Just own the damn robots - <AUTHOR> http://thereformedbroker.com/2017/10/16/just-own-the-damn-robots/ <comment><USER2> Reads like this are slowly convincing me not to buy into the world of mortgages and debt and to just live the rest of my life paying for everything in cash. I tried to buy a house last year with my wife but the market exploded where I live and suddenly houses were 40% more expensive from last year.

So we still rent, which makes me feel incomplete. Like I'm kind of failing my duty of bringing the Canadian Dream to my family. But I gotta tell you, seeing 45% of my before tax income going into savings feels amazingly liberating. I stopped calling my savings a "down payment". It's now, "two college funds and 3 years of unemployment."

I feel in total control of my future this way, but I also feel like I'm feeding into the apocalypse paranoia. I won't actually need this unemployment cash will I?

<comment><USER3> Slightly off-topic, but that is the main reason I do not want to have kids: I am not sure I would like the kind of person I would become.

Sometimes I am already paralysed by fear when thoughts about my future take a dark turn (relatively often), but at the end of the day it is my well-being (and my wife's) we are talking about, and we are economically independent adults. We could take a hit or two.

Throwing little defenceless creatures in the mix? Oh gosh...

<comment><USER4> This seems to be a pretty common attitude amongst a lot of people in their late twenties and early thirties I socialise with (who should probably be well into parenthood).

Common question seems to be, "Why bring a child into a world facing climate change, potential nuclear war and a lack of prosperity or opportunities for personal growth".

Adopting is probably a better option ;)

<comment><USER5> I fully reject that "Why bring a child into this world facing..." argument. (And I'm going to skip the fact that this is probably the best time in the history of the world to be born.) Sure there are big problems in the world. My son may help FIX some of those problems.

And if not, he may end up being the mayor of Bartertown.

<comment><USER4> Ok, interested in hearing your views?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting article but I think the premise that workers are buying tech stocks because they fear automation is incorrect. Gallup found 13% of Americans thought that their jobs would soon be replaced by automation[1]. In fact you usually find more people worried about immigration than automation[2]. Maybe people /should/ be more concerned about automation but they just aren't right now.

[1]: [http://news.gallup.com/poll/216116/few-workers-worry-tech- ma...](http://news.gallup.com/poll/216116/few-workers-worry-tech-making-job- obsolete.aspx)

[2]: [http://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx](http://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx)

<comment><USER7> The article mixes its message a bit between automation/disruption/capital. One couldn't really say that Uber is in the business of automation. The capital/labor distinction is more productive, but since it is derived from marxism no one actually uses it.

I'm starting to get the impression that this genre of "technology gone bad" article is starting to be a safe surrogate for talking about class. The muddling of terms is actually a feature: one can avoid the dirty reality of class by framing it as an inherent feature of technological progress, which, of course, is a good in-and-of-itself (unless you're a dirty commie).

I think the same is true of immigration: low class people blame their poor condition on immigrants, rather than their class standing.

<comment><USER8> Actually here on this site is where I've read many times that automation is Uber's destination and that when they get there they will truly have attained their goal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This "theory" for equities growth is a joke. There is a very simple reason for it and plenty of non-tech baskets show the same 2 yr (or longer) pattern.

Simply put, cash and cash equivalents are generating historically low returns. So you put your money in equity.

(And if you are a retiree you put it in stocks with dividends. Look at the growth in dividend-generating stocks like energy, mining and metals and it makes FANG look shitty. This is fixed income portfolios trying to achieve their needed goals.)

Ironically, it's GDP growth that will stop the music, because enough of that will generate inflation and make it rational to hold something besides US treasuries. In fact it's already starting to happen for non-US markets (although slower than all the hedge fund smarties thought, therefore the complete bath they've taken the last year).

The length of our equities boom is inversely correlated with GDP growth. This cycle is (much) longer than the historical average simply because real growth has been so low. Normalize against aggregate growth over a cycle and we have a year or two left in the current one (assuming job, GDP, wages etc continue to be anemic - if they pick up rapidly things will rapidly shift).

<comment><USER10> > we have a year or two left in the current [cycle]

Are you saying that we have a year or two until we see a pick up in productivity (driving real growth and GDP), which will shift investment out of equities and into? Cash and cash equivalents?

Or are you saying that we have a year or two until we see a recession (decline in GNP), triggered by a flight from the equity markets?

<comment><USER9> I'm making a (perhaps reflexive) statement about economic cycles, that they are effectively defined as a period of growth followed by a shock. Without growth, there is no shock. Our current cycle has been characterized by very low growth. It is also much longer than typical, but I think this simply follows from the fact that we haven't had a lot of growth. Growth seems to be picking up, though, and I think over the entire period of the cycle will soon be "enough" to trigger the next cycle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Whoa. No solutions, at the end, but what a story.

As someone in a situation similar to the 45 year old he mentions, I worry about being displaced. Not every day, but every month or so I wonder.

What a fascinating thesis. I wonder what happens when the 'replacement fear' buy collides with the 'boomer retirement' sell?

<comment><USER12> Pretty sure the proposed solution is to buy stocks of the U.S. technology giants: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.

<comment><USER13> The largest market cap companies in a given decade, overwhelmingly tend to be under-performers in the following decade. It's a trend that has repeated decade after decade. Many of these types of companies - AMZN, NFLX, GOOGL, FB - have pulled a massive share of their future returns forward (which is what happened to Microsoft, stagnating its stock for ~15 years).

In 2007 the largest companies were: Exxon, GE, Microsoft, PetroChina, Royal Dutch Shell, Citigroup, AT&T, Gazprom, BP, Toyota, Bank of America, China Mobile, HSBC, ICBC, Walmart. All have performed at a mediocre level at best over that time. See:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-11/apple- vau...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-11/apple-vaults-to- no-1-from-no-70-after-a-decade-of-iphone-sales)

Is Amazon going to grow into a $2 trillion market cap over the next ten years? No, there is zero possibility of that happening. It'll be very lucky to grow into its existing market cap today, over that ten years. Keep in mind, they have $100 billion in retail sales, generating Walmart style margins on that business; Walmart has ~$450 billion in retail sales, generating ~$15 billion in net income. For that, Walmart gets to trade at half the market cap of Amazon. That's Amazon's future value compression. That multiple erosion won't occur until the market starts to realize the AWS growth machine isn't going to last forever (AWS representing a very large portion of the Amazon stock appreciation the last three years), as that growth curve slows in the next few years, the market will push down on Amazon's present extreme premium.

Netflix has a ~200 PE ratio, there is no means for it to ever justify its existing valuation (400 million global subscribers? no chance), much less a far higher one. Their present business model has never proven the ability to produce good margins, content has perpetually sapped their earnings potential and is likely to continue to do so.

Facebook and Google will stagnate and grow into their valuations. Google particularly is trading far beyond where it should versus its now modest growth rate. ~37 times earnings, $700 billion market cap, for 10%-15% annual growth over the next five years? No thanks. In the not very distant future, Google will pull a Microsoft and begin paying out a dividend, after this latest stock market bubble ends and their stock returns drift to mediocrity.

<comment><USER14> _Netflix has a ~200 PE ratio, there is no means for it to ever justify its existing valuation (400 million global subscribers? no chance), much less a far higher one. Their present business model has never proven the ability to produce good margins, content has perpetually sapped their earnings potential and is likely to continue to do so._

 _Facebook and Google will stagnate and grow into their valuations. Google particularly is trading far beyond where it should versus its now modest growth rate. ~37 times earnings, $700 billion market cap, for 10%-15% annual growth over the next five years? No thanks. In the not very distant future, Google will pull a Microsoft and begin paying out a dividend, after this latest stock market bubble ends and their stock returns drift to mediocrity._

People said that three, five, ten years ago. What is happening is that the market for mobile and desktop ads and e-commerce is growing, combined with increased market share for these three companies, creating a double tailwind. I'm certain Google, Amazon and Facebook will not suffer the fates of Exxon, GE, PetroChina, Royal Dutch Shell, Citigroup, AT&T, Gazprom, BP, Toyota, Bank of America, China Mobile, HSBC, ICBC, and Walmart. Part of the reason Amazon, Google, and Facebook will be permanently successful and are so resilient is because they have market dominance, impassable moats, ubiquity, and are mostly immune to global macro conditions, whereas commodity and banking companies are much more vulnerable to macro conditions. It's much easier to create a steel, drilling, or mining company (look at all the overnight fracking companies that went bust in 2015-2016) than it is to, say, get 1/6 of the world population on your social network (Facebook), every website and phone displaying your ads (Google), or every consumer buying from your store (Amazon) (and also the cloud hosting services). [http://greyenlightenment.com/will-the-silicon- valley-tech-fo...](http://greyenlightenment.com/will-the-silicon-valley-tech- fortunes-dissolve-like-the-rockefeller-carnegie-and-vanderbilt-fortunes-no/)

But also, some of those companies you listed pay huge dividends, so when you factor those into the returns, it's not stagnant.

<comment><USER15> > will be permanently successful

Surely you don't mean actually permanent. So what time scale do you think they will last?

<comment><USER16> One reasonable perspective is they will be successful until there is a market correction so large it can't be hedged against. World War Three, global warming societal collapse, popular revolution, or massive antitrust activity.

As they say, "in the long run we are all dead."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Have fun trying to own the robots after we've allowed proprietary licenses and leasing to takeover anything with a CPU attached.

Ownership is important, which is why copyleft is important, and its time to recognize how integral the four freedoms are to the future I think most of us want.

<comment> Digit-Al He wasn't talking about actually, physically, owning the robots. He was talking about owning stocks in the companies that make the robots. So that as they get wealthier, so do you.

<comment><USER18> Until the robots decide to stop feeding their "owners".

Money is a social construct. Power comes from controlling energetic resources, and automation is gradually stripping that control away from humans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 15 years ago all the software jobs I worked at were retiring clerical workers with software (oh you have 15 people doing spreadsheets ? We can automate that and you won't need them for the same report generation).

So this has been going on a lot longer than the article supposes. Yes its true that the sophistication of the automation, and the breadth of its reach (with robots / gig economy) is higher than before, so it will affect more jobs, but it will also create new jobs managing the automation (the same way people found jobs using Excel to manage those spreadsheets from previously more manual ways to do reporting).

In other words, this is the normal destructive (and positive) cycle of capitalism. It is always painful for people who adapt slowly, and provides opportunities for those willing and able to jump into the development and use of new automation tools.

<comment><USER20> > but it will also create new jobs managing the automation

No, that's bullshit. New jobs will be created that way but far less: there would be no incentive to automation otherwise. This month I visited a warehouse with a team tasked to automate it. If we succeed, phase I should put ~10 people out of job and we don't expect to have to do more than occasional monthly interventions (and that's assuming that we have a high failure rate).

The thing that is different in this cycle is that we may very well manage to 100% automate some industries. At this point, there will be a genuine question: why do we need to work to benefit from the goods of these industries?

At the core of the pact that makes our society is the idea of specialization: we have varied needs that we ask specialists to fill (farmers, car makers, fridge makers, power plant workers, etc...) while we, too, fill one small niche. The less people work we need to fulfill our daily needs, the less work we should be asked daily.

But this transition will only happen if we are conscious that it is possible and desirable.

<comment><USER19> > At this point, there will be a genuine question: why do we need to work to > benefit from the goods of these industries?

For the same reason you can't look over to your neighbor's driveway and say, since he doesn't use his truck all day while he's at work, why can't I drive it ?

The people who built those automated industries expended capital, and likely, borrowed against future revenue to do so.

What you are free to do is compete with them. You can drive them into their stupid lender's hands by forcing a collapsing of margins in the industry using your wits.

But nationalizing the factories has, historically, generally led to nasty (the opposite of what your conscious advocates would call desirable) outcomes. And you are saying that a 100% automated factory should be effectively nationalized.

<comment><USER21> > The people who built those automated industries expended capital, and > likely, borrowed against future revenue to do so.

> What you are free to do is compete with them. You can drive them into their > stupid lender's hands by forcing a collapsing of margins in the industry > using your wits.

So the solution for the hordes of people who were put out of work by automation, is to gamble it all on the bet that they can outcompete powerful, established businesses by operating with far less profit?

Are you really saying "I'm sorry you lost your factory job, but the only moral solutions are a.) let your family starve to death, or b.) every unemployed factory worked just, sorta, _becomes_ an entrepreneur, scrapping with all his former coworkers and bosses over who can survive on the slimmest margins." ?

Nationalizing factories may lead to undesirable outcomes, but your alternative is a different kind of dystopia.

<comment><USER19> I'm not suggesting that literally, I'm saying that's what the overall system does. Someone will gamble their time on beating powerful established businesses, and they will figure out some efficiency to win by.

Some of the factory workers will find other work, some in other industries, or other businesses in the same industry.

But when you are suggesting policy, you think about the overall system, not just the poor factory workers. The overall system works, even if labor isn't part of production due to automation, because labor builds, maintains, and services the automation. Sometimes there's some debugging involved too.

Yes some workers will lose their jobs because they don't have marketable skills any more. That's why we invest in education. Maybe not terribly wisely, but that's the idea.

<comment><USER22> But eventually, you will run up against something never before experienced in human history--exhaustion of demand.

The problem with automation is that the robots don't _want_ anything, and all they _need_ is power and maintenance (that is much easier to perform than medical care).

They can supply goods and some services so much more efficiently than human labor that no human can effectively compete with them and still be able to eat. So the humans that formerly did their jobs have nothing to trade at market. They are forced to subsistence labor, if they are even allowed to do that. You can't afford the electric induction cooktop or the electricity produced by robots, so you have to burn scavenged wood in a hand-built rocket stove. The displaced laborer contributes no more demand to the robot-supplied marketplace.

Each worker you make obsolete removes their demand. The robots produce less, consuming only their most basic needs, and send most of the output to their owners. The owner class, who does not consume 100% the maximum output of their robots, slowly buys up all valuable resources with the excess, as those who wish to avoid subsistence lifestyles sell off their assets in order to stave off scavenging for roots, mushrooms, and squirrels. Perhaps some of them can manage a parallel economy trading in inferior goods and services, but the threat always looms that anyone too productive will be able to buy in to the robot-owner class and stop supplying the under-economy. Most everyone becomes Spam. They only trade with each other until they can be steak again. So everything in the under-economy sucks.

One laborer can maintain hundreds of robots, who can each support a specific want of millions of people, but only have thousands of owners. The owners don't _want_ more than the robots can provide, so those humans that don't own can't manage to sell much of anything to the owners, except things that robots _cannot_ provide [yet]: art, love, babies, etc.

Every unemployed-becomes-entrepreneur is a last-gasp effort to leap the widening gap between the haves and have-nots, like a salmon shooting past the open jaws of a grizzly. If you don't buy in soon, you might not have anything left worth trading for your golden ticket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > In this context, the FANG stocks are not a gimmick or a fad, they're a f--- > ing life raft.

Note that if you are employed in one of those companies, you should think twice how you'd want to invest in them, because you're actually putting a bunch of your eggs in one basket.

I keep remembering those poor Enron employees whose retirement funds were mainly in stock of Enron itself, so that they were both unemployed _and_ financially ruined when the scam fell apart.

<comment><USER24> This. Just a bit of portfolio theory would make it very clear this isn't a good idea ..

.. yet I have to defend myself every odd month as to why I am not participating in the employee stock ownership program.

<comment><USER25> Depends on program in the uk share save schemes are an obvious no brainer investment you literally cant lose more than the difference between inflation and the guaranteed return if the stocks are under water at exercise time

<comment><USER26> There is more to consider than that. How much money is being tied up for participation, what is your average expected return for that amount, how does that compare to just picking an index, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I just don't buy it. I understand I'm in a minority, so let me indulge myself and explain, for a moment, why I think AI / Robots are nothing to worry about.

My claim is: Robots will not replace humans in all jobs. Further, it's more than because of Human preference, I think that Robots will lack cognitive abilities that we have.

My expectation is that in each area where they are deficient then they may well become a tool for a Human overseer, and that might replace some workers.

I don't believe AI will effectively deal with:

1) Cultural concerns. e.g. Appropriate imagery in advertising.

2) Major strategic considerations when faced with an uncertain future. (Physical war, trade war, geopolitical events, natural disasters).

3) Legal frameworks, as they are not well defined.

4) Human relationships. e.g. Don't make Alice and Bob work together.

5) Intuitive leaps. e.g. Rubics cube.

6) Empathy.

The reason I believe this is not because I believe in a soul, or anything mystical, but because I believe that the nature of our brains, our senses, our learning experiences, and the evolutionary processes that got us here can not be matched by our technology.

I think this means Robots / AI will not independently create new businesses, new products, build factories, kit out factories, buy other robots, produce marketing, deal with customer services, returns, courts, investors, regulators, suppliers and so on.

I can imagine products that will exist forever, like, rope, or cutlery, or plates, and someone automating a factory to produce these commodities. But they will still use humans to manage product development, supplier and customer relations, advertising and security, and, probably, looking after the robots.

I think that Robots / AI will at best become a tool for people to use, but the power will remain with Human employees.

<comment><USER28> It was some article here on HN a while back that framed this much better for me.

It's NOT that Robots are going to take all the jobs, it's that automation and productivity advances are going to reduce the people necessary by a drastic degree.

There's lots of stats like Ikea factories making 17x the bookcases they did in 1985 but with the same number of staff. But even in our technical and development niche, look at something like Instagram. They went from idea to billions of users with what a decade ago would have been a laughably small staff.

The future is the top 10% of staff executing with an army of automated services at their command to do the work that 90% of their colleagues used to do.

<comment><USER11> Some might say it's a "Brave New World"

:)

The real question is what happens to the 90%.

<comment><USER29> The best outcome is the "Culture" endpoint: a post-need society. 10% of people are called upon to work, and the rest thrive on basic income and become artists and inventors, philosophers and musicians and actors.

The worst outcome, on the other hand, is rather more dystopian. A society with a very large percentage of young, unemployed people with no particular path to success is not a stable society.

I suppose it matters how comfortable the 90% is when they become unemployed. Is basic income enough to fulfill individual passions and interests? What happens to a large body of humans whose needs are taken care of but who aren't strictly needed for anything?

<comment><USER30> Also, do the 10% believe that they are a static group deserving of persistent participation in the "working class" \- or is this a competitive and fluid group in which the children of the 90% may move into/out of as their skills/ability apply? Which is to ask - is it worth maintaining a 90% at all or should we 'solve that problem'?

<comment><USER31> I think you are assuming equal opportunity for the children of the wealthy vs the children of the poor. It doesn't take any particular smarts to live off of family money though. Investment income doesn't require work to support oneself, properly diversified it will continue to grow. Income from jobs however, does require work.

Study after study indicates that wealth provides opportunities, and that most people don't move up to become wealthy but are born that way. So basically society systematically advantages people who have wealthy parents, over people who work hard.

Bill Gates father was relatively wealthy. Imagine how many bill gates there are who are poor.

If Elon Musk hadn't had his father's money for his first company, there might not be a paypal or tesla.

So the question is how many potential bill gates and elon musks are there who's parents couldn't risk supporting them, who settle for doing something less innovative and interesting because they need to pay the bills or support family members?

<comment><USER32> But where did the wealthy parents come from?

You're setting up a chicken and egg problem for yourself. Wealth had to start somewhere, as I doubt you'd argue that it was handed down to certain families by a deity.

Heritage is important. A person does not just have more opportunity because of the wealth of an ancestor - they _exist_ because of that ancestor. Does everyone not deserve to have whatever their ancestors chose to give them?

The only argument that can be made is if you can show that someone's ancestors only had wealth because they unjustly stole it from others. But that's a tall order.

<comment><USER33> If you go down the history, most wealth was stolen from people violently and from then on anybody born into these aristocratic families would continue benefiting from the wealth.

A lot of new wealth has been created by people born into poor / middle class families in last 1-2 centuries for sure, especially 20th century.

But there are still families today that are wealthy and their wealth have been with them for 400-500 or more years. And in those cases it's very likely the original wealth was stolen.

It could be that original wealth was gathered during robber baron times by exploiting workers or it could be even older, being passed from generation to generation since medieval times. Which means the original aristocracy probably gained this wealth in a violent conquest.

<comment><USER32> Right. "Probably", "maybe".

I don't think it's society's responsibility to look back further than the formation of that society. For the US, I think you can safely use 1776 as a starting point. The US formed itself with the express purpose of creating equality for the original settlers.

If someone is violating those principles, society should punish accordingly. If not, society is not "rewarding wealth". They are allowing for the fact that everyone is someone else's child, and that comes with it certain rights.

<comment><USER22> Prior to industrialization, "pull your own bootstraps" fortunes were extremely rare, and largely a matter of accidentally being in the right place at the right time. Most wealthy folks got there from skimming off their human herd by force or threat of force and by bribing the most docile and cooperative by giving them some of their own production back.

After industrialization, a lot of people were able to leverage first-mover advantages and unrealized frontier opportunities into vast fortunes. But even then, having one extra dollar from daddy in 1790 meant having many, many more to give your own kids by 1820, even if you had 12 of them. That extra dollar might have meant you carried a full feedbag and got there a day before the guy who had to stop to let his horse forage, and getting there first was worth thousands.

Now, daddy's dollars might allow you to start from second place, and grow faster than the first-mover, who might be trying to bootstrap. Or you could do the same with investor money, but with corresponding loss of equity. If mommy or daddy fund you, you probably get to keep more of your own company.

<comment><USER32> What exactly is the problem with this?

<comment><USER31> Well personally, I'd like to incentivize those who put work and value into the system over those whose individual contribution is negligible.

As well the marginal utility of another dollar to someone who is already wealthy is low and they are less likely to use that money, whereas someone who is poor or middle class not only benefits more from another dollar, but is much more likely to spend that money in a way that stimulates the economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> A correction to the history of retirement schemes.

Retirement schemes go back a lot farther than acknowledged in that article. The most popular to have lots of children in the hopes that one would take care of parents in their old age. But then you having things like the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tontine).

<comment><USER35> Sure, but Tontines didn't originate in the US (or at least the UK) and therefore there's no need for the author to consider them part of world history.

<comment><USER34> They didn't originate in the US, but they were popular in the US long before the invention of pension funds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why not just seize the means of production? Private (real) property is ultimately rooted in the theft of the commons. This has historically been justified using two assertions: that people don't value what they don't own, and that nobody does anything except for profit. Both are highly questionable, yet when counterexamples are offered they are generally dismissed as 'the exception that proves the rule' or some equally irrational rhetoric.

Our existing economic paradigms are demonstrably flawed. Just as feudalism tried to restrain the creative forces of capitalism but eventually collapsed, capitalism is arguably restraining the creative forces of (socialism, participativism, something we haven't got a good name for yet). We are familiar with many of the potential pitfalls - excessive bureaucracy and various flavors of authoritarianism - but have yet to fully systematize the desirable alternatives of open source culture. Perhaps what is needed is a general theory of economic networking that incorporates lateral as well as hierarchical structures.

<comment><USER37> > Why not just seize the means of production?

I wonder if anyone has tried that before. I guess I will go read a history book and find out.

<comment><USER38> It's depressing how many people aren't interested in understanding how and why communism failed, and what we can learn from that. The conclusion is always just "capitalism and communism are the only two systems that exist; communism didn't work; therefore capitalism is the best and only way to run things."

<comment><USER39> I think it's helpful to look at it in terms of control vs. freedom. Communism means more state control of people, capitalism means less.

In these terms, what if capitalism is simply the natural outcome of _x_ amount of freedom? Therefore, shifting away from capitalism means shifting toward either anarchy or communism (even if both of those options are far away in absolute distances).

This makes it hard to discuss things calmly and rationally, of course: Few people want actual anarchy, and few people want actual communism, but a move in either direction is a move toward one of them, even if it's not intended to go all the way. And if you do move one way or the other, some of those few people who do want to go all the way will try to capitalize (ha) on the opportunity.

Incidentally, this may be an argument for leaning more toward capitalism, i.e. toward less state control: because people as a whole will never agree on a single course of action, and because there will always be those among us who want to achieve more power and wealth for themselves at others' expense, leaning toward less state control reduces the potential damage and power/wealth accumulation that "rogue" actors can achieve.

Or, to put that another way, it reveals an inherent weakness of leaning toward more state control: that power corrupts, and humans desire power, therefore using the force of law to concentrate power in the hands of fewer people (ultimately backed by the use of force, as all government power is) results in more corruption, and therefore results in more suffering for those not in power. Capitalism certainly causes suffering as well, as the robber barons demonstrated many years ago, but at least that suffering is not enforced by the state--it merely arises opportunistically, and each instance is temporary and localized, not permanent and universal.

Of course, globalism greatly increases the scale of that localization, which demonstrates that theories about economics, government, etc. must be revised and kept current with the times. Our governments and economies are largely built upon ideas whose foundations were laid centuries ago, before any of today's technologies could have even been conceived of. For example, the American Founders could not have foreseen the kinds of rapidly changing, global corporations that exist today, and so we should expect their ideas to have some vulnerabilities which may be exploited by newer technology (to think in infosec terms).

Anyway, if you are wanting to move away from capitalism and not toward anarchy, you necessarily are moving toward less freedom and more state control. I think the important point to note is that state control of economic means cannot be isolated from other facets of life. It necessarily influences all other parts of life, for the economy is that from which human sustenance flows.

To look at it another way, capitalism allows for greed, which has very negative effects--but it also accounts for greed, which is part of human nature, and which motivates. Specifically, it accounts for it by allowing everyone to be motivated by it. In contrast, giving the state more control concentrates the greed in fewer people, by law. And I think it's better to allow the evil of greed to be evenly distributed (which does not guarantee the even distribution of wealth, health, or happiness, but allows it to be pursued), than to use the force of law to concentrate it in fewer people, expecting them to rein it in for the sake of the greater good, because that fails to account for human nature--it's essentially a GIGO system.

Food for thought. :)

<comment><USER40> As someone who comes from a soviet block country, I wanted to thank you. You described it pretty good on the meta level. I may come back and copy it in future ;)

It's far more then the mysterious criticism above deserved as an answer and the "criticism" of this comment goes the same way. There is a certain fear in left Utopism from the realization of what you've described. That fear is being drowned in endless derivations of what already failed in hope to cloud the meta problem.

To me, it's a wasted effort. This energy all those bright young people invest there could be directed towards coming up with something really new or at least making what we have more social. I hope they'll get there one day.

<comment><USER39> Thank you for sharing that. I wish more people like yourself, who have first- hand experience, would speak out. As you noted, the rhetorical techniques they use are not in good faith. We need more actual witnesses to testify against it, because such personal testimony is less susceptible to the deceptive, distracting non-arguments they use.

> To me, it's a wasted effort. This energy all those bright young people > invest there could be directed towards coming up with something really new > or at least making what we have more social. I hope they'll get there one > day.

Indeed. This seems to be the troubling outcome of their long-term efforts in academia. It often seems like humanity is doomed to repeat the horrors of history, not only because our memories are so fragile, but because there are always a few dedicated to systematically erasing them. What a tragic waste of human resources. We could stand on the shoulders of giants, but instead we are pulled back into the crab bucket.

Keep fighting the good fight, my friend. :)

<comment><USER36> _As you noted, the rhetorical techniques they use are not in good faith._

Wow, project much? I don't see that argument made in his comments, nor is it evidenced in the comments of others. Considering that I drew attention to the authoritarian pitfalls of communism and their destruction of 'life, liberty and dignity' _before_ you joined the thread, your complaints about systematic erasure are baseless. Perhaps you didn't bother reading the comments you were replying to; I hope not, since the alternative possibility is that you were engaged in deliberate mischaracterization.

<comment><USER39> I wasn't referring to you, because I wasn't even thinking about your comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Like all things this well written on this topic I feel like it hits the nail on the head and misses a few things because it's an article by necessity must paint in broad strucks so let me say this:

It's completely right that automation/ robotics will accelerate the displacement of workers and cause upheaval. Certainly owning the productive fruits of this will make one very rich.

What won't happen is that these will displace those who service unmapped or poorly systemic mapped things. For instance: in the last 15 years there have been techniques to attempt to automatically curate wine. Most either fail or pivot. Why? Because chemical composition is only ine facet in the high end. Remarkably software still does not do a great job here as tastes are subtle and hard to train in a model or algorithm. It so far can only get n times better than average but never tops an expert human curator in the high end. Will it some day? Maybe. On an infinite time scale yes it will but I wouldn't quite go dumping my high end wine skills quite yet.

Which brings me to my point: automation is great for irredeemable or trainable repetitive processes but still an infant at more complex things like the example given.

In turn, if you can carve out a niche that is unusually hard to model and train you may be okay. Unfortunately that's not 90 percent of jobs I reckon.

The other sure fire bet us to only deal in Veblen goods. The value there being exclusivity, which I reckon will never stop being a thing

<comment><USER42> There an article somewhere which breaks down the types of automation, into a useable manner.

Theres automation of tasks which free up labor to do MORE work - so if you were a bricklayer, and were bottlenecked by number of hands, the wheelbarrow would be a force multiplier.

Theres removal of jobs with less useful jobs, so the chef got replaced by the burger flipper (not really, but I can't think of a good example at the moment).

And finally removal of jobs entirely, with no need of replacement.

<comment><USER43> >And finally removal of jobs entirely, with no need of replacement.

For example, computers - who were replaced by computers.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _In Kurt Vonnegut's 1952 novel, Player Piano, we are introduced to a future in which only engineers and managers have gainful employment and meaningful lives. If you're not one of the engineers and managers, then you're in the army of nameless people fixing roads and bridges. You live in Homestead, far from the machines that do everything, and are treated throughout your life like a helpless baby. The world no longer has a use for you. Anything you can do a machine can do better, and you are reminded of this all day, every day by society and the single omnipotent industrial corporation that oversees it all._

 _He wrote this 65 years ago. It couldn't have been more apropos to what we're witnessing now than if had he written it this morning, right down to the nostalgia-selling demagogue who seizes the opportunity to foment rebellion amongst the displaced and disgruntled. When millions of people start seeing their purpose begin to erode and their dignity being stolen from them, the idea that there's nothing left to lose starts to creep in._

The fact he wrote this 65 years ago yet the labor force and population have grown in lockstep, augers against this. [https://staticseekingalpha.a.ssl.fastly.net/uploads/2011/12/...](https://staticseekingalpha.a.ssl.fastly.net/uploads/2011/12/2/saupload_growth- of-us-labor-force.jpg) Why would companies, especially in an economic environment that is so competitive, keep employees that serve no purpose.

Buying and holding shares of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft ,which are are not only leading this techno revolution but profiting immensely from it, is one the best ways to capitalize on this trend, which is what I have been doing for the past few years (along with owning Bitcoin). I don't however agree that automation will mean the 'end of jobs'. It's not that robots will take all the jobs, but rather the labor market will become increasingly bifurcated, with a 'creative class' at the top and the low-income service sector jobs at the bottom, without much in between. There is significant demand for service sectors jobs, of all skill levels, including skilled technical jobs such as coding, teaching, consulting, and engineering. But also huge demand for hospitality jobs; however, many of these jobs may not pay as much as the jobs they replaced, or bring much personal fulfillment.

<comment><USER44> > The fact he wrote this 65 years ago yet the labor force and population have > grown in lockstep

Only the reporting has grown in lockstep. The metrics have changed to make this happen. Some of the real story can be seen in these graphs:

[https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000)

[https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12026620](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12026620)

(you'll have to change the dates to get the full picture. Works with a POST so I can't link to it. Note that unemployment essentially is labour force - jobs. Hence, the weakest members of the jobs force are counted double. Also, discouraged workers are discounted (and the rules for discouraged workers means they are essentially anyone unemployed for more than some months). The real unemployment rate, discounting double jobs and including discouraged workers is somewhere between 9 and 16%)

The short of it is that the job market froze, with a few bubbles in between, at around 1984-1987 or so, at an unemployment rate of around 8% or so and has been slowly but very steadily increasing since. Even the rate at which this is happening is increasing. The government, of course, has changed definitions again and again to show better numbers, but so far they don't go all out China on us (ie. the real data still appears to be published by the government, unlike in China where we know 15 million people were fired last year in several provinces due to protests and violence resulting from it, but this is not reported anywhere in government data)

Granted, that's still not quite the story of Kurt Vonnegut, but keep in mind that we're about 30 years into a phase in history where jobs grow slightly slower than population growth. This could be accelerating, or it could simply be that under Obama there was no real jobs recovery despite "extraordinary measures" by the Fed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is going to be a rant, so apologies.

This is a pretty crappy read. Lacks real data and also unwillingness to look outside of the tech bubble, seriously what serious AI work is apple or Netflix doing? Its as if the author started with the conclusion and wrote up whole thing to justify it. For large parts most of the tech people at Google/FB are involved in getting more people click and buys ads. And Amazon are involved in getting people to buy more stuff and reduce the costs of handling and shipping them. So, if the logical conclusion that many visionaries in these thread are saying is true that 90% will be useless then these companies will have nobody to serve and will collapse before we reach that point anyways. Secondly, let's believe this is true then if an economic system which does not benefit majority deserves to be overthrown by any means even violent and rise of trump is a step in right direction. Third, if the tech companies are so smart then how were they caught with their pants down when a foreign power used their own infrastructure and technology to help elect a leader that they ostensibly opposed. Finally, the fundamental reason for the current stock boom is simply liquidity and lack of asset classes outside of stocks which give meaningful growth. This is not just limited to fang or usa but seen in many stock markets. I actively invest and trade in India where the markets are hitting new highs and the only reason right now for this is that in most places it is very hard to get a good return plus there is excess institutional & industrial capital since they are not optimistic of the growth and thus not investing in augmenting capacities or production. So investing in stock market seems the only alternative. One of the reasons for this liquidity is central banks around the world have been pumping money. This will end when the excess liquidity is pulled out from the global financial system.

<comment><USER46> So Trump is a harbinger of technocommunism?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> "Player Piano" should be required reading for all. It doesn't have to be the future, but it's a future worth examining.

<comment><USER48> "Manna"[1] as well. While I don't like the writing style, I love the story. Especially since it shows AI gutting middle management in an interesting way before robotics is mature enough to do all the dextrous tasks.

1 [http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm](http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm)

<comment><USER49> I read Manna, but honestly I thought it was silly.

> Terrafoam is, by contrast, 'Worse and worse.'

No, it's not. Manna is better and better: it yields continually better results.

> With all that happening, it is very hard to get people together to work on > big projects.

Wouldn't it be cool if there were something to get people to work together on big projects? Something like an economic force causing them to give a little to get a little?

Frankly, I think the Australia Project would stagnate after a generation or two, while Manna would continually improve. After a few generations, it'd be much like to Communist states vs. the West: yes, the Communists _did_ often improve on their initial conditions by quite a bit — but the free economies improved even more. I recall a story about someone (in China, perhaps?) bragging about how the government dumped a pallet of free cabbage on each city block every time period. Free cabbage sounds wonderful to someone who was a subsistence farmer — but Asian-American fusion cuisine on every city block sounds even better.

And that's just within the construct of the story. A real-world example would have _competing_ Manna-like systems.

Also, in the Manna world the problem is that in the U.S. most people don't have the ability to contribute, and so they languish in Terrafoam. It provides no reason for why they are suddenly more talented in the Australia Project. That just doesn't make sense.

Anyway, I hope that mankind's actual future is not to choose between two different totalitarian systems.

<comment><USER44> > Also, in the Manna world the problem is that in the U.S. most people don't > have the ability to contribute,

Most people don't have the will to contribute. They've always just coasted through life doing what is described in the manna story. They always know what to do next and the only reason they do anything at all is because someone tells them to, or it directly provides satisfaction. After sufficient years they complain that this restricts their ability to do anything at all, especially to change, but of course that's not true. They could spend 2-4 years training themselves and they'd be perfectly able. The reason that doesn't happen is not often lack of ability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting investment thesis, but isn't there a better way to hedge yourself than buying tech stocks?

That's just a huge bet on a tiny number of cyclical revenue sources: online shopping, online advertising, cloud services, iPhones, Microsoft Office, and Windows.

<comment><USER50> What will that tech need to survive?

Lithium, for batteries. Heavy metals, for processing. Energy, most of all. I wonder how long it'll be until we replace fiat currencies with a balance of kilowatt-hours.

<comment><USER47> Energy is the currency of the future.

\- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Centauri Monopoly"

<comment><USER51> That game was incredibly prescient.

I was going to link to its page on Paean to SMAC but it turns out that quote is from "Global Energy Theory", a tech that didn't make it into the final game (but had data set up for it). So there's no write-up about it.

Instead, I'll link to the Paean's "First Time Here?" page: [https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/first-time- here/](https://paeantosmac.wordpress.com/first-time-here/)

<comment><USER52> "No check, no tech." is something I use often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> "We're in an age where we're being told AI is about to start writing its own software."

The most pregnant sentence in the entire piece.

<comment><USER54> All the problems in every serious piece of software I've ever worked on stem from the customer (be it external or in-house) not knowing what they want, the person in charge of capturing that doing a pretty bad job of it anyway, and the chain from there to the person writing the software taking that failure and making it worse.

AI writing software will just get me another flavour of the wrong software. AI working out what people want the software to do would be useful.

<comment><USER15> You don't think good old fashioned bugs are a problem?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> What I never see mentioned in these types of articles is the rise of the service economy. There are some jobs that will never be automated because we prefer to deal with humans. Take food service for instance. No one wants to go to a high end steak house and have their wine poured and meal served by robots. Human interaction is part of the experience and part of the value. (At McDonald's, by contrast, the humans don't add value and could easily be replaced.) The "human touch" is going to become _more_ important, not less, as automation increases.

<comment><USER56> _> No one wants to go to a high end steak house and have their wine poured and meal served by robots._

I'm sorry, but that actually sounds like a wonderfully peaceful way to dine.

<comment><USER25> Don't take this the wrong way but you need to think about some therapy and being able to take a random piece of steak and correctly prepare it 99% of the time is a hard problem.

<comment><USER56> What an odd argument. Preparing food correctly will almost certainly be more reliable with machines.

Regarding the human element of dining: I think you lack foresight. We will look back at human waiters as we now look at horses, vs modern cars. People still ride horses, and that's fine, but to suggest they're the only way or even the best way to go is just archaic and indiciative of an unhealthy level of denial, or a calcified brain unable to change. Open your mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> A certain amount of compute capacity should be given with citizenship to each individual. It is fixed. You get to use that capacity however you want: some on your phone, some on your laptop. If you want to run an internet business that uses a lot of compute capacity, then you'll need to rent it from other individuals and consolidate it under your control.

<comment><USER39> It sounds really silly, but that might actually be the only way to prevent a few bad actors from taking over the world with killer robots. Of course, enforcement would be a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I came to see if people were talking about the robotics and automation ETF cited in the article and if it would be a good idea to buy at this point, but seems that everyone is having philosophical conversation instead of a investing conversation :-p

<comment><USER59> From a clueless investor here, it seems like NVidia would be a good play if you anticipate widespread growth in machine learning.

<comment> FLUX-YOU GPUs are more useful than CPUs for ML, but eventually someone's going to want to cut nVidia out of that process: [https://cloud.google.com/blog/big- data/2017/05/an-in-depth-l...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/big- data/2017/05/an-in-depth-look-at-googles-first-tensor-processing-unit-tpu)

nVidia is still a solid choice as VR has raised the visual fidelity demands for games and experiences, and even a 1080Ti can't render VR games at 90+FPS at max graphics. That's still a lot of demand nVidia has to meet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Definitely an interesting read, if a bit pessimistic, nihilistic, and a bit Marxist (seize the means of production!). But ultimately the article offers no solutions and the author comes off to me as a doomsayer and luddite ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite)). If the author really fears the current system as described, maybe he should return to the old system: become a subsistence farmer and work till you die.

</comment><comment><USER61> HN hug of death strikes again. Website does not reply.

<comment><USER62> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://thereformedbroker.com/2017/10/16/just- own-the-damn-robots/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> It's conditions where most market participants believe future returns are inevitable that often lead to the biggest corrections. Eternal growth of software companies is definitely a great example of "this time it's different", surely one day it will be but the question for the investor today is how confidently they can answer this question.

</comment><comment><USER64> In sci-fi the singularity is the moment when human consciousness merges with machine.

In the real world the singularity is when people get so worked up about automation they invest infinity money in tech companies.

e: I spent a solid chunk of my income on tech company stocks.

</comment><comment><USER65> Nice rant, but I think it would be stronger if it did more to consider the counter arguments.

I see it as:

* perhaps AI will someday rule the world -- in which case there's nothing more to discuss

* if humans do still have a role, then they will work with the machines to figure out a solution

* most moaning about so called under privileged people, such as Uber drivers, ignores that their standard of living is far superior to people of the past (e.g. 1800s farmer) and the millions living in deep poverty or slavery today.

To be clear, I think there are many social problems that need to be addressed.</comment>


Snap blocks Al Jazeera in Saudi Arabia to "comply with local laws" - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/18/snap-blocks-al-jazeera-in-saudi-arabia-to-comply-with-local-laws/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand what Snap gets out of this.

Is it really worth it for them to be dismissed by the free-world as a totalitarian sycophant in exchange for whatever drop-in-the-bucket marketshare they get from Saudi Arabia?

What does it mean to not comply with local laws in Saudi Arabia? A ban for Snapchat in that country? BFD!

<comment><USER3> Usually this means that local Snap employees (if any) are put at risk. In countries like Saudi Arabia, it almost certainly is jail-time in very brutal facilities.

(I don't know if they actually have employees there, but in general, this is a huge risk for many international corporations.)

<comment><USER4> > In countries like Saudi Arabia, it almost certainly is jail-time in very > brutal facilities.

Doesn't sound accurate at all. Please cite or present data.

<comment><USER5> Here is amnesty international's account of one such prison: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%60Ulaysha_Prison#Conditions...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%60Ulaysha_Prison#Conditions_of_detention)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The new world of global TV channels, online media, fake news, international firewalls and propaganda from different countries is really interesting and difficult for me to to decide what is best. eg are RT, AlJazeera provide a different point of view tinged with a little state propaganda a good thing. I like diversity of news, but can see bizarre conspiracy theories given oxygen. Should the government manipulate the media to keep peace in a country? Eg the Chinese way isn't necessarily bad. Watching US news channels its clear they are often highly biased too. Maybe news really is a third facts, a third opinion and a touch of cultural viewpoints, propaganda and cultural straightjacketing. I thought I knew what was best but now I dont know.

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe a deal on buying Snap shares is behind this? Just a guess

Saudi Arabia and Qatar are in a huge diplomatic fight right now with embargoes and lots of tricks to influence powers (like buying airplanes, arms etc from USA, EU...)

</comment><comment><USER8> In related news 'Israel moves to close Al Jazeera, ban its journalists':

[http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/08/israel-seeks-close- al-...](http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/08/israel-seeks-close-al-jazeera- ban-journalists-170806130215616.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Of all the thing I would expect the Saudi's to ask Snap to block, Al Jazeera seems pretty far down the list behind nudity. Is nudity effectively blocked on Snap there?

<comment><USER10> There's a diplomatic crisis between Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Al Jazeera is from Qatar.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Qatar_diplomatic_crisis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Qatar_diplomatic_crisis)

<comment><USER9> My question isn't why they blocked Al Jazeera. Why doesn't Saudi Arabia block Snap? Snap has a reputation as a nude pictures app. Saudi Arabians are offended by too much ankle showing under the burka. It seems like Snap should be blocked entirely in Saudi Arabia. The punishment for sending nude pictures in that country is severe. This is a country that beheaded 157 people in 2015.

Why would they allow Snap in their country in the first place? A quick search turns up this:

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/09/snapchat_saudi_gover...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/09/snapchat_saudi_government/)

That seems to answer my question. Snap is a Saudi monitoring platform. It seems only natural they would use their influence to shape opinions by removing Al Jazeera. Sorta like how Facebook removes "fake news" from their site for the US deep state.

<comment><USER11> 1\. " _Snap has a reputation as a nude pictures app._ " is about as relevant as WhatsApp being a reputation for a nude pictures app. That legacy is years old, especially now as Stories is a larger part of Snap's reputation and because Snap has been removing larger pornographic accounts.

2\. " _Why doesn 't Saudi Arabia block Snap?_" It really seems like you haven't been up to date on what Snapchat is. Snap is a huge social network, and I'd imagine someone is fighting to keep Snapchat so that they can still post their stories about their 20 lamborghinis they bought this morning. Again, blocking Snapchat would be like blocking instagram.

3\. The real reason Al Jareeza is being blocked is political. Nudity isn't a "real" issue, much like you can certainly find Saudi princes allegedly drinking alcohol. Al Jareeza is a real thing royalty is cautious of, nudity is not.

<comment><USER9> 1\. So that's what you tell your parents? Every snap thread I've ever seen is soliciting nudes found on snap or soliciting usernames to solicit nudes.

3\. I don't think we're talking about the same Saudi Arabia. Just talking about sex will earn you 5 years and 1000 lashes.

<comment><USER12> What you are describing is the way it is for the Saudi proletariat. These people don't use Snapchat. The rich do and their lives are completly different from what you describe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In America there is discussion that "hate speech" news sites would also be blocked under local law.

Two different sides of the same coin.

<comment><USER14> You seem to be advocating that all speech should be permitted, and that anything less is unacceptable. I disagree.

I believe there's a gray, ambiguous spectrum of acceptability, and that somewhere down the line there are opinions which incite (or consist in) violence, which inspire malice, and which are overtly harmful. A line between "disgusting, but acceptable" and "reprehensible" can carefully be drawn to not permit these terrible ideas to be promulgated.

I agree that we should be cautious that this line does not creep into acceptable speech, and that the mechanisms used to enact these decisions are not re-purposed inappropriately. I understand that technology makes speech cheap, and suppression of speech difficult, and that encryption algorithms and other mathematical constructs make no distinction between acceptable and unacceptable speech. But these opinions do not need to be tolerated within society.

<comment><USER15> > I believe there's a gray, ambiguous spectrum of acceptability, and that > somewhere down the line there are opinions which incite (or consist in) > violence, which inspire malice, and which are overtly harmful.

That's the reason why we have free speech rights ( in america at least ). So that people can't use and exploit the "gray" as an excuse to censor everyone.

> A line between "disgusting, but acceptable" and "reprehensible" can > carefully be drawn to not permit these terrible ideas to be promulgated.

If the ideas are terrible, they should be promulgated and shown for all to see.

> I understand that technology makes speech cheap, and suppression of speech > difficult

Actually, technology makes suppression of speech easy.

> But these opinions do not need to be tolerated within society.

Which opinions?

You make generalizations and don't speak of any specifics? And who gets to decide which speech shouldn't be tolerated?

<comment><USER16> Arguing over whether black people should be enslaved or Jews should be gassed aren't political arguments with sound reasons on both sides. Treating them like they are sends you directly in the paradox of tolerance.

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

<comment><USER17> The paradox of tolerance is not about tolerating hate speech. It's about tolerating violent actions.

If you tolerate hate speech, there's no paradox: you can do so, without surrendering the protection against intolerance for those members that speech targets.

<comment><USER18> > _The paradox of tolerance is not about tolerating hate speech. It 's about > tolerating violent actions._

While I can understand the motivation to interpret it this way, it seems directly counter to Popper:

> _In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always > suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter > them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, > suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to > suppress them if necessary even by force…_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance#Discussio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance#Discussions)

<comment><USER17> Yes, I'm aware of Popper's argument, and I dispute it. In fact, the very fuzziness of that quote you cited is a good example. What does "we can keep them in check" means? One would assume that it applies so long as adherents of that ideology don't hold any prominent political power - i.e. when they can move on from speech to actions.

The rest of that quote does mesh well with my take on this: "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise".

(Indeed, as Popper himself notes, this is a very straightforward reformulation of the paradox of freedom, whereby you need to suppress the _actions_ of some people that are aimed at reducing the freedom of other people - so you need to reduce freedom for some to maximize freedom for all.)

Another way to approach it is via definitions. Tolerating something means putting up with it. Tolerance is generally deemed to be different from acceptance - to tolerate something means not trying to persecute it or otherwise stamp it out by violence, whereas acceptance is to acknowledge something as proper. But from there follows that intolerance is an _action_ \- merely holding some opinion, or even letting it known that you do, is not per se intolerance. "I will not tolerate X" implies that you're willing to _act_ to prevent X from happening. If and when you do, the paradox of tolerance kicks in - people who want to maximize tolerance, have to act themselves, to restrict your acts - thereby being intolerant towards your intolerance. But if you don't act, suppressing your freedom of conscience or of expression is intolerance of dissenting opinion, not intolerance of intolerance.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there an equivalent of this for Rails? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on replatforming a desktop application, and have yet to come across a library as sophisticated as OpenFaces for doing a web UI:
http://openfaces.org/
I'm not excited about the idea of using JavaServer Faces, but would be willing to do so to use a library like OpenFaces that looks so very good even in IE7.
Any ideas for similar libraries? <comment><USER2> It looks like it's just a widget library. There's any number of those with no platform dependency at all: Bootstrap, YUI, Dojo, SproutCore, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for showing me these. Dojo definitely fits the bill.</comment></comment>


It's Time to Break Up Disney: Part One - <AUTHOR> https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/its-time-to-break-up-disney-part <comment><AUTHOR> Money quote (ok, paragraph) for me:

 _Yet another consequence of Disney Plus is that it will erode the basic foundations of capitalism. in his book, Iger notes had to find ways to compensate Disney division heads with arbitrary metrics to get them to put their stuff on Disney Plus, and this was hard, because they were used to hitting revenue targets. The division heads have a point. Capitalism is premised on selling final goods for more than it costs for the initial inputs, otherwise you are destroying wealth. By selling below cost, which is what Disney may be doing, the corporation is reducing aggregate wealth to acquire market power. It's simply impossible to compete with someone who is willing to gain revenue by paying a dollar for fifty cents. Disney may or may not be doing that with its low Disney Plus price, but the fact that Disney Plus makes it impossible to measure value coming out of each division shows that the breakdown of the price system and potential below cost pricing is likely eroding value._</comment>


Ask HN: What are the "View issue" and "Modify reservation" buttons in Gmail? - <AUTHOR> This morning, my Gmail inbox had a message with a small gray button on the right-hand side that said "Modify reservation". It was an email from my son's baseball team. I've seen similar "View issue" buttons that point to Github issues.
How does Gmail do this? There must be some standard content in the body of the email, some kind of semantic markup, that tells Gmail what the link means. But I can't find documentation on it anywhere.
The ability to put a button in someone's inbox could be a really useful feature for a variety of apps. Where are the docs? <comment><USER2> No docs, Google never gives away its killer features - and this specifically is something that makes them stand out from any other email provider. No standard content or markup, either: Just terabytes of emails - given enough data, the patterns crop up by themselves, one would think.

Source: wild speculation.</comment>


Facebook Targets May 17th For IPO Date - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/18/facebook-targets-may-17th-for-ipo-date/ <comment><USER2> May 17 is a terrible time to IPO. Facebook will be fighting against a falling stock market. Operation twist is about to end, and there are a lot of believers in "Sell in May and go away."

<comment><USER3> The goal of an IPO is to give company liquidity for stock it sells, and to line the pockets of employees who've put sweat equity into the startup.

Whether FCBK goes IPO with a big pop, or instead slowly grows after release into a steady push, it will be in no better position - it's coffers will be lined the same, and the brand still as strong.

Given the popularity and current profitability, I doubt it's going to go GRPN and flounder or sink despite a generally sagging market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, I just looked up how Google's IPO faired: it closed day one as a public company valued at $27 billion.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/20/opinion/google-goes- public...](http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/20/opinion/google-goes-public.html)

<comment><USER5> a "bubbly" 27 billion, no less. wonder what that means, in retrospect.

<comment><USER6> it means google IPO'd with a lot less revenue. most of the story back then was about it still being a bubble and Google being crap as well:

<http://nikcub.appspot.com/posts/the-google-ipo-skeptics>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This ends the speculation that it would be May 14th for Zuckerberg's birthday.

</comment><comment><USER8> And there it is, it's all over.</comment>


Answer: none of them - <AUTHOR> http://www.sicpers.info/2016/12/answer-none-of-them/ <comment><USER2> Alternative answer: anything else you see being used.

Learning a bit of JS means I can now make interactive reports that run anywhere.

Learning some HTML and CSS means I can throw together an OK website.

Learning some ruby and rails means I can now make certain types of websites _really bloody quickly_.

Learning some erlang meant I solved an annoying problem very quickly because it was just a set of message queues.

Learning some haskell wasn't all that useful directly, but was interesting. Not everything has to be some huge productive benefit for me.

Learning some GPU coding stuff back in the day let me build what I think might have been the fastest 'deep learning' thing at the time (certainly I was able to train in minutes what was taking Hinton days) and let me perform experiments remarkably faster.

Learning R recently has opened up a lot more avenues for analysis for me.

Learning some shell scripting has had obvious benefits on a daily basis.

\---

I wouldn't argue for not learning other things too, but learning new languages can help because it can give you access to a huge toolkit not currently available to you. If you do sciency stuff or data analysis and you don't know any python, you're missing out on a wide range of very advanced tools that can make your life easier. Similarly with statistics and R, and I'm sure a whole host of other similar things are true for other languages.

<comment><USER3> While I generally agree with your statement, I would avoid learning too many languages as a beginner. I use 2-3 languages regularly which is fine. As long as I start using others at the same time my productivity drops significantly as I have to think more about syntax and names.

I think as a beginner it's great to learn a language in each domain (e.g. HTML, JS, SQL, Erlang). That way you always have a language to solve a task at hand, but don't confuse them. You also avoid spending too much time thinking about which language to choose for a specific task, when it mostly doesn't matter anyway.

<comment><USER4> For me I think the threshold I'd suggest is learning enough different languages (from multiple paradigms and domains) and familiarity with enough frameworks to have confidence that when you require a language in a particular domain, you know that you'll be able to get up to speed quickly.

In general it pays to know one or two languages deep down to the bare metal as it gives you a basis to reason about other languages.

I would also suggest learning a language without garbage collection: It builds character, or at least the discipline to figure out a consistent practice that ensures every resource has one allocation and one and only one de-allocation. This discipline (of thinking about data flow through your program) will pay dividends as you organize your code even in gc'ed languages.

While you're at it, learning how GC works (at least at a high-level) is useful as depending on the particular GC used in the language at hand you can either be working with it or against it.

Learn your way around basic data structures: Most languages have a significant standard library, and much of the library is usually concerned with data structures. Knowing basic classes of data structures is the important thing here. Lots of stdlibs have hashes, heaps, linked-lists, or arrays even if they call them different things but the important skill is being able to look at the language docs and find the one that meets your requirement (fast look up time, stable ordering, fast sorting, etc) or be able to build a hybrid combination that combines the requirements you do have.

Make sure you know how to use your tools including at least one debugger, a version control system, etc.

I've found it pays to create toy projects in my spare time to gain familiarity with various new software and hardware. I have been surprised how often something I've just been playing with comes up. Someone will randomly ask, "can you set up a website with a CMS and customization," or "I need a hardware timer to sync these two instruments during an experiment." And I have at least a basis to begin to come at those projects even though they weren't things I had been initially employed to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > And if what I'm truly trying to do is to learn to think about problems in a > different way, a week-long effort at dabbling in a side project isn't going > to change my way of thinking.

I'm not sure that's why people try different languages. Certainly what I've gained from messing around with different languages over time (e.g. most recently rust) is exposure to different ideas and ways of doing things. Do I "think about every problem as if it should be a collection of tables in the third normal form"? No, but when I do need to decide how to store data I have a much better idea of how I would do it, or what I needed to look at.

Gaining experience of a range of ideas is a good thing irrespective of whether it changes the way you think. For example, if you know only one language (or one type of language), it can be quite hard to differentiate in your head whether something is a limitation of the language or a limitation of the problem. ("If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail")

That being said, I do take his point that it is worth spending some time learning about things that aren't programming languages: testing, security, business, etc. After all, software development isn't anywhere near _just_ programming. But really it shouldn't be a question of "do I learn this or that?". Read into things that you're interested in, or that would be useful at work, or just something completely different that will broaden your horizons a bit.

I don't think it matters particularly if that is a new language or not.

</comment><comment><USER6> Programming languages probably have the worst cost/benefit ratio of anything else you can learn. In the end, much of the work that goes into thinking about an algorithm is the same in all languages, as are the components of the problems (you have functions for sorting, and for writing to files, and for getting the time etc.). Yet you have to learn a lot of details, like the standard libraries and popular libraries and all the tooling. I'm not saying a new language can't teach you valuable things, but those things are usually not worth all that overlapping effort. Moreover -- and perhaps partly because there are so many details -- languages are distracting, because people tend to fall in love with formalisms. They have an appealing aesthetic of an ordered structure, whereas the problems they're actually used for are messy.

Of course, some people love programming languages, and as an intellectual pursuit, studying them is as good as any other. But learning about, say, mechanical sympathy, data structures, concurrency, concepts in distributed programming, compilation or pretty much any CS topic which isn't tied to a specific language would have a greater impact for less cost. It's certainly good to know one language at each "level" \-- systems, applications and scripting. Other than that, it's a good idea to spend as little time as possible on new languages.

<comment><USER7> I'd say switching between languages within the same paradigm has a pretty low payoff. But if you switch between paradigms -- say, you learn Prolog when all you knew was C -- the payoff is pretty big. This is because you're not merely learning new syntax, libraries or toolchain (boring!), you're learning a completely different way of thinking about problem solving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Disclaimer: I'm not a very experienced programmer and I'm probably an idiot.

I think OP missed entirely the point of learning a new language. When I learn a new language, I try to use the language the way it was built to be used, instead of trying to adapt it to what I already know. That's why you'll often see me asking questions like: "What is the Rubyist way to solve this?". I do adapt the language, but only after I've tried their way first.

I started programming by learning _C_ , which taught me how the computer 'thinks'. Oh, and the absolute basics of programming.

I learned _C++_ , where I was firstly introduced to objects and reliable ways do handle resource allocations without leaks (hopefully :).

I learned _Ruby_ , where I was firstly introduced to functional programming and a wonderful implementation of the language using objects. I also learned what expressive your code can be.

I learned _JavaScript_ , which didn't teach me much, but I've used it extensively to practice what I had learned before. JavaScript does everything.

I learned _Haskell_ , which taught me more functional programming, and how problems go away when you use the correct types (or containers).

I learned _Scheme_ , which showed me how simple a language's syntax can be, while still effective. It confirmed what I knew all along: all those different syntaxes mostly don't matter.

Sure I could have learned all those things without learning a new language. But I had no idea they even existed. Now, what will I learn next? Any suggestions?

<comment><USER9> Erlang/Elixir would be a good bet. Erlang very much has a "model" to it that is hand tailored to a specific niche (reliability), and fits very well in networking scenarios. Adding to that, both languages are gaining adoption and will definitely see an uptick in job postings in the coming years.

If you want to learn a language for the express purpose of expanding your mind, try a postfix language like Forth or Joy. Those are different enough from what you've done so far that it'll be pretty strange to think in that manner at first. I haven't pursued either Forth or Joy beyond messing around with a couple toy examples, but they're very interesting to think about.

<comment><USER8> I will definitely check those out, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I might be in the minority here, but "fighting unfamiliar syntax" seems like a lazy argument to me. I've played around with many languages, and after getting used to the first non-c family syntax (in my case, Scheme) it never bothered me anymore. There are valuable lessons I've learned from other languages and I don't think I could have learned them if I would have stayed in the language I was comfortable in at the time. It's much more difficult (in my mind) to try novelty when you have ingrained habits already.

<comment><USER11> I'm not so sure. I started (technically) with C++ and Java in miscellaneous summer camps and an independent-study highschool class, but my first serious course in a language (instead of just toy problems + messing around) was in Racket... I got the hang of it during the class, but I couldn't hold onto it the way C-family syntax just stuck, and when I last tried to pick up something Lisp-family a few months ago (Common Lisp) it was like I'd never seen Racket.

Unless that actually is "ingrained habits," I suppose, but in that case I had the habits before I ever hit college or knew that other syntaxes existed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Unfortunately we don't live in a world where it's possible to know one language and still get hired in a job where a different language is used. To future proof our careers, we quite often have to dedicate ourselves to learning not just the qualities of a language, but also the syntax itself. We need to be able show some evidence that we can hit the ground running.

I also think that if you work in a non-opinionated language, it can be very informative studying some of the concepts used in opinionated languages. Perhaps you could say the language is a medium used for learning higher-order concepts that would be hard to understand in isolation. Quite often those concepts are very useful and can change your thought processes. An example of this is the rise of functional programming techniques in JavaScript.

I agree with the point of not limiting ourselves to just purely technical programming knowledge. It's surely about finding the right blend.

</comment><comment><USER13> Anything other than programming. Being human is so much more than programming. Division of Labor has sucked the human in me. Learning philosophy from Epicurus, Socrates, Kant, Confucius, Marx has helped me achieve a new perspective on how I should really live my life. Now I think can do better in dealing with people.

Edit: I wonder what is the author's position on free software..

</comment><comment><USER14> Learn languages to see how structures and algorithms can help you think and express ideas. Only that. No language is "that better".

ps: then learn non trivial compilation. (Lookup for books from Aho or Whilhelm)

</comment><comment><USER15> Question: which mobile browser did this link work in on my phone?</comment>


Small guide to making nice tables [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://inf.ethz.ch/personal/markusp/teaching/guides/guide-tables.pdf <comment><USER2> Tufte has a lot to say about this (and many viz things) - worth reading his books, really. The general guideline I try to remember is "facilitate comparison" (present things that you want the viewer to compare/see near each other) and "maximize data/ink ratio" (put as much data, and as little other stuff, on the page). The latter, in particular, tells us to reduce lines from tables as much as possible; I often find just one (not the three this approach recommends) to be plenty, depending on the data. That is, just the line separating header and data. Of course, YMMV :)

<comment><USER3> Great points! Those are wonderful design principles, and can really help everyone in evaluating the layout of a table.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I found the lack of any horizontal line separating rows in the given examples of good tables off-putting. In the examples given from The Economist they are using horizontal lines and I agree those are great examples.

<comment><USER5> In most cases they are using dotted horizontal line which is better than a solid line.

In Google Slides or Excel it's easy to use low-contrast shading between dark and light backgrounds which is another less-intrusive way to delineate rows without using a solid line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here is a good guide to apply to tables used on the web

[https://alistapart.com/article/web-typography- tables/](https://alistapart.com/article/web-typography-tables/)

<comment><USER7> I'm fond of the condensed way similar advice is presented here: [https://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/portfolio/2016/1/7/data-l...](https://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/portfolio/2016/1/7/data- looks-better-naked-clear-off-the-table?rq=tables)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Weighing in as a UX designer. I appreciate the attempt to encourage people to think about design, but this guide has issues.

What's wrong with the advice:

-Removing horizontal lines decreases readability in the complex examples given

-Vertical lines are very helpful when there are more than three columns

-Serifs have actually been found to be more readable due to their distinct letterforms and can be comprehended more quickly. San-serif fonts are fine too though. Basically, choose a font that has good legibility.

-Don't rely on light gray lines, because they might not be visible on all screens, or in various environments, and likely won't translate to print

-Double horizontal lines for column headers are fine.

-Overall, if you're presenting important information, usability is much more important than minor aesthetics.

Here are some more actual tips for laying out tables:

-Ensure that if a horizontal line needs to be scannable, that it actually has enough padding, or a horizontal separator, be it a dotted line or some other type of visible anchor

-If columns have a lot of information, a table may not be sufficient. Consider aggregating individual rows into a card format.

-Padding is your friend. Also, be consistent with it. A table with too little, but consistent padding looks better than one with more breathing room and inconsistent padding.

-Most information should be aligned left. One exception is currency. That should be aligned right

<comment><USER8> You're just countering his subjective opinion with your subjective opinion.

It's like he said he prefers cherry pie, and you're saying 'no that advice has issues, I prefer apple pie.'

<comment><USER9> Sure but is that a problem?

If the originally submitted guide is admittedly subjective, then it seems like sharing different subjective viewpoints (with reasoning) in HN comments is a great idea. If it's a subjective thing, I'd rather hear from several viewpoints before making decisions about how to handle my own tables.

<comment><USER8> How can subjective advice be 'wrong' though? How can there be an 'issue' with what someone likes the look of?

<comment><USER10> Well if you're posting it publicly and claiming "this is better" then you're either wrong or open to criticism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I make my tables like this guide recommends, but more because I know that it's the "professional", "publication quality" way that the people "in the know" prefer. I myself don't really feel that strongly about vertical lines but I avoid them to not look ignorant.

It says a lot that the first slide doesn't even say which is the good one and takes is for granted ("Easy decision, isn't it?") but some here have thought the bad ones are the good ones.

Shows that it's more of a fashion thing. (Not counting the intentional mistakes in the "bad version" like kerning "fi lter" and other spacing errors in the math, like the exponent in the top right formula -- seriously why introduce those additional mistakes, why not just make the tables themselves different?)

<comment><USER12> > It says a lot that the first slide doesn't even say which is the good one > and takes is for granted ("Easy decision, isn't it?") but some here have > thought the bad ones are the good ones.

It's because people on HN loves to be contrarians. The tables with the double lines really do look like garbage. The examples aren't doctored. One variant is what you get with Latex's builtin table commands, the other with the booktabs package.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is talking about print tables. Do the same design principles apply to online tables?

<comment> open-source-ux Yes, many of the rules do. Here is a presentation by Richard Rutter (co- founder of a design agency and an online font service) on Web Typography. The presentation includes advice on how to improvement table readability and appearance.

Link to the segment on tables (approx 7 mins length):

 _Set tables to be read_

[https://youtu.be/hbIZX6tE9JY?t=704](https://youtu.be/hbIZX6tE9JY?t=704)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Page 10/11: -94.7351 etc. is so wrong, my eyes are bleeding! Should be typeset in math mode like $-94.7351$ (or whole column in math) to get at least the minus sign right.

<comment><USER15> What about it is "wrong"? Perhaps I'm scarred by my own institution's predilection of left-justifying (or center) columns of numbers that this seems fine to me.

<comment><USER16> As shown, the minus sign is rendered as a hyphen. This looks glaring when you're used to math mode's thinner, longer minus sign.

To see the difference, typeset this with LaTeX:

        \documentclass{standalone}
        \begin{document}
        -50 vs $-50$
        \end{document}

<comment><USER15> Gotcha, thanks. Hardly "eye-bleed" worthy IMO, but noticeable for sure.

<comment><USER17> Ever since realizing that a minus sign is supposed to line up with a plus, I've never been able to unsee it. Compare:

-Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

+Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

−Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I thought the "bad" tables were the "good" tables until I was 6 pages in.

To each his own, I guess.

<comment><USER19> Same here. You're not alone

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Those "nice" tables are not very nice.

</comment><comment><USER21> Here is the advice:

\- Avoid vertical lines

\- Avoid "boxing up" cells, usually 3 horizontal lines are enough: above, below, and after heading (see examples in this guide)

\- Avoid double horizontal lines

\- Enough space between rows

\- If in doubt, align left

I agree with this, although some of his examples I would tweak slightly, and sometimes I wonder about how much better "align left" ends up working.

</comment><comment><USER22> IMHO author is missing the point here, lines are not just arbitrary decoration, they've got an important purpose to guide the eye. If line is removed, it needs to be replaced by enough white space that will separate the content visually. The 1st example fails horribly with this, it's impossible to see where the 2nd row begins without reading the whole text. Also, the longer a row/column is, harder it is to follow the separation and line is a better choice in those cases (or more spacing is needed). There's nothing particularly special about these "rules", they're just the normal typography practices and some common sense applied to tables.

</comment><comment><USER23> These tables are almost unusable. They look better in the most superficial possible way. They're more "pleasant", but absolutely not better for a serious use-case.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is some good advice for making PPTs or Excel spreadsheets as well.

</comment><comment><USER25> Bulma.io does most of this (web site tables!)

</comment><comment><USER26> (2010)

</comment><comment><USER27> I was honestly expecting (and hoping) this was an article on carpentry...

<comment><USER28> Haha same. Disappointing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> For a moment I thought this was a guide for physical tables (like the ones you use to have dinner).

<comment><USER30> Likewise...with HN you never know what esoteric guide or advice lies beneath a somewhat vague headline, and in almost every case it's unexpectedly convenient or interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> No offense but when you compared and said which is better - I had to read the rest of the slides to figure out which one was supposed to be better. Too many lines is gaudy but also can provide high level information. Too little lines might look "nice" in its own sense but then you have a lot of double checking.

</comment><comment><USER31> > The following tables are taken from the magazine Economist

The Economist is in fact a newspaper.

Edit: do people think this is a snobby comment? The Economist maintains this despite publishing in a medium which looks like a magazine.

<comment><USER20> Getting offended on behalf of others is controversial in general, but in this case it's plain silly.

URL: subscription.economist.com/Magazine/Subscribe

www.economist.com/about-the-economist

> Frequently asked questions

> Why does The Economist call itself a newspaper?

> [...] By the time the transformation from newspaper to magazine format had > been completed, the habit of referring to ourselves as "this newspaper" had > stuck.</comment></comment>