Why the poor pay more for toilet paper and just about everything else - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/08/why-the-poor-pay-more-for-toilet-paper-and-just-about-everything-else/ <comment><USER3> What the quoted study showed was a lot of "did" and "didn't" behavior, but the article phrased it as "can't".

There are some poor of whom it is literally true that they can't spend $24 on toilet paper. My local food bank gives out rolls of TP, and keeps nearly-empty rolls in the public bathrooms because rolls that are above half get stolen. Some of the clientele literally have every dollar for the month already spoken for, and $24 of TP is not in the budget.

But for a lot of the poor, it's more accurate to say that spending $24 on toilet paper would interfere with other things they've chosen to spend on instead. It's not impossible to come up with $24, but they'd rather spend it in other ways when they do. Now, it's not my place to say that a poor family _should_ or _shouldn 't_ use a small surplus to become more efficient and generate bigger surplus later, when they could spend it on something with a more immediate psychological benefit (like a nicer-than-their-average meal). This isn't a judgment, it's just an observation. But I think it's an important observation to make, because the hidden implication is that an extra $20 a month would allow for a new efficiency (like buying TP in bulk/on sale) which would then snowball. But the reality is that an extra $20 a month rarely has anything close to its full potential effect on efficiency, for psychological reasons. Attempts to ease the inefficiencies of poverty need to account for this.

<comment><USER4> I grew up on welfare, in a single parent home. Parent chainsmoked 2 packs a day, which barely left enough money for decent food let alone toilet paper. And yet, somehow, we stocked up on toilet paper when it was on sale.

<comment><USER3> I have three people I point to for how different the experience can be.

One friend was living on disability (about $570/month) and food stamps (about $140/month), in a group home. His one "luxury" was he'd buy GI-Joe figurines every month, for about $20. At one point he asked me to take him to the store because he wasn't going to be able to walk the 10+ blocks that day. As he was shopping, I realized he had something like 30 pounds of meat in his cart and almost nothing else. I told him to put half of it back and add a bag of potatoes, and that whenever he wanted to cook meat, cook half as much as he normally would and replace the rest with potatoes. It was life-changing for him -- he was able to eat every day, and had enough money left over to start buying things like toilet paper in bulk. I've since lost track of him, and I'm sure he's still poor, but he's a more secure grade of poor than he had been.

Another friend was a divorced mom, recently remarried to a disabled man. She's unable to handle a full-time job, but works a few days a week as a substitute teacher. Between disability, child support, and work she makes maybe $1500 a month. She's always bought in bulk, usually splitting orders with her parents and siblings who live in the same complex. The only real escape from poverty she has is to recover from psychological trauma to the point that she can work full time.

Third is a young couple, both just turned 20, and their son is 3 years old. He's had adequate work for a while, but hides financial information from her, they both have expensive phones they use for things my old prepaid Moto X can do for a lot lower price, and they both have a tendency to eat fast food even though he works at a grocery store that has a good selection and good prices. The two things that have kept them from disaster for the past year: I let them live in my basement for a token amount of rent that I stopped collecting after a few months, and his grandparents have helped them pay off a couple of surprise expenses. She recently found work, and with two incomes they're able to afford their own place fairly comfortably, but for a while there it looked like they were going to get into a bad cycle like the one detailed in the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The poor get financially hosed in so many different ways in the US that singling out _toilet paper_ , of all things, seems almost laughable.

How about real killers, like payday loans, bank fees, and paying more for milk, eggs, and everything else at the corner store because you don't have transportation to get to Costco?

And if you want next level hosedom, how about the _opportunity cost_ of having limited or no transportation?

Many of the poor have felony criminal records, as I do, so how about the _political cost_ of being denied the right to vote?

The list goes on and on. [edit] The title does say "..and almost everything else" so I guess I missed that.

<comment><USER6> How about more things?

Credit, which was literally created to hose the poor.

How about _goddamn product marketing_ which merely has the effect 1) robbing poor people of their time and 2) jacking up costs of goods at the expense of 1?

It's all wrong.

<comment><USER7> I always thought credit was created by merchants to screw the nobility. If there's anything that screws the poor, it's _inflation_.

<comment><USER3> Clarification, for the benefit of the sibling comments: inflation screws the poor because

(1) the poor are most likely to be on either fixed incomes, or incomes where cost-of-living adjustments are substantially time-delayed relative to the increased cost of living, and

(2) they're least likely to have any sort of hedge against inflation _or_ sudden shocks to the system, such as having a paid-off house, a fixed-rate mortgage, adequate savings to handle an emergency, or investments in assets other than plain ol' US Dollars That Only Come In On The First And Fifteenth.

The middle class weather inflation just fine -- they're likely to get yearly raises that outpace inflation, to have savings to be able to handle unexpected price increases, and to have at least some assets that keep up with inflation even if their liquid accounts don't. And the wealthy benefit from inflation, because their factories keep producing widgets but their labor costs go down relative to the price of widgets.

<comment><USER8> Sorry, I downvoted your post by accident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've never been able to articulate my own feeling about wealth and poverty. I've been objectively poor at some points in my life. I became vegetarian in my early 20s when I was travelling because I couldn't afford meat. Even then there were some weeks where I didn't eat for a few days because I had spent all my money for the week. It sounds bad, but being hungry taught me how to prioritise and I don't regret it.

In other times of my life, I have quit my job and spent half a year writing free software, or training karate -- without any income. I also spent 5 years living in a run down shack spending less than $10K a year, when I was teaching English in Japan.

By many measures, I was living in poverty because I had almost no income, or I was spending almost no money. But at no time in my life have I ever thought of myself as poor. I have always had money in the bank and I have never really been in debt. When I went hungry it was because I stupidly spent my food budget on beer (or something similar). I didn't have money for food, but I _did_ have money.

Money is an option to buy things and for me the feeling of being rich is the feeling of always having that option. You can be happy with less things, I think. Nobody actually needs a yacht to be happy, or a big house, or a collection of vintage wine. But I think it is really hard to be happy when you have no options. It is even harder to be happy when you spend your options in the future and have to suffer with crushing debt -- possibly enslaved forever.

I could choose to be hungry. I could choose to give up my job and do something that paid no money. I could choose to move half way around the world and live in a shack teaching English. That's incredible wealth for me. That kind of wealth is available to many people, but I think that most people can't see it, unfortunately.

<comment><USER10> You are "quit writing software and went to Japan" poor.

There is also the "working 2 jobs to feed 3 kids" sort of poor.

These are completely different kinds of "poor".

<comment><USER11> Rural or urban also makes a difference. My brother and I regard fish as "poor people's food", a thought brought on by experiences as youths.

I should point out many poor people on EBT (new name for food stamps) do buy toilet paper in bulk once a month. I do wonder how many merchants raise some prices on the 1st of the month.

<comment><USER12> This is exactly one of the problems with EBT. Knowing that all the state benefit income is fast approaching, businesses do everything they can to ensure they sell as much cheap Chinese-made goods, horribly unhealthy food products, and (cold) sandwiches (never hot, that's not something EBT covers) as they can.

Every month this causes huge boom-bust cycles in neighborhoods and local businesses, which adds to the perpetual trauma state benefits have wreaked upon the disenfranchised poor that live in the US's major cities. But Coca- Cola, Nestle, Walmart and Kroger all get their predictable windfalls as a result. And people wonder why these companies are the primary supporters of EBT! It's because EBT is not a people subsidy, but rather a massive corporate subsidy that is also trapping our most vulnerable citizens into food desert wastelands.

As "well intended" as these programs are, they are worse than doing nothing at all, as far as I can tell. I don't see how such massive and ruthless commodification of the poor could ever be achieved in private industry without government support and regulation to bolster it.

<comment><USER11> What exactly do you suggest to fix the problem with EBT?

<comment><USER13> Many states already stagger EBT payments throughout the month, which prevents the boom-and-bust caused by the sudden influx of spending power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some destitute-college-student friends were telling me that they lived on a $20/week of rice + beans + canned tomatoes; I suggested that I take them out to Costco and for $100 stuff their pantries with ~3 months of supplies.

They patiently explained to idiot me that the reason they ate so poorly was because finding $100 was effectively impossible.

<comment><USER15> None of these college friends have any access to credit at all? I find that very hard to believe. How are they paying for college?

<comment><USER16> Funny that the assumption is you must have credit if you are going to school. That's just a given now I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Terry Pratchett said it very well:

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."

<comment><USER18> Sorry, the quote irritates me to no end (doubly so how people trip over each other to copypaste it).

In practice, most opportunities are not a pure savings like this where you will end up ahead in every way if only you could borrow the money; usually, you'll end up with more painful feet but more money to spend, as the cheaper shoes aren't _completely_ useless and in need of replacement.

If the quote were as true as claimed, then someone could make a program where helpers pair up with a poor person, loan them 50 dollars, and then let the savings spiral up virtuously -- that loan enabled $100 of savings, which can be reinvested in more savings, when frees up more savings, etc.

But obviously no one's figured out how to make that happen, and the poor can often already get loans of such size and not trigger the upward spiral. So something's missing.

With that said, being poor _does_ tend to be a double whammy where e.g. you live in a places that makes bulk purchases harder ... but it looks nothing like the dynamic in the Vimes copypasta.

<comment><USER19> I don't think that's quite fair. While the quote oversimplifies it, you too are oversimplifying it. If the boots situation existed your planned boots-loan would never work.

Because poor people are high-risk loans, you'd need to put a significant risk factor on that boots loan if you ever hoped to break even (there's a reason credit cards charge 20+% interest). So now the $100 boots are $130 or more.

Additionally, nobody not already in heaps of debt would ever take the loan, because people hawking predatory loans and money-for-nothing schemes are a dime a dozen in poor parts of cities (cash4gold! payday loans!) and those who don't lean quickly to ignore them all get screwed.

Finally, you're ignoring the psychological aversion to taking on debt, even if it's for the best. Even among fairly well-to-do university students the concept of business leverage seems to come as a bit of a shock, and takes a fair bit of explaining - "But why would you _deliberately_ go into debt?". Imagine trying to explain to somebody below the poverty line that the boots are worth going into debt for!

<comment><USER18> >Because poor people are high-risk loans, you'd need to put a significant risk factor on that boots loan if you ever hoped to break even (there's a reason credit cards charge 20+% interest).

Well, yeah, but that's the point: it's not that they're $50 away from a perpetually self-reinforcing cycle of rising out of poverty. It's that even if you loaned them the money, and showed them the savings, they still won't take the rudimentary steps (pay back some of the easy savings). (Hence why my disproof involved the example of a charity program.)

But at that you'd you'd be using a _very different_ theory of poverty than the Vimes one; it's not that the person couldn't find an extra $50 one time, it's that they are unwilling to plan ahead even when the seed money is given to them. That has a very different moral than the one in the excerpt.

>"But why would you deliberately go into debt?". Imagine trying to explain to somebody below the poverty line that the boots are worth going into debt for!

So wait, now you're saying the problem is that the poor are too unwilling to borrow?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One day I needed to pick up a few things on the way to a party. Was passing through a bad part of town and figured I'd stop at the only grocery store. Surely they have the basics, beer, snacks, etc... To make a long story short, I left without buying anything because the prices were more than I was willing to pay.

I ended up wandering around the store comparing the prices to what I pay in my neighborhood. Almost everything was more expensive. I have no idea how the lower class folks in that neighborhood eat.

<comment><USER21> What people miss is those prices are high in large part due to theft and low volume. A Safeway really can't operate in such places without jacking up prices. And the same is true of most other retail, poor customers are both low volume and expencive.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > spending patterns in developing countries, where cigarettes are sold in > singles and shampoo can come in tiny, pricey sachets.

I wouldn't call the sachets pricey. They are single-use and come at an extremely affordable price (mostly just one rupee = 2 cents). Sachets allow the poor to try out products that they could not afford before, or products that they don't use daily.

Sachet sales created a whole new business paradigm.[0] They form the basis of C.K. Prahalad and Allen Hammond's article _Serving the World's Poor, Profitably_ (HBR September 2002) [1] and C. K. Prahalad's book _The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid_ (Wharton School Publishing, 2004).

[0] [http://repository.umac.mo/bitstream/10692/1300/1/7444_0_Sy-C...](http://repository.umac.mo/bitstream/10692/1300/1/7444_0_Sy- Changco%20et%20al.%20APJML%202011.pdf)

[1] [https://hbr.org/2002/09/serving-the-worlds-poor- profitably](https://hbr.org/2002/09/serving-the-worlds-poor-profitably)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortune_at_the_Bottom_of_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortune_at_the_Bottom_of_the_Pyramid)

</comment><comment><USER22> This analysis ignores inventory costs. Those who can afford to buy in bulk accrue a cost to holding inventory in their dwelling.

This can manifest in two ways: 1) the storage space physically necessary to hold the TP and 2) the capital tied up in owning this before you need it.

To put it another way, maybe poorer people can afford to buy in bulk, but in their apartments they have no place to _put_ a gigantic package of toilet paper. Or, maybe they choose not to tie up $25 in securing future TP when they need that liquidity to ensure they can make a car payment this month.

In either way, they get something of value by not holding inventory in their house. That's why it costs more. It's not completely clear that they'd be better off if they could lock in low TP prices, even if they did have the cash on hand.

<comment><USER23> The space issue seems to be a non-issue until you scale up to multiple bulk products. Unless you are talking about people living in either a shelter or the housing units that are basically a bed and everything else is communal.

<comment><USER24> It's nonsense even with multiple products. At scale, yes, inventory costs make a huge difference. Practically, for most Americans anyway, there is storage room in your place for bulk products.

We have what I like to call a "general store" in our basement that takes up two shelves full of several bulk products. (perhaps 10-15 different products, some small, some not) We're talking about a space that might be 2.5 ft on a side, 1 ft deep. Hardly a ton of space that will require additional capital "tied up in owning this before you need it."

In Tokyo? Sure. In the US? Not so much.

<comment><USER22> There's not room in my two-bedroom house in Silicon Valley for bulk versions of normal staples. I do not have a basement or attic. I have two closets; one has my clothes in it, the other is full of my daughter's baby stuff. Toilet paper gets stored under the sink in the bathroom. Does it seem insane to you that I don't have space for bulk toilet paper buys? That I'd actually consider storage space during these types of purchases?

Congrats on your basement, do you think apartment dwellers have basements?

<comment><USER23> I have an apartment. I keep the toilet paper at the bottom of my closet. I keep a bulk supply of paper towels in the corner of the kitchen area. I have plenty of places where I can put bulk items. It would look cluttered, messy even, and it would put things where they wouldn't normally belong, but I could do it. But even if I had less space, I could still have space for the most common bulk items. (Now if I had a pet I had to keep the items away from, that would be another issue.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> My wife has taught me so much about living frugally. We both grew up relatively poor and I consider myself frugal, but she knows the power of coupons and sales. She combines coupons with sales to get very good prices, and budgets strictly for what we need. She'll also game the heck out of store policies ("you are out of stock on item Y so I'm wondering if I can buy item X for the same price").

Also buy a bidet. They cost less than $40, are better for the environment, and will save on your TP costs!

<comment><USER26> _Also buy a bidet. They cost less than $40, are better for the environment, and will save on your TP costs!_

THIS! I really don't understand why a bidet isn't very popular.

<comment><USER27> Probably because the traditional Western image of a bidet is a separate bowl in a luxurious bathroom. That is, it comes across as a luxury item.

It is an interesting topic though. I have spent a year living in Japan as a graduate student, and had an ultra-modern all-in-one toilet with a built-in bidet (these are quite common in Japanese homes, and even hotels tend to have them en-suite).

At first you are confronted with your cultural baggage; all your life you have been using toilet paper to sanitize your nether regions. After that curiosity sets in, and you rationalize that if a whole modern society embraces this technology, than certainly there must be something to it. Then you start using it, and soon marvel at how barbaric and uncouth the toilet paper method is.

Upon returning to my Western country I was again back to toilet paper, but getting a Japanese style toilet seat with built-in bidet is on my wish list…

Unfortunately, toilet habits are not something that can be easily changed in any society. It is not something people like to discuss. If you've never encountered a bidet (built-in or otherwise) and had the opportunity to use it for a decent while, chances are you will reject the notion of owning one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Every so often I read one of these articles. Thing is, this isn't new information. I've been reading about it since at least the 80's (and I'm quite certain it's been happening since forever). Sadly, nothing every gets done about it. The price of a half gallon of milk will never be half the price of a whole gallon.

<comment><USER22> Do you think it _should_ be?

<comment><USER28> No, I don't. I think that would be trying to put a bandaid on a larger problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Oh fuck this shit, I was poor and I saved by buying rice in bulk and toilet paper in bulk, and everything as cheap as possible.

Seriously, you have to be really fucked up to not be able to put away $25 for rice.

If you're poor and not taking advantage of every savings you can I really don't know how one expects to become not poor. If you're so poor as to not be able to afford a large pack of toilet paper, sacrifice one of your dish rags, I assure you they can be washed for long enough for you to save the extra cash to afford a large pack of toilet paper.

Want to know what my 'rich' neighbors who have a BMW in their drive way do on weekends? Collect cans from their neighbors trash. I can only assume at one point that they were exceedingly poor.

Also, almost everyone I know who was/is poor also smokes. Poor people are mostly poor because they make really bad financial decisions, yes its fucking hard and it seriously takes its toll on you but eventually you get so tired of it you stop making the decisions that keep you poor.

I have never eaten so well, or been so healthy as when I was poor. I walked everywhere, never ate out, spent time with friends, meat was like dessert, and you'd buy the cheapest cuts and marinate and cook them until they were delicious and dropping off the bone.

The only thing I really had a problem with was saving $200 for a decent pair of shoes that would last. Instead I just bought cheap shoes from the thrift store, the nice thing about being poor is you generally don't have anything else to do, so you check veevies every other day. Again if I wanted to solve this problem I know full well I could have stopped smoking and in two months I'd have cash for shoes.

<comment><USER30> Wow. Not everything is clear black and white you know. Your single experience does not cover everyone else's. Let's ignore any depression or anything else stemming from long term poverty that makes things worse, or at least less clear cut.

> they make really bad financial decisions

A lot of the time they KNOW they are making poor financial decisions. Imagine there is barely enough money coming in each month, the kids need to eat, the cooker just broke, the mortgage/rent is due, and you don't have money to solve all of those. So, make a sensible financial decision please, one that is not going to worsen your lot. A second hand cooker is only £50

Sorry kids, no more hot food? Just instant noodles for all for a week, so we can buy the old cooker?

Sometimes the choice is between a poor decision, a bad decision and a really stupid one.

The thing about poverty, especially long term poverty, is it completely takes away your ability to survive an emergency. That could be as simple as an appliance or transport failure. It's the crisis that generally fucks people up. The first three months, whilst the budgets remain credible and intact, is something any fool can cope with.

Most parents I've known would put themselves into penury and risk malnutrition to keep half decent food in their kids' bellies daily. Oftentimes knowing full well, and with due consideration, that they are making their future a little (perhaps a lot) harder.

And just in case you are thinking, but why have kids if so poor? Maybe there was a good job when the kids arrived. Before the recession, accident, or before dad died or whatever.

Yeah, it's easy man.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This exact example was given in a Reddit post. It was sad thread since the question was to the poor of Reddit and what do they buy/how/why. One person was buying tampons for his wife out of a quarter machine. It's easy to not empathize with the poor when you can just ignore it, close yourself off in gated communities.

</comment><comment><USER32> "One possible solution is that retailers could consider pushing their deals to the beginning of the month."

I wonder is she realized what she was saying/implying by writing that.

She's basically saying "the poor can't be trusted to save their money, so help them spend it well, before they waste it [later in the month]".

<comment><USER33> No. She's saying that the poor _can 't_ save their money, because they don't have the luxury of not having to spend it to stay fed, clothed, and housed.

<comment><USER32> No, she did not say that. Otherwise why would the timing of the sale (start of month vs end) make any difference?

<comment><USER34> I didn't even read the article. But obviously, if there is an offer at the beginning of the month, you can buy cheaply and save. If it is at the end of the month, you already had to buy it at the beginning expensively, and you cannot save anything.

That's really simple. I am wondering where your karma points come from.

<comment><USER32> Like you said, you didn't read the article. It's usually better not to comment if you have not.

But I'll help you out:

Implied was that they had enough money to buy in bulk for _multiple_ months, but had wasted it on other things by the time the end of the month came.

There was another class of people who could not do even that, and could only buy for that one month, they could not buy in bulk at any time. (Which is what you were imagining I was talking about.)

<comment><USER33> The article didn't imply anything like that to me.

Where it mentioned buying in bulk it mentioned two classes of people: people who could not buy in bulk at all, and people who did buy in bulk at the beginning of the month, if the option was available, but could not do so at the end.

If you could point at the paragraph which led you to believe it implied the poor were unable to afford bulk purchases due to "wasting" their money, that'd be great.

<comment><USER32> > two classes of people

There are three. There are also those who can buy in bulk for multiple months.

"And the poor often can't afford to do that — to pay $24 for a 30-pack instead of $5 for a four-pack. Then, because they can't stock up, they can't afford to wait until the next sale comes around."

30/4 = 7.5. i.e. implying a multi month purchase. Also "the next sale comes around": at least by me sales are on a multi month schedule, not a monthly schedule.

> If you could point at the paragraph which led you to believe it implied the > poor were unable to afford bulk purchases due to "wasting" their money, > that'd be great.

That's just it - I don't think she realized she said that. It would not be in keeping with the rest of what she wrote.

And yet, her advice to stores to have sales "at the start of the month" does in fact imply that. I assume it was inadvertent, but I called attention to it because she did write it.

I think she would have preferred to advise stores to have sales on a monthly schedule instead of a multi-month schedule. That would be more in line with the rest of her article.

(Convincing stores to do that would be tough - they would have to stock medium quantities of many items, instead of large quantities of a few. That hurts their purchasing power and increases their labor costs.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "You've read your limit of free articles for this month." So.... how to the poor read the Washington Post?

I was talking to a recruiter today. He asked me if I could start a job immediately instead of the usual two week notice. I wondered how I was going to buy gasoline to get to work. Guess I better start saving up.

</comment><comment><USER36> This article presents one theory of why the poor pay more.

Alternate theories are that (some) poor people have weak impulse control, are bad at delayed gratification, and/or have low intelligence.

In reality the causes are very likely a mix of all these factors, but the article makes no attempt to even consider other explanations.

</comment><comment><USER37> The poor _buy_ toilet paper? When I was a dirt poor student, it was assumed that one would simply take two or three or etc doses extra, whenever one was in a public bathroom.

</comment><comment><USER38> I went to a little store in a poor neighbourhood a few weeks ago and was surprised to see a tiny container of Tide for 7.99, and there were no other sizes or brands of detergent.

</comment><comment><USER39> There's some really insightful comments here that I don't want to take anything away from.

I think one important observation is that it's _very_ hard to distinguish poor because they can't from poor because they make bad choices and don't have the tools to make better ones.

Some comments here point out that while toilet paper at Costco might be cheaper than at the corner store, lack of transport options means the corner store is the only option.

Other comments point out that somebody who is poor might spend what little money they have on bad and/or frivolous choices with that money.

Having been pretty darn poor a couple times in my life, I can say that both are true. I've personally been in situations where the only _available_ options were several times more expensive than the cheapest _possible_ one. I've also (and have known many other poor folks) made fabulously stupid decisions on what to spend our limited money on.

An anecdote, I had a poor friend who was constantly struggling to make his rent and car payments and was in a state of near constant financial emergency. He knew, down to the penny, how much money was in his bank account on a daily basis, when pay day was and all his bill paying days. "Don't cash that check until next Thursday" was a normal phrase from him. And yet when a local fair would come around, he'd take a day off work, gather his family in their beat up used car, buy expensive custom made costumes for everyone and spend the day walking around and spending yet more money.

At one point when he ended up on the wrong side of collection for non-payment of a medical bill I showed him with pretty basic arithmetic that his 2 WoW accounts would cover that bill easily if he cancelled his WoW service -- but there were all kinds of emotional reasons why he couldn't and he didn't and he ended up in very serious financial trouble.

But he also packed his lunch every day, would skip meals, knew the prices of all the local gas stations so he could save on fuel, and wore clothes that were literally falling apart. Then spend $50 one Friday night at a movie premier, or spending $500 on a tattoo or whatever.

It turns out humans are complicated, and poverty/being poor is complicated. There are probably a pretty large number of people who are currently very poor who would be in a far better situation with decent financial management -- but have never had the luxury of learning how to do that. And who would probably be better off with training on how to make better life choices.

For example, when I was putting myself through college, I remember coming to the realization that I shouldn't buy any more entertainment of any sort because

a) I didn't have enough time for it anyway

b) It turns out there's plenty of free and legal ways of killing time

Now I'm not poor (thankfully) and have carried this forward with me. I almost never go to movies or concerts, I don't buy lots of bullshit or useless electronics. I'm selective in clothes and other necessities. I don't pay for cable TV or a land-line phone (neither of which I'd use) And when I feel like blowing off some steam I simply fire up Hulu or a freeware game or youtube or I paint, read a book or watch a DVD from the library etc.

I turned not spending money on stupid stuff into a habit, but it was definitely something I had to come to a personal realization about and consciously train myself for. I still get that sweaty palm feeling when I see a Steam sale or a Humble Bundle. But paradoxically, I have the disposable income to buy that stuff because I trained myself not to have disposable income.

This is very hard to get across to many poor-but-could-be-ok folks because they have strong emotional and irrational reasons for what they do and it's those reasons that are very hard to break.

I'm almost convinced that there's a kind of poverty in otherwise high functioning people that could be "fixed" with a certain mental health and training regime, without any other changes to their financial status.

</comment><comment><USER40> The points in the article are all true but there's a case when the poor would pay less that isn't discussed.

For something like toilet paper people who aren't poor probably don't even check the price. In that regard they would be paying more than someone who did comparisons to find the most economical option.

<comment><USER41> That's just a matter of habits and motivation. A well-off person who can't be bothered to price-compare toilet paper still _could_ pay less if they wanted to, they just don't care to because they don't need to. The poor person stuck paying more doesn't have the option to pay less if they want to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Seriously, how much more of this analysis do we really need?

The poor have it bad. Now, what are we going to do about it?

</comment><comment><USER43> I feel like this article focused exclusively on the African-American community. I would really love to see the same type of article for Hispanic, Asian, and white communities. I would love to just see the cultural differences.

</comment><comment><USER44> being destitute indeed is expensive and low income + high costs let you down the spiral

</comment><comment><USER32> This reminds me of getting ahead of a leveling curve in a game. If you can do that, you can level in better areas (relative to your present level), giving you better rewards (relative to your present level) which then helps you get to even better areas.

The only way to get ahead of the leveling curve is to work really hard at first, and it's painful (or boring), and then reap the rewards after.

Or in the context of this story live extremely poorly (in the "badly" sense of the word, not the economic one), forgoing every single possible thing not absolutely necessary, and then reap the rewards later.

It's hard to forgo every single luxury, or even to forgo simple inexpensive entertainments. But it's worth it later.

<comment><USER45> My god, you've solved poverty!

<comment><USER32> Much (most? all?) poverty is caused by human behavior, not adverse circumstance. Just because we know it's caused by human behavior doesn't mean we can fix it.

<comment><USER46> Citation please.

<comment><USER33> To be fair, I think most people probably agree about this. Where the disagreement occurs is the question of whose behaviour is chiefly responsible: people in poverty, or people very much _not_ in poverty.

<comment><USER46> To be fair, I don't think most people agree on this.

<comment><USER33> Really? Most people don't think that "much poverty" is caused by human behaviour?

I'll grant that some temporary localized poverty may exist due to circumstances beyond human control, but I'm absolutely certain that _most_ poverty exists because humans collectively permit it, not because we are - <USER2> a whole - powerless to prevent it.

<comment><USER46> Pure environmental factors for poverty won't necessarily be temporary, since land might just be infertile for thousands of years.

I think that poverty is within human control in the same way that cancer is. Cancer has always been around, and nobody has ever been able to solve it. While most can agree that we have more control over cancer now, sometimes we take a backwards step and introduce something that encourages it.

I'd argue that cancer, like poverty, is a circumstance we find ourselves in. Something that has been there forever, and which we are trying to get under control. And like cancer, the circumstances of poverty inordinately impact people from different backgrounds, even though with a little help from the experts, it could be better. But I'd argue that we don't actively permit cancer to exist like we don't actively permit poverty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The true reality is, most poor people don't have the mental capacity to spend money appropriately.

While we live in the fantasy land that they are quite smart, but happen to be poor we really can't move ahead and improve the situation, the two issues are linked.

Someone well off might also may not have the mental capacity, but it will affect them less, I get that but that's an aside until the far future when everyone is well off.

IE Using disposable diapers rather than reusable ones? It is kinda scary the article has this as a given.

I get as a single parent time is hard to find, but it also means less shopping. True you have to have a washing machine, but surely responsible use of a credit card allows would make this cheaper and easier then going to a laundromat.

Responsible use of a credit card is hard and this is more the issue, not a strict lack of money problem.

<comment><USER48> You typically need to own your residence if you want to install a washing machine. If your residence was not designed for a washing machine, you may need significant changes to the plumbing to put one in.

In one case, I owned my residence and _still_ wasn't allowed to put in a washing machine; it was a condominium, and the common drain lines were insufficient for every unit to have a washing machine, so no unit was allowed to install one.

There are some non-permanent washers available, but the reviews on them appear to be very mixed, so I never took the risk to buy one, and that's as someone with significant disposable income.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Since the crowd around here can't exist without an increase in poverty, the real question is how many poor people do we need to produce one Zuckerberg. If we want more Zuckerbergs we need more poor people, just as if we want more whales in the ocean we need more ocean.

Pretty sure Trump can work out a nice formula to export the poor into the developing world, in return for an expansion of H1B visas or something. Given the clamor I still see in China and India for people coming in, shouldn't be too hard to work out. Also they don't use toilet paper there.

And yes I am that cynical of the crowd around here and the effect the tech industry has had on increasing poverty.

<comment><USER50> This comment is absolutely baffling to me - I can't even disagree because I don't understand what you are saying.

<comment><USER51> I believe the op is referring to the debate about wealth creation and distribution, where one could have a view that people in IT-startups like Zuckerberg are not creating wealth, just distributing it. And to distribute, you need to have someone to distribute FROM and someone to distribute TO. Now the comment should be more legible, I believe.

<comment><USER50> Ok, and yes that makes sense. The wealth creators don't have to be low paid drones though.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What Airbnb really does to a neighbourhood - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45083954 <comment><USER2> How have we gotten this far into the comments without anyone mentioning the root cause here is a general shortage of housing in places people want to live / work / visit?

It seems to me that AirBNB isn't to blame for the overall lack of housing (and temporary housing aka hostel/hotel) options, rather it's just the most visible brand name competing for the limited supply.

Cities can ban it if they want, but I'd rather they focused on allowing more housing to be built.

<comment><USER3> It's not just a lack of housing. Airbnb is changing neighborhoods by creating increased demand for vacation friendly activities and turning some areas into an effective full time weekend. It's taking popular neighborhoods like the Mission in SF or Williamsburg in Brooklyn or the Gothic quarter in Barcelona and turning them into 365 day a year tourist parties. Any neighborhood with a reputation for being hip, having art, music, bars etc. is now half populated by Airbnb guests at all times.

<comment><USER4> > Any neighborhood with a reputation for being hip, having art, music, bars > etc. is now half populated by Airbnb guests at all times

Why are there so few of these places?

<comment><USER5> They're generally unsustainable. Having a reputation means a deviation from the norm. Once their reputation is big enough, the number of newcomers to the culture will outstrips the ability for the culture to assimilate them.

Sustainability in the face of that requires whatever the culture is centered around to be the kind of thing that can both put up a facade that serve casuals and angry neighbors, while simultaneously maintaining an environment for the core that built it to retain momentum. And circumstance might just make that impossible.

<comment><USER6> There's a piece that covers this pretty well:

[https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths](https://meaningness.com/geeks- mops-sociopaths)

Last posted on HN 2 months ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17433487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17433487)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I live next door to an AirBnB, in a building where maybe 1/5 of the flats have been converted to tourist flats. When I moved in 3 years ago there were zero.

I'm woken up by screaming drunk tourists as they come home at 3am on a Tuesday night. There are constantly people clattering suitcases up the stairs at all hours. People smoke inside the common areas instead of on the street. Of course, just generally feeling like you live in an illegal hotel is horrible. We're looking to move.

Then again, I have reservations for two AirBnBs next week on holiday in another part of the country. The difference is we have booked entire houses in the countryside, not city-centre flats. AirBnB is not inherently evil, but strict and enforced controls are definitely necessary in cities.

I love AirBnB as a customer, but hate it as a resident.

<comment><USER8> I, too, love externalities when other's bear the cost, and hate them when I bear the cost.

<comment><USER7> Heh. I am aware of the contradiction.

My point is not all AirBnB usage is equal.

<comment><USER9> So it should be okay for your use case but not others?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> To put it bluntly, I don't like competing with the entire rest of the world for housing in my city, and I'm pretty sure most other people don't either.

<comment><USER11> > my city

 _Your_ city? Interesting way to frame it. Maybe you were born where you currently live or maybe you moved there last year. Either way it doesn't really matter. Why do you feel the need to keep other people out of the city you currently live? The reasons that you live where you live are the same reasons other people want to live and visit. Why deny someone that ability to move or visit only because you got there somewhat earlier?

<comment><USER12> Residents get preferential price treatment to visitors because they provide societal stability. It's the same reason why state residents get preferential tuition pricing to out of state residents.

You give discounted state tuition because you don't want a state full of low- skilled dummies. You give residents an edge over tourists so you don't have a shortage of people to put out fires, cook food and remove garbage.

It's not hard.

<comment><USER13> I think it absolutely is hard. Almost everything in life is more complex than most people think. Even in-state vs out-of-state tuition. Kids don't have control over where their parents choose to raise them. Why should Kid A have to pay twice as much to get the same education as Kid B just because Kid A happened to live 3 miles on the other side of the state border? That can make you feel trapped, like you're stuck in whatever little hellhole you were born in (especially if you have non-supportive parents). I can understand why a resident discount makes sense, but at the same time, sometimes I feel like it should be backwards -- give out-of-state residents the discount -- just to encourage new young adults to get out of what they've known their whole life as "normal", and see that things don't have to be like they are. Move the example just a little bit to kids from Brownsville, TX vs kids from Matamoros, Mexico (also < 3 miles away), and tell me that the issue isn't hard.

To not be purely depressing, I'll present an example of something I think is a step in the right direction: At least some universities are good about giving out scholarships to low-income students that offset the difference between in/out-of-state tuition.

<comment><USER12> not hard as in to grasp the concept of why it should be that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I still use airbnb when travelling because it's convenient but when I'm not travelling I can't stand it at all. (I do realize that I'm contributing to the issue by being a customer myself.)

Airbnb is probably one of the worst things that has happened to many places that were already tourism heavy. The bit of regulation that made stuff work somewhat was completely subverted by it and because of how quickly it became popular it's now almost impossible to put the genie back into the bottle as there are too many vested interests now.

Overall I can't get rid of the feeling that Airbnb is here to stay and it permanently made the world a worse place.

<comment><USER15> The legal side of AirBnB is bad enough, but you couple that with their shady practices and the outright illegal stuff that goes on and AirBnB as a whole is a plague. I've heard there are smaller alternatives that work fantastic, I don't know them by heart though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It seems like there is a perfectly reasonable middle ground here — where households have the flexibility to rent out part of their primary residence, on a limited basis (either temporal or just part of the house), subject to clear and evenly enforced regulations. This is a pre-internet idea (e.g., casas particulares in Cuba in the 1990s) that becomes way easier/safer/better with a web-based platform. Personally, I find it massively more fun to stay in a typical home in a region that I'm visiting, and I can often find these on AirBnB.

Of course AirBnB is going to try to grow as much as possible to try to eat hotel revenues and develop new markets. But shouldn't communities have the right to combat the externalities that such growth entails?

<comment><USER17> I suspect that partial apartment rentals are far less disruptive. It's full apartment rents that are causing issues.

I think this also comes back to over tourism. Travel is the new materialism. It used to be you kept up with the Jones by buying new cars, new jewellery, new houses. Now it's by going away, frequently and to the most exotic places, to prove how open minded and wordly you are. And it's killing the planet and many local communities. There will be a backlash eventually.

<comment><USER18> "Travel is the new materialism."

I wanna argue with this -- I think some portion of the population has a deep- seated psychological _personal_ need to travel for their own internal well- being rather than to _perform_ travel for an audience as a status symbol. But I think there's a pretty strong case that especially with the rise of social media, travel's become much more tightly linked with attention and status.

<comment><USER17> But travel is relatively new idea to much of the population. We don't realise how little folk used to travel because those who did travel are disproportionately famous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here is where the rubber of "corporate responsibility" meets the road. So far AB&B has looked askance to the issues they bring to the table and have only taken token steps to mitigate what they have wrought on communities. They talk the talk all day long about inclusivity, implicit bias and any other terms du jour to shirk from confronting the gigantic mastodon in the room —the one sided effects their services have on lower and middle income shoppers of housing. Yet, where it matters, they fail to walk the walk.

Their inaction and continued ignorance of these issues does magnitudes more harm than their progressive efforts in their corp HQ which benefits very few people in comparison.

<comment><USER20> Is Facebook responsible for people using it to browse their highschool sweetheart's page, and using messenger to try to cheat on their spouse? Is Tinder responsible for an increase in STDs, infidelity, or date-rapes that occur? Is Zillow responsible for someone finding a house that was foreclosed on because somebody got sick and couldn't afford to make their mortgage payments?

AirBnB lets you find available short-term housing on their platform, that's all it does. Any complexity that arises around that, as far as I'm concerned, has nothing to do with AirBnB, and everything to do with local governance (if you have a problem with it).

Housing markets are based off of supply and demand, like most things. If AirBnB suddenly alters the nature of what is supplied, why does that matter? The demand in a given location is based off of so many factors to begin with, should we become upset with everything that changes the nature of the housing market? What happens if there is a neighborhood that is completely crime- ridden, and new police station is added right outside. Suddenly the crime goes down, and the housing prices in that neighborhood increase substantially as it becomes safer to live in. Whose fault is it that the people who were living there when it was highly unsafe can no longer afford to pay rent? Is it the police station's fault? Is it the new tenants'? The landlords'?

I just can't understand why people are so averse to letting situations play themselves out. SV, for example, is refusing to allow new construction due to zoning laws, and all of the jobs that drew people here are no longer enough to counterbalance the monumental cost in living...so people are leaving. Natural equilibriums exist. What happens when an area becomes so oversaturated with tourists that it no longer retains what made it desirable? Japanese tourism in Paris has dropped 42% in the last few years. What happens when the lack of supply for regular housing makes it so difficult to find local housing, people working normal service jobs have to travel increasingly far to work in the area? The rates to do those jobs begin to increase, as they become less desirable, and the area becomes less desirable to visit as everything gets more expensive. Those people become more capable of moving back to the area as their rates have gone up, etc.

This need for platforms to take responsibility for everything that happens as a result of the transactions they allow individuals to make with each other is so unbelievably misguided. There isn't always a boogeyman.

<comment><USER21> > AirBnB lets you find available short-term housing on their platform, that's > all it does. Any complexity that arises around that, as far as I'm > concerned, has nothing to do with AirBnB, and everything to do with local > governance (if you have a problem with it).

As far as I know AirBnB is allowing people in NYC to rent apartments for less than 30 days. Not only are they allowing this to happen they are the ones completing the transaction and profiting from it. This is against NYC law and has been around since AirBnB was founded. To make matter worse when residents are fined for breaking the law they are the ones paying the fine without AirBnB losing money. We all know AirBnb could follow local laws everywhere and not allow any of the activity to happen on their platform. If they can change local governance then good for them but they are clearly involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Airbnb is a zero sum game - what tourists win, locals lose.

Two of my coworkers are currently being forced to look for a new place to live in a tight housing market because their current landlord can make more money renting on Airbnb.

I've stayed in Airbnbs in the past (and appreciated the convenience), but I no longer will.

<comment><USER23> _Airbnb is a zero sum game - what tourists win, locals lose._

I think you mean that "zoning is a zero-sum game." Since the 1970s, when zoning became more severe and restrictive, housing costs have increased substantially: [https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze- in-...](https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in- the-1970s). We know how to create a positive-sum game: [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-14/californi...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-14/california- affordable-housing-is-no-mystery-just-build-more), but we've made doing so illegal.

<comment><USER24> You do know that Airbnb exists outside of California as well right?

I live here in downtown TO, and while we have a shortage of condo's, our condo has quiet a lot of Airbnb units. 1) This reduces number of units available for rent in the market, thus driving the price of available units up. 2) Creates a fucking terrible living conditions for people who actually live in the building. There was a long weekend where Airbnb guests literally broke elevator button because they couldn't get to their floor without their fobs. They throw garbage in the lobby, are loud af till 3-4am.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One impact of AirBnb is that it lowers the threshold for traveler affordability. Couple it with discount air carriers such as RyanAir or Southwest and the number of humans who can afford to travel increases dramatically.

For example, a quick survey of Chicago shows:

On TripAdvisor: 8 hotels with rooms under $100/night. Lowest room $79.

On AirBnb: 100+ listings, entire place, under $100/night. Many under $50.

In this way, AirBnb is an enabler for travel.

Moreover, you don't even need to look at discount airlines. British Air had a round trip from San Francisco to Milan for $650. AirBnb in Milan, entire apartment, start at around $30/night. Suddenly, 10 days in Milan can be had for under $1,500.

Economists might see the future for this situation: More air travel leads to cheaper fares. Cheaper fares leads to still more travelers. More travelers on cheap fares means more demand for AirBnb style housing. AirBnb prices get some upward pressure from added demand, bringing more units into the market. More landlords convert from long to short-term rental. Fewer long term rental means lower supply of long term and higher rents. Higher rents mean more people choose to buy, increasing demand for owned homes.

What it all adds up to: Without increasing the number of humans on the planet, you've increased housing prices by making travel more affordable.

/s Maybe we make the following rule: In order to rent an AirBnb, you have to AirBnb your home while you're gone. s/

</comment><comment><USER26> AirBNB restrictions should be based on housing vacancy rates. In areas where either through poor zoning or historical preservation there is a restricted supply of housing AirBNB should be strictly limited.

However, if vacancy rates are high enough AirBNB acts as a nice pressure valve distributing residential and vacation occupancy without the expense of having to overbuild hotels.

<comment><USER27> What if the vacancy rates are due to untenable rent prices? I could see vacancy being artificially created this way.

<comment><USER26> If vacancy rates are high enough they create downward pressure on rent.

<comment><USER27> Yes, assuming AirBnb isn't more profitable than decreasing prices.

<comment><USER26> That may happen in a vanishingly small subset of instances, perhaps in developing economies where the housing stock of a desirable destination hadn't already been augmented by dedicated hotel space—since visitors would be so profitable. My guess it that any situation like that would be relatively short term, but could be handled with special case moratoriums.

Maybe I'm missing something but I have a hard time thinking of a situation where this would be anything other than a short term issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Rather than blaming the company Airbnb for a city's ills, it may be more helpful to examine why it has popular support in the first place, while family-only zoning is declining in popularity. Short-term rentals in residences were already illegal in San Francisco and New York; they were _legalized_ to allow Airbnb because short-term rentals have popular support from voters. Single-family zoning was designed 100 years ago to create neighborhoods of families who were protected from the nuisances of the lower- class apartment "parasite"s (Euclid v. Ambler) and lower-class houses that were used to raise chickens and take on boarders ([https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/07/it-time-bring-back- bo...](https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/07/it-time-bring-back-boarding- house/6236/) or [https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Government- Undermi...](https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Government-Undermines- Ownership/dp/1937184889)). I think exclusionary zoning has been so extreme in some cities that it is beginning to lose its support among the middle class, for whom it is now more necessary to use their property as a business rather than only as consumption.

Edit: Related point: In some places, it is ingrained in our culture since the 1970s that housing should be a good investment. Low property taxes (Proposition 13) and zoning restrictions are designed to increase the private gains to this investment ([https://www.amazon.com/Homevoter-Hypothesis- Influence-Govern...](https://www.amazon.com/Homevoter-Hypothesis-Influence- Government-Taxation/dp/0674015959)). A small change of use to short-term rentals is perhaps the next incremental step for house investors. It sucks for people who want to use housing as only a peaceful consumption good, but in my opinion that ship sailed a long time ago in Closed-Access cities.

</comment><comment><USER29> > My research has found as many as 90% of Airbnb guests have said they were > "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their stays.

For a perspective on the other 10%... checkout:

[https://airbnbhell.com](https://airbnbhell.com)

</comment><comment><USER30> Maybe locals would be more supportive of Airbnb if cities made deals with other cities saying 'your residents can stay in our units on a short term basis if ours can stay in yours'.

People from boring/small towns and cities would be left out of this though, since their demand to visit tourist destinations would exceed the outside demand to visit their area.

The result would be the residents of larger/more-attractive cities, who are free to stay in other major cities, seeing their advantage over the rest of the population grow, which in turn could lead to more people choosing to move to these cities.

</comment><comment><USER31> I agree that AirBNB is enabling (and profiting from) this behaviour but what is essentially happening is people using AirBNB to turn on their own neighbours.

Have there been any government initiatives to educate AirBNB hosts about the impact of their actions?

</comment><comment><USER32> The apartment vacancy rate in Vancouver is presently sub 1%.

People are illegally renting suites as Airbnb, taking up domestic housing stock.

It's illegal to rent suites for less than 31 days and without a business licence here, but they do it anyways.

<comment><USER33> Are any of those occupied by locals for whom it's the best housing they can find?

<comment><USER32> There are a great many of these that are 1BD/650 sq ft size condos and apartments that would otherwise be occupied by locals, at market rental rate for standard 12-month lease terms. But the owners of the condos are renting them out on AirBNB.

Or people are renting apartments for $1700/mo from absentee owners, and then illegally subletting them for less than 30-day terms on AirBNB and running the sublet as a business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Levy taxes on the rentals.</comment>


Alternatives to Google Finance? - <AUTHOR> Just checked my portfolio and it's a complete disaster. Any alternatives out there? <comment><USER2> We are actually building an alternative here at KloudTrader. Join our beta program!

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16608236](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16608236)

[https://wallmine.com/google-finance-portfolio- alternative](https://wallmine.com/google-finance-portfolio-alternative)

[https://mobile.twitter.com/paultoo/status/978775606006489089...](https://mobile.twitter.com/paultoo/status/978775606006489089?ref_src=twcamp%5Eshare%7Ctwsrc%5Eios%7Ctwgr%5Eother)

</comment><comment><USER4> Yahoo finance is still better. Who knows how long it will be around now that it is part of Verizon.</comment>


LIGO Detects Gravitational Waves for Third Time - <AUTHOR> http://www.caltech.edu/news/ligo-detects-gravitational-waves-third-time-78193 <comment><USER2> The numbers here are just staggering:

\- Black hole merger occurred 3 billion light years away

\- _Two solar masses_ were converted to energy

\- Briefly 10^34 megatons of energy were released every second

This is hard to intuitively wrap your head around because we think of space as constant. Something like this can distort space itself. Amazing stuff.

<comment><USER3> > \- Briefly 10^34 megatons of energy were released every second

That quote caught my eye too. What's the full unit on that? Is that literally the "m" you'd plug into E=mc^2, or was there an elided "...of TNT", like we'd use to describe nuclear weapons?

<comment><USER4> It must be TNT equivalent. One solar mass is 1.99 × 10^30 kilograms, and we know that 2 solar masses were converted in total, so 4 x 10^30 kilograms, which is far less than the "megatons" mentioned, in terms of pure mass.

I wish folks would avoid mixing military units and general relativity units like this, it's confusing.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's that ambiguous.

"Megaton" isn't really used anywhere except for explosive yields, where it always means TNT. As far as the 'native unit' astrophysicists will tend to use ergs for events like supernovae.

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

<comment><USER3> I thought it was ambiguous in the context of an article talking about converting mass to energy. Without running the numbers, I couldn't tell if that was a unit of the input mass or the output energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> FYI - if you want to check out the data, the code, even an audio of the wave checkout:

[https://notebooks.azure.com/roywilliams/libraries/LIGOOpenSc...](https://notebooks.azure.com/roywilliams/libraries/LIGOOpenScienceCenter)

It's a Jupyter notebook that anyone can clone and run.

[edit: updated link]

<comment><USER7> It's just awesome to see these notebooks released. I'm not going to play with them, but I love that people are able to. It makes me much more confident in the results that are announced, and I hope this approach to doing science becomes the norm.

<comment><USER8> I second the wider adoption of notebooks. I'd really love to see government budgeting offices and what not begin to make their spending and analyses transparent through these documents. We need government on github and jupyter notebooks :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was at a talk by Janna Levin, astrophysicist and author of a book _Black Hole Blues_ that describes LIGO. (E.g., [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/books/review-black- hole-b...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/18/books/review-black-hole-blues- recounts-the-quest-to-find-the-cosmic-kazoo.html))

She gave a neat analogy between GWs, as sensed by LIGO, and an electric guitar. In the sense that a distant pluck on the string is transmitted as a wave down the string to the pickup, which senses a little wiggle in the string and amplifies it. I thought it was a poetic analogy that gives a second meaning to the word "instrument" in this context.

<comment><USER10> Except imagine you're embedded on the string itself and cannot actually sense the string "moving through space". The way you have to measure it is by sensing tiny changes in distance between the left and right side of the string as it wiggles around.

The actual detail of the experiment and the precision they reach is quite fascinating. Veratisium has a pretty good video explaining it in more laymen terms [0]

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iphcyNWFD10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iphcyNWFD10)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The paper describing the event is available to the public at [https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P170104/public](https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P170104/public)

The instrument data of this event is also available to the public at [https://losc.ligo.org/events/GW170104/](https://losc.ligo.org/events/GW170104/)

<comment><USER11> Thanks

>"GW170104 was first identified by inspection of low-latency triggers from Livingston data [15–17]. _An automated notification was not generated as the Hanford detector's calibration state was temporarily set incorrectly in the low-latency system_. After it was manually determined that the calibration of both detectors was in a nominal state, an alert with an initial source localization [18,19] was distributed to collaborating astronomers [20] for the purpose of searching for a transient counterpart. About 30 groups of observers covered the parts of the sky localization using ground- and space-based instruments, spanning from γ ray to radio frequencies as well as high energy neutrinos [21]." [https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P170104/public](https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-P170104/public)

Regarding the earlier detection:

>"At 11:23:20 UTC, an analyst follow-up determined which auxiliary channels were associated with iDQ's decision. It became clear that these were _un- calibrated versions of h(t) which had not been flagged as "unsafe" and were only added to the set of available low latency channels after the start of ER8_. Based on the safety of the channels, the Data Quality Veto label was removed within 2.5 hours and analyses proceeded after re- starting by hand." [http://ligo.elte.hu/magazine/LIGO-magazine- issue-8.pdf](http://ligo.elte.hu/magazine/LIGO-magazine-issue-8.pdf)

So both times humans had to take special action for the detection to "count". I really wonder about whether the null model they are using is appropriate/relevant here.

Also, the other thing I have been concerned about is the lack of any corroborating evidence that these signals are truly generated by inspiraling black holes(gamma ray bursts, etc). Apparently, in this case the above- mentioned miscalibration has impeded that effort:

>"The event candidate was not reported by the low-latency analysis pipelines because re-tuning the calibration of the LIGO Hanford detector is not yet complete after the holiday shutdown. This resulted in a delay of over 4 hours before the candidate could be fully examined. We are confident that this is a highly significant event candidate, but the calibration issue may be affecting the initial sky maps. We will provide an update in approximately 48 hours which may include an improved sky map." [https://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/other/G268556.gcn3](https://gcn.gsfc.nasa.gov/other/G268556.gcn3)

I can't tell from that text file whether they got corroborating evidence or not. IANAP though.

<comment><USER12> There have been three signals witnessed in about 12 months of observations - of course the models need some tuning to correctly, automatically, trigger alerts. In any case, you are referring to the _online_ triggers which look very quickly at the data and try to guess if an apparent signal is real before informing electromagnetic observatories to follow up. The real analysis is conducted _offline_ in a much slower, careful way with lots of checks and balances on the state of the instruments to rule out artificial signals. That's one of the main reasons why it took 5 months between the first detection and the publication of the paper announcing it.

In terms of corroborating evidence, remember that the two independent LIGO detectors - 3000km apart - saw the event within 10ms of each other. That's enough corroborating evidence for a lot of people. The NASA text file you link shows no observed electromagnetic counterpart, but that's expected: unfortunately the best models so far for black hole coalescences predict very little or no electromagnetic emission - so although EM partners were informed, the chances of them seeing anything were slim. Other predicted sources of gravitational waves, like as-yet unseen binary neutron star coalescences, are more likely to emit EM radiation and stand a chance of being witnessed by conventional observatories as "corroboration".

<comment><USER11> >"In terms of corroborating evidence, remember that the two independent LIGO detectors - 3000km apart - saw the event within 10ms of each other. That's enough corroborating evidence for a lot of people."

I don't see what the first part of the post has to do with the null ("background noise") model being inapplicable to situations where special human intervention comes into play. Do they include any events like that in the background timeseries or not? I am suspecting not (which renders the model false and hence false alarm rates/sigma values meaningless), but do not know for sure.

Second, that is just a detection. Corroboration occurs when your model predicts multiple types of observations related to a phenomena (measured by different types of instruments). This weakening of definitions is concerning to me if it has infected physics. I have seen that trick used a lot by "softer" fields such as medicine/psych (eg their definition of a replication is just seeing "an effect" in the same direction).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone familiar with this branch of astronomy want to explain why one detection in a volume on the order of 27 billion cubic light years is reasonable? Are they still processing data and will find more events? Is the sensitivity highly anisotropic so the detection volume is significantly smaller? Or are events like this just really conveniently rare that we get about 1 every data gathering interval?

<comment><USER14> Events big enough to be detected are quite rare, but the phenomenon you are asking about is more a financial reality than a "convenient coincidence" as you put it. There is a pretty steep curve connecting sensitivity and cost, so when the team that built LIGO was designing it, they used the best available models of colliding black hole event rates to estimate the sensitivity required to deliver a conclusive result in a reasonable amount of time.

If you're getting 10 events/second with a device like this, you probably overpaid for sensitivity and if you're getting 1 event per century you're probably not going to be able to maintain the operating expenses to still be running when the detectable event occurs (and, as critically, none of the people involved will be able to get the data they need in the time they need it to get their PhD's, assistant profesorships, or tenured positions, so you can't get the labor force you need for your experiment to work on it, which is really what sets the acceptable duration of most experiments in practice).

It looks like the original estimates were pretty good, so events are coming in at about the rate the experimenters hoped they would see them.

<comment><USER15> > If you're getting 10 events/second with a device like this, you probably > overpaid for sensitivity

Aside from issues processing and disentangling the overlapping events in a situation with that high of an event rate, more events would not be bad, so I'm not sure I'd call it "overpaying". Imagine the kind of population demographics that could be built up if we were detecting that many events.

<comment><USER14> It's not that physicists wouldn't love to capture all those events, it's that the cost of building instruments like LIGO is nearly prohibitively high and the cost is a strong function of the sensitivity of the instrument. If you aim too high in your sensitivity aspirations, the cost hits a point where the experiment simply can't be funded.

<comment><USER15> > If you aim too high in your sensitivity aspirations, the cost hits a point > where the experiment simply can't be funded.

Agreed. I misunderstood your meaning then; I'd interpreted your wording to mean that "overpaid" was still within the bounds of reasonable expectations for funding. "Overpaid" didn't imply "too expensive to build", to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great veritasium video about this latest wave: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVKO7UCIlgs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVKO7UCIlgs)

What is involved with increasing sensitivity I wonder? Is it purely lengthening the arms? or are there other advancements required?

Hopefully one day we can have these things in space, isolated from noise and curvature of the earth and no need for vacuum equipment.

<comment><USER12> There are loads of possible ways to increase sensitivity, but none of them are easy or cheap given that the low hanging fruit was all picked off in previous generation detectors.

Increasing arm length is the "easiest" but definitely the most expensive option. Try finding a 40km L-shaped area that's seismically stable and free from significant anthropogenic activity. There may only be a handful of places in North America. However, 4km is already on the cusp of being long enough that gravity misaligns the two mirrors are each end of each arm due to the curvature of the Earth. Going to 40km would prompt the need for static corrections to mirror alignment, which will increase the amount of seismic noise that couples into the longitudinal direction in which gravitational waves are sensed. There are other problems such as the need to either refocus light at points along the arms (very susceptible to alignment and thermal noise) or use much, much bigger mirrors. The Advanced LIGO mirrors are already ~40kg, ~30 x 15cm cylinders of the purest fused silica known to man circa ~2012. There is talk of increasing the mirrors to 200kg and ~50 x 25 cm, and no facility is currently capable of producing pure enough fused silica at that size.

An "easier" option is to increase the laser power. This gives diminishing returns, and leads to an increase in high frequency sensitivity at the expense of low frequency sensitivity (due to photon pressure pushing the mirrors around noisily). However, the challenges are to make stable lasers that are also powerful - very tricky - and to mitigate the effect that laser absorption has on the mirrors within the interferometer - as you increase laser power, things heat up. Hot mirrors can lens the light, misaligning it and creating extra loss (i.e. reducing sensitivity). It's trickly to mitigate. Another effect of higher laser power is the introduction of parametric instabilities, where the mechanical body modes of the mirrors are amplified by the high laser power, leading to huge spikes of noise at narrow frequencies which are difficult to damp out.

Another is to use a different interferometer topology: instead of an L-shaped Michelson interferometer, suggestions have been made for Sagnac interferometers which possess an interesting property called quantum non- demolition, which can potentially reduce the limiting noise source in Advanced LIGO which directly increases sensitivity. Research into this is at a very early stage and will not be seen in detector facilities for decades, if ever.

So, the short answer is: there are lots of potential methods to increase sensitivity, but all of them are challenging and require significant R&D and money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> > These are collisions that produce more power than is radiated as light by > all the stars and galaxies in the universe at any given time.

Astounding, especially given that these are happening at regular intervals in our "neighborhood".

<comment><USER18> It's like the difference between an explosion of TNT and a atomic bomb, but on a much larger scale.

Stars like our sun spend ~10billion years turning a portion of their mass into energy. Most stars are like ours, small, dim and weak in power output. Our sun will not go supernova and will not collapse into a black hole when it dies, it will simply go nova and end up as a dwarf star in a nebula.

But, now imagine two black holes each a billion times as massive as the sun turning all their mass into energy in a couple of seconds.

10billion years to convert 99% of the mass of the sun to energy versus 10 seconds to covert 2 billion times the mass of the sun to energy. Now it makes sense that the power output is more in one second than the whole universe put together.

Solar fusion is on the cosmic scale a very slow way to convert mass to energy. It's so slow that we humans have been 'on the brink' of harnessing it for power generation for decades.

Now imagine if we could build two nano-black-holes and let them collide....

<comment><USER19> > But, now imagine two black holes each a billion times as massive as the sun > turning all their mass into energy in a couple of seconds.

Sure, lemme just take off my "good at socializing with apes and running for long periods of time after antelope" hat and put on my "Cosmological scale" hat.

Huh, I seem to have misplaced that one. And the one I'm currently wearing is oddly well affixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Somewhat naive questions, as I know very little about astronomy. Do black holes "move?" How is it that they could merge if they're stationary, unless they're pulling each other in I guess? If black holes are indeed pulling in everything, does that mean the whole universe would eventually be one giant black hole?

<comment><USER21> > Do black holes "move?"

Yes, like any other massive objects, black holes can have velocity and momentum. Two black holes, or a black hole and another object like a star, can orbit each other in a way that _almost_ follows Newton's laws.

> How is it that they could merge if they're stationary, unless they're > pulling each other in I guess?

This gets at what makes LIGO's findings interesting. Two black holes merge if they fall into each other's event horizons. But Newtonian gravity predicts that, in isolation, this would never happen; two orbiting black holes would just maintain their elliptical orbit forever. (I'm hand-waving here, because Newtonian gravity can't properly model black holes at all.)

The theory of general relativity predicts that the gravitational curvature of the space around the black holes contains energy, similar to the energy in the electric field around a charged particle. And intense changes in curvature can create waves in the curvature of space, which carry away kinetic energy from the black holes and cause them to spiral into each other. Under normal conditions these waves are so unimaginably tiny that they're unmeasurable, but during a black hole merger, they become intense enough to be (barely) detected from billions of light-years away. This is what LIGO detected, confirming a long-known theoretical prediction of GR.

> If black holes are indeed pulling in everything, does that mean the whole > universe would eventually be one giant black hole?

Not necessarily. Everything in the universe attracts everything else gravitationally, but that doesn't mean any two objects will inevitably collide. If they have enough energy to move apart faster than their common escape velocity, they are not gravitationally bound and will continue separating forever.

<comment><USER18> If we scale time to one-trillion-quadrillion years into the future, isn't is possible that all mass in the universe eventually coalesces into a massive universal super black hole? Or, does the expansion of the universe outstrip that?

<comment><USER22> Not an expert, but the evidence is pointing towards continued expansion until a 'big freeze'

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Here's what I don't understand.

In the first detection, they mentioned that two black holes collapsed, emitted gravitational waves, and the resulting combined mass was less than then sum of two previous masses because energy was spent on gravitational wave generation. Hence it means, that due to gravitational interactions, objects leak mass. Now, we know that every object in the universe is gravitationally related to every other object, plus universe is expanding hence objects are constantly in flux with each other. The question is where all the leaked mass goes? Can this leakage account for dark matter? What about the space-time, does it function as a storage medium for this energy that now came from the leaked mass?

Please explain...

<comment><USER24> It's important to note that gravitational waves themselves contain energy and angular momentum. Relativists often use the terms mass and energy interchangeably. When I worked in numerical relativity, we used units such that the speed of light was 1, so E=mc^2 (really E^2=m^2c^4+p^2) simplifies to E=m.

<comment><USER25> I have no idea what these people are talking about but I always thought as a small child that c should = 1. That square really bugged me - why squared, why not cubed or halved or more realistically some bally awkward number... Sounds like fun this numerical relativity!

<comment><USER26> It's squared because energy is work, work is force times displacement (distance), force is mass times acceleration, acceleration is velocity per time, and velocity is vector distance per time. So you get:

mass × distance × ((distance ÷ time) ÷ time)

mass × distance^2 ÷ time^2

mass × (distance ÷ time)^2

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> When a gravitational wave hits the earth, does the planet oscillate in place for the duration, or is our position in the cosmos displaced, or something else altogether?

<comment><USER28> The actual space in which the planet resides stretches and shrinks as the gravitational wave passes through it. The fabric of space itself is the medium that the wave travels through.

However, the affect is incredibly tiny, even though it was generated by two black holes colliding. The size of the distortion experienced here on Earth is 1000x smaller than the width of a proton! It's mind boggling.

I think I remember hearing that there is immense distortion in the area immediately around the collision, but I'm not certain.

<comment><USER29> The resolution of the detector is 1/1000th the width of a proton. The signal they see is much bigger: the length of 4km long arms stretch and then shrink about 1/10 the width of a proton. How do they know it is really space/time changing and not an earthquake? They have two detectors over 1000 miles apart from each other:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO#/media/File:Simplified_di...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO#/media/File:Simplified_diagram_of_an_Advanced_LIGO_detector.png)

<comment><USER28> Ah that's right, I was going off of memory. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does the calculation of how long ago this event occurred account for the speed at which the universe is expanding? Does it need to?

<comment><USER31> We do account for the expansion of the universe in fact. We estimated that this source was at about z ~ 0.2 (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift)). Roughly speaking this means there'll be only ~20% effect as the scale of the universe (a) has increased by (1+z) over the time it has traveled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> How does LIGO separate vibrations caused by a nearby truck from whatever reading that is required for gravitational waves?

<comment><USER33> This is a complete guess, as I don't have any firsthand knowledge ... but I can only imagine that they have a whole array of seismographs on the premises, which they can use to clear noise from the main LIGO readings they are interested in.

Curious to know if this is the case from anyone who happens to know one way or the other :)

 _edit: the more I think about it, the more I think that random vibrations from passing trucks would be irrelevant ... it doesn 't detect vibrations, it's measuring the speed of light between two points_

<comment><USER18> Actually, I think it's measuring the intensity of light between two points. It has two perpendicular lasers of some wavelength which then interfere with one another. If they interfere perfectly you measure a zero, if the interference is off by some amount you measure a deviation in intensity from the i^ or the j^ direction.

You can eliminate passing trucks, earth tremors, mining, asteroid impacts etc simply by applying a band-pass filter that excludes measurement frequencies outside of the range predicted by the equations.

No expert though, just guessing.

<comment><USER12> No filtering is applied to data containing such anthropogenic/geological noise after it is measured to remove such effects. In fact, such data is usually junked and not used for analysis. The sites have thousands of witness channels which listen for things like trucks, ground motion, magnetic storms, etc. that could possibly influence the mirrors in the way a gravitational wave would. If the same signal appears in both the gravitational wave channel and some auxiliary sensor, it's thrown away.

Instead, the mirrors are highly isolated from the ground (suspended from pendulums, motion damped by actuators, that sort of thing) so that such effects do not have significant impact on the motion of the mirrors.

In any case, seismic noise can't be fully isolated and creates a sensitivity wall below around 10Hz. To get sensitivity much below 10Hz, you have to go to space (look up LISA).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is awesome. I spent a summer in high school at LIGO Hanford (Washington), it's so cool to see positive results starting to come out of it.</comment>


Ask HN: Did posting your startup in HN give you users or only competitors? - <AUTHOR>

I can't understand why anyone would want to post their startup in an early stage, when their codebase is probably quite small and easily clonable . Unless, of course, they want the professional feedback and brainstorming that this forum provides . Did any of you who posted your startup here gain a decent amount of real users (clients) ? <comment><USER2> I've mentioned mine on here a few times, and it's picked me up a few users, although i've never done a 'Show HN' type thing. Most startups, I'd hazard, are specific enough in implementation, market and niche that you need to find someone who cares enough about all of those same things _and has the skills, time and wherewithal to land it_. Lots of people have ideas, few land them - there are probably 50 teams working on the same idea as you, but most won't land them. (On my example - the site's in beta, it's a soccer stats site so probably barred in a lot of non-UK domains as gambling related, of niche interest in any case, etc. My site's a clone/improvement, in many respects, on others that I've used in the past - fixing my own problems.)

If you've got a world-changing, hugely scalable, easily copyable concept, then yeah, probably don't post it here. But otherwise, it's all in the implementation, and posting it on HN probably won't change that.

<comment><USER3> I echo this completely and I have done a "Show HN" and a "Share Your Startup" on Reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Speaking openly about a problem is a sign of strength, not a weakness. It's a sign of a weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.

You want to be educating people of what you are doing. Copying an idea has little to do with the codebase being either small or clonable and more with the people behind the idea. And I don't mean just about having courage. Ideas by themselves are roughly worthless. There's no market for them. There's no place where one can go and buy an idea.

Describing your idea in detail doesn't mean other people will copy it. First they'll have to be convinced it's a good idea. If you ever tried to change anyone else's mind you know by now how hard that is. Not even founders themselves can predict how well their own ideas will do. Larry and Sergey originally tried to sell Google to Yahoo for $1m.

And even if people are convinced your idea is a good idea, they'll still have to compare it to the existing idea they are already working on and see which one they're more likely to do well with. A better, more ambitious idea might seem frightening. A simpler idea might seem more tangible. It could be at least a year before one can convince themselves it's ok to let an old idea die, and at least two years to pursue an ambitious one. Ambitious ideas really are that frightening.

If you are not convinced choosing between two ideas like this is hard, here's a simpler test that doesn't even involve a good idea. When you have only a bad idea and no good ones, how long does it take you to stop working on it?

Regardless, good ideas will have competition anyway. You can't avoid it. So actively working on the next step of getting feedback on what you have is a sign you are strong enough to take the next steps, however small they seem, as opposed to hiding to avoid competition.

Dropbox launched on HN ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)) and their biggest gain wasn't the number of users they got from HN. Their biggest gain was probably that they became less frightened by the idea of one day evolving into a startup with 300m users.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the biggest disservice you can do to yourself as a startup is to be protective about your idea and being afraid of getting cloned..

Ideas by themselves don't mean anything.. Its the execution of this idea that makes for a good venture. I personally meet so many people who don't speak or talk about their idea because they are afraid it will be copied. It just stops them from getting help from others.

On the other hand I have been open about our startup idea and what we are developing, and an amazing thing it has done for us, is the feedback it has gotten us and more importantly connections to right places and people.</comment>


Please help – stuck with recursive speculative display list algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/404293/recursive-speculative-display-list-engine-computing-text-length-across-stack-b <comment><USER2> Look up papers on pretty-printing with dynamic programming. "A prettier printer" was a good starting point, though in Haskell, so it might be easier to find something citing it using a perhaps-more-familiar language.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is awesome, thanks!

It's also given me the idea to ask around in functional-programming communities.

The "prettier printer" paper was actually more accessible than I expected it would be too :) although I get the impression it wants me to define group starts and ends before it does its work, and the algorithm I'm currently headscratching on works as a streaming buffer.

<comment><USER2> You're welcome! I think the lazy evaluation effectively does streaming -- that was the other reason to look at followup work, like the "Strictly Pretty" paper which had code in ML, a non-lazy language. I'm forgetting the titles of newer ones than that.</comment></comment></comment>