The Highest-Paid CEOs Are The Worst Performers, New Study Says - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2014/06/16/the-highest-paid-ceos-are-the-worst-performers-new-study-says/ <comment><USER3> This may be a correlation-vs-causation effect. It's possible that companies that are in poor markets and likely to do poorly in the next few years _have to pay more_ to attract qualified CEO candidates, because good executives realize the shit the company is in and don't want to take the risk of a failure on their resume without being compensated significantly for it.

This would also explain why the negative correlation is strongest at the extreme high ends of the pay scale - these are the companies that are in the worst shape - and why these CEOs relied heavily on acquisitions, because they had no talent or useful products in the organization itself. It also fits with Warren Buffett's observation that "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."

One way to confirm or deny this hypothesis would be to look at companies that previously were high-performing, and then see what the correlation between CEO pay and the change in market performance is within that group.

<comment><USER4> I'd argue it's not.

People that are paid most to do a job that isn't repetitive manual labor have worst performance scores, time and time again.

So unless CEOs are paid to manually bolt things or throws ball into a hoop, they probably aren't doing well because, in part, they are given money. Money introduces fear (i.e. fear that you won't make enough money or lose your position with lots of money) and that leads to tunnel vision.

People give more performance if you give them more autonomy, mastery and purpose.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc)

<comment><USER5> I would argue the opposite with so much money on at your finger tips you are more prone to bad decisions because you are not invested enough in the outcome.

You ear more in a year than you can spend in a life time what are the chances of you looking a every deal very attentively?

You do the absolute minimum to maintain your position but you're not driven enough to put more effort into it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ok, so I do believe that CEO's are usually overpaid with regard to their performance. That being said, I am not convinced by the methodology used in the study, specifically the period used for measuring the performance: 3 years. It sounds like a lot of time, but actually, I would expect a truly great CEO to undertake projects with a 5 years or more horizon. There's this great interview of Bezos discussing the point of focusing on quarterly results vs long term. So an alternative explanation for the findings could be: the highest paid CEOs invest in 5-10 years projects, so their results after 3 years are below average.

Again, I repeat that even before reading the study, I intuitively agreed with their conclusion, but I'm not so sure about their argument to prove it

<comment><USER7> Looking at the first 3 years seems almost doomed to failure. It seems to me that it's pretty likely that a new CEO is going to be taking a company in a direction at least slightly different.

That means cutting out some projects may have been just about to pay off, while at the same time embarking on new ventures that won't bear fruit for some time.

One might interpret these results to say, "the highest-paid CEOs are engaging in the most expensive change for their firms". It's only natural that significant change is both forgoing some income that would have been realized soon, and creating risks for what's in the short-to-medium term while they look to the horizon.

This is all to be expected, and doesn't necessarily say anything about the amount of value they create in the long term.

<comment><USER8> Stock prices are based on the market's view of the future. You don't evaluate a CEO like a middle manager. If he cuts some critical program for strategic reasoning, the market will either punish him or reward him based on the future outlook.

<comment><USER9> Stock prices are animal herd logic, not science. See e.g.

[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=670404](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=670404)

If you believe that business should have long-term horizons and not simply be a machine for organising the maximum possible quarterly profit, stock markets in their current form are one of the least efficient ways to organise labor and capital.

Inflated CEO pay is only one symptom of this.

<comment><USER7> _Stock prices are animal herd logic, not science_

That's not how I understand your link. The study suggests to me that analyst recommendations are unreliable predictors of short-term gain. And it certainly does not show that changes in a company's overall market capitalization are based on a herd mentality.

Note that it says that those rebalancing according to advisors achieved higher terminal wealth, but lower risk-adjusted return. Most importantly, they _did_ do better in the end. But adjusted for risk, it's worse. This suggests to me that the analysts usually do pretty well, but when they flub it, it's a doozy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think this is the most interesting excerpt from the study:

"The level of incentive compensation is significantly negatively related to the forward ROA, while the level of cash compensation is positively related to the level of ROA.

Overall, we conclude that our results seem most consistent with the hypothesis that overconfident CEOs accept large amounts of incentive pay and consequently engage in value destroying activities that translate into future reductions in returns and firm performance. "

<comment><USER11> I wonder about that "overconfident" label, and it might be possible to tease various effects out of the data.

Consider two possibilities:

1) CEOs with large incentive pay are irrationally confident in the success of risky policies

2) CEOs with large incentive pay are behaving like economically rational agents... betting someone else's money.

That is, incentive pay is more like a free pass to a casino where your losses are made good but you keep some fraction of your winnings. Under those circumstances taking large risks may be the most rational thing to do, IF the cash component of the CEO's compensation is sufficient to keep them in caviar and summer homes while they gamble the firm's money away.

<comment><USER12> Your second possibility covers not only executives who partake in high-risk gambles but also executives who deliberately bankrupt their company for personal profit. A canny executive doesn't rob the firm by dipping his fingers in the till but by, for instance, loading the firm with gold-plated rubbish and extracting a personal profit in the form of compensation, stock-options etc, before the sheen wears off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm skeptical because it sounds like this effect should be tradeable, unless they're using some measure of shareholder returns which doesn't imply that you could short-sell high-paid-CEO equities and buy median-paid-CEO equities and get an excess return. In other words, it sounds like this study is postulating an _exploitably_ inefficient market, unless this kind of data only recently became available. [http://lesswrong.com/lw/yv/markets_are_antiinductive/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/yv/markets_are_antiinductive/)

To be clear, I'm very willing to believe that the companies with the highest- paid CEOs have generally poor governance and will antiperform on some appropriate metric, like price-to-book. But that metric shouldn't be equity price changes because CEO pay is public info, people are already speculating about it as a negative sign, and the market should already be taking that into account and pricing such shares lower (meaning that the returns cost less, hence such stocks should return the market rate, albeit perhaps with greater volatility).

<comment><USER14> It doesn't matter that the effect is tradable. What matters is that there is no possible arbitrage i.e. a way to make money with a 100% probability. For example, would you enter a bet in which you have a 50% chance of loosing $1000 and a 50% chance of making $1001 if you can enter it only once a year?

There are many many observable patterns that contradict the efficient market hypothesis amongst which:

\- historical option volatility is lower than implied vol - you can make money by writing options.

\- sell in may and go away strategy - you can make money (and beat the index) by being long the SP500 only between october-may

\- strong contango in the VIX futures market - you can make money by shorting a volatility ETN like VXX that rolls near-maturation future contracts.

\- mean-reversion on the second day after an earnings release - you can make money by going short if the stock price rises after the earnings call or vice- versa

In the end, what matters is how much risk (volatility, max drawdown...) you're willing to take for superior returns. That is often summarized by the information ratio of your strategy which is equal to (return of your strat - return of the bechmark)/vol(difference in returns).

<comment><USER15> Yes, if this was a very high volatility bet with a low payout that can't be easily repeated it might not be arbitraged away efficiently.

But this should let you make predictions about literally every single company in the world if it's true. You can take it thousands of times, not once per year. So I don't think the situation you're positing applies here.

If CEO salary was a signal as to equity performance, you could make a "CEO salary weighted S&P index" that should outperform the S&P consistently. Which we don't observe. Therefore it probably isn't a signal. Or if it is a signal, it's very weak.

<comment><USER14> In short, you're saying that by diversifying your holdings across thousands of companies, you can statistically arbitrage the signal but it is not true.

You could make predictions for every company in the world but you'd need both the signal to be right most of time, over any time period, be uncorrelated across companies and have an excess return collectable over a period short enough. If any of these conditions are not met, you will not be able to statistically arbitrage it. Take options for example, writing them (selling them) is a strategy you can backtest and it has positive return on average. You can write options on thousand of stocks, every week. But because volatility - on which the option price depends - is correlated across stocks, this strategy will incur a large loss on a financial crisis. Your diversification will not matter.

Also, you say that we don't observe the signal but you can't know, maybe we do. There are tons of simpler signals - some of which I cited above - that we still observe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm really curious about the relationship of CEO compensation and employee satisfaction/morale in companies. I have lost count of the number of times I've heard about a CEO, COO or CFO getting 8 figure salaries while the rank and file employees had to forego their bonuses in a touch year. I cannot begin to imagine how devastating that knowledge is to employee morale.

<comment><USER17> The best I remember is that a Danish bank (I think it was "Nordea" or "Danske Bank", but I'm not sure and my search-karma seems to have gone for the day) had a CEO who got a huge bonus for meeting his goals in making a profit back in 2009 or 2010.

The way he did that, though, was to fire 30% of the staff (and branches) and living off the profit from the hard work those 30% did the previous years - the next years they had bigger and bigger deficits, because they couldn't keep living off previous years loans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is it possible that what we're seeing here is a reversion to the mean[1] - CEOs who do particularly well some years get large pay packages, and then when their performance reverts to the mean in subsequent years they end up overpaid relative to performance?

[1] Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

<comment><USER19> You beat me to it. Another way to state it would be that having a richly-paid CEO is a lagging indicator; or the companies with the resources to have a trophy CEO are likely already topped out and running up against the law of large numbers. Imagine being Tim Cook, CEO of Apple: he ought to expect high pay for such a prestigious job (I haven't looked it up), but continuing to grow the stock price at past rates would be next to impossible.

<comment><USER20> Yes, but they are not comparing future performance to past performance, but rather to that of similar firms.

<comment><USER19> I'm sure they ruled out the more obvious confounding variables. All else being equal, you would expect a result like they got, based on the null hypothesis that expensive CEOs are at least average among CEOs, combined with the suspicion that their hiring is not a random event. Factor in that the researchers were undoubtedly biased in favor of the outcome they found, and a lot of skepticism is justified in making sense of this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't see how it can simultaneously be the case that:

      Though Cooper concedes that there could be exceptions at
      specific companies (the study didn't measure individual
      firms)

and

      How could this be? In a word, overconfidence. CEOs who get
      paid huge amounts tend to think less critically about their
      decisions. "They ignore dis-confirming information and just
      think that they're right," says Cooper.

If he didn't look at individual people, how can he speak to the psychology of the effect? Are we suggesting that overconfidence shows up statistically as differentiated from other poor performance? What is the statistical proxy being used here?

</comment><comment><USER22> Interestingly, Peter Thiel wrote that Startup success is correlated with CEO pay (or the lack there-of)

[http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/08/peter-thiel-best- predictor-...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/08/peter-thiel-best-predictor-of- startup-success-is-low-ceo-pay/)

<comment><USER23> Thiel's idea is fine if you're a kid eating ramen and living with your parents, but it is completely wrong for people who already have experience, and/or have families to support. I actually lost an investment because the investor thought I should not pay myself _at all_ while trying to build the business.

<comment><USER22> You're a founder, so none of this should be shocking, early stage startups are cash strapped, and cash-in-the-bank is the 2nd most valuable commodity a company has, after it's people. In fact, the #1 reasons startup's will fail, will because they run out of money.

Thus, a CEO who doesn't treat their cash as the valuable resource it is, is just putting an unnecessary burden on their company.

Peter Thiel isn't advocating paying yourself nothing. His point (and data[1] backs this up), that CEO's making a high salary is a pretty good indicator of Startup that will fail.

If you need a high salary, then being a Founder/CEO probably isn't the right move. You're putting a burden on the company because of your life style choices.

Conversely, if you don't pay yourself anything, you're going to spend too much time dealing with the pain of not making ends meet, instead spending your energy growing your company.

[1] [http://blog.startupcompass.co/73-percent-of-startup- founders...](http://blog.startupcompass.co/73-percent-of-startup-founders- make-50-dollars-000-per-year-or-less)

<comment><USER24> Your making assumptions that don't hold up. If you have 1+M in the bank then paying yourself nothing is not a major issue. If your company just got 5+M in funding paying yourself 200k/year is not going to make much difference.

Often paying yourself nothing makes things look better than they are which can be a bad thing. A slightly profitable 3 person company that pays it's founders nothing is not actually profitable.

In the end what you make as CEO is often more important from a signaling standpoint than a survival one. Investors often have the mindset where they don't invest in companies where the CEO makes more than X or less than Y.

<comment><USER3> It's not the money so much as the signalling effect to potential investors. You presumably have the best knowledge about your own ability to profitably employ capital. If you take out a lot of money to pay yourself, that implies that you believe that the business's current cash is worth more to you as personal income than it is in business equity. What does that say to people who hold _only_ equity and are supplying the cash?

If I had investors and free business cash flow, I'd pay myself only enough to break-even on personal expenses. The reason is that I'd also own equity in the business, and any money invested in the business could presumably earn a bigger return than if I took that money out of the business and invested it elsewhere. If that assumption doesn't hold, I have no business being an entrepreneur, because it is more economically rational for me to take a fat- paying job at Google or in finance, and then stick my excess savings into index funds.

<comment><USER25> Founders don't know how to employ capital profitably because for any individual startup the best course of action is to return the funds to the shareholder because it's a virtually assured failure.

However, in aggregate the serious performers outweigh the losses from the 99% failure rate.

So given that I am about to give 5 years of my time to something that is most likely a failure I'd like some compensation for my time, just like every VC takes 2% to flush the LPs money down the toilet, and 20% when they return.

<comment><USER3> Think of how terrible that sounds from an investor's perspective. "I don't know how to employ capital profitably because my best course of action is to return my funds to you because my startup is a virtually assured failure." Would _you_ invest in a startup that just told you that?

If you're going to bother founding a startup, you should have some reason to believe that you are in the 1% that is going to be a success. You might be wrong in that belief, and that's why startup success continues to be fairly rare, but if you don't even have a reason to believe that much you might as well pack up the startup, get a good-paying job, and invest the money you earn.

<comment><USER25> Being honest and forthright goes a lot further than you think. Startups have risk, outline the risk, and ask for what you want.

You don't need the thousands of investors who want you to work for free, you need one who believes in the business enough to think the CEO is worth being paid. If the CEO isn't worth being paid the startup isn't worth investing in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I haven't read the paper, just the article. It's possible some of these are directly addressed, but I would want to know more before any credibility is given to the conclusions.

Some alternative explanations:

\- The 'lowest paid CEOs', per their definition, are typically the ones who have the most skin in the game. When you have many CEOs out there with only $1 compensation, and just stock (and not stock grants as the author mention), they will inevitably be on the bottom. Think Zuckerberg, Google, Apple w/ Jobs, etc. One would expect this highly underpaid group to outperform.

\- The highest paid CEOs are often times the ones dealing with the most troubled companies. If you were a shareholder of Kodak in 2000 and saw that digital cameras were coming, would you want to pay for the best CEO possible to ensure you could harvest the most out of the company? Kodak would still underperform the market, but maybe they would have underperformed the market more with inferior management.

\- This is a little technical, but with an experienced manager pulling in big dollars, it's more likely that this is a well established company and manager that are well understood by the market. This means that the risk premium demanded by investors would be smaller resulting in a higher stock price. This means that the stock has less to move. And on the other hand, more unproven companies with cheaper managers will have higher risk premia demanded by investors, resulting in lower stock price and therefore have more room to go up over time as some of the unknowns are answered.

Ideally we'd need include other variables such as market size and expected growth (P/E Ratio), CEO share ownership, ex-ante company distress, etc. into the analysis. Based on the described methodology, it doesn't sound like that was done.. but again, didn't read the paper itself.

</comment><comment><USER27> The conflict-of-interest and self-dealing problems at the c-suite and board level are absolutely pervasive at this point.

I don't think much will change until investors finally throw in the towel on the capital gains lottery and start demanding dividends at the point of pitchforks.

<comment><USER28> A simpler, and effective, approach is if you don't like what a CEO is doing, don't invest in the company.

I recall years ago a CEO stating that he was adjusting the accounting to reflect numbers "that stock analysts were looking for." He underestimated the investors - they weren't fooled, the stock price tanked and he went out the door.

<comment><USER27> I don't regard that as a particularly viable option: interest rates are low so the natural alternative investment isn't worthwhile and the problem is pervasive so it's true in almost all companies large enough to be listed on a stock exchange.

I'm lucky in that I can invest money in my own business, and afford to take riskier bets on alternative investments, but that isn't relevant for your average investor.

Until capital gain return to their appropriate position relative to dividends (and sane tax law would help here), the shareholder beatings at the hands of the c-suite and boards will continue.

<comment><USER28> > almost all companies

Meaning there are some you can reward with your investment.

> shareholder beatings

I've done reasonably well simply investing in SPY and holding it long term. Badly managed companies get dropped from SPY because their cap evaporates, and well managed companies get on it and stay on it.

SPY is extremely relevant to the average investor, and even more so to the below average investor.

<comment><USER27> I find is extremely difficult to determine which large companies are self- dealing, since executive and board compensation is not split out in most financial statements. (I can't help but think that this is by design.) So, broadly, I assume all of them are engaged in it unless proven otherwise, which no companies I'm aware of bother to do.

<comment><USER28> > is not split out in most financial statements.

I hate to belabor the obvious, but that means there are companies that disclose this information, and you can choose (or not) to reward them with your investment.

<comment><USER27> No, please, belabor.

So, I do do that, by investing in equity (as much as I do) with high dividends, since that is orders of magnitude easier to dig up than to find the few companies that are both interesting as a business and also have sufficiently transparent quarterly statements. Time is valuable, after all.

However, to get back to the original point, the current environment of board and c-suite self-dealing will not change until many, many more people invest and think the way I do. For that to happen, the current bias towards capital gains, which your generation grew up on, will need to be wiped out conclusively.

We shall see if that happens.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm not happy that they led with Larry Ellison as an example. As a Founder- CEO, his perspective on the company is fundamentally different from the mercenary CEOs running companies they didn't found or haven't worked at for decades.

</comment><comment><USER30> There's an interesting psychological phenomenon I've read about where if you offer someone a material reward in return for doing a job, it tends to make them enjoy the job less. In extreme cases, you can take something that a person really loves to do and make it feel like a burdensome chore for them, simply by saying, "I'll give you $X to do Y".

I wonder if this story could have something to do with that.

<comment><USER31> You might enjoy "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us", which explores the research on that topic.

[http://www.danpink.com/books/drive](http://www.danpink.com/books/drive)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's naive to not pay yourself a reasonable salary once you can afford to.

One of the biggest regrets of failed first-time CEOs is that they didn't pay themselves enough.

<comment><USER33> A reasonable salary is not $28 million a year.

<comment><USER34> It is if you're in high demand. LeBron James, for instance, earns $19MM per year and generates far more than that in revenues for the Miami Heat and NBA.

<comment><USER35> The NBA also has a salary cap for players:

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

A salary cap for CEOs would be an interesting experiment.

<comment><USER36> But whereas the NBA can enforce a salary cap for its players, who would enforce the salary cap for CEOs?

<comment><USER37> Shareholders presumably, if they cared to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> ...but the best negotiators, evidently.

</comment><comment><USER39> I realize it is popular to hate CEOs nowadays, but the article sure seems to be stretching with its conclusions. It seems much simpler and more likely to simply conclude that companies pay CEOs more than usual and give them large non-cash incentives when the company is doing badly and they are trying to buy their way out of a problem. That explains the increased mergers as well.

</comment><comment><USER40> The article merely scratches the surface. We can probably agree that corporations have certain structural flaws, but I doubt making a CEOs life more burdensome - who would take the job under a claw-back regime without some kind of financial protection? - will improve the picture.

One line of inspiration come from government - maybe a bicameral board - <USER2> for managing quarterlies, the other for longer horizons - might fix some issues.

Another might be to limit cronyism - boards seats given to CEO appointees, or limiting the number of board seats a person can hold.

</comment><comment><USER41> People need to take the efficient market hypothesis seriously when using stock prices for things like this.

The _announcement_ of a new CEO (or more realistically, the rumors preceding the announcement) already given the market a chance to adjust based on their expectations of the CEO. So what the study really shows is that highly paid CEOs tend to perform less well than the market would expect. This might be because they perform worse. It might also be because they perform better, but not by as large a margin as the market expected.

</comment><comment><USER42> One thing that could improve performance: only let CEOs sell their stock gradually over a 5 year period after the exercise their options.

Too much risk for the CEO? He's the one with the most influence over future performance. If he's putting the company on a good long term footing and chooses a good successor, he'll do fine.

If we incent CEOs to think long term, its more likely they will. CEOs that are founders or that have huge investments in their company's stock already tend to think long term.

</comment><comment><USER43> Check out CEO compensation for Fortune 500 [https://my.infocaptor.com/dash/mt.php?pa=ceo_compensation_20...](https://my.infocaptor.com/dash/mt.php?pa=ceo_compensation_2012_5159dc6ecb22b)

</comment><comment><USER44> Poor performing companies make bad decisions. One of those decisions may be how much to pay a CEO. The causation arrow may be going the wrong direction.

</comment><comment><USER45> The biggest problem is shown by the article saying that the results are "counter-intuitive". That certainly isn't my experience.

</comment><comment><USER46> My take from this: it highlights the worst performing _boards_ – i.e. those that compensate highly despite poor performance.

</comment><comment><USER47> Ehh this isnt really rocket science. If you take someone who is specifically focused on their own benefit over that of the company, and you have that person run your company... they are going to make choices that benefit them more than your company...

I wouldnt say CEOs arent worth it, but the incentives are completely perverse.

<comment><USER48> This kind of reasoning after-the-fact is easy.

If it was the opposite, it would also not really be rocket science: "Good CEO's have immense values for companies. So of course companies would pay a lot more for those CEOs that do a good job -- it is worth so much to the company."

You can't really make useful predictions with that kind of reasoning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> How does one go about becoming a CEO? What sort of career progression does it take?

<comment> FLUX-YOU Look up CEOs on Linkedin, look at their history. Maybe shoot them some messages. Networking is necessary anyway.

My uncle, who runs a resort as CEO, started as a bellhop with no college and just climbed in rank (I'm glossing over because I don't know the entire story).

I'm pessimistic and feel like that progression is very, very rare today in larger companies with everyone trying to hold on to middle-class positions as they dry up (so says the news). Hard to advance when there's no room. You'd also likely hit a ceiling today without a degree instead of in the past.

At the same time, I make a grand $15/hr, so I can only glimpse what I've heard from him. Definitely dig and try to reach out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> > "The more CEOs are paid, the worse the firm does over the next three years, > as far as stock performance and even accounting performance"

Yeah well this entire study is invalidated by using stock performance as the lazy way to measure CEO performance.

Expensive CEOs are typically expensive, because they're hired to fix a company that everyone knows is going down. The riskier the company, the more the stock is expected to go worthless, the more you get paid in cash for taking on the job.

So it's expected that if you look for expensive CEOs you'll be seeing stock/accounting performance going down in short to mid term, because recoveries, whether successful or not, take time. They take years.

Also are you honestly counting CEOs who get millions in stock and $1 pay as... just getting $1 in pay? How stupid are you.

<comment><USER51> I can't agree with you more. This would have been a nice study if it didn't reach any conclusions; just laid the data, pointed out all the possible reasons why their analysis could be wrong and paved the way for a better study.

One example, their data only covers from 1994 to 2011.

PS: Direct link to the study [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1572085](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1572085)

<comment><USER52> The standard format for a scientific paper includes a discussion section, where you're supposed to draw such conclusions and interpret the results and their significance.

<comment><USER51> Then this document should not be called a "scientific paper" or/and should never be published.

<comment><USER52> Sorry, what? It shouldn't be called a scientific paper because it follows the standard format for one?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> "The Highest-Paid CEOs Are The Worst Performers, New Study <Which Is in Line with People's Assumptions> Says"

<comment><USER53> This is a Common Sense Fallacy[0].

Playing devil's advocate, the result could have been that CEO pay was very well correlated with performance. The company doing well can justify a higher compensation.

Of course, this is probably the argument that gets used.

[0] [http://corkskeptics.org/2011/05/03/the-common-sense- fallacy/](http://corkskeptics.org/2011/05/03/the-common-sense-fallacy/)</comment></comment>


Facebook disabling notes RSS auto-importing - <AUTHOR>

Getting this message on my Facebook page today. I have a personal blog that I've linked to auto-post to Facebook using their "Notes" RSS import.<p>"Changes to How You Share Content in Notes"<p>"You currently automatically import content from your website or blog into your Facebook notes. Starting November 22nd, this feature will no longer be available, although you'll still be able to write individual notes. The best way to share content from your website is to post links on your timeline. Learn more about notes." <comment><USER2> Some solutions from [http://www.thewatchmakerproject.com/post/facebook-to- stop-rs...](http://www.thewatchmakerproject.com/post/facebook-to-stop-rss- blog-import-to-notes-from-november-22/)

Ping.fm <http://ping.fm/>

My Blog Posts <http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=234713335398></comment>


The Stock Buyback Swindle - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-stock-buyback-swindle/592774/ <comment><USER2> Is there anything inherently wrong with buybacks v paying dividends? If a company generated $1 does it make a difference whether its paid as a dividend or as a stock buy back.

The 2 major differences seem to be tax treatment, and financial benefits accruing to the CEO. It doesn't seem like it would be hard to base CEO pay on say EPS stripping out the effects of share buy backs, if that's the concern.

I'm just not convinced that stock buybacks are the bogyman they made out to be.</comment>


Ask YC: Anyone in SV get a sense the economy is headed south? - <AUTHOR>

This post was by davidw, and I figured that it merited it's own thread.  Here's his question:
Any of you guys in SV get a sense that that area is headed south along with the rest of the economy... or not? I recall moving back to the bay area in 2002, and it was pretty bad. I found work, but it was kind of difficult to connect to potential employers as there were a lot of .com people still milling about, looking for something to do. <comment><AUTHOR> I know that Yahoo just fired 1000 people in the past few weeks, but I hear that many of them got a 3 months severance. That should be enough time for them to start a business or find another gig.

Friend was a laser engineer, just got laid off after 25 years, but had 5 offers on the table in two weeks.

GOOG's stock price has taken a tumble, but they still seem to be hiring: [http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/topic.py?loc_id=1116&...](http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/topic.py?loc_id=1116&dep_id=1173)

Even the "big names" out here that are VC funded web startups, that would be at risk of taking a one way to the dead pool in the event of a "bubble pop", don't really have that many employees. Digg has 50 employees, Facebook had 300 at my last count but is still hiring like crazy: <http://www.facebook.com/jobs/>

It seems like there are a lot of companies that are coming and going, but there aren't the huge layoffs that hit the place so hard 6-7 years ago, because web startups have kept it pretty lean and mean. For the most part, the engineers still seem to be running the valley, not the biz dev guys.

Startups have been built without a lot of money, and are used to running on a shoe string. If the economy tightens up, I don't think that it will the startup guys that hard.

Some of the big hardware companies might shed some people if capital expenditures take a nose dive across the country, so that means that Intel, HP and Sun might shed some employees. But that's about it.

<comment><USER2> Even Yahoo seems somewhat schizophrenic these days. I don't know exactly how they got my contact info but I've been politely turning away an average of one recruiter from them a month for a few years now, recent layoffs notwithstanding.</comment></comment>


The Life of a Professional Guinea Pig - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/09/life-of-a-professional-guinea-pig/406018/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> "It sounds selfish," Helms said of the deception, "but the way it works is, I'm working poor, and the people making the drugs are filthy rich, and I need a job."

This guy disgusts me. He acts as though it's just some me-vs-them thing. Drugs are being tested for people that really need them. Using deceit, purposely throwing up the drugs to avoid side effects, etc, this is all shit that some real, ill person is going to have to go through one day and he's skewing the results.

I sincerely hope someone here can "disrupt" the clinical testing industry and put this guy out of business.

<comment><USER3> > He acts as though it's just some me-vs-them thing.

Well, he's a former union organizer, so that attitude isn't surprising: it's the same attitude one typically finds in union members, who don't view management and employees as a team trying to satisfy their customers, but instead as opponents trying to gain advantage over one another (and, as an incidental side-effect, perhaps deliver products to customers).

<comment><USER4> I don't think that is a fair characterization--though I'll readily agree that it is a common one in the anti-union propaganda we've been swimming in for the last few decades.

While it's true, in a general sense, that management and workers are all working toward a common goal, only one side in that partnerships holds all the power in that relationship, and it isn't the workers. Unions are a natural response to that imbalance of power.

Chalking this guy's bad attitude up to union involvement is an unwarranted anti-union slur, nothing more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands I actually did this when I was in college. I started as a participant, then started recruiting, and also worked as a monitor. When I left, I was trained as a phlebotomist (someone who draws blood).

I did a ton of studies. Most were harmless like Diclofenac, Naproxen Sodium and countless others. The first study I did was for Morphine and the company did several studies in various strengths. I was in the study that did 15mg dose, but they went as high as 30mg and had some issues with the higher doses. Since they were dosing people on empty stomachs the higher dosed participants threw up sometime after being dosed. There were two people in the 30mg morphine study who got black listed from the company when they found out they weren't taking the dosage.

I'm surprised the guy in the article still got paid considering its pretty easy to tell if you've taken the drug they give you. The guy who ran the place I was at said when they do blood draws, they can track the drug through your system. It's like a bell curve. Your body absorbs the drug, then gradually gets rid of it. If you don't take the pill, the line is totally flat.

I have a ton of stories since I worked for the company almost my entire college career in some aspect or another. Since I worked both sides of the equation, I could probably answer any question people have about doing this.

EDIT: The interesting they left out of the article was how this is taxed, and if you have to pay taxes on this kind of work. It's something I ran into with the company I was at.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm disappointed this wasn't an article about actual guinea pigs, those suckers are adorable.

<comment><USER6> and surprisingly tasty (common Andean dish).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was really hoping this article was about a working rodent. I got all prepared for a guinea pig in a business suit.

</comment><comment><USER8> A few years ago, I was on a health list and someone was asking for non drug alternatives for treating a chronic issue so they could get into a drug study. The study would not take them while they were on this particular drug for their chronic issue. For that and other reasons, I am already skeptical about the data from drug trials. Some of his points are pretty scary, like about who has the flexibility to enter a study where they will be locked up for several weeks.

</comment><comment><USER9> Doesn't seem a good idea to do a drug test on someone whose body has been through a lot of unproven drugs already</comment>


Notorious 'Hijack Factory' Shunned from Web - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/07/notorious-hijack-factory-shunned-from-web/ <comment><USER2> The conversations that strike up off the back of things like this (why does it take 4 years to disconnect them‽) really make me wonder what the internet will look like in a couple of decades.

There clearly is appetite at most levels of government for a restricted internet. Obvious crime, paedophilia, terrorism, etc but increasingly, you're seeing direct-to-consumer sites like Alibaba and Wish flogging knock-off crap over borders without paying taxes, without consumer safety checks and often without having license to make and sell that stuff in the first place.

It's not going to be long before somebody legislates that you're only allowed to peer a network if you agree to cut anybody off who enables that, including other peers who ignore abuse across their network. It'll effectively limit what "the internet" is allowed to contain. Essentially embargoing bad actors and those that enable them, and all in a very pro-active way.

It will —and should— put the fear of iJesus into consumer ISPs. They could _easily_ cut off customers with computers operating within botnets, alerting them to infections, etc. At the peril of having your peerings cut off, you'd expect them to be a lot more pro-active too.

I honestly don't how I'd feel about this. It _seems_ safer but if life has taught me anything, that usually just means it's not, and somebody's just quietly getting rich in the corner.

<comment><USER3> The first question is who decides what's illegal? Being gay is illegal in certain countries...

Making ISPs more proactive is only doable with either heavy restrictions what communication is allowed or heuristics (that fail). That sounds like anyone out of the ordinary (so a majority of this site's users) will get flagged as suspicious. The fun thing is that I've seen both methods already applied and either me or someone I know has been encumbered by them.

There's not a single piece of me that feels that this would somehow end up positive in total.

<comment><USER2> On the point of ISP pro-activeness, I really just mean that —without a warrant or other court order (or national security edict)— they currently do somewhere between zilch and nothing with abuse emails.

And everybody on the Internet knows this. When somebody brutes your login page or SSH server, what do you do? Nothing. It _should_ be trivial to report IPs and timestamps back to ISPs. Many ISPs are already required to log connections at some level (destination and port) so this stands to verify the abuse report. Get a number of these shoot through for a single customer (IPs are unimportant at this point), and it's time for a nasty conversation.

The machinery to make this work already exists. It's the ISP that's the problem. Threaten non-compliance of continued abuse (or a lack of reduction in botnet activity, whatever) with disconnection to the parent peer, so the ISP takes it seriously, and we'll see reporting rates rocket.

Monitored at local level (FCC, Ofcom, etc), per existing ISP complaints.

But yeah, no ISP is going to do this without serious threat of action.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure this is a great idea - the "bad guys" have access to writing nastygrams to your ISP, too. You have to be careful creating the mechanisms for this, otherwise you could have a situation like YouTube has: it's trivially easy to report a video for containing your copyrighted content and then receive the ad income from it, so a lot of videos will get frivolous claims attached to them.

<comment><USER2> Large ISPs in many countries are already required to log connection metadata. This could trivially be used to verify botnet activity, even identity CnC nodes.

I'm sure there is still scope for abuse, but letting ISPs ignore abuse reports isn't working out well for the rest of the internet either.

But yes, maybe attaching some real personal perjury liability —unlike the watered down DMCA abuse liability— might be a good idea. Good network admins know what abuse looks like and have logs to corroborate.

<comment><USER4> YouTube's system doesn't even require a DMCA complaint AFAICT, it just requires you to tell YouTube that you own the copyright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> See also previous discussion about this topic from yesterday

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17501201](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17501201) (56 comments)

</comment><comment><USER6> I really don't know why this isn't more common.

Bad actors can often be identified. Their upstream should just disconnect them. Or _their_ upstream should. Draw a boundary around them and their intransigent collaborators, and cut them out of the network like a cancer.

<comment><USER7> Isn't this because of the various safe harbor provisions ? If you start policing content then you cease to be a mere pipe and your gain much higher legal responsibility for whatever content passes through your systems.

In general I think it is a very bad idea to give this kind of policing power in the hands of private companies. They tend to be very conservative to avoid legal liability and they can also take arbitrary decisions. When Cloudfront decided to cutoff the Daily Stormer they crossed a line and many people were justifiably upset. It's the job of the legal system.

<comment><USER8> If someone reports to you that a bad actor (spammer, bruteforcer, whatever) is on your network, it would seem to eliminate your plausible deniability and safe harbor defense.

The real problem is economic; for any given ISP, they are going to side with their customers over some rando complainer most of the time. You don't get rich by disconnecting your own customers unless you absolutely have to.

Sometimes, this is good, if you're the one who might get disconnected (Cox was a great ISP to have, because for many years they would blithely ignore Bittorrent complaints and give you a dozen or so 'strikes' without consequence); it's awful and obnoxious if you are on the receiving end of an attack, and some shitlord low-budget VPS reseller or datacenter operator won't unplug the control server or whatever, or drags their feet to a ridiculous extent.

All about whose ox is getting gored.

<comment><USER9> >If someone reports to you that a bad actor (spammer, bruteforcer, whatever) is on your network, it would seem to eliminate your plausible deniability and safe harbor defense.

Sure, that seems like it could never be abused at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pet peeve: shunned from _Internet_ , not web.

</comment><comment><USER11> An underlying question I have: Is it useful to trust IP-addresses on their range / owner / (distant) past behavior?

<comment><USER12> IPV6 offers to all practical intents and purposes a near infinite range so there that tactic won't work (you will simply exhaust your storage at some point).

IPV4 addresses in 'known bad' ranges can be totally benign, I know this because I've been the owner/steward of a whole pile of such addresses over the years. Typically the hosting providers where our stuff was colocated would be the likes of Leaseweb and Dynamic Pipe which had a lot of porn customers and spammers as customers.

It would not be rare at all to be blocked either on entire class C's or ports from those blocks of addresses in spite of never having had interaction with certain parties before.

Kudos to the people at Spamhaus who _never_ blocked us and went out of their way to ensure they only hit the boxes of the spammers with surgical precision.

Finally, 'distant past behavior' is what caused me to have to jump through all kinds of hoops to reclaim the IP address of my present day mail server.

There is no set protocol to register a change of tenancy for an IP address and I'm pretty sure if such a protocol did exist that spammers would abuse it but it is super annoying to have to go begging cap in hand to the likes of Google, Apple and Microsoft for clemency when you've done nothing wrong (and to be ignored...).

<comment><USER13> > it is super annoying to have to go begging cap in hand to the likes of > Google, Apple and Microsoft for clemency when you've done nothing wrong (and > to be ignored...).

This is really upsetting. The imbalance of power is especially pronounced here as they don't really care whether you deliver you mail or not - you do. You're totally at their mercy. That's why lots of people nowadays say "it's too much hurdle to maintain my own e-mail server, I'll just use some service" \- and in this way they give even more power to Google and the rest.

We'll wake up one day and realize e-mail is no longer as free as it used to be, but it will be too late.

<comment><USER14> Totally agree. I'm not entirely sure the various spam RBLs have a much better process though, and some blacklisting seems arbitrary. Wouldn't each RBL have their own obscure process as well?

I'm dreading the day that I have to switch my personal mail server's IP address.

(important disclaimer: it's been a while since I had to deal with un- blacklisting, so maybe things have changed since?)

<comment><USER15> It's not enough not to be on blacklists, Google Mail and MS Outlook online use complex, cryptic, algos to determine whether to receive mails and whitelisting someone is very far down the filter for MS (don't know about Gmail) so receiving mail you've told Outlook you want, from non-RBLed servers on long- term domains is blocked ... but you can pay to ensure the mail gets through.

We're talking single emails, in reply, from whitelisted addresses, being blocked because they come from (paraphrasing) "a server associated with a server whose IP address was previously a spam source".

That's a shared hosting experience. Mind you we were trying to send a flood of perhaps 10 emails a month to ourselves, so you can understand why they'd ignore our whitelisting./s</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


We Just Breached the 410 PPM Threshold for CO2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-just-breached-the-410-ppm-threshold-for-co2/ <comment><USER2> Does anyone have ideas on how a mid-career software developer can switch gears into the clean energy/climate change industry, to do something to help?

I've come to think that climate change will be humanity's defining moment, and that we'll all be suffering greatly come mid-to-late-century. I want to do what I can to put my professional skills to use in helping. But I'm not sure where to even begin.

<comment><USER3> If in the US I'd suggest getting politically active. It will take long enough even according to the pessimistic models (assuming we don't hit some doomsday scenario like the clathrate gun) for things to actually get noticeably bad [1] that a lot of people will choose short term profit over long term fixing the climate.

That means that to seriously get things done _soon_ is going to require government action, and that means politics.

Regardless of whether you lean to the left or the right, register as a Republican and participate in the Republican primaries or caucuses for your local, state, and national offices supporting those Republicans who acknowledge that climate change is a series problem and that the government needs to play an active role in slowing, stopping, or reversing it.

I say register as a Republican, even if you would normally be something more to the left, because right now the Democrats are much more likely to nominate candidates that acknowledge climate change and the need for strong government action. The Republicans do have some people who believe that, but they currently rarely get nominated.

What we need to see is general elections where it is _both_ the Democrat and the Republican that are on the right side of climate change so that no matter which party wins the election we get a government that will do something about the problem.

[1] Generally what most places will see is that bad things that already happen there will very slowly happen a little more often, and get a little more bad. But in many places there will also be good things that start happening a little more often and get a little bit better. It will take a generation or two before these changes have become big enough and frequent enough in most places that it will really be noticeable to the people there that yup, their climate has changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is very bad (albeit completely unsurprising) news, but I really don't see that the word "threshold" is appropriate. Is there some special bad thing that happens once 410ppm is reached, that's qualitatively different from 400ppm? Nope.

The article itself is quite clear about this: e.g., it quotes one climate scientist as saying "These milestones are just numbers, but they give us an opportunity to pause and take stock and act as useful yard sticks for comparisons to the geological record." I suspect it's the usual story: journalist writes reasonable article, sub-editor puts needlessly overexcited headline on it.

<comment><USER5> How we communicate climate science and its relevance to our world is just as important as the science itself. In my opinion, if labeling it a threshold in media intended for non-scientist audiences captures attention and calls readers to action, great! Frankly, we need to be "overexcited" about CO2 and stop sitting on our assess.

<comment><USER6> This is how you end up overstimulating and oversaturating headlines and making people distrust science.

<comment><USER5> Point taken. I would add that fossil fuel companies and mainstream politicians are doing more to cause people to distrust science than headlines like this, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I haven't seen any talk about the health effects of rising CO2.

I know there are studies finding a difference in productivity between 600 and 1000 ppm with just hours of exposure, so isn't it possible that going from 300 globally to over 400 has had some health impact over a lifetime? Is there a point where lower CO2 has no effect and how do we know that?

<comment><USER8> The funny thing O2 is dropping faster than CO2 is rising, but for whatever reasons it's not really a subject of interest.

<comment><USER9> That's because it's easily explained. About half the O2 lost through burning of hydrocarbons becomes CO2. Other half becomes H2O. The latter doesn't increase its percentage in the atmosphere just because there's more of it.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, but my point is that lack of O2 is very easy to explain why it's bad of the health!

<comment><USER9> Silly point. O2 shortages are irrelevant- 210,000ppm to 209,800ppm O2 is far less of concern than 300ppm to 400ppm CO2.

<comment><USER10> And keep in mind that atmospheric pressure (and thus the partial pressure of oxygen) routinely varies by 10% or more due to weather, and people live at altitudes where the pressure is as low as 50% below sea level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't know much about climate science, but won't plants multiply and grow faster until we eventually hit a new equilibrium CO2 level?

I guess the only danger is reaching thermal runaway before that happens? Then again, earth CO2 levels have been far higher in the past without signs that it killed off much life on Earth. Is rising CO2 that dangerous?

Don't humans already have effective ways to reduce surface heating by injecting dust or chemicals into the upper atmosphere? We've seen that throwing a bunch of dust up there reflects more heat and it sounds like something certainly within our ability to do.

I'm not a climate change denier, I'm just skeptical that the rising CO2 level is as dangerous as it's made out to be.

<comment><USER12> > I don't know much about climate science ... I'm just skeptical that the > rising CO2 level is as dangerous as it's made out to be.

Respectfully, is this a mindset you apply to other aspects of your life?

Let's say you leased an apartment in a large building, and after an inspection, numerous structural engineers said the building was in danger of collapse. Would you say "I don't know much about engineering, but I'm skeptical it's that bad", or would you demand the building management take steps to correct the issues?

<comment><USER13> Not quite the same. Climate scientists are notoriously bad at predicting consequences of climate change - kind of like how meteorologists are often bad at predicting the weather.

Why is it okay to be skeptical of what meteorologists are predicting, but not okay to be skeptical of what climate scientists are predicting?

It's one thing to be skeptical of sciences that have stood the test of time like civil engineering and quite another to be skeptical of climate science, whose models are being updated _annually_ in response to the discovery of new variables.

Note: I am not saying we should be climate change deniers, only that we should not blindly accept apocalyptic predictions as the gospel truth of what is going to happen to the planet if we fail to mitigate CO2.

<comment><USER14> Why is there still a pop culture cliche of weathermen being terrible at their job?

Precipitation forecasts are usually accurate several days out and temperature forecasts are good a week or two out, in my experience. If I want to know if it's going to rain on Saturday I check the weather on Thursday and it's usually right. When there's a big storm comin', a local meteorologist does rolling updates with the latest data and it usually gives a consistent but evolving picture that matches up with what actually happens.

Are people disappointed by this? What are you wanting out of your weathermen that you're not getting?

I know the weatherman used to be a joke, back before satellites and computers, but I swear the cliche only survives as part of climate change denialism.

<comment> mark-r Yes they're usually right about whether it's going to rain or not, but often they're completely wrong about _how much_ it's going to rain. They can tell you whether tomorrow will be warmer or colder than today, but the exact temperature still eludes them. Since the whole climate debate is about a matter of degrees, it's natural to be skeptical.

<comment><USER14> I'm also pretty satisfied with the forecasts on those numbers as well, within the bounds of what is reasonable to forecast. During big events, snowstorms and hurricanes, the local meteorologist will break the area I'm in into ~7 regions and give guidance like 'zones 5-7 will get 3-6" of snow, zones 1&2 12-18"' or '3-4 inches of rain north of 84'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> An error in the third paragraph, which states:

It stood at 280 ppm when record keeping began at Mauna Loa in 1958.

CO2 was 280 ppm at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

"The first monthly average carbon dioxide reading at Mauna Loa was 315.7 parts per million (ppm) in March 1958." [0]

[0] [https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2015/06/02/am...](https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/2015/06/02/american- chemical-society-to-recognize-keeling-curve/#more-1297)

</comment><comment><USER16> There is an aspect that is perhaps not very well communicated.

Higher the environmental CO2 level, more of it you need to dilute the air in the confined environment (i.e. buildings) to the desired level.

This means that you have to move more air that will require more energy directly but also indirectly through higher heating/cooling need.

It will also decrease the comfort due to more tangible airflow.

<comment><USER17> I'm interested by your comment, but I can't figure out what you are intending to say. Why do you need to dilute CO2?

<comment><USER16> Mostly because you do not want to die into CO2 poisoning when inside. :)

Every building has some designed air change rate with the outside that will keep its habitants alive and comfortable. This can happen through so called natural ventilation or through controlled ventilation.

As far I know, the common standard for the commercial buildings is 800 ppm (parts per million (1)) CO2 in the air. It is assumed that this level of CO2 would on average provide environment where people do not loose their productivity due to the air quality.

This is what I mean by diluting - part of the CO2 rich air inside is replaced with the less CO2 rich air from the outside.

Because habitants are producing CO2 with some rate, you have to replace the air with the rate that can keep up with this CO2 production rate.

If the air outside has higher levels of CO2 then more of the replacement air is needed and the replacement rate must be higher to keep the projected inside CO2 levels.

Replacing air faster will require more energy.

Disclaimer: I am not a ventilation engineer, I just got interested of this topic during the home renovation.

(1) Air contains about 21% of oxygen that is 210000 ppm of it. It follows that when the air feels "stuffy", it is not due to lack of oxygen but due to too much CO2 in it.

<comment><USER17> Interesting. What would the benefit be of complicating something as simple as ventilation.

However, 400000 to 410000 is a very small percentage incresse

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> in plain english (from article): "Right now we're on track to create a climate unseen in 50 million years by mid-century."

<comment><USER19> The states hit hardest by climate change are the ones cheerleading the burning of more fossil fuels. It's utterly bizarre.

<comment><USER20> They've been told by well-funded industry groups and politicians that all their woes are due to excessive regulation.

<comment><USER19> I hear a lot of grief about the EPA in places where coal is winding down, and yet it's not the EPA that's killing coal, it's rampant fracking that's shifted the industry to a whole new method of energy extraction. If there was lots of natural gas in West Virginia I bet I wouldn't hear a peep of complaint about the EPA.

If we can't smack some sense into people we're doomed as a species.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It would be of value to overlay actual global temperatures over the graphs given in this document such as these..

[https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Five_Myr_Climate_C...](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.png)

</comment><comment><USER22> How do we measure the average concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, given all the disparity and local extremums?

<comment><USER23> The article describes an in situ (ground based) measurement, that is sample based.

You can get CO2 concentrations from satellite remote sensing, as well. Usually they use spectral analysis of CO2 emission/absorption lines in the infrared. This is a passive measurement, but active measurements with lasers are used in ground based and airborne measurements now.

These measurements are of CO2 within a given (vertical) column of air -- where the infrared light came from -- whereas the Mauna Loa measurement in TFA is localized to air moving past the sample station.

One starting place for CO2 data is: [https://co2.jpl.nasa.gov](https://co2.jpl.nasa.gov)

This summary of Los Angeles area ground based measurements hints at some of the complexities of integrating these different data sources: [https://megacities.jpl.nasa.gov/portal/collection- network/](https://megacities.jpl.nasa.gov/portal/collection-network/) .

Other pages on that site indicate the extreme spatial and temporal variability of CO2 in an urban setting. That's why the comparatively pristine Mauna Loa site is so important.

</comment></comment><comment> crush-n-spread This post is intended for folks upset and concerned about the state of the climate, that are unsure about how to make an impact, but are very interested in doing _something_ ; it does not directly discuss the article (sorry dang.)

First off, I suggest you disregard politics and convincing your friends: Telling the ignorant masses to change their firmly held opinions and way of life is a waste of time. Do not delude yourself into thinking you'll get 5 billion poor folks (there are about that many) to not use coal power, or to not get gas scooters/cars. They will all do it - unless we provide a better alternatives. So your first action is to help make electric cars, solar power generation, and batteries as good as possible, and that means you go work hard as an engineer at one of these companies. Not an elec/mech/whatever engineer? Stop thinking so small; you have the internet, teach yourself enough to do a thesis level project and start applying. You can do this.

The second, more dire action is to help with Carbon Sequestration (taking carbon out of the atmosphere). What you need to do is replicate the Elon Musk model of directing the Human Colossus [0] towards Accelerated Silicate Weathering [1] - That is, crushing and spreading silicate minerals along all coastlines and wet tropical climates. There are two links; the first covers how Elon Musk uses commercially viable businesses to fund research and advanced engineering to create leverage. The second link covers the science behind accelerated weathering; The abstract is that the oceans naturally uptake carbon from the atmosphere by reacting C02 with cations in the water that come from dissolved silicate minerals. This uptake de-acidifies the oceans and produces food for ocean life; for us to collect all the carbon produced in the USA last year, we would need to crush about 60km^3 of silicate rock (which is in abundance) and spread it along coastlines.

To successful sequester enough carbon to save the ecosystem, this might one of the best options we have.

The way you go about this is you copy Elon's model and make a business crushing rock. Thus, you must make mining machines and get into the mining business. Take a software based approach and use electric vehicles if you can. Vertically integrate, hire more engineers, get more clients and build a _lot_ of machines. I think that's a good starting point.

Anyways, I've thought a lot about this and if you are concerned then these are the two things you ought to focus on. Don't try and convince people! We need engineering solutions not talk.

[1][http://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html](http://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html) [2][http://www.greensand.nl/content/user/1/files/rog20004.pdf](http://www.greensand.nl/content/user/1/files/rog20004.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER24> Show this to any conservative who claims that global warming has nothing to do with human activity. I guess it's just a giant coincidence that we live in the time of the highest CO2 concentration in millions of years? And the highest disappearance of species?

<comment><USER25> "Millions of years" is an eyeblink in the history of the earth. In fact, the CO2 level has been _much_ higher than this level in the past (like, orders of magnitude higher). The earth was fine.

And no, this isn't the era of the "highest disappearance of species". Not even close.

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

<comment><USER24> Regardless of all this, it's pretty clear what's causing this currently buildup of CO2. So why deny that man's activity is a major factor?

As for "the earth will be fine": yes the planet will still be here, but will humans survive this? In the past, these changes were far more gradual, letting life adapt.

As for "not even close", please show me a period when the rate of extinction was higher: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene)

<comment><USER26> 1\. Historical temperature changes were often quite abrupt and of greater magnitude than our current one.

2\. Life is anti-fragile, so I think you're really underestimating humans and animals in general if you think a few degrees is something we can't handle.

<comment><USER24> I think you need to prove both these assertions. They are quite startling responses to "we have produced a quick rise to the most CO2 in millions of years" or "we have seriously damaged the biodiversity of large animals on this planet". It's as if someone said "we set the entire rainforest ablaze" and someone said "Relax! Nothing to worry about, this happened a few times naturally in the history of the Earth."

Can you at least admit that _humans_ are behind this rise in CO2? I mean, it's not like wind and solar energy generation is going to kill the economy. So why is this even debated so much?

<comment><USER25> "The highest level in millions of years" is just rhetoric. The Earth is _billions_ (with a b) years old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Just in time for earth day!</comment>


Should software be protected by patents?  - <AUTHOR>

As patent trolls keep going after Google, Groupon and others, I thought it is time to discuss the merits of software patenting. NZ and India and other countries have recently struck down software patenting as the patents have an adverse impact on innovation. I'm ok with copyrights for code, but patenting software ideas seems ridiculous. What do you guys think? <comment><USER2> I think that, rather than removing software patents altogether, there has to be a rethink of what is 'patentable' (Finger movements? Probably not patentable. An entirely new protocol for transferring data? I'm fine with that being patented.)

Aside from that, I believe that there should be a "6 months to defend" clause attached to software patents (i.e. if you don't file a patent dispute within 6 months of another company publicly releasing something that "infringes" your patent, then you lose the right to defend it). That would solve many of the "patent troll" issues, and to get a large chunk of the rest of them, the laws about acquiring patents in a buy-out/merger should be examined.</comment>


Competitor Attempts to Steal Product Descriptions.. Gets RickRoll'd - <AUTHOR>

So today I noticed an interesting referer while tailing my ecommerce website's production.log file
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?groupId=ZXN2S645SXNTG6SRHV5Z (Notice the link at the top of the page links to revzilla.com (my site), sometimes it swaps to an amazon.com product so just refresh that page if it does)
Apparently someone had created a mechanical turk which is paying people to reword / paraphrase our product descriptions (I assume) for use on their competing website.  We can't be having that so I added a simple rule to redirect any Mechanical Turk referrers to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU :D <comment><USER2> We used to redirect competitors (based on their ip addresses) to their own sites when they tried to log into our software.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not use some free library to thesaurasize your product DB and then collect on those mechanical turk payouts yourself?

Bankrupt them. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> you should've forced them to redirect always to the same product, if they were directly linking to products from the turk. that way, the person paying would be getting hundreds of one product description.

</comment><comment><USER5> For $0.76 they're also overpaying for the HIT.

</comment><comment><USER6> Those who live by the gun, die by the gun.

</comment><comment><USER7> What is the affect of this on your Google ranking? Just curious as to how much of your content they are altering. If not much then could it cause your site to be ranked lower due to duplicated content? Just curious on this. I think there are tools that will look for plagarised content online

</comment><comment><USER8> Next time they will not link directly to you but redirect through something. Or simply copy-and-paste your content into the job description. It's a waste of time trying to fight this...

<comment><USER9> Who cares? It's fun.

Same with pranks at the office. Total waste of time, but huge morale boosters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd make sure it's not one of your affiliates.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats a good point and I actually did look into that a bit ago. Not one of our affiliates at least, but maybe one of the competitor's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love this.

</comment><comment><USER12> Ha! Served.

</comment><comment><USER13> They need to get vunk'd or if you're extra mean throw some 2G,1C their way.

<comment><USER14> meatspin.com

Always good for laffs when the boss walks by</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I have a question about shady patent trolls - <AUTHOR>

If I'm the first to launch a web site with a new kind of business model, assuming that I didn't get a patent for it, can someone patent that business method afterwards and than sue me later?<p>Also, could I patent the business method down the road since I was the first one to launch it?  Even if other companies copied my idea? <comment><USER2> You need to clearly declare a prior art detailing your idea to protect it in the first place. This can be done by writing down your idea and having three people attest and sign on it. Another method is to file your idea with an organization such as Writers guild of America <http://www.wga.org>. But to make commercial use of your idea, you need to file a patent in every country you plan to do business.

</comment><comment><USER3> Answering your first question, they can't. Their patent would be rendered invalid since your earlier website would be a "prior art".

<comment><USER4> I'd replace "can't" with "shouldn't be able to, but don't count on it". Every week there is a new case involving patents with obvious prior art getting through. As America has switched to a first-to-file system (as of the America Invents Act), you'll also have to prove that you invented it first. This presumably is easier with a website front-end, but possibly less so with back- end technologies.</comment></comment>


Why I Stopped Throwing Out Junk Mail - <AUTHOR> http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-i-stopped-throwing-out-junk-mail/

<comment><USER2> Working in Search marketing for a few years has taught me something similar about writing PPC ad-copy; if you want to see masters at work search for something like "Home Refinancing" and check out the ad-copy on the sponsored results. (These guys are paying $50+ per click. You can bet they know what they're doing; that is, they must if they're going to be doing it for any amount of time.)

<comment><USER3> Probably the most power of instant arbitrary financial transfer any member of the proletariat has is to search for asbestos or mesothelioma and click on every ad.

<comment><USER3> Did anyone do it in response to this post? You could reply with a new name if you don't want to admit it. I'm curious how many thousands of dollars were just arbitrarily shifted around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe this is obvious, but in case it's not: For those interested in really studying direct mail tactics, there are lots of books on the subject by experienced practitioners. I read several of them a few years ago; wish I could highlight one or two as a recommendation, but I don't remember.

As noted in some of the other comments, these folks test _everything_ , right down to the color of the envelope and the size of the signature at the bottom of the letter. It's also fascinating to read war stories. IIRC, there's a direct mail letter for Reader's Digest (or some similar publication) that was most effective for decades. They kept testing it against other contenders, but that same letter kept getting results.

</comment><comment><USER5> i both agree and disagree.

i disagree with the premise that years and years and billions of dollars have been spent, so it must be the best way. times are changing, people are changing. i've been trained to throw away every piece of junk mail, and so have most of my friends. junk mail is being actively read by a shrinking demographic. just because something has worked does not mean it will continue to do so, or that the statistics are representative. it might not be a good plan to hitch your line to a sinking ship.

i agree in the sense that there are some effective design patterns with respect to effective copywriting, and that some people are forgoing them for something else, perhaps something more aesthetically pleasing when aesthetics don't necessarily get the job done.

<comment><USER6> "years and years and billions of dollars have been spent, so it must be the best way"

That way lies cargo cult capitalism.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the short run, yeah. But if everyone is flinging money at junk mail, eventually the ones who are doing it wrong will be broke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just had a series of thoughts:

1\. You should learn from others' mistakes because it's cheaper than learning from your own. (approximation of a famous quote)

2\. You should learn from other's successes, because it's cheaper than discovering what works by yourself. (simple variation)

3\. Applying mutuality principle: how can we mutually benefit from our mistakes?

4\. Why not conduct A/B testing and ad word campaigns together so that lessons learned can benefit the maximum number?

5\. How to do this?

a) The easiest way is just to blog about your own findings and read others' blogs. This suffers from the free-rider problem: you end up doing research for others.

b) Another alternative is to form a club where each member spends a certain amount per month on ads, and they share their results.

c) Another way is to simply do a lot of Google searches (automatically?) and see what ads are displayed. You're letting Google and the free market do your work for you. This is the e-version of collecting junk mail. You're not being a free rider in this case because your results are being used by others too.

</comment><comment><USER8> While I find junk mail material sometime entertaining, I can't help to think that it's designed to sell to a certain category of people. _Especially_ long copy. It's often for questionable products, dubious benefits or almost scams. And while I don't doubt it works for them, I'm not sure at all it would work for my target demographic.

I think a good version of 'long copy' is something like this: <http://highrisehq.com> where a lot of info is packed on a single page, and it's very far from "junk mail" copy.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a good approach. I do wonder how much of it translates over (from junk mail to a website or email) but that's something that can be tested. At the very least it provides a good starting foundation to work off of for those unsure of their copywriting abilities.

<comment><USER10> The entire premise is that junk mail is compelling and should be emulated. I wholeheartedly agree, but only if you're producing something junk-mail flavored. Membership drive for an online game is not the same thing as a call for papers for an academic conference, and one of them benefits from emulating junk-mail copy.

FWIW, I found the article refreshingly unique and "outside the box".

<comment><AUTHOR> Reading junk mail has changed the way I write other things, like blog posts, instant messages, and even personal emails. I'm more likely to use numbers, bullet points, and shorter paragraphs, and much more likely to close with a call to action.

Your call for papers probably shouldn't end with "Operators are standing by!" but it wouldn't hurt to establish urgency some other way. ("If your paper is ready, submit it now--although the deadline is in X weeks, we'll only be able to thoroughly review papers we get in the next Y weeks.")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think it was David Ogilvy who said anyone who wanted to write advertising copy should spend a year working in direct response marketing. Same principle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Here's a short video on the subject, from Ogilvy: "We Sell or Else." (Transcript below.)

[http://www.infomarketingblog.com/direct-response-vs- general-...](http://www.infomarketingblog.com/direct-response-vs-general- advertising/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The "junk mail" approach to persuasion is only one approach, and it tends to be urgent-sounding. When I think about the businesses I like the most, one common factor is that they have a much more honest-sounding tone.

Maybe the question is not "which technique works best," but "which technique works best on my target audience."

<comment><USER13> I was wondering about this. It seems to me that the 10% conversion rate for junk mail is based on selling to a credulous consumer. Hence the urgent tone. Most people (the other 90%?) toss the shit out because they know even if the copy sounds vaguely interesting, you're most likely not going to get something for nothing. Everything from the 4 (bright) color ad to the fake christmas card goes in the recycling immediately from the mailbox because you know you're going to be manipulated.

Are people more or less credulous on the web? I dunno, that has to depend on the category. In some ways, it's harder to avoid reading the copy -- but for experienced users there is a degree of resentment when you realize you've been "SEO"ed by an interesting sounding google link into a page of marketing bullshit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Direct mail (not so "junk"-y) works for some higher-end products. I know American Express has launched some of their more expensive cards through direct mail; luxury car companies use similar tactics; and insurance companies invest a lot in direct mail, as well.

(And direct marketing companies eat their own dogfood, too. Ogilvy & Mather sent sales letters to lots of Fortune 500 executives, in order to get them to pay O&M to send similar letters to _other_ people. It's a great way to bootstrap your own sales pitch: if your pitch is persuasive, it deserves to be.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Agree for the most part - direct mailers were doing A/B testing before the internet existed to maximize their ROI. There's definitely some carry over between what works in print and on the internet.

That being said, its important to know _why_ the junk mail is presented like it is, it may not always work for your users.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't buy it. Can you show me some statistics to prove that this (junk mail) works? I have always thought of junk mail as a last ditch effort. You have no other means to reach your customer, so you do the "throw it against the wall and see what sticks" approach.

<comment><USER16> I think his whole point is that junk mail's mere existence means that it works.

Junk mailers pay real hard currency for every letter they send, so they've can't afford to use ineffective copy. Online, there is no cost to to sending an email, publishing a blog post, etc., so it's more difficult to determine what copy actually works.

<comment><USER17> Or it could be that the old adage that _"there's a sucker born every minute"_ applies not only to the consumers of junk mail, but to its purveyors as well.

<comment><USER18> You could say the same thing about online advertising though. Sure, some people waste money, but the bulk of people get value for the money they are spending or it would not continue to exist.

<comment><USER17> I don't know why people think businesses are immune from spending money on products and services they don't need or which are ineffective.

They may well continue to make money regardless, or for some other reason than the money they spend on direct marketing (or on online advertising, for that matter).

What we need are some serious studies published in peer reviewed journals that prove that direct marketing works, not claims that if it didn't work businesses wouldn't spend money on it.

<comment><USER18> Your argument is flawed. Why do we need these for direct mail any more than we need them for:

Display Advertising PPC Advertising TV Advertising Radio Advertising Trade Shows In-Mall Kiosks etc.

Also, how would you do the study anyway? Some people do this effectively and others do not. Certain types of advertising are better for reaching some customers and others are not. It seems you are assuming that in the general case direct mail does not work at all and people are using it just because they haven't measured their marketing ROI for that channel. With minimal research you could see that this is false.

<comment><USER17> I am simply withholding judgment on the efficacy of direct marketing until I see some solid evidence. Same with the rest of the examples you mention.

So far all I've seen are claims (mostly by direct marketers themselves), not any kind of reliable proof.

As for how the studies would be done, I have no doubt that scientists (who are very clever at coming up with innovative research protocols) could figure something out.

But here is a modest proposal: track the spending habits of a reasonably large, randomized group of people (should be easy enough to do these days), along with the ads they receive. See how many of the products are bought by people who receive and read direct mail ads vs those that don't. That should be a good start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I took a direct marketing copywriting course six or seven years ago that suggested the same, and I've been pinching examples from my junk mail ever since.

In fact, it looks like the course is still running - and even taught by the same instructor I had (John Friesen). If you're in the Vancouver area, I'd recommend it: <http://www.sfu.ca/wp/dmc.htm>

The mail he valued most was the stuff he'd get repeatedly, year after year, month after month - since presumably it performed the best. If he only saw one example of something, he figured it was a test that didn't pull well.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nicely done. What is it about magazine renewals that seem so effective to you?

<comment><USER21> They work well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Beside junk mail and expensive PPC ads, _magazine covers_ and headlines can be great sources of inspiration, depending on what demographic you're targeting.

</comment><comment><USER23> In my personal lexicon, I call this the "Waffle House Method". WH values efficiency above all else. They are all-cash stores, with an occasional ATM machine in the store. Every single element of the store has an efficiency study behind it. But the single biggest efficiency point they cover is complete failure to do any market research. Instead, they just build a store on the same block as a McDonald's. If McDonald's did the market research to say that this location was good, then it's good enough for WH too.

I use the WH Method for my choices on fashion (when I bother to care about fashion): I pick a celebrity who looks rather well put together and similar to me in build, reason that celebrities are required to spend an inordinate amount of attention on fashion in order to maintain their marketability, and then wear/style however they do. It works out rather well.

I've also used the WH Method for doing basic site design in a documentation- happy environment. "Look, every other site with a similar purpose outside your market does their site design like this. You should have those elements as well, or users will be confused."

</comment><comment><USER24> I thought he was going to say he was turning the junk mail into paper logs to burn - free fuel.

</comment><comment><USER25> "You can look at the results of a hundred years of careful analysis, big bets, and bad investments—and you can coast on the results."

Agreed</comment>