Political Crisis Engulfs Samsung, a Firm Tied to South Korea's Success - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/business/lee-jae-yong-samsung.html <comment><USER2> Most large Korean companies are family-owned or family-controlled, and most are corrupt. An unusually high percentage of the heads of these companies have criminal records for financial crimes, compared to other developed economies. For decades, presidents have frequently pardoned them -- and many other CEOs would be convicted of financial crimes if the government bothered to charge them.

Presidents of South Korea have often justified their pardons of criminal CEOs by stressing the consequences for the economy. Fortunately, those excuses are less widely accepted than they used to be. Besides, it's not healthy for an economy to be heavily dependent on a small number of family-controlled firms, whether they are corrupt or not. It's true that enforcing the law against those companies may cause a short-term economic downturn, but in the long term, the economy will have a more sustainable foundation.

Incidentally, the Korean term for these large conglomerates, chaebol, is cognate with the Japanese term zaibatsu, which dominated the pre-WWII Japanese economy and shared many characteristics, including family control and political and financial corruption. Japan was better off when they were broken up. Despite appearances, the current Japanese conglomerates are better than the zaibatsu in important ways: they are rarely family-controlled, and they are less corrupt, more accountable to shareholders, and have much better corporate governance as a result.

Some reform of the economy, and less tolerance for corruption among the voters, are likely to be the best things that comes out of the impeachment of the current president.

<comment><USER3> American companies are also extremely corrupt. The difference is that they operate through loopholes in the law, and pay armies of lawyers to find such loopholes. They also pay a fortune to lobbyists to maintain and expand these friendly laws.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you, but I have to say it's probably better to have transparent corruption within the law, than opaqueness. In America, most of the corruption is open, people are just too busy with their own shit to worry about it.

<comment><USER5> > most of the corruption is open, people are just too busy with their own shit > to worry about it

And this is reason, why Basic Income won't come easily. They (government, corporations) don't want people to have too much free time, to worry about theirs wrong-doing.

<comment><USER6> Basic Income is intended to be a more efficient and fairer way to provide social support and to eliminate the poverty trap that makes some people worse off if they get a job. It's actually designed to encourage more people to work and thus reduce aggregate free time. After all, the money to provide the Basic Income has to come from somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The stranglehold that large "chaebols" (large family conglomerates) hold on the Korean economy and politics here is frightening. And it's still such an "honour" to work for them, a sign of social prestige, which makes change unlikely any time soon.

Kind of like publishing in top journals is so prestigious and career-advancing for scientists. It makes creeps like Elsevier "above the market laws", virtually undisruptible (as well as fabulously rich). It's a deeply cultural thing, with glacial inertia, not a question of technology/funding!

On a similar note, after the AlphaGo commotion, Korean government allocated some $860M to "AI innovation". I may be too cynical, but it wouldn't surprise me if the money ended up in "friendly hands", the likes of Samsung.

</comment><comment><USER8> It doesn't help Lee Jaeyong that, unlike his ruthless father (who was somehow brutally efficient at making Samsung the most powerful company in Korea), Lee Jaeyong has the moniker of "Hand of Minus", after several of his pet projects that went nowhere.

Already some people are (somewhat jokingly) predicting that maybe his arrest would be a _plus_ to Samsung...

That said, it was quite a bold move by prosecutors. Without the current scandal of president Park and puppetmaster Choi, I don't think they would have dared arrest Samsung's leader. (Well, the court may still say no to the arrest; we should wait and see.)

<comment><USER9> Despite the history of corruption in Korean politics up to the presidential level, my gut feeling is that the Park/Choi scandal is unprecedented in Korean history, both in terms of the scale of the revelations, and the low level of tolerance that regular Koreans are showing towards it.

I think in 20 years, people will talk about pre and post Park Geun-hye Korea because the difference will be that important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hard to imagine Tim Cook or Sundar Pichai being arrested.

It's an even bigger deal in SK than either of those guys, where Samsung's role in the respective GDP is much higher.

<comment><USER11> Partly because they are involved in politics on a mostly cosmetic basis. It is much easier to imagine a specifically politically connected figure (imagine a John Podesta or Rick Perry level personality) being arrested for some sort of corruption; in SK evidently those figures are also businessmen of various sorts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's about time Korea moves away from this oligarchical bs and embrace a true liberal democracy and market economy

<comment><USER13> Right, they should follow our lead in the west where we recognize that campaign donations are speech and end up with the CEO of a major corporation as the next Sec. of State. We don't just do bribery, we've legalized it.

<comment><USER14> To be fair, that's mostly an American thing.

compaign donations are tightly controlled in almost all the rest of the West.

<comment><USER15> Straight up illegal in Poland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When South Korea was coming out the war, it was around the poorest country on Earth. The generation who lived through the war, or who grew up right after saw their country going from being literal rubble to being a global powerhouse -- and lots of the credit is given to the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee and the particulars of the economic development program he initiated. The downside to that program, and much of it still exists today, is that is was designed to operate in a way that tolerated lots of corruption in both government and industry.

The <40 generations, who remember, at the earliest, leaving behind the military dictatorship and emergence as a fledgling democracy are far less tolerant of the excesses that the old system tolerated and want to raise expectations, bring about accountability, "deconfucionize" the national leadership (both political and industrial/commercial), and I think along with that further diversify the economy.

South Koreans are tremendously entrepreneurial, there are many many small businesses that are formed every year, and they operate in some ways in the shadows of the offerings from the major conglomerates. The government, for what it's worth, has been toying around with growing and promoting VC-like startups to help formalize the grow-and-sell approach. But there's still a tremendous disconnect and you find very few medium-sized, or even large businesses, as the conglomerates tend to either out-compete or buy up all of those companies.

From the normal person's perspective you find yourself trapped in a cycle of "making it big" and getting into a salary-man's life with a big firm (and all the downsides of that lifestyle), or doing similar jobs with less security and less pay for tiny companies. Many people don't want either choice, they want a third-way, even if they're having difficulty articulating this desire, and I _think_ the country may be on the verge of this transformation into a more fully diversified economy.

Superficially it's hard for outsiders to see or understand this, since you can get all of the first-world fixings you would expect...except that they all seem to come from the same 4 or 5 companies and it keeps the economy perpetually trapped.

However, Korea's global position is precarious, cheaper manufacturing and goods are an hour flight away to the West (China), and higher-quality precision engineering is an hour flight away to the East (Japan). Korea has neither the money, or population to really directly compete with either and thus tries to use both the bulk of the conglomerates to act as economic gate crashers into global trade and then massive cultural subsidies and funding to push in awareness of Korean cultural properties and the network that comes with that (oh, so you like K-POP? you'll love Kimchi!). Politicians are rightly terrified of losing the relative power the conglomerates give the nation as powerful chess pieces.

The recent presidential crisis and the continuing revelations of how corrupt, and tied together the government and the conglomerates are has been a major revelation to millions of young Koreans. This crisis could become a watershed moment that could radically transform the entire political and economic landscape in the country. It's not clear at all what that could look like or if it would be beneficial for the country.

</comment><comment><USER16> I have been convinced that NAND chips have been price-fixed for years now, similar to how the exact same companies (Samsung a big one) involved in their production price-fixed RAM chips and then LCD panels. A few years ago, there was an investigation launched into exactly this. South Korea, however, closed that investigation. Has anyone heard whether that investigation was closed as one of the 'political favors' the bribes facilitated? Given the production processes involved, the materials involved, and the sheer titanic scale of the number of products which include NAND chips, it is absurd that we do not yet have SSDs which are significantly larger, and significantly cheaper, than any mechanical hard drives.

</comment><comment><USER17> The NYT once again disappoints. No mention of the 8 Goddess scandal?

It's almost as if the western media is deliberately avoiding the scandal, lest anyone draw parallels to western corruption.

</comment><comment><USER18> Reading this, it would seem the President of Samsung is more important to Korea than their National President. One is mentioned in every paragraph; the other in only one, offhand.

<comment><USER19> There were HUGE protests [1][2] last year with the President of South Korea, so people do not really like/trust their president right now. Also, I've always been told by Koreans how Samsung is a great Korean company in a way that it shows that it's a big national pride.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Korean_political_sc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Korean_political_scandal)

[2] [https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=korea+protest&hl=en&tb...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=korea+protest&hl=en&tbm=isch)

<comment><USER20> There is a hint of irony to this. Many Koreans (especially the younger crowd) views Samsung-like chaebols with disdain not unlike many have towards Wall Street, and yet getting an offer from one of these companies is a dream come true.

<comment><USER13> It is perhaps ironic, but not surprising. Familiar human nature shouldn't surprise anyone.

I'm a damn lib, but a year or so ago, a fellow graduate student left to become a VP at JP Morgan (he's a well connected fellow). I was damn well tempted to follow him but I eventually decided against it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Port Scan Attack Detector - <AUTHOR> http://www.linuxhaxor.net/2008/02/07/the-port-scan-attack-detector/ PSAD is a collection of four lightweight system daemons written in Perl and in C that is designed to work with Linux firewalling code (iptables in the 2.4.x kernels, and ipchains in the 2.2.x kernels) to detect port scans. It features a set of highly configurable danger thresholds (with sensible defaults provided), verbose alert messages that include the source, destination, scanned port range, begin and end times, tcp flags and corresponding nmap options (Linux 2.4.x kernels only), reverse DNS info, email alerting, and automatic blocking of offending ip addresses via dynamic configuration of ipchains/iptables firewall rulesets. In addition, for the 2.4.x kernels psad incorporates many of the tcp signatures included in Snort to detect highly suspect scans. <comment><USER2> Since when has port scanning been considered an attack?

<comment><USER3> While it could be considered bad form to do a port scan it's far from an attack.

<comment><AUTHOR> The name of the script is PSAD (Port Scan Attack Detector).

Is a portscan of a machine malicious/illegal/unfriendly? [http://faqs.org/faqs/computer-security/most-common- qs/sectio...](http://faqs.org/faqs/computer-security/most-common- qs/section-21.html)</comment></comment></comment>


OnMetal Performance In Early Benchmarks - <AUTHOR> http://www.rackspace.com/blog/onmetal-shows-phenomenal-performance-in-early-benchmarks/ <comment><USER2> SoftLayer has been doing this since 2006 and also offers virtual compute instances as well. Can be purchased hourly or monthly

[http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers](http://www.softlayer.com/bare- metal-servers)

<comment> old-gregg I've been SL customer and have using that prior to joining Rackspace and building OnMetal. The point isn't about "lets get rid of hypervisor", the point was to:

* Lets provision as quickly as VMs (as opposed to 1hr+ on SL)

* Lets engineer hardware to deliver maximum uptime via no-moving-parts design (as opposed to vanilla SuperMicro on SL)

* Lets design hardware to deliver maximum unit of work per dollar (like DB transactions/second per dollar, or requests/second/dollar) as opposed to average value elsewhere.

* Deriving from the above, lets just give RAM away nearly for free, and put dual 10Gig network in place, because modern apps should be mostly RAM-based.

* Lets adopt standard OpenStack provisioning API, with myriad of pre-existing tools, community and ecosystem (like auto-scaling, orchestration, etc) as opposed to proprietary API.

The end result is a completely different infrastructure, something akin to what OpenCompute pioneers use internally. This is how running at scale should be like.

As always, I encourage skeptics to spend more than 10 seconds on a product page, because most of the time there're humans behind it, and - in this case for sure - they are way too ambitious to be spending their lives simply cloning old designs.

Enjoy OnMetal, dear jberekw, it's built for critical thinkers (and skeptics! :-) like you and it's awesome - it's going to rock your world.

<comment><USER3> The pricing (on the compute flavor especially) is appealing -- can certainly see uses for it.

Looking forward to OnMetal being available in other regions, especially ORD.

I'm one of the skeptics -- but that's because I've had very few problems with Rackspace cloud instance performance in general; rather, it's the control plane reliability which has caused 99% of the pain.

As an aside, I find the Cloud Servers SLA disappointing, as it defines control plane availability as 1 – (Total API Errors)/(Total Valid API Requests) . Can't launch instances on Super Bowl Sunday? Tough. The failed POSTs to /servers will never trigger a violation, so long as GET /servers is working:

[http://www.rackspace.com/information/legal/cloud/sla](http://www.rackspace.com/information/legal/cloud/sla)

Most SLAs remedies are weak ("we break the SLA you get a free t-shirt"), but this one is broken to the point of glossing over fundamental outages.

<comment><USER4> Agreed -- SLAs are a pet peeve of mine. I wrote a post [0] about this a few years ago, it still feels fairly current. Basically, I don't think SLAs are a useful tool for managing service provider relationships; it's too difficult to capture nuance in a legal document. Transparency and track records seem like a more realistic approach. We've been seeing some movement here, but not much. Most service providers offer very little hard data about historical performance, and don't say enough about their internal operations to let you make a realistic assessment of disaster probabilities.

[0] [http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2011/04/slas- considered-h...](http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2011/04/slas-considered- harmful.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As near as I can figure, the OnMetal servers are 3x-5x what I'd pay for dedicated servers from, say, a Hurricane reseller, and the virtual servers are more than 2x as much as comparable Linode servers, with the Linode servers offering way more SSD storage, more bandwidth, etc.

Not to mention, Rackspace charges you $120 per terabyte of data transfer, while you'll get several terabytes of transfer free/included when buying from Linode or most dedicated server resellers.

That seems like a hefty premium for...what? The Rackspace name? Is there any reason to believe that Rackspace has better uptime/reliability than Linode? Any reason to believe Rackspace has better hardware than Linode? Given that neither company — as with most cloud providers — provides any truly meaningful transparency, it's impossible to say.

For my money, I _think_ I'd rather spend less of it, or spend the same amount and get more/redundant servers.

I'm genuinely struggling to understand the value of Rackspace.

<comment><USER6> _I 'm genuinely struggling to understand the value of Rackspace._

See [1]: "We don't offer raw infrastructure without service." That is, support is included in the cost. Lots of people don't need support or don't want to pay for it, particularly the startup-oriented crowd here on HN. But I would be interested in a comparison of Rackspace's support to others'.

 _Rackspace charges you $120 per terabyte of data transfer_

Is this in the fine print somewhere? I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't see it mentioned in [1].

1: [http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal/](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal/)

<comment><USER5> Actually, I didn't notice that support was required. I was basing my cost comparisons on Rackspaces's "Raw Infrastructure" pricing — the fact you are required to purchase support at additional cost makes their pricing even less competitive.

They have a more detailed pricing page, with bandwidth charges listed near the bottom, here: [http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/)

<comment><USER7> >I was basing my cost comparisons on Rackspaces's "Raw Infrastructure" pricing

As parent clearly stated, there _is_ no raw infrastructure pricing; all pricing includes support already.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps you should pay a visit to the link parent posted, so you would understand what I was talking about.

[http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal/](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal/)

Where they present their pricing in the format of a "Raw Infrastructure" price plus your choice of 2 different levels of support. So, there _is_ raw infrastructure pricing — if you'd visited the page before posting, you'd have known that's where I got the nomenclature in the first place — but you must also purchase some form of support (where the pricing varies for different support levels).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I want to want this, but the pricing just doesn't seem competitive with EC2. Am I missing something?

For example, compare the "I/O" server with an EC2 i2.4xlarge instance. The Rackspace server has 128GB RAM, 3.2TB disk, and 20 cores; i2.4xlarge has 122GB, 3.2TB, and 16 -- nearly comparable.

On EC2, I can buy a 3-year Light Utilization Reserved Instance for $3884, and then pay $828/month (based on 720 hours per month). After 12 months, my average cost has been $1152/month. I still have two years left on my reservation, which I can keep using, or possibly sell, so the effective cost is even lower.

If I'm more certain of a 12-month server lifetime, I can buy a 1-year Heavy Utilization Reserved Instance for $7280, and then pay $447/month, for a total cost of $1054/month.

On Rackspace, list price is $1800/month. Suppose my total spend is $10,000/month (list price) and I commit to 12 months. I get a 15% discount, or $1530/month. That's quite a bit more expensive than EC2, and with EC2 I'm committing less up front. A longer commitment would help, but it would also bring down the EC2 price.

Can anyone poke holes in my analysis?

<comment><USER8> You are not too far off. I would use 730 hours = 365 * 24 / 12 instead of 720. You could add little (or not so little) things like the cost of IOPS, bandwidth differential, etc. You could add a little more for the core diffs. But all that won't close the gap.

Regardless, if you want the cheapest, I would go with Digital Ocean, though it is a different kind of hosting. For Rackspace, you really go when you need their support people and not just a server.

I hear a lot more developers this year going to DO than last year, but I have never used them though, trying to stick with the "devil I know."

<comment><USER4> Digital Ocean is interesting, but they don't really come out cheaper for large, continuous-duty instances. Their tiny servers look great, if you don't need much storage. But on the larger instances, it's a straight $1/GB/month for SSD. With some commitment, Rackspace is more like $0.50, and Amazon around $0.35.

Digital Ocean looks roughly comparable to Amazon for RAM, and slightly ahead on price-per-core (if you assume all cores are equal), but way behind on SSD. Again, this is assuming you want large instances and are going to run them 24/7 for at least 6 to 12 months -- otherwise, DO pricing starts to look a lot better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> SysBench is ok when used properly, but UnixBench?

They provide instructions on how you can patch and run it, using "./Run", but no warnings about what this is actually doing. See [http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-02/compilers- love-m...](http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-02/compilers-love-messing- with-benchmarks.html) . I'd like to write a lot more about UnixBench, but I really don't have the time. It takes a lot of energy to refute this stuff.

If I were benchmarking OnMetal vs HW virt, I'd be showing a spectrum of micro- benchmarks, from equal performance (CPU) to network I/O. I'd expect some of my results to show a ~10x difference. You would then choose/weight them depending on what matters for your intended application.

</comment><comment><USER10> Still not seen a discussion of how they are dealing with the huge security nightmare of direct customer hardware access.

<comment> old-gregg What makes you think it's "huge"? How do you think the dedicated hosting industry has been operating for more than a decade? You can re-flush the bios, you can secure-erase the storage, etc.

<comment><USER10> Just because the dedicated server hosting industry hasn't been dealing with the problem, doesn't mean it's not there :)

If I flash the BIOS (or the network card firmware or the LOM device firmware or the disk controller firmware or the individual disk firmware, etc) with malicious firmware, it can lie to you when you try to reflash it later, leaving my malicious code running against later customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The pricing of OnMetal appears relatively competitive if not on the expensive side. I think the best way to make the case that OnMetal is worth the premium is with a series of system benchmarks comparing their solution to comparably priced AWS instances.

</comment><comment><USER12> So is rackspace now giving up the virtualized cloud market? (Because I remember they didn't follow the recent price drop of Google/AWS/Azure?)

</comment><comment><USER13> Wanna see if we can salt-call the servers to spin-up on demand. O_o

<comment><AUTHOR> If it can do it for normal Rackspace Cloud instances, it can do it for OnMetal instances.</comment></comment>


How America became uncompetitive and unequal - <AUTHOR> http://m.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-america-became-uncompetitive-and-unequal/2014/06/13/a690ad94-ec00-11e3-b98c-72cef4a00499_story.html?hpid=z3 <comment><USER3> Consolidation is also favored by cheap money (yes, back to money monopoly thingy). Above some threshold and especially if you are in good relations with a bank, it is far easier to buy your competitors and dismantle them by selling their assets than to compete with them. It's ironic how in the failed communist centralized economies, the economic policy was dictated by "elected" nomenklatura and it was BAD, while in the "free/democratic" market economies the control is held by unaccountable private banks and nobody worries much.

<comment><USER4> _It 's ironic how in the failed communist centralized economies, the economic policy was dictated by "elected" nomenklatura and it was BAD_

It wasn't judged as bad because of nomenklatura, or rigged elections. Few people care about these. It was bad because you couldn't get basic goods. There were shortages of sugar and toiler paper. Not war-time shortages, decades after the war.

Which is why the current system will continue as long as it can carry out its basic obligations. American banks are a little behind the times but mostly because of all the backwards compatibility they carry, not scale-related dysfunction. Regular consumers don't feel that. They can still can get their credit cards, chargebacks work, fraud is policed, Amazon gets paid, etc, etc.

<comment><USER3> "It was bad because you couldn't get basic goods". True. But the current system is (even more?) problematic because you can't get basic JOBS. And not only that but a fundamental part of the current system is the accelerating race of getting rid of jobs. And not only that but now, unlike ever before, the system uses the best tools against jobs: software & automation.

<comment><USER5> Well, that is just not true. Technological innovation has been automating jobs since, well, the Romans built aqueducts and hydro-power and stopped people having to haul water in buckets up hills and bashing grain with a rock.

There are more people employed now than at any time in history. That's only possible with automation. Even since the time of the Luddites, people have been freed from drudgery and poor jobs and have higher quality of life, despite industry after industry being dissolved.

For each product that is produced at lower cost and higher quality through automation, extra spending is released by the consumers who get to purchase those products at lower cost relative to their income. The extra spending either goes into savings (good) or spending (still good) which in turn creates new industries which create new jobs.

Essentially, you can't have a gaming and micro-brewing industry without the more menial tasks being replaced by automation. I want no part of a future where new innovations can't happen because we insist on slowing technical progress to keep people in menial jobs.

The process has been repeating for a millenia - you have to have a very compelling reason to suggest that it will somehow stop because of more technology.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you on many points. Trying to keep my messages short, I made them too ambiguous. I'm not a Luddite. My only worry is that Thomas Piketty may be right. I don't know where you live, but where I come from, there is a very small percent of shareholders/capital owners/producers and a very large number of consumers/labor owners. The consumers have less and less money and the producers need less and less labor. Are you sure a system like this is stable ? Technology and innovation is great if it works for you and useless if it's someone else's and he has no incentives to share it with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This opinion piece articulates something I've felt for a long time... consolidation is the biggest problem in America right now, scratch that, in the World.

One thing that I can't comprehend is how right-wing free-market ideologues can get behind all the consolidation. Cant they see that consolidation is just like communism?

Only a competitive market with many players can ensure progress continues.

<comment><USER5> Except that it is nothing like communism.

Communism is defined by a complete lack of freedom to change the status quo. In turn, the lack of freedom to change the status quo means that development and progress is dramatically slowed, slowing down improvements in quality of life - as people themselves would prefer.

Consolidation only persists where it is either an effective way to deliver value (Walmart) or regulatory capture has occured (eg taxi licences, car dealerships). Todays consolidated behemoth is tomorrows has-been company - <USER2> long as the laws allow them to fall apart when they can no longer innovate and compete.

Inequality of income to me seems as though an economy is functioning well at the creating-value part. A lack of inequality (too much equality) is a danger sign that the creation of wealth and progress has been halted, most likely due to lack of freedom for individuals to pursue their own interests.

It's a misunderstanding to think that competition requires many players to be effective. In many cases, you only need two players and threat of entry to any others for competition to be successful at optimal use of resources. You only need two fighters and some contenders for a world champ boxing match to make them the best available at the time. And a fair referree.

I'll be the first to admit that the last part is the most difficult to achieve, but it's no reason to abandon the concept of the game.

<comment><USER7> > Consolidation only persists where it is either an effective way to deliver > value (Walmart) or regulatory capture has occured (eg taxi licences, car > dealerships).

Value for whom?

The problem is that "effective way to deliver value" is measured in terms of corporate profit (value to shareholders), not in terms of the actual thing being produced. So firms can produce less value to the economy at-large (fewer flights, worse beer, etc.), at greater cost to the consumer/supply chain, and still increase value.

The entire article is indicting this setup, where companies screw over their customers and suppliers in order to produce value for a few already very wealthy individuals who hold large stakes in the corporation.

This is how low-competitive environments work. Period. And it's not commie nonsense (unless Goldman Sachs are part of a massive commie conspiracy). From the article:

Goldman Sachs in February published a research memo advising investors to seek out "oligopolistic market structure[s]" in which "a smaller set of relevant peers faces lower competitive intensity, greater stickiness and pricing power with customers due to reduced choice, scale cost benefits including stronger leverage over suppliers, and higher barriers to new entrants all at once."

> In many cases, you only need two players and threat of entry to any others > for competition to be successful at optimal use of resources.

First of all, there's not much of a threat to entry when one or two companies own the entire market and there's a huge cost to entry. Have you seen many airline start-ups in the past half century or so?

Furthermore, it's possible to price like a monopoly when you only have one or two major competitors and everyone is part of a gentleman's agreement. Implicit, of course, but these aren't pricing cartels in the same sense that PACs don't coordinate with political campaigns.

The boxing match analogy is inherently flawed because these companies can still win big without wiping out all their competition. There is no gold medal when everyone's happy splitting the enormous pot of gold.

In fact, most seem to desire a situation where they have one "friendly" competitor so that they get all the perks of monopolistic position via an implicit gentleman's agreement on pricing, while still having the luxury of pointing across the street whenever regulators come around.

<comment><USER8> Value for who? PLEASE! Get real! Wal-Mart delivers value for shareholders because they attract customers because they're cheaper and more efficient.

But I suppose some people rather vilify its customers, under the delusion that tens of millions of America's poorest could magically lift themselves out of poverty by spending more money on manufacturing and transportation costs and on people working at cash registers. Bah.

(And the grocery market in general is anything but low-competition.)

<comment><USER7> > Value for who?

Well they sure as hell aren't passing it on to their employees; meanwhile, their stock is doing quite well...

> Wal-Mart delivers value for shareholders because they attract customers > because they're cheaper and more efficient.

> (And the grocery market in general is anything but low-competition.)

Okay, so you've double turned yourself. Walmart faces lots of competition from local chains, which prevents it from screwing consumers on prices. Competition is good.

I'd argue they compensate by leveraging their market position to place pressure on their increasingly de facto vertical supply chain and by poorly compensating their employees.

> by spending more money on manufacturing and transportation costs and on > people working at cash registers.

Of course, this ignores that many of those poor are the ones in the factories, warehouses, trucks and behind the cash registers.

<comment><USER8> > Okay, so you've double turned yourself... Competition is good.

What? This isn't a double-turn at all. I'm not defending uncompetitive environments and monopolistic exploitation, I'm asserting Wal-Mart as example uncompetitive environment is, in the general case, nuts.

> Of course, this ignores that many of those poor are the ones in the > factories, warehouses, trucks and behind the cash registers.

Not ignoring that fact, NOTWITHSTANDING THAT FACT. No one is better off if one person working minimum wage pay extra money to have another person working minimum wage drive a truck further (and burn more fuel for that matter). Recognize a simple truism: no group gets better off by engaging in waste. _(You could make a case that someone-else making substantially more than minimum wage paying extra for that would increase overall well being by paying more for these services, because of diminishing marginal utility of that richer person 's wealth, but making groceries cost more is a freakishly regressive sort of way to attempt to redistribute wealth... and wealthy people aren't shopping at Wal-Mart anyway, they're all at Target or Whole Foods...)_

<comment><USER7> > I'm not defending uncompetitive environments and monopolistic exploitation

Okay. Well that's what the article is attacking. So I guess I don't understand your point w.r.t. the thesis of the original article. Do you agree with the article but disagree that Wal-Mart is an example? Or what? Could you clarify?

> I'm asserting Wal-Mart as example uncompetitive environment is, in the > general case, nuts.

To repeat myself, there's more than one way for companies to behave anti- competitively.

Wal-mart cannot afford to screw consumers, so they find other ways to leverage their status as a mega-corp -- squeezing local government via tifs (this corn field/park/10 year old walmart is "blighted", so give us 15 year tax break to build a new one), paying poorly compared to other players in the market, abusing or undercutting supply chain partners, etc..

> but making groceries cost more is a freakishly regressive sort of way to > attempt to redistribute wealth

Well, we could one-up Wal-Mart and make all the groceries completely free by enslaving all those involved in food production. So this is clearly an over- simplification.

It's also a false choice. Wal-Mart could instead decrease its profits and play nicer with everyone (like many of its local chain competitors do, arguably because they don't have the huge legal/PR/marketing team and cash reserves which can buy F-U leverage against local governments and labor groups -- this coercive power that comes with being so big is at the heart of the article's thesis).

Also, the price difference vs. wage difference between Walmart and its competitors also puts the lie to this claim -- even an extra 1.00+ an hour way more than offsets an extra .10 cents on the dollar for groceries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a different take on this article than most. I'm a proponent of Classical economics, and I reject all modern schools of economics-- neoclassical, Austrian, Keynesian, etc.

Classical thinkers like Adam Smith expounded how rational self-interest _and_ competition together lead to economic prosperity. There's a balancing act going on between self-interest and competition--competition is the economic faculty that _restrains_ self-interest.

Only in perfect competition do we get _Pareto efficiency_ \--the state in which it is impossible to make any one individual better off without making at least one individual worse off.

Unfortunately, modern schools of economics have diminished the role of competition. Keynesianism lauds government monopoly power; while neoclassicism and Austrianism foster private monopoly power. Both are _evil_. The result has been a state of affairs wherein the vast majority of people are getting worse off.

WRT government intervention in the markets, Adam Smith would not oppose intervention that fosters competition and stifles monopoly. The goal of the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act was to foster competition, not to diminish "economic freedom."

"Economic freedom" is a mostly meaningless buzzword that's thrown around by both libertarians and socialists. Indices of "economic freedom" as compiled by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal serve no other purpose than propaganda.

It's impossible to divorce politics from economics in the real world. Adam Smith understood this. The subject used to be called "politico-economics."

Today, the Left favors reforms to give government more monopoly power. While the Right favors reforms that give firms more monopoly power. Until people start to wake up and realize all monopoly power is evil and what we need instead is more competition, things will continue to decline.

<comment><USER10> _Keynesianism lauds government monopoly power; while neoclassicism and Austrianism foster private monopoly power. Both are evil._

At least in the case of government, you may feel that it is evil, but it is necessary [0]. So the more pragmatic and productive approach would be to think about how this monopoly power could be used to further prosperity and equity of the people.

 _Today, the Left favors reforms to give government more monopoly power. While the Right favors reforms that give firms more monopoly power._

I think both those characterizations are a bit simplistic. Look at the discussion surrounding surveillance, secret courts and the police state, for example.

[0] This is true even within the economy: having a common measure of value is important for doing business, so you need currencies to have large scopes. Whoever ultimately controls a currency necessarily has a lot of monopoly power. So the question is not whether such powers exist, but how they should be structured subject to goals that we need to set for ourselves as a society.

<comment><USER9> I was speaking specifically of monopoly power, i.e., the power to raise or lower prices in the market. And no, neither government nor private firms should have this power. Monopoly power is an example of market failure. In a competitive market, all participants are _price takers_ , i.e., passive agents incapable of changing the market price. In perfect competition, in every transaction, at least one party is better off, and nobody is worse off. That all changes when somebody gets the power to set prices; then transactions leave some people worse off.

There are kinds of power besides monopoly power, such as coercive power. WRT coercive power, that's best monopolized by a democratic government accountable to its people. And government can and should use it's monopoly on coercive power to promote competitive markets. Instead, its been empowering monopolies.

But people today aren't well informed enough to make demands on government to promote competition or hold politicians accountable. They're given bogus ideologies (neoclassicism, Keynesianism, etc.). And they're given the false choice between Left and Right.

The terms "Left" and "Right" are not merely overly simplistic. They're total falsehoods, fabricated by self-interested parties to delude people into thinking they either need to give government more monopoly power or else give private firms more monopoly power. There is a third choice that's left unmentioned: Government can promote competition.

<comment><USER10> I appreciate your engagement in this discussion. I think the notion of a competitive market _as you define it_ [0] is inherently flawed. To quote:

> all participants are price takers, i.e., passive agents incapable of > changing the market price

That makes no sense. If all participants cannot influence the price, then where does the price come from?

Logically speaking, once you abstract away from all sorts of fluff, everything that happens in a market is ultimately the result of the action of one or more of its participants. That is, if participants were unable to change the market price, then why would the market price ever change? Why would there be a price in the first place? The fact is that participants are _necessarily_ able to change the market price, whether you want that or not. The only question is how this power is distributed and what the consequences are.

Having competitive markets in the sense of low barriers to entry etc. is clearly a good thing. But in the sense you've defined them, they are either useless or self-contradictory.

Interestingly, for every market, somebody has the (or at least some) power to set prices. Despite of what you write, most transactions are mutually beneficial anyway. Why is that?

I believe this is actually because the vast majority of markets _aren 't_ efficient in the efficient market hypothesis sense, and transactions aren't happening at the margin. For obvious transaction overhead and opportunity cost reasons, most transactions are only ever realized if they increase the total welfare not just by some epsilon, but by a significant percentage.

The really interesting question is how this large benefit is distributed between the transacting parties, and I would wager that the power to set prices does actually have a big influence there. That is, whoever actually gets to set the sticker price (for example) is bound to capture a larger fraction of the benefits than the other party, even if the transaction is overall still beneficial to both.

For this reason, I think the problem isn't even so much that transactions leave people worse off. That only happens comparatively rarely. The much more significant problem is when unequal power relations are exploited to give somebody a benefit that is deemed to be unjustified. [1]

The prototypical example would be the millionaire in the desert who is near death by thirst. If she signs over her entire wealth in exchange for a bottle of water and a ride out of the desert, then clearly, this is a transaction that is beneficial to both parties. Yet only the most psychopathic internet- libertarians would ever think that such a transaction was okay in any sense. The problem was not a lack of mutual benefit, but an exploitation of unequal power relations.

[0] And I suppose others define it in the same way, perhaps even a large group of economists.

[1] By the way, this is the root of the classical criticism of capitalism: that the surplus value of labor is siphoned off by capitalists, leaving workers with only a small amount. Even though employment contracts are typically mutually beneficial in the narrow, technical sense, there is the fact that the employer often exploits the reality of unequal power relationships.

<comment><USER9> > That makes no sense. If all participants cannot influence the price, then > where does the price come from?

You are assuming that the dynamics of an economic system is nothing but a summation of the individual dynamics. This assumption excludes the possibility of the emergence of complex structures from simple individual behaviors.

I _strongly_ suggest you take a look at the subjects of Complex Systems[1] theory, Nonlinear dynamics[2], Catastrophe theory[3], and Chaos theory[4]---all consistent, mathematically well grounded theories which allow for the _emergence_ [5] of aggregate behavior that cannot be explained simply in terms of individual behaviors. There is also the emerging field of Complex economics[6]. Donald Saari wrote an introductory paper called the _Mathematical Complexity of Simple Economics_ [7].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_systems](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_systems) [2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamical_system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamical_system) [3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_theory) [4] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory) [5] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence) [6] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_economics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_economics) [7] [http://www.ams.org/notices/199502/saari.pdf](http://www.ams.org/notices/199502/saari.pdf)

<comment><USER10> What you write is not an argument against what I wrote, and you make incorrect assumptions about what I'm assuming.

You yourself talk about the possibility of the emergence of complex structures _from simple individual behaviors_.

In other words, you acknowledge that it is the _individual behaviors_ that are necessary for the complex structures to exist. There may not be a simple linear relationship between the individual action and the ultimate outcome, but that doesn't change the fact that individual actions have an influence on the market price.

It also doesn't change the fact that without individual actions, a market price would never change (and would never exist in the first place), and that therefore, individuals have some power over the market price.

That does not mean that an individual can just dictate what the price should be without any constraints, but it does mean that your definition of a competitive market is a meaningless phantasy that cannot possibly exist.

The whole field of optimal control theory is about how to control complex structures that emerge from individual controls.

Edit to add: By the way, outside of the theoretical argument, I think it's a good idea to take a brief look at what kind of markets exist empirically. In all markets that actually exist, it is obvious that there are actors who are capable of changing the market price.

This holds for exchanges, where actors change the price by buying or selling. It also holds for more everyday markets where it's typically the seller who puts up a sticker price. For example, the people running a supermarket set the price for the items in the supermarket.

One last thought: My argument is basically that for every market, there is some function f whose outputs are the prices in the market, and that the only inputs of this function is the history of actions of market participants (the shape of the function depends on the structure of the market).

My argument then continues to say that since the market price is a function of only the actions of the market participants, there must be at least one market participant whose actions influence the price, otherwise the price could never change. This is a simple mathematical statement.

Your attempted counter-argument is that the function f could be very complicated, which is completely irrelevant to my argument.

<comment><USER9> > you acknowledge that it is the individual behaviors that are necessary for > the complex structures to exist.

 _Monopoly pricing_ and _price fixing_ are not any of the individual behaviors necessary to get a market price, and that's all I was arguing.

In the absence of monopolies and cartels, market prices will emerge from individual behaviors, without any one individual having the power to set the price.

> a competitive market is a meaningless phantasy that cannot possibly exist.

If competitive markets don't exist empirically, that's not a flaw in the theory of Classical economics, it is merely a symptom of corrupt culture and politics. It means we don't really have a free-market system---

What we have today is more akin to Mercantilism. And with income inequality increasing at an accelerating rate, our society will soon devolve back into Feudalism.

> Your attempted counter-argument...

My argument isn't with you. My argument is strictly anti-monopoly and pro- competition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hospitals by their very nature are anti-competitive. There is no way that you as a patient can shop around. You do not have the necessary knowledge to compare the treatments, evaluate the options and decide on what represents the best value.

<comment><USER12> that's generally not true. For most procedures done in hospitals there is nearly no reason why patients can't shop around. With basically the only exception being the ER, for true emergencies.

Moreover, even if NOT ALL patients shop around, say, even just 10%, there would be enough momentum going to put pressure on doctors to improve quality of care and decrease costs.

<comment><USER13> It is hard to shop around because prices are not transparent. It is very hard to find out in advance how much exactly will everything cost you. You can get some partial information (how much they charge for room), but they will not tell you in advance about all the tests you will have to pay. Then there are small item hospitals charge a lot for: band-aids for example. Unless you know a lot about healthcare system, you will not be able to guess all of them.

Plus, hospitals are not in habit of committing to agreed upon price in advance. So, even if you shop around the amount they will charge you still can be much different then the one you calculated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am pleased to see that all of the comments up to now deal with the "uncompetitive" aspect of the article and none with the "unequal" aspect. Indeed, it seems to me that "inequality" (the word appears 9 times in the article) was thrown in after the fact to decorate a piece about the adverse effects of monopoly, because post-Piketti it's stylish to talk about inequality. These aren't the same subject; the discussion of inequality is focused on person fortunes, not industrial domination. The former doesn't require the latter.

<comment><USER15> No more than dying requires getting shot in the face. But nonetheless getting shot in the face adds considerably to the likelihood of dying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Author has great points but too optimistic we're screwed, there's no fixing it as long as politicians are our only hope for change.</comment>


Why your digital games collection isn't yours to own - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/news/the-double-edge-of-digital-games-and-changing-ownership <comment><USER2> Support DRM-free purchases from places like [https://www.gog.com](https://www.gog.com) or [https://www.humblebundle.com](https://www.humblebundle.com) (when they're not doing a DRM sale) if this kind of thing bothers you. Exclusives are also something that should probably die. Portability of games shouldn't be a problem in 2017.

Edit: buying from the creator/studio directly is also often another option, but less convenient and reliable.

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't just games.

Apple has deleted paid music from my itunes account, despite it still being for sale, and refused to restore it when asked. They said the publisher removed that specific version of the album from the store (the new version has an identical track list) so their hands were tied, and to use the file backups I made of those files.

Microsoft threw away my e-book collection when they shuttered their first ebook store back in the day, with no (legal) ability to carry those books onto a new device, even if I copied the files.

So far the only long term reliable digital goods business I know has been amazon with the kindle, but I'm sure you can find horror stories there as well.

You don't buy this stuff, you rent it indefinitely.

<comment><USER4> > so [Apples] hands were tied, and to use the file backups I made of those > files.

Is it really a digitals stores duty to indefinitely offer re-downloads of material bought? Sounds like you should have taken better care of your own stuff.

When a seller sells you a digital asset that is not encumbered with copy protection, I find it quite fair that they don't see themselves as responsible for also being your backup solution til the end of time.

If they do, however, sell you an encumbered digital asset, which requires access to theirs or their 3rd party server in order to function, then yes, they do owe it to their customers to be available til the end of time.

<comment><USER5> Did you miss the part where Apple deleted the files?

<comment><USER6> Joeri said Apple deleted the files from his _account_ , which may or may not include the files on his hard drive.

<comment><USER7> Apple did not delete files from his hard drive.

<comment><USER3> Indeed they did not. But, they did break the (unspoken) promise that I could freely keep streaming and redownloading all my iTunes purchases from every machine. You can call it a courtesy service to provide that, and technically that's true, but that courtesy is a huge part of the convenience of iTunes, and definitely convinces people to "buy".

<comment><USER8> I think you just learned that unspoken promises are worth the paper they're printed on.

That said, the iTunes Store Terms and Conditions clearly state:

SERVICES AND CONTENT USAGE RULES

[...]

All Services:

[...]

\- It is your responsibility not to lose, destroy, or damage Content once downloaded. We encourage you to back up your Content regularly.

[...]

REDOWNLOADS

You may be able to redownload previously acquired Content ("Redownload") to your devices that are signed in with the same Apple ID ("Associated Devices"). You can see Content types available for Redownload in your Home Country at [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204632](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT204632). Content may not be available for Redownload if that Content is no longer offered on our Services.

So next time, I suggest you read the T&C before you buy something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This doesn't get said enough and is why we need better consumer protection laws, like the ones that the EU has implemented or seeks to.

Publishers can't have it both ways. The way gamers are treated has been embarrassingly bad for way too long now. With the sums of money in the videogame economy I'm annoyed this hasn't been solved yet.

Also, we gamers need to stop accepting the pathetic treatment we get. Use your wallets and vote.

<comment><USER10> The EU isn't a whole lot better on this particular issue at the moment.

But it's basically inevitable, as younger jurists and legislators take power. The idea that digital property is ephemeral is just a quirk of IP law which can be changed with the stroke of a pen. Digital property intuitively _is_ personal property, and they'll only be able to weasel their way around this fact with contract law and "licenses" for so long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is why emulators are important. Console makers should be compelled to release documentation of their hardware when they EOL one of their products so the community can make use of it.

<comment><USER12> I agree. I'm not sure that PS3 games will survive into the future because its unusual architecture makes porting difficult. The most popular games may eventually have custom code that makes them playable, but there is a vast collection of games on the ps3 that won't get that kind of attention. As a side note, the previous generations (ps2, gamecube) all have great emulators.

<comment><USER13> RPCS3 ([https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3](https://github.com/RPCS3/rpcs3) | [https://rpcs3.net/](https://rpcs3.net/)) has come a long way in the past year or so.

Only around 6.65% are actually playable start to finish, but the fact that over half over half the games (64.02%) on the platform can at least load the title screen is great progress for such a weird architecture.

I would be more worried about having the original Xbox emulated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Sony in the past has gone through periods of removing purchased games, at least on the PS3. I have not noticed it on the PS4, but on the PS3, I bought a Worms game many years back which later simply got removed from my account (I looked in history and downloads and could never download it again). I assume that's what will happen to all the games. The precedent is already set. What was I going to do? Sue Sony over the removal of a $20 game? They do whatever they want. "Piracy" is the only real solution when legal means are unavailable. You fuck me over, I fuck you over. That's pretty much where we're at with digital goods like this.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think this is pretty rare, but when it does happen it sticks out. For example: P.T. was pulled by Konami when they decided they hate video games and canceled Silent Hills. You can't download it anymore, even if it was already purchased. I remember people buying PS4s that had it installed.

Although DRM free options exist on PC, Steam is far and away the main marketplace with many games not being released outside of it, not even physical. Consoles of course have only one option on where to buy digital games. That said, I've rarely run into games removed from Steam... I actually can't think of one that was retroactively removed. You can even still buy games (keys) that are no longer sold on Steam and activate them, for example you can find unused copies of Prey for PC and unlock it on Steam even though they no longer sell it on the store.

<comment><USER16> >You can't download it anymore, even if it was already purchased.

PT was never for sale though so how you purchased it? It was a demo you could freely download for a period of time then it was gone after an ample warning period.

>I actually can't think of one that was retroactively removed.

Google to the rescue: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/12/30/steam- remov...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/12/30/steam-removes-game- order-of-war-challenge-from-user-libraries/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The scripts ( read: ads) on this article crashed my browser. My phones not new by any metric but still; I don't think its unreasonable to expect a page intent on serving text to load without issue.

</comment><comment> nommm-nommm I think of digital games like rentals so I'll only buy them if they are priced accordingly. That is, at a price point I'd pay for a rental and no more.</comment>


Trust No One: Kim Philby and the Hazards of Mistrust (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://gladwell.com/trust-no-one/ <comment><USER2> I enjoy Gladwell's writing style and annecdotes, but have become wary of actually believing any argument he makes with them. The more I know about a subject the less convincing and more cherry-picked the annecdotes seem to become.

I think his books are made the same way the evening TV news is:- an editorial narrative is decided upon, and then people are interviewed until someone says what the editor wants and that's the clip that gets used.

Buy his books, by all means, just be wary and do your own research :)

<comment><USER3> He spreads anti-information. I wonder if we would be better off without him.

I know sometimes lies-to-children are necessarily part of an education but sometimes they are just lies that get in the way of understanding.

So far as I can tell he deciphers what most people want to believe is true and then gives it to them.

Jared Diamond is in a very similar position.

<comment><USER4> Haha this seems like the start of a fun game. You see Gladwell and raise Diamond. I'll see your Diamond and raise Pinker.

Eventually we'll upset someone, who will then have to draw a reasonable line somewhere between Gladwell and their favored popular author.

<comment><USER3> Not at all, upset away!

I do think Pinker is of a higher calibre than Gladwell but ever since reading Dawkin's (in the God Delusion) vague idea of some eternal progress towards 'Progress' (which he called the Zeitgeist) I haven't seen much substantiating why outbreaks of violence should decline asymptotically. A handful of modern bombs would disturb that nice little chart. Seems like cycles are more likely, perhaps contingent on solar cycles. If we don't understand why we go to war (I find most explanations too high level and utterly unconvincing) we should not predict peace. Things can and do turn on a dime.

<comment><USER5> _If we don 't understand why we go to war (I find most explanations too high level and utterly unconvincing)_

Fear, greed, or ideology. Those were the three reasons the Greeks came up with.

<comment><USER4> Fear and ideology are usually smokescreens for that other reason, at least on the aggressor's side.

<comment><USER6> Well, you can break "why does a country go to war" into two separate questions: first, why has war been declared? And second, why do the soldiers enlist and willingly go?

You can probably put together a decent argument saying "The second War in Iraq was because of oil", but I haven't heard any stories of soldiers who signed up and came out of their deployment with the rights to an oil well. If you want to have a discussion about the motivations for war, it seems foolish to ignore the motivations of the boots on the ground that are actually making shit happen out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My favorite part was the story about wine at the end, which had little or nothing to do with the rest of the piece.

> [Regarding] a don at Trinity College in the mid-nineteenth century:

> In 1848 he published a thesis entitled Horae Apocalypticae, purporting to > prove beyond doubt that the world would come to an end in 1868 because the > Euphrates would have dried up the previous year. Harmless enough, you would > think. But since he was a man of dominating though eccentric personality he > succeeded in persuading the wine committee of Trinity that it would be > pointless to lay down any 1853 port because it would not be fit to drink > before Judgment Day. As 1853 proved to be one of the best vintages of the > century and as Trinity was the only college without any, his name was not > remembered with overmuch affection.

It reminded me of an old Jewish saying, "If you are planting a tree and you hear that Messiah has come, finish planting the tree, then go and inquire."

<comment><USER8> Can you explain that old Jewish saying a little bit? It sounds quite though provoking. TIA.

<comment><USER9> If you are catching a Pokemon and you hear that Halo 3 has been confirmed, finish catching the Pokemon, then go and inquire.

<comment><USER10> Halo 3 was released almost 10 years ago. Now, I'm pretty sure you meant Half- Life 3, I just wanted to be an ass Even then the saying doesn't fit because the Jewish Messiah is far more likely than Half-Life 3.

<comment><USER9> Oops! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm so happy to see the a good deal of skepticism of Gladwell here. What a change from ~10 years ago when he was near-universally lauded.

Gladwell is an amazinglh eloquent and convincing writer. I only wish I had his talents there. But oh how I wish he were more intellectually honest with his subject matter.

Do others have examples of writers with similar prowess of the pen, but greater merit in seeking truth? Always on the hunt for more good thinkers to read and all the better when their writing is entertaining and of admirable skill to boot.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Hester Harriet Marsden-Smedley" Wow. Just wow. And apparently it isn't never lupus.

Gladwell has a knack for making me want to know more about his topics. Not by reading Gladwell, of course; that would be pointless.

He makes the assertion in this article that intelligence services in general, and British intelligence in the early decades of the cold war specifically, are useless. Based on a few examples, he thinks that having MI5 and 6 riddled with spies had no consequences---either the intelligence wasn't believed or it was, it was acted on, and people died, but that didn't change the outcome. Further, he says the later, paranoid period was bad, although other than a couple quotes from politicians, he gives no evidence.

And yet, the period between 1945 and 1965 was the high point of the Soviet Union. Taking over neighbors. Stealing secrets. Influence. Striking terror in the hearts of free world politicos. And then, after the golden age of Philby, not so much, realistically.

<comment><USER13> Back in Russia, we considered our golden age to be 1966 to 1982. Soviet spy stories of this time are no less dramatic.

<comment><USER14> That's a very debatable assertion, comrade. If true, the 70s-80s period would've not commonly referred to as The Stagnation Period. Plenty of spy activity, granted, but calling it a golden era is an overstatement.

<comment><USER5> Lack of purges, lack of famine, lack of war, maybe could find something better than a Khrushchyovka.......the struggle continued, but there was less struggling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> See also [http://www.lrb.co.uk/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times- they-...](http://www.lrb.co.uk/v10/n16/paul-foot/the-great-times-they-could- have-had) on Wallis Simpson and spying for Fascism. Anthony Blunt is mentioned in both articles.

</comment><comment><USER16> C-Span Booknotes interview with Anthony Cave Brown, author of "Treason in the blood"[1] starts off with an recap of his father's life and so far (8 mins in) it has been pretty interesting.

[1]: [https://youtu.be/ShwR-TsnW0U](https://youtu.be/ShwR-TsnW0U)

</comment><comment><USER17> Another Gladwell special, devoid of real substance.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not trusting Gladwell</comment>


Netflix on Linux with Chrome - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/104912707432334684242/posts/1gnbmo63xVa

<comment><USER2> In other news, bittorrent continues to work on all platforms, without placing any restrictions on what viewers can do.

<comment><USER3> Including participating in massive copyright infringement.

I struggle with the sentiment that if offered no other way to legally consume media, BitTorrent will show them! I can't find "The Money Pit" anywhere but BT. Does that make it ok to download?

I don't know. Morally, legally, etc., I've never been quite so torn for quite so long.

<comment><USER4> I think OP's point was that DRM pushes people to pirate content, regardless of whether this is morally acceptable or not.

<comment><USER5> I think his point is rather that DRM asks more from the user (a specific browser, a specific plugin, a specific string to enter in a box) for essentially the same experience.

Oh and you can do less things with a DRM'd media than with a non-DRM'd. Even though you technically have the same rights.

<comment><USER6> _Oh and you can do less things with a DRM 'd media than with a non-DRM'd. Even though you technically have the same rights._

None of the big streaming-services supports the HW I have in my home-stereo rig. All of them supports H264 video and HDMI.

Not offering me H264 content uncrippled is leaving me, as a potential customer, no reason to sign up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Firefox + pipelight + UA switcher has been working flawlessly* for me for the last six months or so.

It doesn't work on chrome anymore unfortunately after the update where they disabled NPAPI plugins.

Native support still can't come soon enough.

</comment><comment><USER8> i don't think the explanation as to why this works is correct. the poster says it's because Google and Microsoft "have been working closely with Netflix to get the needed DRM code required for HTML5 streaming", yet:

1\. the user-agent switch involves adding a Safari identifier (rather than IE or a new Chrome one)

2\. at WWDC 2014, Apple announced that _it_ had been working closely with Netflix along those lines, and that the upcoming version of Safari would be able to play Netflix without Silverlight. (And indeed Safari on Yosemite can do just that in the developer previews)

<comment><USER9> What they mean is that the "Digital Restriction Management in HTML5" proposal is pushed by Google, Microsoft, and Netflix into the W3C spec. Apple has simply followed the proposal and implemented it as well. AFAIK Chrome, IE, Safari ship with it. Firefox will follow suite by adding a Restriction Module from Adobe (given Adobe's track record it will certainly be an amazingly fast, flexible, beautiful, efficient, and nice way of viewing videos...).

So Web-Restrictions is kinda unstoppable now. Instead of having a plugin-free future with HTML5 we have an even worse situation.

<comment><USER10> "No DRM" was never an option. The option was between 1 DRM standard and 50 (so silverlight and widevine and....).

The W3C made the most pragmatic choice, here. I think DRM is still crap, but one system is unambiguously better than >1.

<comment><USER11> Except Flash was at least used for stuff other than just DRM, so there was an incentive to get it working across all OSes. Linux is going to struggle once this is adopted, at least open browsers will, and that makes me sad

<comment><USER12> The openness of the browser has nothing to do with it, the browser provides an interface to the DRM mechanism which could be open or closed source. Open source browsers like firefox already support proprietary plugins such as Flash.

If anything this makes Linux support easier, because you no longer have to provide support for an entire virtual machine and all APIs such as Flash or Silverlight. The only software required will be the DRM module itself as everything else can be provided by the browser.

<comment><USER9> The DRM mechanism can't really be open source. You could simply change it to write the unencrypted video data to the disk if it were.

A plugin DRM module will also have to do all of the video rendering and displaying. Because if it just hands the unencrypted stream back to the browser then you could change the browser to simply write it to disk.

The relevant DRM mechanisms will come from Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Adobe. Both Apple and Microsoft have no interest in supporting GNU/Linux. You won't get their DRM on GNU/Linux no matter how simple it is. Google seems to ship their DRM now on the GNU/Linux version of Chrome. But I don't know if the license allows using it in other browsers. Which would be hindered by the fact that Google uses their own unspecified PAPPI. Adobe wants to provide a DRM module for Firefox EME mechanism. But we all know from enough bad experience how well Adobe does GNU/Linux support. Flash on GNU/Linux was even worse than on any other system until they simply stopped it. They recently even stopped distributing Acrobat Reader for GNU/Linux. So yeah, great hope there. Even if they compile the module for GNU/Linux because Mozilla asks them to then we can expect the typical Adobe software safety and quality... Remember HTML5 was supposed to rid the world of Flash, Silverlight, and such things. Not force those binary blobs into the spec.

<comment><USER12> Having an EME spec allows for competition in the DRM market, it creates a business opportunity for a company (or potentially a solo dev) to develop a cross platform solution.

EME means you rely less on Adobe code than you did previously as they are no longer shipping an entire runtime, just the content protection module.

<comment><USER9> You are completely wrong here. Please note that the EME proposal does _not_ specify a plugin interface for the Restriction module! It only specifies how the Restriction module is exposed to JavaScript. How the Restriction module is implemented or connected to the browser is up to the browser developer. Both Google and Microsoft are involved in the creation of the spec and Apple is also supporting it. All three companies make up a large share of the web browser market. And all three companies have their existing DRM solutions which they are using for their EME implementation. None of them have announced a plugin interface to allow other companies to provide a DRM module.

The only browser vendor who wants to implement EME via a plugin is Mozilla. Simply because there can't be a free software Restriction module implementation (and consequently due to the W3C's efforts there defacto can't be a fully free software web implementation). And Mozilla already made a deal with Adobe to provide the Restriction module.

So no, there won't be a market. It will actually close down the market. Content providers will have to support those four DRM solutions if they want to offer their content on all those platforms. They won't have any choice.

<comment><USER12> That browser vendors will bundle their own solutions doesn't really close down the market and I don't understand how it would necessarily hurt cross platform adoption?

<comment><USER9> Of course it closes down the market. There won't even be a market. There is not going to be a plugin interface (except for Firefox) to provide a different Restriction module.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you use Ubuntu 14.04 (like me) you have to install a newer version of libnss3 (at least 3.16.2) and than it works.

Runs smoother than pipelight + firefox at least for me.

<comment><USER14> Full instructions for reference. Run:

      wget http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/n/nss/libnss3{_3.16.3-1ubuntu1_amd64,-1d_3.16.3-1ubuntu1_amd64,-nssdb_3.16.3-1ubuntu1_all}.deb
      sudo dpkg -i libnss3*.deb

Create a new Tampermonkey script:

      // ==UserScript==
      // @name         Netflix HTML5 for Linux
      // @namespace    0d0a3443-cc79-4f86-bf62-2dac581d2b3a
      // @version      0.1
      // @description  Enables HTML5 video support for the Linux host platform
      // @match        *://www.netflix.com/WiPlayer?*
      // @user-agent   Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.68 Safari/537.36
      // ==/UserScript==

<comment><USER15> I tried this, but I just get prompted to install the silverlight plugin. I am using Lubuntu 14.04.

<comment><USER16> In your account settings, try turning on the HTML5 Player. Its opt-in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> CentOS-6.5 and later with Pipelight and Firefox 24.7.0 ESR works flawlessly. God knows what it's installing and what security holes I opened up by downloading it though.

Looking forward to any native solutions.

</comment><comment><USER18> I can confirm this works on Chrome on OpenSuSE 13.1:

        Version 37.0.2062.68 beta (64-bit)

</comment><comment><USER19> Really, it's more like accidently supported on Linux.

<comment><USER20> But I thought that Netflix required Silverlight on the client to work. What is this using then?

<comment><USER21> The HTML5 encrypted media extensions. Chrome has support for that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Doesn't work for me. Error Code: M7063-1913

lsb_release -d: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS

uname -a: Linux x230 3.13.0-32-generic #57-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jul 15 03:51:08 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

chrome://version: 38.0.2114.2 (Official Build 287444) dev

</comment><comment><USER23> Does this work with only Chrome and not Chromium?

<comment><USER24> Chromium is open source doesn't ship with the proprietary, closed bits of Chrome, like the EME DRM module which is used here. So this is Chrome-only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If anyone gets it working, my start-up is doing some interesting things with Netfix: turboflix.com

<comment><USER26> Your website seems confusing a few ways:

* You only list TV shows in the examples, despite the service offering both movies and shows

* I actually do have all of those shows (or at least most) on my Netflix. Although I see on your Facebook page that the service is perhaps targeted to people in other countries.)

* I am wondering if what your service offers will be legal, especially if you are charging for it (my best guess is that it is some kind of proxy that lets you access international Netflixes, perhaps a little more convenient than existing Chrome extensions in that it might list movies allowed in different countries together.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fantastic.

What do you use to watch movies and series on-demand ?

Why, a web browser !

</comment><comment><USER27> It works perfectly on v37 on my Mac OSX machine (running Mavericks)

</comment><comment><USER28> Anyone tried it on a Raspberry Pi?

<comment><USER29> google-chrome not supported on arm

<comment><USER30> Say what? The majority of Android devices have ARM processors, and Chrome is available for Android:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.ch...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.chrome&hl=en)</comment></comment></comment>


Go accepts patches from GitHub pull requests now - vhost- https://github.com/golang/go/issues/18517#issuecomment-365099814 <comment><AUTHOR> To summarize:

We now mirror GitHub PRs into Gerrit. Gerrit is still our upstream Git server. Gerrit is still where we do reviews and press the "Merge" button. (And once merged, it gets mirrored back to GitHub)

But now we have a bot that slurps PRs into Gerrit and syncs comments back and forth and closes PRs when needed. (We'll do more fine-grained comment sync in the future. We just shipped an "MVP" for the Go 1.11 tree opening).

Some more information is at [https://golang.org/wiki/GerritBot](https://golang.org/wiki/GerritBot)

Code is at [https://github.com/golang/build/blob/master/cmd/gerritbot/ge...](https://github.com/golang/build/blob/master/cmd/gerritbot/gerritbot.go)

<comment><USER2> This is smart, decreasing the hurdles to contributions will inevitably result in more contributions. Economics 101. And I don't think it necessarily follows that they will be lower quality either, maybe for first time contributors, but we all start at the same place and have to learn. More first time contributors will also lead to more repeat contributors.

<comment><USER3> Any time I come across a project that uses Gerrit I immediately abandon any proposed patches I had planned to submit. Gerrit is terrible for actually working with and is unfriendly even to experienced git users. I have to battle with Gerrit to submit patches to MediaWiki and it is a painful process every time.

Clarifying that I believe that my personal off work time is valuable to myself. The more time and friction I have to spend putting in a pull request/code review is the less time I get to myself.

<comment><USER4> I don't understand your point of view at all. Gerrit has such a good work flow and ui. It's probably in the top 5 best tools I have ever used. Github's pull request model is like a child's toy in comparison.

<comment><USER5> Serious question, what are other best ones?

<comment><USER6> I like [https://reviewable.io](https://reviewable.io), low friction github integration but gerrit-like multi-patchsets and generally a sane flow when you have multiple rounds of comments

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is an excellent change. While Gerrit is undoubtedly more powerful than GitHub's PR, GitHub is easy and familiar. I've found a fair number of small fixes and changes I've wanted to make to Gerrit projects but just abandoned due to not being inline with my current workflow. Now, I'll submit a PR and figure out the rest later. Hopefully, code review still being through Gerrit doesn't mean more stale PRs to deal with though. I guess time will tell...

</comment><comment><USER8> It seems odd to me that Golang treats Github as a first class citizen for package management, yet a second class citizen for core contributions.

I'm really only a dabbler in Golang, so would appreciate any context.

For instance I was affected by the recent go-bindata owner change[1]. The Github user deleted their account and some random user reregistered the original user's name and recreated the repo (albeit seemingly innocently to help everyone get their CIs running again).

Actually while we're on the subject, Golang's whole package management experience is surprisingly disappointing :/

[1][https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/7vv9zz/popular_lib_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/7vv9zz/popular_lib_gobindata_removed_from_github_or_why/)

<comment><USER9> Go does not treat Github any differently than any other VCS provider when it comes to package management.

OG gophers vendor their deps into their repo and avoid creating dependencies on 3rd party code whenever possible. The Go stdlib is very full featured so it is not unrealistic.

The problem with the go-bindata could be avoided by always vendoring/forking your deps and never trust any VCS provider (e.g. GitHub, Bitbucket, source forge) to handle your critical dependency needs.

<comment><USER10> Go _does have_ special handling for Github: [https://github.com/golang/go/blob/816154b06553a4cf8ee7ad089f...](https://github.com/golang/go/blob/816154b06553a4cf8ee7ad089f5e444b37bed43d/src/cmd/go/internal/get/vcs.go#L953-L961).

<comment><USER11> Except that that link also shows special handling for 5 other VCS hosts, and you can have your own website given the same special handling by putting meta tags in the html. Github is not given special handling that no other VCS host is allowed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm still putting off contributions because the CLA signing mechanism asked me for my phone number.

</comment><comment><USER13> Slightly off topic, but would anyone have a similar solution/experience to sync between GitHub and Gitlab? (community version, not EE, since this is for a Free Software project)

<comment><USER14> Mirroring is an Enterprise Edition feature but there are probably ways to hack around that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great to see the high-friction barriers falling. The move to Github for issues has been a massive improvement.

Hopefully they can do something about getting rid of Google groups now. It's an extraordinarily poor organ of record. The low-friction Github issue tracker is full to bursting with high-ranking results for things that amount to support requests, but the pat response is a slightly-too-curt "ask this on golang-nuts, closed, kthxbye", and that's where the trail ends.

<comment><USER15> [https://github.com/golang/go/issues/23745](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/23745)</comment></comment>


The Erlang Runtime System - <AUTHOR> https://happi.github.io/theBeamBook/ <comment><USER3> The thing that gets me about Erlang and Elixir is that it has transparent and simple to use microservices out of the box. These services are machine transparent, can be called locally and remotely, provide bounded contexts within your application, are robust and supervised against crashes, are simpler to deploy and far far simpler to develop, can be discovered using a variety of solutions or your own code. They also don't require hundreds of containers interacting to work locally. I would go so far as to suggest that you shouldn't build a microservices system without looking at the huge time, cost and complexity savings that Elixir or Erlang will give you.

<comment><USER4> If it's feasible to write (most) all of your app backend in Elixir, then I think it's a pretty great option. I feel like language context switches tend to be very expensive and error prone for developers, plus the increased hiring and on-boarding cost associated.

I think the core advantages of micro-services are:

1\. Polyglot applications. There often is _some_ library in a language for a use case, but there is also often _the_ library in a specific language - <USER2> one that has a far larger community around it, very active development, considerable battle testing, a wealth of examples and guides and support available online. If you use this library in this language, you just kind of _know_ it will work as best and easily as possible. The trail is well trodden. You now have a new problem of API contracts and versioning and such, but pretty much every language can at least HTTP and JSON reasonably at this point, so it's fairly tractable.

2\. You already _have_ code written in another language that pretty much works, either because of (1) or for historic reasons. If you go all-Elixir, you're going to need to re-write that hairy-ass black-box of a Go service that interfaces with Chinese SMS delivery. But it pretty much works, and if you can just chat with that over HTTP you can keep going. However, you probably want something to turn that thing back on every week-or-two when it inevitably eats it for whatever reason, and K8S gives you a _really_ nice interface for this.

In general, I think - and this was an opinion I read on this forum at some point - that when building from scratch it's best to build a mono-service and then break small things off from that as the need arises, and Elixir would probably be at the top of my current list.

However, if you can run that mono-service in a micro-service environment - Kubernetes and containers - then you're well prepared for breaking pieces off or rolling new isolated components using the "right tool for the job".

I know there are difficulties around BEAM and K8S with both kind-of trying to do a lot of the same things, and that's something to definitely be aware of... people that have worked with it seem divided on where it falls between terrible and not really that bad of an idea (if you're paying attention and have some idea what you're doing).

<comment><USER5> That's exactly the problem I have with elixir, or akka for that matter. It's definitely a very convenient abstraction for building microservices and distributed systems, but at the same time it's a heavy language lock-in you're getting yourself into, the moment you start your project.

And especially now, when there are the de facto standard libraries to do various tasks (like TF in Python) I think language lock-in can be a terrible idea.

<comment><USER6> I don't think it's heavy language lock in at all.

If I need to do something in Python, I have options like pyrlang[0] and rabbitmq[1].

In fact, parsing in Elixir is not nearly as mature as what is provided in Python. I need to parse emails. Python has `email.parser` which is perfect for my use case. I can easily use Pyrlang to do this. But Elixir is still much better at being an email client (or many email clients). The end result is an email client in Elixir that uses Python to parse the emails.

When I started with Elixir, my goal was to use it as much as possible, but delegate as soon as the task is better handled in another language.

[0]:[https://github.com/esl/Pyrlang](https://github.com/esl/Pyrlang) [1]:[https://www.rabbitmq.com/](https://www.rabbitmq.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The more I learn about erlang, elixir, and all the pieces that make them tick, the more fascinating and appealing it all seems. It's also arguably my first deeper dive into a compiler and all the ways you can get it to go the extra mile. It's pretty amazing stuff the technology that goes into a modern compiler.

</comment><comment><USER8> You can download a PDF version from here: [https://github.com/happi/theBeamBook/releases](https://github.com/happi/theBeamBook/releases)

</comment><comment><USER9> Erlang is awesome! This book as well. Learned a ton about ERTS. Must read for everyone who works in erlang.

</comment><comment><USER10> Due to its crash tolerant nature the Erlang runtime system always seemed a little odd. I like this introduction though. I don't write much Erlang, but I have to run a lot of it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for this, the last time I read a straightforward language tutorial in this spirt was "A Gentle introduction to Haskell" around 2004-2005.

</comment><comment><USER12> dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16952311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16952311)

<comment><USER13> Submissions without discussion aren't duplicates.

<comment><USER14> Especially not on a forum where new posts don't bump the topic. Commenting on that 7-day-old topic means your post goes unread indefinitely. Which is about as fulfilling as typing your comments into your diary.</comment></comment></comment>