'The system is broken': Ray Dalio fears a return to the 1930s - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/09/ray-dalio-billionaire-hedge-fund-capitalism <comment><USER2> Interesting piece until the guardian adds this random piece of dismissiveness at the bottom:

"Theirs is that old, radically conservative, message: everything must change so that everything can stay the same."

Which is the opposite of what he is saying.

The press are political actors. Until they admit that they too are responsible for creating the system as it is and critique themselves, they are just as dishonest as any other politician.

<comment><USER3> A different view is the press, at least the most popular press, are corporate actors, and so are nearly all federal level politicians. It's not so much that the press are spewing political propaganda as the press and the politicians are both spewing corporate propaganda.

<comment><USER2> What is the word 'corporate' adding to this?

The guardian's propaganda is weirdly leftist for corporate propaganda.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, it wouldn't be bad for the world economy if China were to sell some US Treasury bonds and bid yields a little bit. The smart way to avert the time bomb that is the US equity market is to take a little bit of pain now in a controlled and manageable fashion, in order to avert an eventual uncontrolled crash.

It does seem that people are getting more militant, more aggressive, more angry these days. Kind of makes me wonder how bad the world could get in a sharp downturn like what we saw about a century ago.

</comment><comment><USER5> Here is Ray's actual blog post referenced in the article:

[https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-how-capitalism-needs- refo...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-how-capitalism-needs-reformed- parts-1-2-ray-dalio/)</comment>


How do startups find good and cheap programmers in the Valley? - <AUTHOR>

I will hopefully move to the valley soon to found a startup with my bro! The thing is that we are aiming at something big and will need a lot of programmers!
At this early stage, programmers are everything! So how do I found them at the valley? Any suggestions? Are there websites?
By the way, can you hire them for a couple months? How much could that be? I heard that salaries in the valley are crazy, so how can I handle that!! I mean we could hire programmers that work from home in Berlin or Madrid for this early age where we won't have much money, but what would be the advantage of moving to the valley?
How do startup deal with this paradox?
Thanks in advanced!
PS: Any suggestions and link are very welcome
At this early stage, programmers are everything! So how do I found them at the valley? Any suggestion? Are there websites?
By the way, can you hire them for a couple months? How much would the damage be? I heard that salaries are crazy in the valley, so would it be a good idea to hire programmers in Berlin or Madrid for this early age where we won't have much time?
Thanks in advanced! <comment><USER2> You and several thousand of other people here (and everywhere else for that matter) are exactly the same. The talent you seek are often not cheap. If you're expecting to get people to build your company for you without much value proposition, you might as well forget it. If you're hoping to sell them on equity (founder or employee), they must believe in your company and vision.

I assume from your post that you and your brother are cofounders and neither can code? If this is the case, your setup already hardly make any sense. Smart coders will know better. Chances are you hardly know much about the business side of things much less convince coders to build your dream, one that I'm sure hasn't been "truly" validated.

Of course I am assuming and I could be wrong and you did validate your idea correctly and have much more going, but I seriously doubt it (and I'm trying to say that nicely here).

You should in all sense, validate the idea with REAL potential users, not your friends. If that pans out and you have limited funds, outsource a prototype first. THEN and only then, should you consider moving to the valley after you've got some minor traction and a working demo. The valley is not cheap and unless you live somewhere like Manhattan, you're not helping your financial situation much more. You're making it worse.

Networking is important but working smart is also important. You can make online connections before coming here. You have your odds stacked against you if you don't have local coders for raising (whether you hire before or after). Majority of all investors won't invest unless you have in-house coders so the long term strategy of hiring overseas hopefully isn't something you were planning and is only in consideration for your prototype/demo.

Salaries here are crazy but that's how it goes. At this point in your startup, I would seriously consider finding a cofounder and define very specific roles between you and your brother. And hopefully you're bringing enough knowledge on the business side as you're expecting your coder to bring to the table on the technical side. After all, you don't want to bring on someone who can't code at all and expect them to learn, no one wants to team up with an inexperience business cofounder only to have them learn and certainly not TWO of them. Something to consider.

Ideas are great but alone they're not worth much. You need to make it worthwhile for whoever you're working with as well. If you can get a prototype and demo up, pitching to coders AFTERWARDS make things a bit easier. Something to consider.

Best of luck

<comment><AUTHOR> Well maybe the message went out wrong.

1\. We are both programmers, but we will need more people... 2\. The thing is that if we get a beginning investment of 10K we dont want to blow it off inmediately on one single guy...What I was asking is how to invest it the better way possible? (that is what I meant with cheap)

<comment><USER2> If you're both coders, stay true to what you're suppose to be doing. Bootstrap your prototype yourselves and make it a true MINIMUM viable product. You don't need a 3rd developer as much as you want one, or a 4th or 5th right now. One you get some tractions, there will be more doors open to you.

However, as someone else noted, if you're looking for cheap help, you're probably in the wrong place. While there are many talented people who may consider working for cheap or pure equity, it's something that naturally happens if they believe in you, your brother, your company, your vision, etc... It's not something you should go out of your way to try to convince people. Hard sales rarely work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone who's basing their business model on cheap programmers is doomed to fail. The reason is that he/she does not understand the inherent nature of programmers. The quality therefore productiveness of programmers follows the power law distribution, meaning that a single good programmer can not be matched by 100 average coders. So if not possible to pay him a stellar salary, try with equity options. However your idea must be worth something, and the cofounders need to be worth something, which I seriously doubt.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you move here, your options are

1\. start lean:

Only hire founders who will work for nothing. You can also hire new people and train, but that's /very slow/ and not really recommended if you are a "startup" rather than a lifestyle business.

or

2\. get funded. take the money (and the publicity. 1% of a funded company is going to be perceived as more valuable by most people than 50% of the same company before it's funded) and hire good people.

For both 1 and 2, the valley is great. It's a great place to meet people who have the technical skills (and the financial acumen) to become a co-founder. It's also a great place to find people who might fund you, and it's a wonderful place to find people you'd want to hire if you had a lot of money.

The thing of it is, people get paid more around here, but standards are higher, too. A mediocre SysAdmin in silicon valley, if you move him to, say, the Sacramento area, will be like a minor god.

This isn't to say that you can't find good people outside of silicon valley, but the average here is higher. I'd say high enough higher to justify our inflated wages. If you are paying market rate for market skill, even though you are paying more here, I'd say you are at least getting as much skill per dollar as you would elsewhere, and maybe more.

Hang out at the hacker dojo, go to various meetups, meet people. It's pretty great. Personally, I think it's worth the extra cost just for the social life. I feels pretty great to be surrounded by all these smart people who are interested in the same sorts of things you are interested in.

But really, if you want to hire people on the cheap, this is not the place to do it. You would be better off almost anywhere else in the world. Hiring foreigners (or Midwesterners) and having them work remote is one way to do it. Moving to Texas is another popular option.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Well maybe the message went out wrong.

This is not what I was asking for! Infact, we are both programmers. So I wasn't trying to offense anybody!

The thing is that if we get an early investment of 10K (we also want to ask for the less possible that we could need) we dont want to blow it off inmediately on one single guy...

What I was asking is how to invest it the better way possible to finish a prototype? (that is what I meant with cheap)

What I was looking for are things like: 1\. Hire a prgrammer for a month for around 5K to help you with the core. You can find them in ... 2\. At the same time hire 2 trainees for 2K each and... etc

Can someone give me an advice on that?

<comment><USER5> 5k? 2K? You aren't going to find developers to work for that money for such a short timespan.

If you are two software developers, time to buckle down and build an MVP. Being 2 developers you are in a great position to do this. Once you have that, and still no money, you'll only have equity, so find a co-founder who believes in your product and give him equity. Build out the product, get traction and then go looking for capital, any financing round at this point should give you enough cash to make solid hires. Then it's time to really get to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Programmers aren't just cogs in a system, and this is a mistake that many managers make. (And this is insulting to potential hires, by the way.) If you only know that you need "a lot" of them, you need to clarify the nature of the work. For example...is it a web site, will there be databases involved, is this software to power some kind of machine, will it use a network, will it require a GUI, will it run on Mac or Windows or Linux, are there restrictions on what it must interact with, is it safe to open-source the project and use GPL'd libraries, etc.? These details will also help you to write job postings.

In general, you get what you pay for, only less. Code has to be maintained, and even if something is thrown together in "a couple months", you may regret that for anything except a prototype.

A single excellent programmer may very well handle your entire project, and ten horrible programmers may never get it done. If you're not experienced dealing with programmers, then set up some kind of deal where you pay only when it's _finished_ and you see regular progress from the people you hire. Be prepared to set aside plenty of time to test what is given to you, and do _both_ expected and unexpected things with it. You need to be in a position to reject their work if they say it's "done" and you can still see quirks and instability (because some programmers can be lazy or clueless).

The cost of living in the valley is very high, so anyone living there will need more money for that reason alone. It wouldn't surprise me if you paid nearly 50% extra. This _might_ be worth it, especially if it means finding someone right away instead of 6 months from now, but keep it in mind.

</comment><comment><USER7> 1\. As I see it, the main advantage of being in a high-tech area is networking opportunities. There are also more _good_ programmers and cofounders available, but the former is expensive.

2\. Many startups don't need that many programmers early on. I prototyped my latest project by myself in under two weeks.

</comment><comment><USER8> Find some high-school graduate, not-yet-going-to-college supergenius coder- deities. The thing is, I don't think they're actually cheap.

Another possibility is to drive a nondescript van down Castro Street on a weekday around lunch, pick out a scrappily dressed young male, and kidnap him. Make sure you're driving facing west (or is it north? I mean south) so that you don't get trapped by the railroad. You'll need guns, I hear you can get them in Reno.

</comment><comment><USER9> For starters, don't use the word "cheap".

If you can't afford to pay now, offer them shares/equity/whatever-it's-called.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hmm....try checking out universities in the area ?</comment>


Why I Turned Down A $20,000/Year Client - <AUTHOR> http://creativeoverflow.net/why-i-turned-down-a-20000year-client/ <comment><USER3> I worked away as a (very) low earning freelancer for several years after the dot com bust so I'm only knowledgable in hindsight, but.. _She complained about my fee – constantly_ is the #1 indicator that a client will ultimately be a huge pain in the ass you shouldn't have taken on, in my experience.

For a client to "negotiate" early on or from contract to contract is wise and can form the basis of a healthy client/vendor relationship, but _complaints_ are indicative of someone who's happy to see and treat you like a cog in their machine.

<comment><USER4> > _but complaints are indicative of someone who 's happy to see and treat you > like a cog in their machine._

... a cog in their slipshod, sand-in-the-gears, barely-operational machine in most cases.

<comment><USER5> A client that pays on time and, even better, via direct deposit, and doesn't complain or question you every month feels soooo much more professional. They give you a sense of great stability (financial and psychological). These are great partners, not just clients.

<comment><USER6> Yikes. I don't know if you are in the US or not, but in the US "direct deposit" means the depositor has both deposit and withdrawal rights (ostensibly to let them self-correct any deposit errors).

I would never permit a client that level of access to my bank account, not even for just a deposit-only account which automatically sweeps all funds to another account. To me, that level of interconnectedness says "employer" not "client."

<comment><USER7> In Europe, direct deposits are the norm (they're how you get money into people's accounts), and they have deposit-only rights.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Article made a good point: $20K per year is a good client, but a low paying job. I have thankfully just had a few customers who expected me to always be available, and to turn things around on very short notice, all the time.

The issue is fairness to all customers and except for emergencies allocate large blocks of time, in advance, to each customer and don't interrupt thinking time for one customer by talking to another. In other words, if you are like me and like to work in intense 1 to 2 hour sprints without interruptions, customers who hire me should understand that it might take a few hours to get back to them for non-emergencies.

One sign of a good customer: when they know they are going to have a crunch and ask if they can pay extra for getting "always on" service for a while.

</comment><comment><USER9> > I very rarely miss a family dinner, and I almost never work on the weekends. > These are the perks of working for one's self.

You don't have to work for yourself to do that; indeed I'd think it's a bigger risk when freelancing.

I have a conventional job; my boss and I both know what my hours are (they're written in my contract). I'd never miss an arranged dinner or work a weekend; I'd be amazed and somewhat insulted to even be asked. Is this really something normal over in the US?

<comment><USER10> I think there is a perception of working all the time in the US that isn't entirely true. For one thing people overstate that they're "working like a dog" because it implies some kind of importance.

But, as far as actual working hours, most people I know in IT work a pretty standard 40 hour week. Occasionally they might log in from home for an hour or two, here and there, if they need to catch up. Infrequently (like once or twice per year max) there may be a major release or update that required a week or two of working long hours. That can sometimes be due to slacking off at the beginning of the release phase, or just overly optimistic planning. Generally after a big push like that everybody will take a break and coast for a while or take a few days off.

That's my personal observation of my own team and about 5 or 10 others that I know.

When freelancing though, I felt like I never stopped working!

<comment><USER10> I should add, these are mostly stable companies - not startups fighting for their survival. Generally the larger the company the more stable the hours is my observation.

<comment> __--__ I'm not sure I'd agree with that. With the exception of the one job I had in the games industry, the mid sized startups I've worked for gave me the best work/life balance and stable hours. The crazy hours of a young, small startup are well documented, but I also have a friend who works for IBM who has survived several layoffs over the last decade. He managed that because as they downsize his group, he picks up the slack. That often means working 80-100 hour weeks. He does this for years at a time, until he moves departments. Then he repeats the process all over again.

Maybe the sweet spot is mid-sized startups before they grow out of control and large companies who never seem to downsize? Those two situations never seem to last for more than a few years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't see it as a big problem to change plans somewhat at the start of a project, this is certainly better than doing it half way through. As long as it's not a strategy to get a contractor to do extra work for free.

If you are charging a higher rate, part of the value associated with that is a certain degree of flexibility.

Also don't see the problem with the client wanting a cell number, if you don't want calls on your personal phone just get a cheap second phone + SIM for business. Make it clear which hours you will be available, put the phone on silent during family time and check voicemail periodically. I would be sceptical of giving somebody $20K who won't give me a "real" phone number.

I always find that speaking to somebody on the phone or in person regularly leads to a much better long term working relationship than simply email or IM. It's much easier to trust someone when you can associate them with a face or voice.

<comment><USER12> A higher rate is commensurate with a higher end product. It does not give the client license to change the scope of the project every other day.

Cell phones are for emergency access (the site is down, etc) and only given in specific situations for specific rates. That does not sound like the case here. The client was given a phone number that would go to his cell at specific times which was more than sufficient.

Having regular phone contact is perfectly fine and can be scheduled for regular meetings. Weekly status meetings on ongoing work. Pre and post-launch meetings for specific milestones. Things like that. A client that wants license to call your cell whenever they think of a random bit of information instead of sending it in an email or saving it for a scheduled phone meeting (or scheduling one specifically for it) is not a client you want to have. They clearly don't value your time or the fact that you have other clients and responsibilities.

<comment><USER11> A higher end product will be something that fits requirements well, and sometimes those requirements will change; better to get those changes out of the way to the extent possible before you have written any code.

I agree that giving a personal number and letting people call you at any time should not be necessary but having a business number and email are fairly standard if you are a full time contractor.

<comment><USER13> I am also in favor of getting requirements change in the start but the client should be willing to renegotiate if they change the scope too much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The core problem I see this consultant facing is that they're doing business with an individual person and not with a business. Take people out to dinner. But do business with their companies.

<comment><USER15> Good point, but even when the client is a company you're usually only interfacing with one or two people, either of whom can be high maintenance.

Bottom line is customers suck. You're either a people person who enjoys the challenge of turning customer frowns into smiles, or arrange your business to minimize direct contact with customers.

<comment><USER14> The key difference between working for an annoying employee of a company and working for an annoying person is that the annoying employee isn't spending their own money. Both the spend and the return on spending are (usually) abstractions to employees. They're all too vivid to sole proprietors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "She complained about my fee – constantly"

This is generally a sign that the person you're working with is paying directly from their own pocket, or the business is so small it feels like the equivalent of paying out of their own pocket, even if it's not technically.

I've had _some_ mid sized clients that were still concerned about fee size - and they were family-owned/run. I'm not suggesting people _shouldn 't_ be concerned about a fee at all - they want to know they're getting more value than they're shelling out. It's a valid concern, but should be just one of many factors, and judging by hourly rate alone is a poor measuring stick (but one which few people can get past).

#1 I had someone call me up frantic because their site was broken. I didn't have the time to fix it right then, but _emailed back instructions_ on how to fix it. I said "give this to your web team" (they _had_ at least 2 JS developers on staff who had _created_ the bug in the first place), but 7 hours later I got an even more frantic call to 'just fix it'.

I fixed it, sent an invoice for $200, and got back to my work in 15 minutes. I got a check in the mail the next week. They didn't particularly care what the price was. If I'd sent an invoice for $2k, possibly, but I probably could have said $500 and it still would have been paid. It wasn't that person's money - it was just a problem that needed to be solved, and there was money in the budget to do it.

#2 - had a prospective client complain about their current dev/tech guy, who kept fighting/arguing that some of the requested features couldn't be done, because they're not possible or they'd be too slow. I did a demo in an hour outlining exactly how to do it, what tech to use, how to set it up, and what the code would look like. And still got pushback on my fee, because hourly I'm about 6x what they're paying the other guy, but they only feel comfortable paying 2-3x the current rate. And I'm trying to get across to them that while I have an hourly (and daily, and weekly) rate, the bigger measure is - <USER2> fast is stuff getting done. I've been tempted to offer a project quote, but I've watched the project from afar for several months and it's felt like too many pivots to be stable enough to provide a flat rate quote.

#1 didn't complain at all - provided value, they saved face with their client, and I made $200 in 15 minutes.

#2 spending effectively their own money (or borrowed money) and are cautious about every penny. Again, not that they shouldn't be, but it's much harder dealing with this sort of client.

</comment><comment><USER17> The second and third issues are serious. I read the first issue, being indecisive, as a cry for help from client to professional. After the first scope change on the first day, I'd do my professional duty and inquire if they might want to engage me to determine what they really needed, at 10% or whatever of the estimated project cost. In fact, wouldn't this have been obvious from discussions with the client before the freelancer's bid was accepted? If we abdicate our responsibility to guide the customer to make good choices using our skills and experience, then we often get indecisive clients. Otherwise we are reduced to glorified order takers. For example, if we got the RFP specs and are chatting with the client as we prepared our response, it is perfectly valid to ask them how they arrived at these requirements. If they tell us that they had engaged a brand consultant who laid out a multistep plan that they were now executing on, that is one thing. If they tell us that they decided to issue the RFP on the drive into work this morning, that's another. Is it that hard to detect that major scope changes are in the offing before submitting a proposal?

</comment><comment><USER18> I would love to read what happened next: his resignation letter and her response. Did she try to change the rules? Did he give her a reasonable list of "why"? Did she ever get nasty with him. What happened next??

</comment><comment><USER19> Good points, but seemed a bit misogynistic. Maybe it was the pictures.

<comment><USER20> How did the pictures betray a contempt for women?

<comment><USER21> The whole article used the pronoun "she". Several pictures of women complaining or generally in a bad mood. I removed the pictures and ads first thing when visiting that site. Talk about a "client" not a "gender". When you use the word "she" you are referring to a person's gender, not that person. Since we had no idea who "she" was, other than "some client" it may have been more appropriate to call her "Penny" or some other such name (to protect the identity of said person).

<comment><USER22> We can also butcher the english language even more! For example, why betray the fact that the client was human? He could just use "it", or "a living organism". I mean sticking to the actual facts? The nerve of some people!

In other news "she" will be replaced by "Penny", anywhere, ever. And the world will be a better place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> 100% Kudos. Refusing to take on an adverse relationship is a sign of maturity in business. If you manage your own finances well - saving, and not taking on unnecessarily large recurring expenses - your life will be happier one overall because you'll be able to say "no" when you should.

</comment><comment><USER24> Why not just make it non-gender specific? The female pronouns and imagery really distracts.

<comment><USER25> How? By using 'he' instead of 'she'?

<comment><USER26> It's only acceptable to use "she" if the character in question is positive. Using "she" or stock photos depicting females to refer to a negative character is sexist.

<comment><USER22> I hope that you're speaking tongue in cheek. I mean, I am almost sure you are, but in the past few years the Internet has made my eyes rolling with all the silly code of conducts and special rules.

We seriously have jumped the shark as a species with this stuff. I'm hoping it's just the latest fad of the politically correct "party".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Totally tangential: I'm curious as to why the author included Shutterstock attribution links on all of the images.

Is the author getting some deal where they get images for free if they supply an attribution link?

<comment><USER28> Shutterstock has a blogger program wherein blogs and news websites get free use of their catalog of stock photography in exchange for attribution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Almost unrelated -- the iframes that contain ads on the right side of your page need to either be made a little bigger to avoid the scrollbars that are popping up, or you need to do some CSS tweaks.

</comment><comment><USER30> I guess my attitude here would depend on my pipeline. $20k of freelance work doesn't sound like chicken feed. I'd probably put up with a certain amount of bullshit if they pay in time.

</comment><comment><USER31> Site looks like a content farm to me, complete with lousy advertising.

</comment><comment><USER32> Smart move in my opinion I've faced some of the same decisions .

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't understand why you call it $20K/year. Isn't it $20K/project?

$20K/year is lower than what most programmer interns/entry make these days.

<comment><USER14> No, it's 20k/yr. When you run a consulting business, you value clients by the revenue they'll generate every year. Obviously, you have lots of clients.

<comment><USER33> So how does that work? They hire you for a year, pay you 20K, and how many hours/week do they expect to get (is that in the contract)?

I do consulting myself, and I've never heard of such a strange arrangement.

<comment><USER11> Often it will be for work that is estimated to be delivered in one year, which may be full time or not. Or the project might be delivered in under 1 year the contract includes support for a longer period.

<comment><USER33> You just described a per project contract that's supposed to be delivered in under a year. There's nothing in your description that says you're supposed to work for the whole year. You can finish it in one day.

<comment><USER14> Nobody said anything about delivery constraints. 20k/yr is a sales figure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Did anyone else notice sexism?</comment>


Show HN: Noty – Uptime monitoring with SMS/Phone call alert - <AUTHOR> https://noty.im <comment><AUTHOR> noty is a my side project that I have been working on three month. It's an uptime monitoring system, like pingdom or Apex Ping. I'm in a very early stage and lots of feature is still missing.

I build it because I cannot found any service that will SMS/Call me when site is down/slow, and have a simple to use interface. Apex is what I found that's very cool, but it lacks of SMS/Phone alerting when I tried.

I also open source it because of working as a DevOps, I feel the pain of all monitoring tool. Nagios, Icinga, Sensu all rely on a third party to do SMS/Phone alert such as PagerDuty. So I build this to help everyone who don't want to pay for my service can install the whole thing and run it themselves. It lacks of document now, but that'll on my roadmap for next month.

A long the way, I realize I need more than that such as monitoring worker/cron/security(check if open MongoDB/Redis port accidently, alert when user SSH into server). I also want to monitor uptime for internal service(inside a VPC or behind a firewall) as well. Those are thing on my next list, and seamless bot intergration so you can manage everything from your slack/bot channel. Because at the end of the day, all we want for an uptime monitoring is alert. Charting is nice to have but alert is the most important thing. I want the service is just something like set and forget. Simple add the bot, tell it to monitor some service, and it message you when the service is down. So that's is on next roadmap.

At this moment, noty is just yet another uptime monitoring tool. I plan to make the development transparency(issues/roadmap) and 100% open source all the component, including any infrastructure setup.

If you signed up and want to use SMS, but don't want to subscribe to a plan yet, just send me an email and I will assign free SMS credit for your testing.

Thank you for your time and looking forward to your feedback. You can also hit me directly at firstname.lastname@example.com.</comment>


WikiLeaks offers $20,000 for information on former DNC staffer's murder - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/wikileaks-20000-seth-rich-dnc-2016-8 <comment><USER3> WikiLeaks is becoming a political mess with Assange leading the charge.

The philosophy that all information should be public is just absurd. There is a reason that the whistle-blowers prior passed their information to reporters, it allowed for certain pieces of information to be redacted.

Sending out the name of every woman voter in Turkey does not benefit anyone. Leaking the private conversation of a man and his daughter does not benefit anyone.

Assange's crazed obsession of having WikiLeaks in the news doesn't help either, it only leads to further politicization and larger claims. The whole site has just turned into a show more than anything.

<comment><USER4> I find it weird that all these critiques from liberals come just when Wikileaks released info that the DNC primaries were rigged. Before that, it was pretty much all praise. Now, it turns out one of their informant may have been the victim of political assassination and you focus on the fact that they released a conversation of a dad and his daughter, which is of course a blunder but still, compared to the other potential news... Not that I want to see Trump win of course, but I don't want to give a free pass to the other side either.

edit: grammar

<comment><USER5> I think calling the primaries "rigged" misses a lot of nuance about the Parties in the US and the situation at hand.

First, parties are clubs and they can have their own rules about their internal elections and campaigns. The rules of the normal election at federal level do not apply. The whole free association thing.

Second, Bernie is not "real" democrat. He was prior and plans on returning to the Senate as an independent. He joined/registered early enough before the process started... but essentially he was just renting the ticket. I can understand how the party would try to dissuade that.

Which leads to my third point, the party has to care about its platform, future viability and not just one candidate. The Clinton have a long history with the DNC. Obviously Bill was a generally well liked president before (by the base) but they have done a lot over the years to support other Democratic candidates in State, Congressional and even Mayoral races. They've raised a lot of money for the DNC and down tickets candidates.

Finally, Bernie didn't earn any extra points (my eyes) by claiming a lot of problems with voting and the process it self. He benefit from the system where there were caucuses; in NYC (where the DNC electoral organizer sucks) he voters that were purged were in heavy HRC; and to take the the next level the campaign started claiming at the end it was going to flip the super delegates after bitching about it for a while.

TL;DR Parties have their own rules; Bernie did not pay his DNC dues; parties have to care about a lot more then a single election; Bernie acted like a spoiled child about ballot box issues.

Disclosure: I'm registered independent in NY. Can't vote in either parties primary as a result of that.

<comment><USER6> Currently, the presidency is like a public park bench placed on private land. The bench is public property and everyone has the same theoretical right to sit on it - but there are only two paths to the bench, and both paths' owners charge huge fees.

A hundred years ago, it probably seemed possible to build a third path - <USER2> with our modern understanding of game theory, we know a two-party system is the inevitable result of first-past-the-post. Building a third path is impossible.

This creates an inconvenient contradiction - the moral legitimacy of the person sitting on the bench derives from the fact that everyone has the same right to sit on it, but we can quite plainly see the criteria for moral legitimacy are not met in practice.

Some people would say we should aspire to meet the criteria for moral legitimacy; and therefore that, regardless of their private status, their internal elections for access to the path should be free, fair and open to all.

Of course, other opinions are available. Some people would argue that the private property owners' rights were more important, morally, than the legitimacy of the presidency. Or that the idea of pursuing morality in politics is a joke. Or that our consent to our rulers isn't derived from the moral legitimacy of their being fairly elected, but comes from some other source such as habit or force of arms. Or that everything is a shade of grey, america is better than russia or north korea, and improving sounds like a hassle who can be bothered?

<comment><USER7> Nicely crafted analogy. I don't see it.

I'm very involved in party politics and have run for office.

The Democratic Party isn't a single thing. I can't even summarize it briefly. One facet is a bunch of independent groups sharing the same logo, tribal identity. Another is a hierarchy of squabbling ad hoc volunteer organizations fighting each other for relevancy. A third are the Democratic themed campaigns which are largely parasitic on the party organizations. A fifth are the loose coalitions of like minded interest groups also squabbling for resources and relevance.

The DNC isn't even that influential. Closest analog I can think of is a trade association that hosts conferences.

I can't speak directly to the GOP's structure. From observations and contact with their players, they're similar.

People don't get how candidates are chosen to run for office. Especially at the top of the ticket. I'm talking before the primary / caucus. Special interest groups form and then go candidate shopping. "Superstar" electable candidates, like GWB and Obama, are selected, groomed, promoted to other interest groups (investment clubs, individuals). Note that these groups filled the vacuum left by the decline of the traditional GOP and Dem party machines.

All the other candidates are delusional self promoters. They literally have almost no chance. But they run anyway, to promote their brands, to take one for the team, to get the experience, because _anything_ can happen during the campaign cycle, etc.

Me personally, I'm still gobsmacked that Trump iced out both Cruz and Rubio. My initial post-mortem for the GOP 2016 is Trump's dark horse victory just demonstrates how dysfunctional the GOP has become (the Tea Party has driven away their "moderates").

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Of course you'll be called a "conspiracy theorist" for speculating about this case in any way deviating from the official narrative. But the circumstances are extremely suspicious.

The DNC voter expansion data director was found shot dead, assassination style, two bullets in the back, in one of the safest neighborhoods of DC. Nothing was taken off his person. No forensic evidence was left behind. Yet the police deemed it a "robbery gone wrong." How can anyone believe this was a robbery gone wrong?

<comment><USER9> > Of course you'll be called a "conspiracy theorist" for speculating about > this case in any way deviating from the official narrative.

Prior to Snowden, people who warned about extensive government surveillance were dismissed as 'conspiracy theorists'. After Snowden, everyone said, "oh all this was common knowledge anyway".

Prior to the DNCLeaks, Sanders supporters who complained about the DNC favouring Hillary were dismissed as 'conspiracy theorists'. After to the leaks, everyone said, "oh this was all common knowledge anyway"

Things are getting pretty messed up. I used to mentally snicker at anyone who seriously used terms like 'liberal media' and 'mainstream media' as pejoratives. And yet here we are in 2016, and it's harder and harder to deny that they are right to use terms like that.

And I'm appalled. I don't know what to do about it, but when you have self- declared liberal readers of the NYTimes complaining that they have to go to _Fox News_ of all places to get the full story[0], then you know there are serious problems.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/public-editor/liz-spayd- th...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/public-editor/liz-spayd-the-new-york- times-public-editor.html?_r=1)

<comment><USER10> >Prior to the DNCLeaks, Sanders supporters who complained about the DNC favouring Hillary were dismissed as 'conspiracy theorists'. After to the leaks, everyone said, "oh this was all common knowledge anyway"

Multiple times in this very thread, the argument is "this is how the DNC is supposed to operate, they can do whatever they want since it's a private organization". Which is frankly even worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very strong anti-Wikileaks vibe in this thread. But, why? Someone was murdered (irrespective of if they're a Wikileaks source or not) and Wikileaks is putting money on the table to help get it solved and bringing greater attention to it. In my book trying to help solve murders is a Good Thing™.

I have to say I am surprised, in 2016, how well the Red Scare still works in the US. You say Russia is behind something and the entire american public ignore the actual content of the leaks and talk about how evil Putin is.

<comment><USER12> It's because Assange is just offering this reward to create this news story in order to harm Hillary Clinton as much as possible as part of his personal vendetta against her. I respect Manning and Snowden immensely, but Assange now is clearly playing a personal game which happens to be extremely dangerous for the rest of us.

<comment><USER13> The guy has practically sacrificed his life and you think he is going to offer $20,000 just to hurt Hillary Clinton?

He is a smart guy and I'm sure if his intention was to get revenge on her he might be able to come up with something a little more creative no?

<comment><USER14> Yes, he's admitted in interviews that he has a vendetta against Clinton. Smart people act impulsively and irrationally, too, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The subject at hand is not about Wikileaks' journalistic ethics, rather it is about a reward for a murder of an DNC worker during what police suspect was an "attempted robbery" even though nothing of value was taken from his body. Both the family and Wikileaks are suspicious since he has been identified as the leaker of the DNC emails. I don't see this as Wikileaks grandstanding if he was the true leaker but YMMV.

From the Washington Post: "...Rich was shot twice in the back as he walked to his townhouse about 4:20 a.m. Nothing was taken, but police have said attempted robbery is their leading theory for a motive, noting a spike in robberies in the neighborhood in the preceding weeks. WikiLeaks released the trove of emails later that month, on July 22...."

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public- safety/wikileaks...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public- safety/wikileaks-offers-reward-in-killing-of-dnc-staffer-in- washington/2016/08/09/f84fcbf4-5e5b-11e6-8e45-477372e89d78_story.html)

<comment> Trill-I-Am Who's identified him as the leaker?

<comment><USER15> FOX News video of Assange implying it: [http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/08/10/assange- implies-m...](http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/08/10/assange-implies- murdered-dnc-staffer-was-wikileaks-source.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wikileaks is the new Fourth Estate. They're doing a job which the old media seems no longer interested in taking on.

It's not responsible to let conspiracy theories about this bubble under the surface without any evidence. Hopefully we will all get some clarity on whether this relates to the DNC leaks or the murders were just coincidental.

</comment><comment><USER17> A serious question :- In the context of this story, what is the difference between wikileaks offering money for information from a whistle blower and a media outlet offering money for a story (ie chequebook journalism)?

<comment><USER18> > A serious question :- In the context of this story, what is the difference > between wikileaks offering money for information from a whistle blower and a > media outlet offering money for a story (ie chequebook journalism)?

I see it more like when the police offer a reward for " _information leading to the capture of ..._ ".

There's nothing inherently wrong with the media paying for information. It's the same as paying for hotels and plane tickets to get to and stay at where the story is.

The money issue becomes real when it flows in the other direction. Here's XYZ to run this pro-Clinton piece where XYZ could be something tangible like cash or intangible like future access for quotes/interviews.

<comment><USER19> > There's nothing inherently wrong with the media paying for information.

I'm tempted to agree, but almost every reputable media outlet does in fact claim that there's sometimes wrong with paying for stories, most in their own ethics handbook.

The common explanation is that "paying for information creates an additional incentive for subjects to lie or embellish the truth. And even if a subject tells the truth, the fact that he's been paid undermines the journalist's position as a disinterested observer".

However, this seems rather absolute for what appears to be only mild cause.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> it's pretty clear from interviews with Assange that Wikileaks is entirely ego driven, and always has been. When his trial was happening rather than let Wikileaks distance itself from it, like other leaders like this would, he used it as a tool to argue his case to the public. He has been releasing information out of spite rather than public good. An impartial organization like Wikileaks should exist, that whistleblowers can come to - it just really can't be run like this

<comment><USER21> Yes, being cooped up in an embassy for years while state actors hold phony charges against you threatening your arrest must be for the thrill of it.

<comment><USER22> He can leave at any time remember. The locks are on the inside of his door.

EDIT: Awesome! Downvoted with no comment!

<comment><USER21> If he leaves, he goes to jail.

<comment><USER22> But he can leave. He isn't in jail. It is his choice to stay where he is. I really can't see why people insist he is being held there against his will.

<comment><USER21> Yes, you're right. I suppose it is a very comfortable position to be in and we should envy him.

Thanks!

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure it's a position that would be envied as such, I guess everyone is different. I suppose if you were wanted for questioning by police for a serious crime that you wanted to evade and you hadn't got a friendly government seeking positive news coverage to give you a legal loophole to remain at large, you might.

<comment><USER23> The post you replied to was being sarcastic.

"Questioning by police" is an enormous understatement. If Assange leaves the embassy, he will be arrested, extradited to the US, and likely convicted of treason. His fate would at best look something like Chelsea Manning's, and at worst, execution.

<comment><USER22> Oh, I see.

As others have pointed out, very unlikely he could be done for treason given he isn't American. But let's not let facts get in the way of some good down voting.

<comment><USER10> You're right, as a non-American he'd just get sent to Gitmo where he faces indefinite detention without any recourse, without any legal rights or constitutionally required due process, and endless torture+interrogations for the rest of his life. But at least he can't be found guilty of treason in a constitutionally bound American court system by a jury of peers!

<comment><USER22> Have any changes been made against him in the US to date? Genuinely don't know the answer and a cursory search I can't see anything obvious.

Also, why would the US not have an extradition request for him open with the UK? The UK would be much more likely to do as the USA pleases than Sweden.

<comment><USER24> > Have any changes been made against him in the US to date?

There is a publicly disclosed criminal investigation, and several years ago there were reports based on a non-detailed reference in an email in the Stratfor leak (which didn't come from anyone who would have firsthand knowledge) that there was a sealed indictment produced from that investigation, which the Justice Department has flatly denied.

So, apparently not.

> Also, why would the US not have an extradition request for him open with the > UK?

If there were charges, there probably would be an extradition request.

<comment><USER10> More importantly, if there were criminal charges, it would mean going through the regular channels of the criminal justice system. I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to treat Assange as an enemy combatant (i.e. no due process).

<comment><USER24> > More importantly, if there were criminal charges, it would mean going > through the regular channels of the criminal justice system.

I'm not sure why you think this would be a problem; the regular criminal justice system has processes for handling classified evidence and is the regular venue for people accused of espionage.

> I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to treat Assange as an enemy combatant > (i.e. no due process)

The cases challenging detentions under the Bush Administration pretty clearly established that "unlawful enemy combatant" designation comes with its own due process protections ( _lawful_ enemy combatants are Prisoners of War, who have rather extensive legal protections.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The tinfoil hat crowd was having a field day with this murder before Assange did this, single-handedly moving the "DNC assassination" meme from infowars to outlets like the WaPo.

Assange is an anarchist who wants to burn down the system, and he's really smart. I don't know why Seth Rich was killed, but the only thing Assange's actions say to me is that Assange saw an opportunity to pour gasoline on a fire and he took it. In other words, all the Wikileaks offer brings to this story is a reminder that Assange is really good at stirring stuff up.

<comment><USER26> If you dont know why Seth Rich was killed then how can you call anyone with their own theory a 'tinfoil hat crowd'?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If this is a conspiracy and someone knows something about this murder why would $20,000 change their mind if they haven't already reported their knowledge to the police?

<comment><USER28> Presumably that's not the point. It raises awareness of the death (first I've heard of this). That gets people talking (even without proof) and gets the Wikileaks name on anything that _does_ turn up.

Charitably, it could cause someone to realize that some piece of knowledge is part of a larger issue, but I'd be stunned if that was the real point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It is straight up weird that Assange is going after Hillary because he's a bit butthurt about her. Its funny when a whistleblowing body is explicitly partisan for personal reasons. Don't have strong feelings one way or the other

</comment><comment><USER30> Assange has clearly suggested in a interview recently that DNC staffer Seth Rich was indeed the person responsible for the DNC leak. (and not the Russians as the DNC would like us to believe)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp7FkLBRpKg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp7FkLBRpKg)

He was shot dead in a "robbery" where nothing was stolen from him.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wikileaks, and Assange specifically, keep implying Seth Rich leaked them DNC emails to attention whore on his death. Really disgusting behavior.

<comment><USER32> I wonder what was Seth Rich's job at DNC ? Technically, could he have leaked those emails ? How can we be sure Assange is dishonest when he implies Seth Rich was the source ? Is there solid proof that Rich was really the victim of a failed robbery and not revenge disguised as robbery ?

<comment><USER31> >"Whistle-blowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks," Assange said. "As a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington."

>When the interviewer interjected that the murder may have been a robbery, Assange pushed back.

>"No," he said. "There's no finding. So… I'm suggesting that our sources take risks."

>When pressed as to whether Rich was, in fact, the leaker, Assange stated that the organization does not reveal its sources.

[http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/08/10/assange- implies-m...](http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/08/10/assange-implies- murdered-dnc-staffer-was-wikileaks-source.html)

Assange's transparent conflation of the murder of Seth Rich with "our sources" is obvious. He won't outright lie and claim Rich as a source, but he's nakedly prodding you to form your own conspiracy theory.

<comment><USER30> Oh believe me he will leak the proof for it too. He will slowly destroy the Democrats by constantly leaking proof of their outright criminal conduct.

And Trump doesn't strike me as a man that will allow the Clintons to get away from this. He will definitely persecute them to the fullest extent after he has won the elections, he even said himself that he believes Hillary should go to prison.

<comment><USER33> Why would I believe you when you have no proof and Assange has no proof. If Assange has proof he should release it, otherwise he's just injecting more conspiracy theories into an election that is already poisoned by them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It happened at 4am in Bloomingdale, a recently gentrifying and possibly the robberiest neighborhood in DC right now, during a wave of robberies. The police said there was sign of a struggle, the guy was almost certainly shot in a botched robbery attempt. The conspiracy theories are offensive.

</comment><comment><USER35> There sure is a hell of a lot of smoke around the DNC this year for there to not be any fire.

</comment><comment><USER36> Assange is one of those celebrities you hope you never meet in real life</comment>


Business Words to Ban - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/silverman/2009/02/10-business-words-to-ban.html

<comment><USER2> _9\. And/or An editor once told me, "And-slash-or means 'and' or 'or,' so pick one, unless you have no idea what you're trying to say, in which case, by all means use it."_

I think that to some people this could seem misleading and/or incorrect.

 _8\. People manager As opposed to "Goldfish supervisor?" Seriously, this is a "try not to offend anyone term," that makes managers of people and non-people (whatever that is) feel less like managers or people and more like guppies._

"Manager" is a very wide term. You can manage processes, you can manage inventories, you can manage people, you can manage documents. Is a document manager a people manager? No.

 _5\. Take Away You take away food in a paper bag with a clown on it. Period._

Sometimes "What's the take-away from this?" can be a good quick synonym for "What are the important conclusions and insights we should get from this?" You might dislike it, but it's hardly ban-worthy.

Certainly, some of the examples there are pretty annoying, but I don't get the whole "words to ban" thing... seems like a pretty weak article for a publication by a prestigious university.

<comment><USER3> Well in normal English, 'or' is generally exclusive. _The cat is black or red._ (Generally understood that he is one or the other, not both.)

So, to me, 'and/or' is the English equivalent of the inclusive OR. _The cat is black and/or red._ (The cat may be black or red or both.)

Pretty sure this was discussed here a while back. (English boolean operators versus the programming kind.)

      English     Logic
      and         AND
      or          XOR
      and/or      OR

So yeah, I'd agree with you in that I think the author's banning of 'and/or' is wrong. Honestly the only ones that I agreed with were 6, 7, 8, and 10. I've never even heard people use several of the others.

One thing I hate is my current employer's culture of referring to people as 'resources'. I am not a lump of coal or a gallon of oil thank you very much. It took me quite a while to figure out that 'allocating resources' was a euphemism for 'reorganizing', which is itself a euphemism for 'firing some dead weight'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At least we now know the words and phrases that can annoy the most individuals most of the time. The net-net is that it can be valuable. However, the bottom line is that it is a challenge to use them in a value added way.

My take away from this article is that its a space filler. It was a slow news day and/or his real news sources were out of pocket.

You know what I mean?

Oh well, if this is the worst we will have to deal with today, its going to be a good day.

</comment><comment><USER5> "challenge". So many people have installed this regex in their speech centers I wanna cap 'em with a pipe wrench:

        s/problem|issue|difficulty|flaw|bug|shit don't work/challenge/g

</comment><comment><USER6> An annual favorite of mine: Lake Superior State University Banished Words List (<http://www.lssu.edu/banished/>)

</comment><comment><USER7> Really on target!

<comment><USER8> Do you really think our software for detecting voting rings is this primitive?

<comment><USER3> On that topic, how do you handle the case where a user registers a dozen accounts and then uses them all to vote up his 'main' account? Are IPs tracked or something?

Or is this something I could find out by looking an the source you released for this site?

<comment><USER8> The abuse protection code looks at a bunch of things. IP addrs are the easiest, but it also looks at others. Sorry I can't go into more detail.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> great piece</comment>


Seven Questions Employees Should Ask Before Joining a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.personalbee.com/227/20874981 There are many benefits associated with joining a startup as an employee at any level (energized work atmosphere, little bureaucracy, upside), but there are many significant risks coupled with them as well. Of course, a prospective employee should ask numerous questions of both his/her role and the company before joining any firm, but there is a set of questions specific to joining a startup that people should pose. <comment><USER2> I'm curious about #4 - "What is the plan for exit strategy and its timeframe?" - isn't that a little presumptuous for a first date?

<comment><USER3> seems like a question pretty much anyone related to any startup is going to want to know the answer to.

in fact, all of these questions do.</comment></comment>


Universal Basic Income Will Likely Increase Social Cohesion - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-santens/universal-basic-income-wi_b_8354072.html <comment><USER2> If I read it correctly, in all of the case studies referenced in the article, the basic income provided was exogenous. That is, the basic income going to the villagers, was not coming from the villagers. So it's not surprising that everyone got chummy when the money flowed in. However a complete picture would show how the people paying felt about it.

<comment><USER3> The money for basic income will come from automation driven productivity improvements. Many of the people who are "paying for it" (ie, putting in the thousands of man-years to create those technologies) have exactly that intent, to free people from drudgery.

EDIT: pvnick, yes the consensus is measured in decades. Some think fewer, some think more, but yes and thanks.

<comment><USER4> A $10,000 basic income, perhaps the bare minimum to prevent starvation and homelessness in the most rural parts of the country, for everyone in the United States over the age of 18 involves roughly 2.5 trillion dollars in payouts per year, about 10% GDP for the country (about twice the GDP accounted for by social security). Increasing basic income to $20,000 per year doubles that to about 5 trillion, and that is still starvation wages in big cities. I am curious as to how automation pays that kind of cash. That's a big freaking number.

Your suggestion about automation providing the wealth for basic income is the _only_ argument that makes sense, because wealth redistribution from the nebulous "rich" just would not work on such a massive scale. Personally I don't think we're there yet, but maybe in a couple decades when we have strong AI and automation is more pronounced and self-improving.

<comment><USER5> US GDP has risen by more than 5 trillion since the year 2000 driven mostly by productivity improvements from tech. So we could already be doing it if we wanted to.

<comment><USER6> Is that in 2000 dollars?

<comment><USER7> Per the numbers Wolfram Alpha is giving, the increase seems to be close to $8 trillion nominally, which amounts to something over $5 trillion in 2000 dollars.

Edited to add: I wondered how much of this was population growth, and certainly there has been some but real GDP per capita has grown about $5k over that period.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for looking into this!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Consider agriculture. It used to employ over 80% of the workforce, now less than 2%. But now, with over 98% unemployment, we're not starving. Instead, we're wasting 40% of our food, exporting food, and reading articles about obesity epidemics and how the grocery store is reducing its 57 varieties of ketchup so that we won't have so much difficulty choosing.

Manufacturing is going that way. We're well into the disposable junk and cheaper to replace than repair era. Relatively few people work in industry now.

That only leaves services. But how many people does it take to hand you your burger or bag your new cellphone? Repairmen have less to do now that most everything is disposable. Even in the more professional level services, salaries have been stagnant for decades, moreso than minimum wage in some cases. Sure companies complain that they can't find good talent, but they're not willing to pay for it, so they don't really need it.

The traditionalists say "people will just go do something else, like they always have" but what? Well, for now, some could become Uber drivers or such...until the automated cars come online in a few years. Then what? And how many Uber drivers do we need? Can they make a good living doing that if everyone else is too?

People moved from the farms to the cities to do industrial work, then commuted from the suburbs to do commercial and services work. Where do they go when none of the farms, cities, and suburbs need workers anymore (and they can't afford to live in any of those places)?

<comment><USER9> i think a major problem is that basic income will breed some very undesirable attitudes with those people who will depend on long term basic income. Dependency on handouts breeds passivity and indifference, you will also see a very violent and angry younger generation - these people might be very angry at anybody who sticks out of the gray norm of basic income.

i think basic income will not breed critical thinkers, instead you achieve a state of intolerant and angry uniformity.

You might also study some prior experience here : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus)

<comment><USER10> Nice try with the commie scare. The Soviet Union was the opposite of UBI. They maximized employment, even if it meant multiple people doing one boring job (imagine 5 convenience store clerks in one store, forced to the there all day). And most people couldn't actually choose what they would do in life. This is the opposite of what UBI would do for people.

<comment><USER9> commie scare? labeling away you opponents is a very nice method of arguing, it also is not without historic precedence.

Now concerning choice - you better ask some long term unemployed about the degree of choice that they are experiencing. I guess that this UBI thing is only a catchword to turn long term unemployment into the socially accepted norm.

Still in my book: UBI creates a situation that is very similar to the hidden unemployment of socialism - indifference and apathy is the result when your salary and living conditions have absolutely no connection to the effort that you have to put into it all.

<comment><USER10> Many put it tons of effort and live in near-poverty conditions. How do you think that feels as a disconnect between effort and result? They are trapped, with no options.

The indifference and apathy of bureaucratic communism comes from lack of choice, starting with who to vote for.

And as for long-term-unemployment... that's kind of the reason UBI is being proposed, because automation will eliminate so many jobs there simply won't be enough work to go around.

Would you prefer the new norm to be the owners of that automation forcing those locked out of work opportunities from birth into worse and worse living conditions, because in the automated future their labour has no value?

<comment><USER9> >Would you prefer the new norm to be the owners of that automation forcing those locked out of work opportunities from birth into worse and worse living conditions, because in the automated future their labour has no value?

i don't think that is inevitable; there is a lot you can do - shorter working days come to mind. Also mind me but technology is also creating jobs, a hundred years ago there were no programmers, that's a profession created by technology. A hundred years ago there were more jobs in assembly, nowadays work is more varied - employment is more specialized and there are professions that nobody thought of back then.

The worst you can do is to label off a large percentage of your population and to refuse to educate them. You end up in a situation where many shops need to import H1B workers.

>The indifference and apathy of bureaucratic communism comes from lack of choice, starting with who to vote for.

I think that in the soviet block most people were working on the construction of Egyptian pyramids - projects that were not productive in any sense, everything was subordinate to the the military industrial complex, etc. There are many non democratic countries in the world, but here you had it that the bureaucracy was totally out of touch with reality, that's a quite unique situation.

i think that this would be the real danger - a ruling elite that is disregarding any feedback and which is totally out of touch with reality. One can argue that this can't happen in an enlightened democracy, i am not so sure about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think it's especially telling that even in a 3rd world country where one might expect profound poverty to be the norm, a basic income still provided a cushion against the social friction that comes with poverty.

God damn lets just do this already.

</comment><comment><USER12> Basic income is just classical economics rebranded, and basic income is not drastically different from welfare systems that are simple, rule based, and have minimal compliance monitoring, for example Australia's.

Most of the arguments for basic income apply just as well to a welfare system like Australia's. The ones that to not are the worst ones. E.g. it's said that basic income avoids disincentivizing work. And yet as an accounting identity, all redistribution schemes must disincentive work for some people. Welfare systems place a greater disincentive to work on the poorest, which to me makes sense as many of these people have a lower intrinsic incentive to work in the first place. In any case, the lower marginal effective tax rate for the poor under basic income, is only possible because of a higher marginal effective tax rate for the middle class.

<comment><USER13> Why would you need tax with a basic income? Flip it around and incorporate the tax into the income distribution.

<comment><USER12> I don't understand your point. Can you clarify?

For reference, when I speak of "marginal effective tax rate" I mean the marginal effective tax rate after including (1) welfare payments to you, (2) the tax you pay and (3) any basic income you receive, although (3) does not directly contribute to the marginal effective tax rate, since it is zero.

<comment><USER13> I'm just thinking that instead of taxing some other money (primarily debt) to fund the basic income, the basic income itself can be the money (though, additional monies may be desired), which would obviate any need for taxes/reclaimation.

<comment><USER14> > I'm just thinking that instead of taxing some other money (primarily debt) > to fund the basic income, the basic income itself can be the money

The basic income can't be the money that pays for the basic income, unless your concept is that the government _prints_ additional money for the basic income directly (note this is distinct from the Fed printing money and buying government securities, which is just debt financing.) That's possible, just as it is for any government spending, if you break the whole independent central bank system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find it both funny and appalling how Americans view any sort of movement in the common social interest as a threat. It's as if they want to maintain an inegalitarian status-quo that only protects the richest minority, even if they are not part of it. Absolutely ridiculous.

<comment><USER16> Some approach the issue from a Kantian perspective, and ask 'what right does A have to take B's money and give it to C?'[1]

Others (of a more utilitarian leaning) wonder whether redistribution will 'kill the engine of prosperity'. The USA has overtaken Britain in per capita GDP by growing 1% (point) faster per year for 100 years, and many believe that redistribution reduces growth.

What part of this is "absolutely ridiculous"?

[1] [http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Sumner.For...](http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Sumner.Forgotten.html)

<comment><USER15> The part of it that is ridiculous is that Americans protect their richest minority without being part of it.

Seriously, America is the country where paid sickness leaves or maternity leaves are not guaranteed.

America is the country where waiters are expected to make the most of their living income from tips and not from their salary.

America is the country where local governments have outlawed people from collecting rainwater while giving exclusive contracts to rich corporations to collect ground water or pollute it by dumping fracking waste into or near it.

America is the country where the police can rob normal people from their money without probable cause (civil asset forfeiture) and the majority will rally behind said policemen because "blue lives matter".

America is the country where home owners aren't free to plant vegetables in from of their own houses, on their own property and you call that country "the land of the free".

America is the country that goes to war to make corporations and shareholders richer and you all call it "bringing them liberation and democracy" while America's legislators, judges, sheriffs and government officials can be bought by Political Action Committees and "unions", sometimes for as little as access to garden parties, golf clubs, tickets for sports events in VIP boxes and other trinkets.

Do you think those laws are to protect the people, or corporations like Walmart, Costco, Nestle, Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil and others?

Still absolutely ridiculous.

Here's the thing about the future of humanity: if we want to have a future without perpetual (American-caused) war, we must promote and nurture post- scarcity cultures.

<comment><USER17> America is the country that sends the most on health for the worst outcomes

America is the country that spends millions/billions/trillions invading desert countries and does not fund public education

America is the country where politicians have to publish in a register the bribes they take so voters know who they really represent (it is not he voters!)

America is the country that would not regulate derivatives and off market trading

America is not unique in any one of these things. But it is unique in being so rich and so dysfunctional. So smart and creative so cruel and failure prone.

And they have more military than the rest of the world combined, and they are quite will to use it for the indiscriminate slaughter of millions. Sending uniformed psychopaths all over the world to kill and maim was quite risky, so now all those smarts are turning to robots! Killing and maiming by remote control. Evil.

My hope? The USA elects a Tea Party slate of candidates and goes isolationist.

They can keep Elon Musk if they put their seven (or is it nine?) carrier groups in port and leave them there.

In a word (or two): Fuck Off.

<comment><USER18> > My hope? The USA elects a Tea Party slate of candidates and goes > isolationist.

The Tea Party can be motivated to support our continued invasions as long as it fits in their framework or is promoted by their figureheads, just like any other party.

There's too much money to be made in fucking up the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if universal basic income is going to change the ad hoc basic income we already have in place -- the one where I'm supporting my retired parents, my wife, and my pre-workforce kid.

<comment><USER20> If you're supporting your retired parents that's a strong signal of a big failure at a societal level.

<comment><USER21> I disagree. That's why you have children.

<comment><USER22> That philosophy is directly responsible for overpopulation. If you need to have children to keep from starving to death when you're old, you'll want to have a lot of them.

Note that the areas where this is true are precisely the ones with catastrophically high birth rates, and the areas where there are pensions, social programs, etc. are precisely the ones where population is stable, or even falling.

<comment><USER23> > Note that the areas where this is true are precisely the ones with > catastrophically high birth rates, and the areas where there are pensions, > social programs, etc. are precisely the ones where population is stable, or > even falling.

And then those countries with pensions and falling population are mentioned as ones who need to import immigrants in order to keep their pension pyramid scheme working...

<comment><USER22> Well, you could do other things to encourage more births. It's been done before, with significant success.

<comment><USER24> Where? Every country I'm aware of that dipped below replacement fertility has not been able to recover.

<comment><USER22> Israel, for one.

[http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/children-of- isr...](http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/28/children-of-israel/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If I could live and not have a job, I wouldn't have a job. I could do my art and enjoy my life and the economy would crumble while everyone else watches Netflix.

<comment><USER25> If I could live and not have a job, I wouldn't have a job either. I could grow as an engineer, finally pivot into biotech, finish the couple of open source projects I know would be useful to many as opposed to the bullshit job I have in webdev (had, actually, right now I'm finally working on something remotely useful - manufacturing management). The economy would be totally fucking fine, enjoyed by all people, many of whom gotten bored to near-death after watching Netflix for an entire month and decided to follow their passions instead - passions they never had time to follow, because they had to work their asses off in low-paying jobs so that their families could eat a warm meal every other day.

<comment><USER26> You underestimate the laziness of countless spoiled children who have lived in their parents basements watching netflix and playing video games for years when they could be following their passions.

<comment><USER27> "This sounds great, I haven't had any time off since I was 21 through 24!" \- Phillip J Fry

Seriously though, I'd wager the vast majority, if not all of the world's greatest inventions of the last millenium came not from those who inherited great wealth but those who had to struggle, worry, pray and perhaps cry about their fate before their survival instincts threw their imagination and determination into overdrive. UBI on the face of it seems like a noble idea but we are far too confident in what we think we know about the human spirit and our own nature to on average, try to follow the path of least resistance. It can certainly work well in small groups that have strong moral and ethical backbones but I fear it will ruin a land's people in direct proportion to how far it tries to implement it.

<comment><USER28> Galileo's father was essentially a famous renaissance rock star. Newton was the son of a wealthy farmer. Leibniz's and Lord Kelvin's fathers were both professors. Maxwell's father was a baronet, and Werner von Braun's father was a literal duke. Turing was from upper middle class english gentry. Larry and Sergei went to Montessori school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What I'd like to see is machines on the street (like drinking fountains) that dispense (at no charge) nutritious meals. I'd like to see a global network of (robot cleaned) rooms anyone can go into at any time, (at no charge), and sleep. I'd like to see free transportation. Free education. Free places you can go work. Free places to go watch a movie. The best medical care at no charge. I'd like for people to completely have to stop worrying about providing for biological needs and have those met with 0 friction.

And... I'm pretty sure all this will happen with time.

The problem now is we have this myopia about money. We think it's something more than just the symbol or variable it actually is. But really it's a fairly new invention. We have done without it for most of our history.

Don't get me wrong... the invention of money as a concept has allowed great leaps forward in technology and progress. But the concept isn't eternal and it has it's downsides. One is that it creates a certain amount of friction. You have people spending too much effort playing with the symbol rather than what it represents.

Ideally, I'd like to own absolutely nothing. Except for a great big sack. When I need something, I'd tell the sack and out comes the thing I need. When I'm done, it goes back and the sack and disappears and no more worrying about it. That's how I think it should be.

</comment><comment><USER30> No it won't. Full stop.

It will drive a further wedge between the producers and consumers in society, which plays right into the class warfare rhetoric that the politicians who would support UBI are always fomenting.

Who's going to pay for UBI? Everyone! I see the amount of $10,000 thrown about. There are 235 million adults in the U.S. That's $2.35 trillion per annum, more than 13% of the GDP. You don't think the taxation required to generate that kind of money won't reach far down into the middle class? Dream on.

And we are going sacrifice $2.35 trillion for what? It won't increase productivity. If anything it will reduce it somewhat. Yes, I'm ignoring the benefit it will be to the truly needy, and that's important, but for the majority of the country, the UBI will be way more offset by the much higher amount they have to pay in additional taxes.

Social cohesion, my ass.

<comment><USER31> Straw man. Using 'taxation' as a boogeyman is where everybody goes, when first thinking about this topic.

Read more about it. Printing money is another way - I know, it has other effects, but that could be very useful in the current financial situation. There are other solutions as well.

'Money' is an imaginary concept managed by arbitrary rules, and if a BI is created then rules will have to be changed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> People are using Australia as an example, we have very large taxes (most people pay at least 25%, some 35%+) we also have a 10% tax on all goods and high GDP per capita. You cant fund social welfare programs without huge taxes on everyone not just the rich.

<comment><USER33> Australia along with Canada have the highest wealth per person of any countries in the world. Much of the wealth comes from a large land area divided by a tiny population. I remember reading in an Australian magazine about 15 yrs ago (but forget the details) that Australia is the country with the largest proportion of "made-up jobs", i.e. jobs in finance, law, IT, etc which don't actually contribute to the production and distribution of goods and services. By making laws which businesses must comply with by creating "made-up jobs", the government is ensuring there's enough work for everyone, a form of basic income.

<comment><USER6> Oh, indeed. The nanny state is strong here in New South Wales.

You can't open a nursery in a building above a certain height. Even if the kids are only ever going to be on the ground floor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Basic Income sounds great on paper but I fear that it will lead to a new kind of servitude towards the state, that will be the only provider. Politicians will have even more access (direct access) to the quality of life of their electorate. What will stop states to link the "Chinese style credit score" to the quantum of BI one receives?

How will we make sure the quantum of basic income is enough for a decent life? How will we convince people that they got enough and avoid falling into dissatisfaction with it? I suppose people will always bitch about BI being too low.

<comment><USER6> You can look at central and northern European soziale Marktwirtschaft to get some of your questions about how it could work out in practice answered.

They don't have basic income, yet, but they do have fairly generous welfare payments, that do try to provide for a decent life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> In the studies mentioned, were immigrants able to move into the areas receiving UBI and avail themselves of those funds? It doesn't appear so. What difference might that have made? And wouldn't that have made them more realistic experiments? (Were the experiments specifically designed to produce positive outcomes?) Can the experiments even be considered to have been about UBI? What does giving money to a small group and finding it makes them happy have to do with the likely outcome of a state-level wealth distribution scheme? Doesn't receiving money for nothing make everyone happier and more trusting?

<comment><USER8> I don't know whether they did that in the studies, but here in the U.S., we have a long tradition of immigrants moving in and participating in the local bounty. We celebrate it, in fact. A major holiday coming up next month is centered around exactly that - immigrants being thankful for the wealth they had received.

<comment><USER35> That's one of the most disingenuous statements I've ever read. The first European colonists were all scratching an existence out of the ground via their labor and celebrated, as was their religious tradition, the bountiful harvest they had "received" via Providence. That in no way resembles a modern nation-state making direct cash payments (money taken via taxes from the native population) to whoever makes it, by hook or by crook, across the border.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Just like communism.</comment>


To Build a Mobile App Business, Build a Growth Engine First - <AUTHOR> http://www.500.co/mobile-growth-engine-branch/

<comment><USER2> Sweet tactics, very useful, but I disagree completely with the headline for one reason: growth is necessary for success, but not sufficient. Growth doesn't happen without something really great. You can optimize growth techniques in the ways described above when you've iterated on your product enough to already be facing diminishing returns from pure feature-building. Or shit, maybe sooner.

I think of time spent on product as establishing the curve you'll follow: if you're building intelligently, it makes the company and the product more valuable to do more product-building. But time spent on growth can only move you along the curve faster.</comment>


Another New Wrinkle In User Interfaces - <AUTHOR> http://mikeschaffner.typepad.com/michael_schaffner/2007/10/another-new-wri.html <comment><USER2> It sounds like an extension of the T9 predictive text system present on every cell phone I've ever had. If so, it'll probably suffer the same difficulties: There are many more edge cases when you have fewer keys. Typing titles, acronyms and symbols all are painfully slow on T9, you have to click 3 or 4 times to get the desired character.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think Dasher is more interesting. Not sure about the memory requirements, though.</comment>