what my brain instructed. Sorry!

<comment><USER31> >Which is easier, building a successful brand or building a clothing factory? The _brand_ , unquestionably.

I'd question that. To me, convincing tens of millions of people that your products have certain qualities seems much more difficult than physically manipulating some cloth.

<comment><USER32> You are largely correct. Brands are very hard, especially in established markets. But brands don't employ people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > _The U.S. contribution, however well compensated, seems like the most > inessential part of this setup. The global economy is a fair-weather > economy. If there is a slight rise in tariffs, a subtle judicial > reinterpretation of regulation, a tiny change of attitude — in short, if > there is any exercise of what we think of as normal democracy anywhere along > the supply chain — the model that links companies like Hilfiger and Li & > Fung to producers will fall apart. Should that happen, which is more likely? > That Asian manufacturing powerhouses will learn to market their own > products, or that Western P.R. spivs and window-treatment consultants and > professional espresso-tasters will learn to rebuild an industrial base from > scratch?_

This is well put and funny, but there are other options. It seems in fact more likely that Western designers would find other suppliers, than manufacturers would be able to market and sell directly to consumers.

Good design needs proximity - cultural, geographical proximity - with the end user.

</comment><comment><USER34> Any argument against free trade also applies to internal trade between individual the individual states which make up the USA.

Why is trade between China and the USA different to trade between Virginia and California?

<comment><USER35> Perhaps because they share more common values, as well as highly intertwined financially, e.g. via the government?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> >"The most shocking statistic in Baldwin's book is that almost all of the manufacturing uptake and poverty reduction has gone on in just six countries emerging from either Communism or post-revolutionary authoritarianism: China, Korea, India, Poland, Indonesia, and Thailand."

These 'just six countries' make up the majority of the world population. 2 of these countries are continents by any measure.

Other than these bending of statistics the article is pretty decent.

</comment><comment><USER37> What an excellent article. Now combine Clinton's 7 careers over your lifetime with the cost of education in the US...Say $65,000 base to get a masters in Product management from CMU and multiply that x 7 over the course of a career. Eternal debt. And age discrimination after your age and salary peak.

</comment><comment><USER38> Right now the U.S. still has the best universities in the world, which is the heart of the non-manufacturing IP economy.

If the U.S. cuts off their universities by following the lead of the anti- knowledge conservatives, and if Asian countries decide to develop their universities to compete fully - not just in tech (which they are doing), but in things like the arts and business - the U.S. is completely fucked over the long-term.

Another comparative advantage that the U.S. has is that the U.S. still attracts migrants. During the 90's economic boom, immigration was wide open, bringing in millions of people. Each immigrant drives demand. For example, they need a place to live, which causes someone else to sell their house to them for a nice profit, leading to further economic activity.

If the U.S. follows the lead of the dumb working-class Trump/Bernie voter that incorrectly thinks migrants are a bad thing, and therefore reduces immigration, then that turns into another massive economic loss.

A good way to be poor is to close your borders.

<comment><USER15> None of this is what the article is about. The article, as it relates to your comment, is about imbalances in GDP growth between the developed and almost- developed world, and how the expected upside for the developed world hasn't materialized. the non-manufacturing IP economy, as you put it, hasn't generated enough well paying jobs or enough domestic product, to offset massive export of domestic wealth, capacity and assets. If your argument is that an influx of unskilled immigrant labor and an army of college professors can correct this imbalance then I'm speechless.

<comment><USER38> > If your argument is that an influx of unskilled immigrant labor and an army > of college professors can correct this imbalance then I'm speechless.

Then try harder to formulate a response, because that's the proper argument for globalization: an influx of unskilled immigrant labor and an army of college professors is what will save the world.

The article itself describes how globalization has benefitted the world, in particular, the massive reduction in of poverty in China, Korea, India, Poland, Indonesia, and Thailand after they opened up for globalization. It even says China went from 2% to 20% of the world's share of manufacturing, in line with it's share of world population.

How is that a bad thing?

Did you think the world was supposed to be static? That the third-world was supposed to be poor and suffering forever?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This article was great to read up until I got to this point near the bottom:

> One of the alarming innovations of the Obama years was the way the > president's aides enlisted corporations of various kinds—from Wal-Mart to > the NCAA—to discipline recalcitrant American states in the same way. Indiana > was going to have gay marriage and North Carolina was going to let > conflicted males use ladies' restrooms, or the administration would rally > corporate friends to destroy their economies.

I'm not sure what the author was trying to imply here - obviously something about Obama getting help from corporations in an effort to force a couple of states to - gasp - treat humans with dignity and respect.

I guess I can understand the whole "goverments and corporate working hand-in- hand" fear thing; perhaps the author would have rather had the government withhold highway funds or something in that manner, and not get the corporations involved?

Or maybe the author doesn't like that citizens all over the United States are largely in support of gay marriage and LGBTQ rights - and that perhaps these companies, knowing this, knew that it was in their better marketing and brand interest to use their economic might against those states to change those laws?

Does the author think less of LGBTQ people? Should they not have the right to be married, or to use the bathroom of their gender identity? Does the author even understand what gender identity is, and how it is apart and separate from sexual orientation and physical gender?

I can't fault the author if they are simply ignorant on these topics, but I can fault them if they are and haven't taken the time to rectify that ignorance. Understanding these issues isn't difficult. For some, though, being empathetic and supportive of those who are different, yet still human, is.

I'm not sure where the author's bias lies, but that one section seems to indicate that it lies against that of basic human rights, dignity, and respect towards LGBTQ. This made the piece lesser than it could have been; it's arguments (whether you agree with them or not) were made solid and some other example than what was given to show a similar means of globalization on a local scale could have been illustrated.

Other than that, it was a great piece of writing; I only wish it could have offered or suggested potential solutions, or had explored more in-depth the consequences of the current status-quo; though one could say "look around you; these are the consequences" \- and I would have to agree.

<comment><USER40> > I'm not sure what the author was trying to imply here - obviously something > about Obama getting help from corporations in an effort to force a couple of > states to - gasp - treat humans with dignity and respect.

I believe the author's point was broader than that, more about the dangerous power that corporations wield over their supply chains. From further up in the paragraph you quoted:

> International corporations are constantly threatening and laying down the > law to backward societies.

And from the previous paragraph:

> If the English people were better, they could have had those jobs, but they > have proved unworthy—they have failed the global supply chain. Any sense > that the economy should serve the citizenry and not vice-versa tends to get > lost.

In other words, the citizenry are only a link in the chain that can be replaced at will, and have thus become subservient to the corporations, for good or ill. Thus the author closes by saying,

> It is hard to say whether we were right to go down this road.

Even if the ring is used for good, it might not end well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The article holds that computer has reduced the need for people to cluster in the same building or the same city. If that is true, Silicon Valley is such an irony.

<comment><USER42> The network is what makes the Valley and the network effect happens because they live in a concentrated place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The idea that it's a choice between low-skill American workers and ones in Bangladesh has always been a clever false choice caused by both self-interest from those that benefit from it, and completely muddled thinking. There's no conflict between someone in Ohio making a decent living, and someone in Dhaka doing the same. Profits are hoarded at the top, and those doing most of the benefitting are the owners of capital. Deboer explains in "Outsource Brad deLong":

"We have entered another phase of journalists, raised in affluence and currently enjoying at least middle class incomes — who are thus, according to their own moral calculus, very economically privileged — telling Americans devastated by the collapse of the uneducated labor market that their poverty, marginalization, and hopelessness is Actually Good, because people in Bangladesh can now move from absolutely abject poverty to slightly-less-abject poverty. Provided the sweatshop where they work doesn't collapse on them. And provided they are willing to endure a nightmare of nonexistent labor power, terrible health and safety standards, total impunity from their bosses, and for the women, an atmosphere of near-constant sexual threat and exploitation.

The first thing to say is that this is transparently bogus, a complete false choice propagated in order to preserve the class hierarchy of this country and this planet. "Help poor people in Bangladesh" or "help poor people in Yuma" is a false binary. Yes, as the working class in America have suffered, the incomes of some of the poorest people in the world have risen. You know who else have seen their incomes rise? The world's wealthiest, by vast margins. Pretending that globalization is a simple matter of siphoning from the poor- but-less-poor to the more-poor is a willful deception. It completely ignores the vast explosion in the income and wealth of those at the top. So if you want to know where we can get the money to help poor people in China and India and Mexico, we know where to look.

Now the actual numbers of such distributions are often debated. But you don't have to accept UNICEF's exact numbers to acknowledge that there is a vast ocean of income that is controlled by a tiny portion of the world's people. There is more than enough money being generated in the global economy to ensure a decent standard of living for a Bangladeshi factory worker and an out of work Ohio iron worker with a bad knee and two kids. To constantly frame this as a zero-sum game between the global poor and the American poor is an act of basic dishonesty. It's just another example of capital's favorite tactic: playing poor people against each other to prevent them from working together against their natural class enemies, the rich. All it takes is a willingness by the people to take by force that which the wealthy refuse to give up by choice.

But suppose you're a journo, writer, or academic who really does think that outsourcing is the only way to help the world's poorest. Isn't your own moral path then clear? Shouldn't you be outsourcing your own job to people from the poorest parts of the earth? There are many talented and ambitious writers and scholars in China, India, Pakistan, Nigeria…. If you make, say, $80K a year as a pundit, isn't your moral duty to work with your employee to outsource your work to a poorer country? Punditry, after all, is very easy to conduct via telecommunications, unlike being a waiter, an orchard worker, or a yoga instructor. And isn't it very possible that you could get at least a large majority of the value of your work from a team of people in India at a fraction of the cost, while providing all of them with wages far higher than the median income of their home country? You could have your employer pay five Indian writers $10K/year to replicate what you provide for the company. The Indian writers would make better than six times the Indian median annual income. And your employer gets to pocket that extra $30K — which, after all, is why outsourcing actually exists, to improve the profits of our corporate overlords. Everyone wins! Well, not you. But this is precisely the bargain that you think America's uneducated labor force should make. It is, in fact, a condition that you have loudly argued is morally necessary."</comment>


Thomas Friedman: Amazon.you (1999) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/26/opinion/foreign-affairs-amazonyou.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm <comment><USER2> It never ceases to amaze me how "easy" everything is for Tom Friedman. Especially given his complete lack of any real experience.

It was just a couple of months ago that he was talking about how "easy" it was to design a product in the US, prototype it in Taiwan, manufacture it in China, setup customer service in India, get a graphic designer off of 99designs, blah blah blah. (Come to think of it, he's been saying some variation of that for an entire decade...)

International business is easy! Scaling to Amazon levels is easy! (And yes, less of a challenge in 1999 than today, but still: not "easy"...)

How does this hack keep getting work? Bigger question: how many people have been led astray by this pied piper of the globalized/information age?

<comment><USER3> The message I get from his article, is not that "scaling to amazon levels is easy", but "scaling amazon size ideas down to a size where they are easier is possible".

Isn't that part of the startup culture? That simple scaled down approaches are not only credible alternatives to "big business" but are in many ways better alternatives.

Bigger question: how many people have been motivated to try something by this pied piper of the globalized/information age?

<comment><USER4> I think you're giving his analysis too much credit. His point wasn't so much that the field remains wide open to startups. It was that, in his estimation, Amazon had no sustainable competitive advantage precisely because the barriers to entry into its business were (ostensibly) very low.

This is a little like saying that anyone can beat Tiger Woods, because all you need to do is pick up a golf club and practice for 10,000 hours, and golf clubs are readily accessible. While nominally and theoretically true, it's also a drastic simplification of many, many factors that have gone into making Tiger as good as he is -- and that will keep him better than most of the competition for quite some time.

Access to resources is only one very small part of business strategy. The rest is what you make of those resources, and how the advantages compound when you're making smart use of them. On the flipside, the beauty of startups is that they can, and often must, use the resources in different ways.

Furthermore, he made the fundamental mistake of thinking that Amazon was just a traditional retailer, but on the web.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In some ways he's right. He happened to pick a couple of poor examples, since Amazon turned out to be run by one of the most savvy founder/CEOs of the past several decades, and the company has managed to adroitly maneuver from one business to the next, leveraging existing resources to build into the next. It would have been difficult to predict _which_ of the seemingly outrageously priced stocks in 1999 were going to stand the test of time. Most of them didn't, Amazon was one that did.

But, there have been numerous big Internet companies from the first boom/bust who have been displaced by smaller competitors. In fact, it's probably more common than the alternative.

So, was Friedman wrong? Yeah, about these two companies. But, if you're viewing it as an example, and you take a look at a few dozen other comparably valued tech companies of the same age during the same time period, I'm certain you'll find most of them are mere shadows of their former self or long-since defunct.

<comment><USER6> +1 - Amazon is the one left standing because they totally changed their business model from being a store to being a platform.

Plus, their stock is huge because of stuff like Kindle and AWS, not because of selling books.

If Amazon had kept doing what they had been doing, Friedman would have been right.

The only place he was wrong is not realizing Amazon is a great company with the ability to foresee and adapt.

<comment><USER7> Yes and no.

Amazon is not _a_ store it is _the_ store. Once you get Amazon Prime, retail is dead to you. My personal experience (and several colleagues) of course, but once someone gets hooked on Amazon great service, 2 day shipping, easy returns, etc, you just can't use retail or even another web store. They just _suck_ in comparison.

Amazon is fantastic at what they do, more so than any other company I can think of. Maybe Apple, but Amazon is _cheaper_ than the competition not 50% more expensive.

The platform is just a bonus. They found out a way to do infrastructure right and now they are even making money on what is normally "just" a cost center.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looking at [http://replay.web.archive.org/20071123051120/http://positive...](http://replay.web.archive.org/20071123051120/http://positively- you.com/):

1998 - 2001 Book store

2003 Redirect to porn-looking domain name

2005 - 2009 Self-(book)publishing site

2009 Content site or directory of links for dating

2011 Redirect to a MFA site

If the site had been sustainable, it would have to grow into a niche or grow in size, the latter which would become Amazon or the likes anyhow.

<comment><USER9> I find it amusing that that the current domain-squatter-template's tag line is "Without books there would be no history!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How could Friedman not see that Mr. Brodlin's business could not possibly be sustainable at any kind of larger scale? His wife is mailing the books by hand! It may be a nice little family business, but to compare it with Amazon, even in 1999...

<comment><USER11> Friedman has not made a career out of being consistently correct.

I don't generally agree with Matt Taibbi, but he does a great job dismantling T.L.F. here:

<http://www.nypress.com/article-19271-flat-n-all-that.html>

<comment><USER12> This guy's writing ain't so hot, either. I'll leave it to the readers to find his bad analogies, parallelism-failures, jarring subject changes, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Keep in mind that at the time Friedman was writing this, his in-laws had a billion dollar empire of shopping malls. His dire predictions for investing in Amazon start looking quite self serving. His wife's family fortune hasn't fared nearly as well as Amazon since then...

<comment><USER14> Do you have a source?

<comment><USER15> [http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/11/thomas- friedm...](http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/11/thomas-friedmans- world-is-flat-broke.html)

... based on the bad news coming out of shopping-mall owner General Growth Properties [GGP], it is no wonder Friedman is feeling crankier than usual. That's because the author's wife, Ann (née Bucksbaum), is an heir to the General Growth fortune. In the past year, the couple—who live in an 11,400-square-foot mansion in Bethesda, Maryland—have watched helplessly as General Growth stock has fallen 99 percent, from a high of $51 to a recent 35 cents a share. The assorted Bucksbaum family trusts, once worth a combined $3.6 billion, are now worth less than $25 million.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I suspect a series of "Thomas Friedman, 12 years ago" looks back would generate a lot of yuks. Friedman offers a lot of goofy predictions, phrasings, and oversimplifications with an easy, unearned confidence.

But some of this is the fault of the form: NYT op-ed columnists have to spit out something at least mildly discussion-worthy and topical, fitting neatly into 800 words, with an authoritative tone befitting the Gray Lady, like clockwork multiple times a week. So all the columns can't be gems, or even fully-baked.

(We're now spoiled by blogs, which can vary in frequency, length, and tone with the topic matter, and speculate and self-correct via rapid iteration with readers and other correspondents.)

To Friedman's credit, he reported Positively-You's failure – despite the boost of NYT coverage – almost exactly a year later:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/03/opinion/foreign-affairs- sa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/03/opinion/foreign-affairs-saga-of-an- online-pioneer.html)

Though, the lessons he draws from the failure are a mixed bag, and mostly boil down to: they couldn't afford advertising once their free media wore off.

</comment><comment><USER17> Don't forget that he is talking about "investing in Amazon.com" in 1999 a bad thing, not "Building an Amazon.com"

</comment><comment><USER18> Help. I may need an intervention for my curiosity problem. Here's the whole story, found in this book: <http://books.google.com/books?id=HmyqbzrlVpkC>

Bezos's story resonated among the book-buying public, the investment community, and beyond. At its peak, the story was so compelling that he was Time magazine's 1999 "Person of the Year." Months before Bezos earned that particular accolade, however, Friedman detected a flaw in the story. On February 26. 1999. Friedman's column "Amazon.you," asked: What's so special about selling books over the Internet? He introduced Lyle Bowlin, a professor of small business at the University of Northern Iowa and founder of Positively-you.com, a bookselling Web site. Bowlin, his wife, and his daughter ran Positively-you out of their spare bedroom. This arrangement let Positively-you cut its overhead even further than Amazon—according lo Bowlin, down to about $150 a month—and thus to undercut Amazon's prices. Friedman's conclusion? "For about the cost of one share of Amazon.com, you can _be_ Amazon.com."

Not surprisingly, Friedman's column was good for Bowlin's business. Within ten days, Positively-you's business had grown by a factor of about thirty. Bowlin moved its operations out of the spare bedroom and into the formal dining room. Friedman responded with a follow-up column, "KillingGoliath.com," in which he summarized Positively-you's success in a two-word reply directed at the skeptical readers who'd questioned "Amazon.you." No, not those two words. This was, after all, the op-ed page of the New York Times. Friedman's response was a fully capitalized "YOU'RE WRONG."

That's where Scott Rosenberg entered the story. Rosenberg, the managing editor of Salon.com, was one of the skeptical experts to whom Friedman had directed his reply. In "Amazon vs. the Ants," Rosenberg explained that Friedman had captured only half the logic of the online marketplace. That half, the low cost of getting started, certainly allowed hobbyists like Bowlin to launch commercial ventures. The other half, in Rosenberg's view, was what set Amazon apart from Positively-you. He cited two fatal flaws with Positively-you's business model. The first flaw stemmed from scalability. Positively-you's overhead was lower than Amazon's precisely because it was a smaller operation. As business grew, Bowlin would have to relocate yet again, likely to a warehouse for which he might actually have to pay rent. He would also eventually run out of unpaid family membeis and need to hire employees. These costs would drive his overhead up and narrow if not eliminate any cost advantage that he maintained over Amazon. The second flaw dealt with the challenges and the expense of generating traffic comparable to Amazon's. Rosenberg simply assumed that Bowlin couldn't rely upon the substantial free publicity that he received by appearing in Friedman's columns. Rosenberg's conclusion? "If I were Amazon's Jeff Bezos, I wouldn't be too worried."

Lyle Bowlin and Positively-you then proceeded to fall from public view for about a year. They reappeared March 3, 2000, in columns written by Friedman and by Rosenberg. Friedman's "Saga of an Online Pioneer" told of Bowlin's attempt to leverage his early publicity into a real business. He raised $90,000, took a leave from his teaching position, rented office space, hired employees—and went out of business. Friedman considered Positively-you's failure instructive. He cited a number of lessons that he had learned about e-commerce. The two most significant of them were the difficulty of scaling costs and the challenge of driving traffic to a Web site. Rosenberg's column basically said "I told you so," which, of course, he had.

</comment><comment><USER19> It turns out this article has nothing to do with Amazon:

A random guy has an idea about how to take on the giant corporation. He fails when it turns out that ideas are much less important than execution.

Friedman was right for cheering the guy on and admonishing late 90's ecommerce in general. He just got the details wrong.

</comment><comment><USER20> This error highlights a rather important point actually.

The migration of large chunks of commerce onto the web has hidden away a lot of the complexity of doing business, which can (as seen in this example) lead to massive errors of judgement due to ignorance. Nobody would imagine that owning a single bookcase stocked with books is equivalent to the operation of a brick and mortar bookstore. Yet here we see Friedman making the same error in comparing amazon with a one man operation.

In a sense they are comparable, and that's one of the things that makes the web so wonderful, it's possible for very low overhead business to exist on the web, and it's possible for them to look very professional. However, underneath they are as different as a home kitchen and a commercial restaurant line. Just because you can cook doesn't mean you can be a chef or run a restaurant. Just because you can pack, label, and ship boxes doesn't mean you can match the logistical capabilities of a company like Amazon.

Certainly many companies tried. Amazon built itself up quite rapidly with a heavy focus on logistics at scale and product fulfillment. A lot of companies mistakenly believed that you can get away with unorganized chaos and just putting together a bunch of guys with a bunch of boxes in a room and you'd get the same results. Those companies were very wrong, many of them have gone out of business.

Amazon, even going back to 1999, has several unique qualities which put it ahead of its competition, not least of which have been melding a high-tech web store on one end to an equally high-tech logistics and fulfillment process on the back end. If you look at a web business and you can't see what's going on with enough fidelity to tell a home maker's kitchen from a commercial restaurant kitchen then you really ought to avoid commenting on the subject.

<comment><USER21> He didn't make that error.

There are some industries, like restaurants, that are dominated by small-time entrepreneurs. As knowledge of web technology spread, Friedman was guessing that the internet would be one of these.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It almost reads like an article from The Onion.

</comment><comment><USER23> In fairness its pretty easy to go back 12 years and pick apart a prediction. I've known some really bright guys who after using the web the first time said something like, "Not bad, but not sure why I'd use this over gopher, ftp, archie, etc...".

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks like the site pointed to in that column is now owned by a domain squatter. I guess that Amazon had the last laugh...

</comment><comment><USER25> So _positively-you_ domain went under sometime before 2002.</comment>


Women in tech can have it all – even an arts degree  - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2013/sep/10/women-tech-arts-degree <comment><USER2> Actually, imposter syndrome as presented here, is not real. Just a handy political fiction.

Sometimes people feel like they do not know what they are doing, and generally, such feelings are accurate.

Claiming despite any evidence to the contrary that they are actually geniuses seems to be all the rage with womyn_in_tech right now, and I find it pretty silly.

They do seem to feel that men are better programmers than them:

> Struggling with the course work, perceiving her peers (mostly male) as doing > much better with much less effort, feeling a misfit between herself and a > cultural norm that associates success with an all-consuming love of > computing, she questions whether she belongs in the department. [1]

But this difference is not a false belief implanted in their minds by a male conspiracy, this difference is real, and kind of obvious. If anything, people chronically overestimate their competence [2].

1\. [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/gendergap/www/p...](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/gendergap/www/papers/anatomyWSQ99.html)

2\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone with an arts degree I have found that knowing how to tell a story really well; and working collaboratively with subject matter experts has made me a successful and valued contributor on technology teams. Theatre people know how to hit a deadline, to make the tradeoffs necessary to do that, and how to handle immense pressure with a spirit of humor and focus on quality.</comment>