Academia and the decline of wealth in America - <AUTHOR> http://brucejacob.tumblr.com/post/373498114/academia-and-the-decline-of-wealth-in-america

<comment><USER2> I actually do think he's onto something when he talks about the decline of engineering relative to law, banking, and medicine.

It's interesting, because in the midst of an article about how much poorer we are than our parents, he does discuss extremely high salaries in these fields. I think the problem is that the "Best and Brightest" young Americans are now chiefly interested in entering fields where they _get_ a lot of money but probably don't _create_ much wealth.

I read a while back that many economists believe that while a good legal system is critical to a modern economy and state, the marginal value of an additional lawyer in the US is actually negative - that is, additional regulation, litigation, and so forth is actually wealth destroying. Banking, as defined as moving money from where it is to where it is needed is a valuable economic activity, but a lot of banking lately seems to have been a wealth destroying activity that is lucrative for its practitioners as well.

Medicine seems more defensible, but my father (a prof of medicine) told me recently that he was disturbed by a report on how much of a person's lifetime medical expenses are accrued in the last few years/months of life.

By the way, sorry about the lack of cites. But I'm guessing that these generalities really aren't all that controversial.

A friend of mine (a lawyer) makes a lot of money by creating corporations that exist purely to purchase expensive equipment (such as airplanes) and then lease them back to the actual "owner", mainly because this creates a favorable tax write-off. Have the methods used by the "elites" to gain personal wealth always so unaligned with the general creation of wealth?

One really wonderful thing about the US is that there isn't all that much class resentment. People generally talk about "making" or "earning" money, and we admire people who do it, largely because we believe that they create wealth for everyone as they create it for themselves. I think this is very true of high tech entrepreneurship and other activities... but it does seem (especially from the massive expansion of the banking sector) that many of our current wealthy elite seem to be adding about as much to the general economy as feudal lords.

They'll try to cast this in terms of "disliking people who make money", but I really don't. It doesn't bother me at all that the google guys have billions. I may envy them, but I don't resent them. However, I _resent_ AIG and GS, because I'm utterly unconvinced that they are contributing a damn thing, and that they are probably damaging wealth creation.

<comment><USER3> _lifetime medical expenses are accrued in the last few years/months of life_

When my mother got terminal cancer, the last few months of her life became her most valuable. Those last days were scarce. In a way, they are infinitely more valuable than all her other days, because she knew at that point that she had a finite number. Until you are given a terminal diagnosis, you feel infinite, and perhaps -- with the innovation in life extension -- you actually could live forever. Of course accidents still happen and with more days to live, the law of large numbers kicks in, so we'll probably never live forever, but I digress.

Point being, the last days are the most valuable and the treatments to keep us alive under terminal conditions are expensive. It's expensive to fight death and few want to die. Most believe not dying to be the most important and valuable thing in their lives, so it is understandable that the last years, in general, cost the most to keep.

The only alternative to this situation is to embrace death. Make it normal. Make it not scary. Treat the emotional aspects of dying rather than the conditions that cause death.

We are a long way from a society like that.

<comment><USER4> Well, anyone reading this now will most probably die within the next 80 years. It's not that much really...on an astronomical scale.

<comment><USER5> Not if Aubrey de Grey ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_grey> ) gets his way!

Seriously, I expect there are people alive today who will still be alive in 1000 years.

<comment><USER6> 1000 years?

<comment><USER3> The argument life extenders make is that in 20 years, we'll cure all the ailments that may cause death for another 20 years and then within that time, another set of cures will evolve until eventually, we've cured everything that could kill a person.

The trend supports them, somewhat. Lifetimes centuries ago were 30-40 years on average. Only a handful of people lived 60 or more years. Today, many people live to 100, many more to 80... so we are getting better at preventing death.

At some point, if this trend continues, we'll be almost perfect at it.

<comment><USER7> >Lifetimes centuries ago were 30-40 years on average. Only a handful of people lived 60 or more years. Today, many people live to 100, many more to 80

The average in previous centuries was heavily skewed by infant/childhood mortality. Plenty of people lived into their 80's back then. It's just that half of their brothers and sisters died before age 10, which dragged the average down. Still more succumbed to disease and infection before even middle age.

The average isn't going up because people live longer, it's going up because fewer people die young.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _We decided to make and sell crap. Why? Because we could get away with it. The quote re: autos — "Detroit decided that they would rather make money than cars."_

I'm not an economist, but I wouldn't be surprised if this had something to do with it. All the excitement about startups isn't just about getting rich and changing the world. It's also because everyone knows it's the only way a technical worker is allowed to actually think about improving the product. If you're in a big business, you aren't allowed to just improve the product. You're going to be kept busy doing things that improve the bottom line (really or just notionally) and half the time they make the product worse. But nobody says that, so you're dispirited by hypocrisy as well.

Worst is when you actually _use_ some of the products and services from your company, _know_ that they're worse than the competitors, _know_ that anybody paying the market price for them is getting ripped off, and have to listen to management talk about how hard everyone has to work to live up to MyMegaCorp standards of quality. That's how you take productive people and reprogram them not to care about their contribution to society anymore. I'm really enjoying the stability of MyMegaCorp for a change (the company I work for was acquired a year ago) but I don't think I'm going to last here much longer.

And it could actually be much worse. At MyMegaCorp at least we all feel like we're on the same team. (No fooling; people reflexively cooperate.) At some big corporations, your team might actually _intentionally sabotage product releases_ in order to make another team look bad. I've heard specific stories about documentation being intentionally obfuscated, vital product information being buried in obscure places, verbal commitments given and then intentionally broken and denied, and the most dramatic case, where resentment was so high that three teams knew a fourth team was making a large mistake and kept their mouths shut for _months_ so the project would go down in flames and take the fourth manager with it.

<comment><USER9> I believe Oracle has seen some really weird group interactions on this level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "We don't build anything here anymore, outside of tech."

Not true. [http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/02/us-manufacturing- is-n...](http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/02/us-manufacturing-is-not- dead.html)

We make plenty, it's just that (thanks to innovation) we don't have as many workers making the same amount of stuff. So while US manufacturing is healthy in terms of goods produced, there just aren't many manufacturing jobs around any more.

<comment><USER11> I stopped reading shortly after this sentence - the secret to speed-reading is to not waste time reading things that have been deduced from false facts.

But let me underline: this is no minor factual error. The whole piece appears to be built on falsehood. The author is trying to argue that the USA needs more innovation. But why can we produce more manufactured goods than ever with fewer workers? Increased productivity! And why has productivity increased? Innovation!

<comment><USER12> If you look for excuses to dismiss an article you're always going to find them. That way you're not likely to learn much, though. The error in this case _was_ minor, because his reasoning doesn't depend on it.

The article is making the (rather mundane) point that more innovation is a good thing (premise) and that many of the best students are not going into industry but are lured away by academia and a few well compensated fields (law/medicine) and that the country is worse off because of it.

So whether the USA produces much outside of tech isn't that relevant.

<comment><USER11> _many of the best students are not going into industry but are lured away by academia_

So, I stopped reading, but did the OP support this with statistics? Because in my world -- the one in which I myself have gone back and forth a couple of times between academia and industry -- there's plenty of people who _try_ to go into academia, but they don't find work because there aren't enough jobs, and those that exist have low pay, because there's high demand but a rather short supply...

Meanwhile, the thousands of highly-educated people who can't get into academia try to go into industry. Except that many industries aren't hiring much. Perhaps because their productivity keeps increasing and they don't really need armies of new Ph.Ds to keep cranking out widgets at the rate the market demands. I have a lot of friends with Ph.Ds, and not all of them are happily employed. [1]

And that's not even getting into the fact that drawing the line between "academia" and "industry" is increasingly difficult. Every professor has a startup on the side, every major university has a staff of lawyers to manage their intellectual property, and half the grants are industrially funded... or are funded by government grants that are aimed directly at industrially- relevant product development, e.g. drugs. Many industries don't _want_ to do cutting-edge pure research anymore, but instead try to outsource that to academia. In the semiconductor field, a lot of the cutting-edge research gets done in academic labs. E.g. I knew some of the folks who did early OLED research, the product of which now sits inside various Android phones. They were academics, but they are innovating, and their innovations are promptly adopted by industry here and abroad. Similarly, a lot of drugs come out of academic labs and are then pushed through development, testing, and production by industry.

\---

[1] Though most are, in fact, employed. Don't get me wrong. These days almost any job is a happy job compared to the alternative.

<comment><USER12> Statistics or references? None are offered.

In fact, some of the claims in the article are so ludicrous I can't take them seriously at all. For example:

 _"... so an entire generation of high-school graduates went to college and learned to loathe industry"_ and

 _"so innovation [in the USA] died, and perhaps nine tenths of the brilliant minds that would have otherwise gone into industry and innovated the hell out of their field, that nine tenths went into the legal profession or the medical field or investment banking."_.

I just can't take those remarks at face value. I must say though, that the author's claims of disdain for the industry by academia match my experience. The author's complaints about low salaries (relative to law/medicine) in technical fields also match my experience. Where I live (Europe) professors don't have startups on the side, even at the top universities. Different worlds, I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "One of the things they teach you in American college is that industry is to be looked down upon."

This statement is not at all true in engineering schools. At least when I went to school (Northwestern, '00), there were huge numbers of industry/academic partnerships and the innovation talked about in this article was pushed as the sort of thing it was expected for you to do after graduation, unless you had the misfortune to continue on for your Ph.D., which very few people did. Maybe that quote applies more to non-engineering schools?

Can other engineering-educated folks relate to his quote?

<comment><USER14> I have a bunch of friends who are philosophy students and right now they are "on strike", occupying a building at Middlesex University.

The irony that they gleefully proclaim that they aren't studying a lowly "vocational" or "technical" course, yet have purloined the language and ideology of, umm, _actual workers_ seems to have entirely escaped them.

Then again, several of them genuinely believe that writing essays at university is morally equivalent to building tractors at a factory... Marxists, eh? They'll be in for a bit of a shock when they have to meet the real world.

<comment><USER15> Top tip for annoying an academic: refer to the "real world" in a way that implies that they don't belong to it.

The professor I used to work for used become incandescent with rage when someone did this. :-)

<comment><USER14> Well their message to taxpayers is "work harder for longer for less so we can go on sneering at you from our ivory tower", so they really don't belong to the real world. Yet, but they will soon...

<comment><USER16> They don't belong in the real world in the sense that people get _paid_ in the real world. Meanwhile, most academics go into debt, earn very little, and work long hours trying to genuinely contribute something to society as a whole.

This is why so many phd students in computer science and related technical fields go into industry where they can get over double the salary from day one. Many academics _do_ have a very negative view of none academics, precisely because of the sentiment that you so eloquently put into words.

The irony is that society is eager as ever to consume the technologies and knowledge that comes from academic research, yet somehow expect all that for free, and even get angry when their results don't come fast enough.

The me generation indeed.

<comment><USER15> My experience is in the the UK, but when I worked in academia (from '89 to '95) I was paid roughly the same amount as my friends in the private sector.

Looking at academic salaries these days they don't look too bad when you compare working conditions, perks (access sports centers etc.), long holidays and the rather generous final salary pension scheme.

Yeah, I can imagine PhD students have a hard time everywhere - but I really don't have much sympathy for salaried staff in academia (or most of the UK public sector) complaining about wages and conditions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't get it - if you're on any kind of growth curve at all, you should be getting wealthier.

The drop from a 3% curve to a 2% curve just means you're getting wealthier slower, but you can't lose wealth unless the growth goes negative.

He's right about not being able to afford his dad's house, but that's because when his dad bought it, it was probably a middle-income area. Now, thanks to city growth, it's probably a middle-to-upper income area. So he's comparing apples to oranges.

<comment><USER18> If inflation is higher than economic growth you get wealth destruction.

<comment><USER11> So, having found one or two glaring factual errors in the piece, I went looking for more.

I can't easily find a chart of real GDP growth since 1950 from an official source, but I did find the chart on this page - you have to scroll down.

<http://www.valueinvest.org/27.html>

Look for "GDP growth vs S&P 500 returns", the blue line. This should, I believe, correct for inflation - that's what the whole "corrected for CPI" thing is about.

Interesting things about this graph: national real GDP has been growing, and there is no obvious discontinuity in the 1970s - sure, there was a big recession then, but that's just a jog in the chart. Squinting at the data, it looks like the average rate of growth is about the same immediately before and after the 1970s; if anything the rate of growth is a tiny bit higher since then.

So, either this chart is bogus or the OP is bogus. Having already caught the OP citing false facts about domestic manufacturing output, I have my suspicions. But feel free to cite a better GDP chart; it will be nice to have in the files for when the next nonsense article comes along.

<comment><USER19> Instead of considering GDP alone, perhaps we need to be considering share of GDP. We are significantly more people today than we were in 1950.

<comment><USER20> One of the charts in that link is GDP per capita adjusted for CPI, and it's still shows growth at a pretty constant rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >Think of all the examples of American innovation since the 1970s. How many examples are not in the tech sector?

Um, I can think of thousands, but then again, I'm not some moron PhD. How about all the innovation in the medical field? Better imaging technology like the fMRI has come about since the 1970s. How about the cervical cancer vaccine? How about Viagra? Flonaze?

How about airbags? Anti-Lock brakes? BioDiesel? Cars are safer, more fuel efficient, more reliable, and all around better than they were in the 1970s. It's not up for debate. Innovation is still innovation, even if cars existed in the 1970s. By the same token, the cars coming out of detroit in the 1970s were way better than the Model T. Why? Innovation!

On the energy front, we have new wind turbine designs. We have nuclear batteries. We have off-shore wind. We have more efficient CO2 scrubbers. We have LED lightbulbs and CFLs. We have hybrid drive trains in consumer vehicles. We have shipping barges harnessing wind-power through computer- controlled deployable sails.

On the social innovations, we see that seeking help from a mental health specialist is no longer stigmatized. An entire generation is fighting to stay healthy despite a lifetime diet of high fructose corn syrup. People are attempting to return to the ways of buying locally and minimizing their impact. Women continue to advance towards career and earning equality with men.

Long story short, Academic prattles on long and hard about nothing.

<comment><USER22> The key phrase is "American innovation". A lot (most?) of your examples come from outside of America, I think. I know a lot of medical imaging and vaccine research gets done in Europe, there's a lot of Nuclear design in the UK and Russia, a lot of the off-shore wind stuff is done in Europe, many of the automobile advances are German or Japanese.

He may be engaging a little in hyperbole, but he does have a kernel of a point. Dismissing him because of his job is a little harsh.

<comment><USER21> Do they? I know the American Healthcare system funds a lot of medical research that doesn't happen in countries with socialized medicine. I'm not trying to make a ideological point over one system being better over another, but drug research, especially, seems to be funded by the 'vanity market' of consumer brand name drugs. And our (arguably strong) patent system (while broken IMO) provides a great incentive for developing and repurposing drugs.

Medical Imaging is a field of research that is global. I only know what is being with people I've worked with in the past.

Vehicles, well, even if the technology was developed outside the United States, our market was the motivation for the innovation. Audi invented "Shift Lock" for automatic transmissions back in the 80s because they had the same problem in the U.S. that Toyota does now -- consumers claiming of cars that just accelerate forward and cannot be stopped. Shift Lock seemed to have put a stop to that.

As for dismissing him because of his job, well, he brought it up 'My dad was a professor and I'm a professor, but I'm in poorer than my father ever was".

The first thing I learned as the child of a PhD is that if you want to actually have money to do things like travel, go on vacations, and afford college for your children, its that you don't get a PhD unless its in engineering or law. I went with engineering but only got a master's.

And it being my last week of finals, in my last semester for my master's, I'm really, really tired of hearing academics drone on with little actual grasp of reality. I apologize for the display.

<comment><USER22> I can sympathise with it being exam week. Don't worry about it.

I think that the problem that you have with academics is that to be good at research you must concentrate on that, and that alone. Teaching gets you nothing, so the good researchers tend to put as little effort into it as possible and the people who spend their time worrying about teaching are left behind on the research front. Not always, but often. So, if someone's interested in talking to you as a student, then they're more than likely poor at research or really not interested in you.

If you can find the research-oriented staff on your campus and talk to them on their own terms, I guarantee that your opinion of 'academics' will change. You'll find a lot of interesting, dedicated people who do wonders on shoe- string budgets, working long hours on things that they find fascinating. Of course, these people tend not to get permanent jobs because of the amount of hideous politics that abounds in the upper echelons of academia...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "The problem is that if you don't build anything you cannot possibly innovate --you cannot innovate if most of your economy is service--or anything other than manufacturing."

Quoted for disagreement. (Was this posted for disagreement?) I think plenty of HN participants know that innovation is possible in service industries. They have seen it done, because they have done it themselves. That means wealth- creation is possible in an economy based largely on services.

After edit: Upon a bit more reflection, it appears that the author of the submitted article has had an extremely poor education in economics.

<comment><USER24> You can innovate in service industries, but service industries contract when an economy contracts, whereas manufacturing and industry expands.

e.g. Who cares if my Barista can be faster and more efficient? I just want coffee for less.

The problem with innovation is that it's leaky. There's no national border to it. America is a tremendously innovative country, but there's nothing stopping that innovation from finding its way to countries where they'll produce that same innovative product for less. (e.g. Look at the iPad and forthcoming Adam from India.)

Economies are equalizing. Nothing, including innovation, will stem that tide.

<comment><USER25> Well, more like "service industries _necessarily_ contract when an economy contracts (unless they help others deal with the government)", "whereas manufacturing and industry _may_ expand."

E.g. your solution to "coffee for less" may be making your own, which will involve some equipment purchases on your part, but on the other hand the coffee shops you and people like you used to frequent won't be buying more equipment (in fact, new entrants/shops will likely be buying used but serviceable stuff from failed shops).

Getting outside of the service field, lots of people including my father have decided to drive their current vehicles much longer than they'd previously planned. Auto companies are seeing much less demand due to that sort of thing (uncertainty on the part of my father, others just don't have the money) and are buying less capital equipment, tooling, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The author seems to appreciate the wealth produced by _ideas_ , at least here:

 _Why do I finger innovation? Because innovation defies all laws of conservation: with innovation, you create wealth out of nothing. One day, you have nothing in your hand. The next day you have created, out of pure unadulterated thought, something that people want bad enough to give you money for it. You have created a thing of value. You have created wealth.

Out of nothing._

But then he goes on and (imho) contradicts himself, claiming that _manufacturing_ only creates wealth, not ideas:

 _We don't build anything here anymore, outside of tech. Kitchen appliances, power systems, washers/dryers, airplanes, raw materials, electronics, trucks, ships, even satellites these days — nothing is built here. We are no longer the only player in any of these markets; for nearly all we're not even the predominant one; for most we don't even play. We stopped manufacturing, and with that we stopped innovating. In industries where we still do manufacturing, we innovate like mad, but the number of industries is shrinking, and I fear that the economic footprint of those industries as a percentage of the global economy is also shrinking. The bottom line: even though we are an innovative people, our innovations are a drop in the global bucket. Meaning that our country's growth will largely be static, and mostly in the downward slope compared to elsewhere._

I'm not sure what he thinks wealth comes from: ideas or manufacturing.

<comment><USER27> > I'm not sure what he thinks wealth comes from: ideas or manufacturing.

It _is_ possible for wealth to come from both.

<comment><USER26> While I agree with that, I thought he said the only source of wealth is ideas and then say it's manufacturing instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> He's making a huge mistake by applying averages to EVERYONE. He does this routinely:

"Bottom line: every individual in the country became wealthier over time.

I'm not talking about companies, I'm talking about individuals. This is why, for centuries, every American child fully expected to do better than his/her parents. Every parent's dream of seeing his/her children do well (financially) came true."

The problem is, that was never entirely true (clearly not everyone did better than their parents) and it's become less true over time, especially since the 1980's.

Since then we've had a seismic shift of wealth away from the middle class and to the upper class. The fact is that the average middle class American is doing about the same as their parents, while the average rich American is doing much better.

The why of this is debated. It's some combination of Reaganomics and globalization. But the fact is that simply adding a percent of growth won't help the problem if it all goes to the rich.

</comment><comment><USER29> "In the US, it used to be that every year you could expect to be wealthier. Your purchasing power grew over time: you could afford things you couldn't the year before. Your salary increase every year outpaced inflation."

I think the author is from a different socio-economic-status than me. My parents didn't believe they were going to be wealthier year after year. My grandfather (i lived with my grandparents) cut sheet metal for a living. I remember my life being pretty good when I was little, then the recession of the 80's hit, and we were on food stamps. Certainly not better year after year.

Maybe that was a fluke, but if I go back one more generation, my great grandmother lived through the great depression. She didn't believe she would be better off year after year. In fact, she was super paranoid about the opposite happening. She used to hide food around the house "just in case".

Also, no one in my family got a salary, maybe that is a give away to the different americas we seem to have grown up in.

Sorry, I have a hard time with "essays" where the first paragraph seems false to me.

</comment><comment><USER30> Interesting read. I wonder what the author thinks of personal debt. From where I'm sitting it seems like massive amounts of personal debt are the problem. I don't think my grandma had any credit cards a car payment or a mortgage costing her about a third of her take home pay.

Hard to come out on top when you are spending 5 - 30% more for an item than inflation says you should thanks to interest.

<comment><USER31> This is an interesting point - I wonder how debt also impacts individual risk aversion and wealth accumulation and if these effects can be seen (measured) in the post-mid-century US.

<comment><USER32> I would assume that debit would encourage risk-seeking behaviour. But, outside of real estate speculation, which, until recently has been seen as not very risky at all, I haven't seen it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Less hand-waving, more economics: <http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=4954>

</comment><comment><USER34> Investment, defined as current production used (saved and invested) for future growth, is critical to growth. Since the federal reserve has gotten control of the dollar, the dollar has been steadily dropping in value. This discourages savings and investment and rewards borrowing and consumption. Also, the government has been steadily growing. This crowds out investment. Also, government regulation discourages investment. As investment decreases, so does growth.

<comment><USER35> Well, borrowing is just using future production for current growth, which is more efficient but less reliable. Assuming the future production will be there (and that otherwise someone will take care of it for a small fee), that's obviously more efficient.

It's pretty clear that proper investment is the only way to get growth. It's less clear whose wealth should be invested - that's why we have both borrowing and regulation, and by extension consumption (if you assume ceteris paribus, you damn well better advance entrenchment).

Innovation and efficiency are at odds with one another, and as we get more and more complexity, the only innovations easily reachable are paradigm shifts. What we might need next is a way to simulate and bootstrap scenarios further and further from the local optimum - and that might have to be government investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Oo, fun! A populist economic screed!

A growth rate of 2% instead of 3% doesn't mean you're getting poorer instead of richer. It means your country is getting richer at a 2% rate. And it certainly doesn't give grandpa evidence to blame all the perceived economic woes of the country on the things that were better back in his day.

But of course, this is not an evidence based article. This is a mindless rant.

</comment><comment><USER37> >>an entire generation of high-school graduates went to college and learned to loathe industry. They learned that working in the factories, in the design houses, in the drawing rooms — they learned that type of work was beneath them.

>>And so innovation died, ... the brilliant minds that would have otherwise gone into industry ... went into the legal profession or the medical field or investment banking.

This seems like a hell of a non sequitur.

</comment><comment><USER38> While I may be sympathetic to some of his thesis, I stopped reading when I realized he was making up numbers, or getting them from an unreliable source. The 80's and 90's were just fine for growth, thank you, and held for the most part above his magic 3% growth (82 and 91 were recession years) even so average GDP growth in both spans 81-90 and 91-2000 was 3.2%. Here are the numbers courtesy of the Statistical abstract of the United States calculating GDP in constant 1996 dollars:

1981 2.5% 1982 -2.0% 1983 4.3% 1984 7.3% 1985 3.8% 1986 3.4% 1987 3.4% 1988 4.2% 1989 3.5% 1990 1.8% 1991 -0.5% 1992 3.0% 1993 2.7% 1994 4.0% 1995 2.7% 1996 3.6% 1997 4.4% 1998 4.3% 1999 4.1% 2000 3.8% 2001 0.3% 2002 2.4%

</comment><comment><USER39> I suspect that our money is not working for us.

Money is a means of accounting, a proxy for value, but money != value/wealth.

Because ALL of our money is by nature exponential-interest-bearing debt money, it is guaranteed that in due time the debt will overwhelm the system. We've been good for 200 years because our interest rates have been sufficiently low, and bankruptcies have been injecting money into the system (at the price of inflation, which is essentially just a hidden tax).

One understands this once s/he understand the nature of the National-Debt and the function of the Federal Reserve. The personal debt per citizen is now over $50K, and the nature of our money is such that this debt CANNOT BE PAID OFF in full. How can we focus on creating real value when we're all chasing the ghost?

Interest may have driven innovation in the past, but it's basically just a slave-driver now. Any doctor can tell you.

BTW, if you get this, and you want to work on a long term solution with me, email firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER40> > You can even see it in things like the government's long-term programs, for > example Social Security — who in the hell in their right mind would start a > long-term program without an appropriate plan for funding it?

A politician trying to get reelected by spending other people's money.

</comment><comment><USER41> There are other forces that have a part to play in this, although having engineering and other creative industries is important:

1, The change in the nature of money. Once money hand an intrinsic value, it was linked to a commodity: gold or silver. I thought one of the points of fiat money was if you put money in a teapot today, it would be worth less tomorrow. To increase wealth don't people need to maintain the ratio of money they have to the total money in circulation? If the government prints more money the money in circulation is worth a little less.

2, Competition, once the world was a lot less equal. America and some European countries more-or-less had all the technology and drove the pace of change.

<comment><USER42> There's an easy way to avoid being harmed by inflation: Don't hold cash. If you wish the currency was backed by gold so you could put it in a teapot, buy gold with your fiat money and put it in a teapot.

An economy in which the primary currency of trade can deflate _sucks_. We've been there.

<comment><USER41> I wasn't advocating holding money in a teapot, just that erosion of wealth is built into the system. I was not also advocating the gold standard, just saying there are other dimensions why some professions have not attracted money. To reduce wages salaries just need to be static.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> That decline of wealth coincides with American politicians finally killing off the new deal and Keynesian economic policies and falling hook line and sinker for the Chicago school swindle.

You can argue that economic growth was stopped before that point, but here that is because of the fuel crisis which was of course an external event that had nothing to do with US economic policy. If you correct for the fuel crisis, the US growth malaise starts with Reagan and his policies. And it just keeps on going only being very partially and temporarily alleviated by the ever so slightly populist policies of Clinton.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is how I read this:

Yadda yadda blah blah blah -- real income growth curve used to be 3% (mostly true)

blah blah blah -- New income curve is 2%. Changed in 1970s (think so. So far so good)

yadda yadda yadda -- wise president Carter warned us of this but nationalistic Reagan glossed it over and it became anathema

WTF? Is this a politics article or something about the economy?

blah blah blah -- _This is what it means to fall off a growth curve._ (a bit extreme of an extreme judgment, at the least)

blah blah blah _I will be poorer than my father_

Okay. You get a couple of WTFs for any article. But we're done here. The growth curve, presumably from sticking along so far, is now 2%, not 3%. I poked around a bit, and I didn't see where you said we were on a negative growth curve. Plus any reasonable person can see that even at a negative growth, our kids are going to have a tremendously better life than we did. The very poor today are much better than the richest of rich from 70 BCE

I did not finish. From the pattern so far, I would expect lots more exaggerations and oversimplifications in order to make some quasi political point. I'm just guessing though. Sorry if I missed a good read. I thought it was important to show how these things are read.

Remember -- if you are going to put in a WTF, either do it at the beginning and then support it, or build up to it and hit it as a climax. But don't sprinkle them throughout the essay. Readers would like you to tell a story that has some conclusion, even if they disagree. But if you fail to establish common ground, we're out of here.

<comment><USER45> Inflation-adjusted wages haven't had 2 percent growth since the 70s; they've stagnated or slightly decreased. Productivity keeps improving, but wages don't keep up.

Edit:

Hmm, I did some googling, and there seem to be substantially divergent charts/numbers floating around. Some numbers have real wages going down, others have them staying approximately flat, and some more optimistic estimates have ~2% rises. I don't have the time to do deep investigation.

\----

The US also has an unprecedented and unique-among-western-countries incarceration rate; people have substantially more debt (college loans, credit card debt, etc.) than they did a few decades ago, and the laws are much less friendly to debtors than they were between the 40s and the 70s; families are less stable than before, and there are more working single mothers. There are an unacceptably high (in my opinion) number of uninsured children. And so on.

In other words, we face all manner of difficult social challenges. At the same time, US society is in many ways much more tolerant than it was 30 or 40 years ago. We have many nifty technological tools that improve people's lives, safer cars, better communications infrastructure, some great medical advances, etc. All in all, I'm optimistic about the future, but it is true that the American working class could use help from our regulatory/economic policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Some points from the article are really good..specially innovation is more important then cost cutting...isn't that what Apple does, they innovate and create new products that creates a whole market altogether, imagine what would have happened if they would have got into only services (they would have made money still no doubt), but would they have been at the same place they are now.

</comment><comment><USER47> What the author doesn't mention is that continual 3% or 2% growth represents exponential, not linear, growth of an economy. It can't continue indefinitely.

If my economy is growing, this year's 2% growth requires substantially more innovation and resources than last year's 2% growth, simply because it's a larger pie.

<comment><USER48> Luckily we also have exponentially more individuals to help out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Why did the US went from 3% to 2% growth?

My guess is that before it had a very low population density and a lot of fertile land. That changed when population density increased. Check the conclusions of this article. <http://mises.org/daily/1568>

</comment><comment><USER50> Trade unions built the middle class.

No trade unions to speak of... no middle class to speak of.

Without a legitimate threat of strikes costing business interests big money in lost profits, there's no reason for businesses to pay workers a reasonable wage for their labor.

</comment><comment><USER51> Most of the article, I think he is trying to connect something that isnt there. But he is unto something with the STEM students going into Professional Vocation.

Face it, it's just as much hardship to do these profession but the return is greater.

</comment><comment><USER52> We've stopped manufacturing, but have we stopped designing? No.

The real money is made not by the people who make the stuff physically, but the people that design the stuff that is made. In that sense, we, too, are "making things out of nothing".

</comment><comment><USER53> Probably bigger factors:

1) pre-1970s income tax used to be 90% for the highest tax bracket.

2) Nixon killing the Bretton Woods system in 1971.

</comment><comment><USER54> Something else happened in the 1970s: the US crossed its oil production peak and imports started increasing as a share of total oil consumed.

</comment><comment><USER55> "I can't afford any of the houses I grew up in — and it's not like my dad is a millionaire or anything; he's a professor just like me. Identical social standing. The difference: I am poorer than he was. My children will be poorer than me."

Bullshit. You may have less money in the bank, but that doesn't make you poorer. Could your dad afford to buy a 65" TV when you where a kid - NO. They didn't even exist. Can you afford a holographic entertainment system - No, they don't really exist right now, but I bet you're kids will have one when they're grown up.

Stop looking at money and start looking at standard of living.

<comment><USER56> Is your argument that if your TV is big enough you won't notice your otherwise poor standard of living?

<comment><USER57> I think he's arguing that money != wealth, and that other things contribute to standard of living other than how big one's house is.

<comment><USER56> Living in a $2400/m studio apartment for a few months is a good way to cure one's self of this conceit.

<comment><USER58> Why does everyone insist on defining wealth in terms of housing?

Today, virtually everyone has air conditioning. When I was a kid, this was quite rare.

Today , everyone has at least one telephone. I can remember families sharing party lines, or even having no phone at all.

Today, most infections can be readily cured (yes, even for people without insurance!). For my grandparents this was unthinkable.

Today I can store food for a long time, and enjoy a cold drink whenever I want. A century ago, who could have that?

Today we have so much food available to us that the overriding health concern is obesity.

Today I can listen to virtually any piece of music, or view any piece of art, on the slightest whim, in the comfort of my favorite chair. That was unthinkable when I was a child.

All these things are within the economic reach of virtually everyone, at least if he's got the most basic job. Yet even a century ago they could be enjoyed only by kings, if that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> That he can't afford the house he grew up in has to do mainly with two factors:

1\. House prices are still ridiculously high, since cities and college towns haven't hit the back side of the bubble yet.

2\. The academia job market has shit all over its knees.

The economic tone of the past 35 years isn't growth or decline but stagnation. Some people are better off than their parents; some are worse off. This has always been the case, but it used to be that being better off was far more common. Now it's 50/50.

Economic growth has been decent in the past 35 years, and world economic growth has is at record highs, but the upper class (which is better described as a malevolent and extremely powerful interest group than any kind of formal conspiracy; of the latter, there is none) has done an excellent job of siphoning off all of the gains for themselves, leaving the lower 99.5% of the American population in essential stagnation. They don't want the American lower- and middle-classes to get poorer (they'll revolt) or richer (they'll challenge their position) but to stay right where they are.

</comment><comment><USER60> So, I find this article very strange. The author seems quite intelligent, yet he has avoided learning much of anything about macroeconomic history. Is he really so naive to think that economists haven't noticed and thought about this phenomena?

He could start with two simple things: first, America left WWII with essentially the rest of the industrialized world flattened. It took everyone else a while to rebuild, but they eventually did. The prosperity of America post WWII is a historical outlier hopefully never to be repeated.

Second, America for a long time had policies that grew the middle class. Without starting a political pissing match, it's pretty clear that either those policies or their effect is gone. Wealth accruing at a disproportional rate to particular sectors of society isn't just happenstance or the "right" outcome in some moral scheme, but rather the outcome of specific government policy.

If the author wants to understand these things, he could start by reading Brad DeLong's blog and / or asking him for book recommendations.</comment>


Show HN: Printed Books from WhatsApp with Python and LaTeX - <AUTHOR> http://beckman.io/whatsapp-books-a-hackers-guide <comment><USER2> I could see an application for this in the field of disaster risk management. After a hurricane for example, WhatsApp channels are becoming used to coordinate response and recovery efforts between multiple different organizations. There is a need for a tool that can extract all the information that gets shared into a report that can be used for analysis of the big picture.

</comment><comment><USER3> This would make an awesome gift. I've been planning on doing exactly this with my girlfriend's conversation for quite some time now, but just haven't been able to get to it.

Also, my chat history is so large, it craps out while exporting the chat. I'll try to see if I can do something about it.

Thanks for sharing!

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy you liked it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If neither Blurb nor Publit appeal to you, I've been using Lulu.com for making hard copies of our blog about our kids. Seems to be the same price as Blurb, and has a UK division.

To generate the PDF, I use a nasty Python script to scrape the blog entries and images and massage then into LaTeX. Nasty code, but at least it works :P

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I hadn't heard of Lulu!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I once created a little python script that would find an input search term in a WhatsApp chat archive. I have a similar chat with friends with almost 4 years of history, and a lot of daily activity, so it was cool to get a snapshot of what we spoke about.

But this is a much more useful, and novel, tool.

</comment><comment><USER6> This looks good. It's a great way to keep a memory of long running WhatsApp chats. Even without printing, this makes for a neat memento.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is going to be a great Christmas gift for the family. Thanks for posting this in September. Gives me enough time to put in the effort :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, yeah that is a great christmas gift!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Our conversations range from lolcats to the very personal — just like life > itself

I am not sure I'd feel comfortable sending a "very personal" conversation to a printing service, maybe I am too paranoid, but I'd rather investigate into getting some sort of home-book-binding kit and doing that as opposed to sending it off to be printed

<comment><AUTHOR> That's reasonable. In our case "the very personal" usually mean opinions on events and other people, stuff that is only sensitive if you know us. I wouldn't print logs that included bank statements, and I probably wouldn't print this kind of thing if I were a public figure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have to say this looks really nice. We have build a similar service with [https://www.whappbook.com](https://www.whappbook.com) where we've automated the whole workflow, and give it a bit more whatsapp-like design. /end plug :). (I'm running the technical part at Whappbook).

</comment><comment><USER10> Take a look at peecho.com, they ship worldwide, are cheaper and don't require you to make it PDF/X-3 compatible.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll take a look! Thanks!

<comment><USER10> By the way, this is if you want to sell books through their API's. If you just want to order something for yourself they have a separate service where you can upload & buy: [http://www.simpleprintservice.com/](http://www.simpleprintservice.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Have you tried them? Good results?

<comment><USER10> They aggregate volume to leverage big printing facilities, so the products you get are really high quality. (I've worked for them a couple of years ago).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm curious: how do you decide where to end the book? Did you make the cut based on length, or did you go in and look for a "natural" endpoint?

<comment><AUTHOR> I try to keep them to 12 months each, ending at the last day of a specific month. I've printed three books so far; you'd think the thickness of individual books would vary a lot per year, but for our group it seems the amount of chatting is constant :)

<comment><USER11> Ah okay, thanks. I'm thinking of doing something similar with a Hangouts group. You can use "Google Takeout" to export your entire Hangouts activities in JSON... so it looks like I'll need to do a bunch of my own parsing. It's a fantastic idea though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> You should expand to facebook messenger.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, Messenger is on my list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> An example would be very cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree! I'm working on it, books hopefully delivered within two or three weeks.

<comment><USER13> What I meant was, adding a generated PDF with demo content.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, ok. That should be doable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thanks for sharing. Do you put censoring things in your program? I need to hide somethings :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha, that's a great idea!</comment></comment>


3 Ways Conference Badges Fail - <AUTHOR> http://www.entrepreneursunpluggd.com/blog/3-ways-conference-badges-fail

<comment><USER2> All good points. It would be awesome if they even had a QR code to scan for wifi

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a bad idea. I'd like that if the scan automatically logged you into the wifi, or if it provided the login info ready to copy/paste into the login form.</comment></comment>


Extensive Benchmarks Of Amazon's EC2 Compute Cloud Performance - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amazon_ec2_exhaustive&num=1

<comment><USER2> These benchmarks were done by someone who seems to have no idea about the ins- and-outs of EC2. For example, there's a lot of IO bound tests... but they're on instance storage. What about Instance storage vs EBS? What about network performance over time?

All I can get from these is that Amazon isn't lying that their instance sizes are different in terms of compute units and memory.

</comment><comment><USER3> It looks strange to me that High-CPU Instances didn't come as clear winners in compilation tests. I thought of choosing only between c1.medium and c1.xlarge for my CPU-intensive tasks. Looks like I should look closely into all types of instances instead, except for micro and small.

According to the specs Amazon gives us, "High-Memory" instances have 3.25 Compute Units per virtual core, while "High-CPU" only 2.5. It would be interesting to know what is going on: are their compilation tests unable to properly utilize many cores, or the nodes assigned to "High-Memory" instances tend to have more powerful hardware, or what?

</comment><comment><USER4> How about a comparison to a known standalone unvirtualized box?

</comment><comment><USER5> I was hoping for more extensive and definitive. Bandwidth? Latency? Startup time? A meaningful sample with variation from day to day and an idea of variation across instances running at the same time?

For all the dollars being thrown at EC2, I'm surprised someone hasn't gone nuts with benchmarking this for the authority, notoriety and seo link juice.

<comment><USER6> I've done some long-running benchmarks of EC2, mostly for kicks and personal edification. For about 8 months now, I've had a job running on an EC2 "small" instance, that performs a suite of microbencharks every 10 seconds and records the results. Lots of raw data can be found here:

<http://amistrongeryet.com/dashboard.jsp>

This covers a variety of AWS operations, ranging from simple EC2 CPU benchmarks to SimpleDB and RDS operations. I also include some measurements of Google App Engine. I've put a lot of focus on measuring variation over time, and measuring outliers (i.e. 99.9th percentile, not just mean). I'd like to measure variation across instances, but haven't gotten around to it.

The web site linked above has no documentation at the moment, and is a bit broken in other ways, but the data may be of interest. I have a little blog (<http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/>) where I've discussed some of my findings, e.g. [http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/early-results- on-...](http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/early-results-on-gae-and- aws.html), [http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/beginnings-of- rob...](http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/beginnings-of-robust-data- collector.html), and [http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/cloud-data- storag...](http://amistrongeryet.blogspot.com/2010/04/cloud-data-storage-many- choices-all-bad.html).

If there's interest, I'll put a little effort into cleaning up and documenting the data reporting site.

<comment><USER3> Hi, I'm definitely interested in benchmarking the EC2 instances. Are you doing some benchmarks that are CPU-intensive? You're measuring the one instance that you've got to use as a server, aren't you? (I'm interested more in, "what perfomance would I keep getting if I keep requesting instances") How can I contact you?

<comment><USER6> You can reach me at e-mail address "public" on domain "snewman.net". I'd be happy to share more of what I'm doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> <http://cloudharmony.com/> has at least as extensive benchmarks, and includes other cloud providers.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how those compare to others IaaS providers like Gogrid or Rackspace

</comment><comment><USER9> How about cc1.4xlarge we have been debating using them for the IO.

</comment><comment><USER10> i'm much more interested in ec2's variation over time</comment>


Ask HN: Website for posting and discuss product idea besides HN? - <AUTHOR>

Is there a list of website that allows people to post and discuss new ideas besides HN? <comment><USER2> I don't know if there's a list or not, but many such sites have appeared here on HN over the years. Search through the history here and you should find quite a few. Not sure if they're all still active or not, but it's something that seems to get launched quite frequently.

</comment><comment><USER3> fwiw here is a "hacker news for x, which lists a lot of such sites, with various purposes: [https://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com/](https://hn4hn4x.herokuapp.com/)</comment>


Depression link to processed food - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8334353.stm <comment><USER2> It seems like depression is really a case of the pharma industry having everyone brainwashed. The vast majority of people believe that depression is a disease of biological origin, even though the academic research clearly shows that it's not a disease (it's a symptom, like AIDS) and in most cases this symptom is not the result of some underlying brain malfunction.

And yet we have all these people committing suicide because they can't get the help they need, and we have all these people who freak out whenever you say that depression isn't a disease. I don't understand it. I've literally never seen anything where the academic research was so clear and unambiguous, and yet completely rejected by virtually the entire general public.

<comment><USER3> Can you supply some links to this "academic research [that is] so clear and unambiguous"? I came to a similar conclusion years ago and would be interested in retracing your steps.

As for the not-understanding-it part, how is it hard to understand? It's effective marketing. The industry doesn't make money by people getting better, it makes money by getting (their) drugs into them. Humans are a vehicle for the delivery of their product. (So now are pets. The opening of the pet market for antidepressants is so classic a move that it will surely be studied in business schools.)

The vegetable oil industry did the same thing, ingeniously, against dairy fat. Remember those decades of propaganda about how butter and cream mean cholestorol which means heart attacks which mean death? It was an industry contrivance. The original studies it was based on were shamelessly cherry- picked. The campaign leveraged the widespread public fear that derived from the heart-attack epidemic of the 1950s and 60s. (Edit: I learned this from a CBC Ideas episode a few years ago.)

<comment><USER2> "Can you supply some links to this "academic research [that is] so clear and unambiguous"? I came to a similar conclusion years ago and would be interested in retracing your steps."

Just Google treatment for depression.

<comment><USER3> Are you being sarcastic? <http://www.google.com/search?q=treatment+for+depression> is a mire of orthodox SEO'd junk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's an interesting one.

On the one hand, I'm not shocked that taking all the nutrients out of food makes them less good for us.

On the other hand, we don't have a mechanism nailed down, and I'm wary of the correlation here - particularly because it's telling me something I'd like to believe.

Hopefully this will lead to more research - and possibly to ways of processing food that don't remove whatever the vital nutrients are.

Not to mention that knowing what causes this might be very useful - particularly if we can make it available in pill form :->

<comment><USER5> Correlation /= causation, which the article didn't really make note of. Does the actual research suggest causation, or merely a link?

<comment><USER4> Actually, it does make note of it:

 _Although the researchers cannot totally rule out the possibility that people with depression may eat a less healthy diet they believe it is unlikely to be the reason for the findings because there was no association with diet and previous diagnosis of depression._

<comment><USER6> I tend to eat unhealthier when I am feeling down. Of course, when I resolve an issue with a bug that has been given me trouble, I usually celebrate with unhealthy food as well. Many people have habits that are based on unhealthy food as a reward mechanism.

<comment><USER7> I think they looked more to people who eat processed foods as part of their normal diet and not people who eat processed foods as a reward.

It would be good to know how much processed food within some recurring time frame - say weekly - the people with recurring depression ate.

<comment><USER8> there's a correlation between depression and food, but there are also correlations between food and socio economic status. So being low income might also be contributing to mental health (which isn't addressed in the article at all; though they do point out that if there are a lot of takeaway joints near by then the problem is exacerbated...might those areas also be lower income?).

<comment><USER7> I'd need to read the article again but I think the study was done on civil employees. I don't know how broad the pay range is for civil employees nor if the authors sampled the full range.

The thing to keep in mind is that Western science made a dichotomy between the mind and body for religious reasons. In reality, they are completely interrelated. Eating unhealthy food will eventually affect your mind: right now it's just not predictable how or to what extent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know of any estimates of rates of depression say, 75-100-150 years ago? Depression seems to be a disease of civilization, but as far as I know it's not clear if it's rooted in something chemical (as this article suggests) or psychological (we simply have trouble finding meaning in the sorts of lives we live today).

<comment><USER10> Another question is when was depression first classified to the scope at which it is today. We can't know if its rising or falling over an extended period of time without such info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if they controlled for socioeconomic biases. High fast food intake is correlated to a bunch of other things.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's really depressing to come back from a hamburger (with fries) and read this article on hacker news.

</comment><comment><USER13> I see about 5 of these articles a week. Whats the point? Are any of us going to change our behavior based on slight correlations reported in non scientific journals? Do the social and life sciences really experience breakthroughs every week? Or are these articles just fluff?</comment>


Monocular Rivalry - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocular_rivalry <comment><USER2> It's almost always the red grating that disappears when I look at the demo in the article. I have to work at making the green grid partially disappear (don't ask how).</comment>


Using Machine Learning to identify authors of texts - <AUTHOR> http://jiaconda.github.io/Using-Machine-Learning-to-Identify-authors-of-texts/ <comment><USER2> Really neat presentation style! I thought this was a proper mix of wording / explanation and code. very neat.</comment>


Hackers of the World, Unite - <AUTHOR> http://master-signifier.posterous.com/

<comment><USER2> _Technology. What exactly is it? It's stuff. Stuff we make. And stuff that makes. Or helps us make. Make stuff._

Eloquence. Not his strong point. Like passing Hacker News and a few books of post-marxist philosophers through a Markov chain generator.</comment>


CoffeeScript Koans - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blindsey/coffee_script_koans

<comment><AUTHOR> A fork of the well-known (and quite good) JavaScript Koans. As a fork, it currently suffers from a lack of CoffeeScript-specific content; see this pull request: <https://github.com/blindsey/coffee_script_koans/pull/4>

There's also another project calling itself CoffeeScript Koans, also based on JavaScript Koans: <https://github.com/sleepyfox/coffeescript-koans></comment>


The Sokal Affair - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair <comment><USER2> There are also "science war" in the field of economics, especially regarding what is knowable what isn't.

We have one side that is largely deductive, do not assume that humans are "rational", and distrust mathematical models and believe that economists are misusing statistics.

Another side is economic that attempt to imitate the scientific methodology of physics and as well being largely inductive. This is now the current and newest trend in the field of economics.

From my point of view, the Austrian school("Pyschological") is victorious over both the mainstream neoclassical and neo keynesian schools. Those who are of the Austrian prediction have successfully predicted the recession for quite some time now.

You may have different view which schools is superior but the battle is not decided. Until the field of economics matured, there will be many ruthless debates among those who are in the profession of economics for years to come.

The Economic Calculation Debate anyone?

<comment><USER3> From what I've gathered, the real debate is between neoclassical economists and behavioral economists. Behavioral economists are more empirical, studying exactly how incentives work and how people behave in the economy. "Austrian" economics (aside from what was done decades ago, in Austria) only lives on as a pseudoscientific attempt to justify libertarian politics. Politically, I'm largely libertarian myself, but there's nothing more unscientific than turning something like economics into an apologia for anarcho-capitalism.

<comment><USER2> So you believe that "government cannot calculate, ever" is bullshit?

If government can calculate the allocation of resource then it invaildated the entire concept of anarcho-capitalism.

This seem an unlikely hypothesis because government tend to listen to political talking points rather than economic talking points. Whatever is political prudent tend to not be neccesary economically prudent.

<comment><USER3> I think economics should be a descriptive science, not a set of arguments for one particular political system. Markets have certain consequences that we may or may not want, and so do certain types of government interventions. Planned economies don't tend to have very many desirable consequences, as far as I can tell, but that's not how most economic policies work anyway.

I'm not a good enough economist to give an intellectually honest account of what would happen in an anarcho-capitalist system, but I doubt from a historical and anthropological standpoint that anarcho-capitalism is likely to ever happen anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While it's amusing for us computer science majors to poke fun at the scientific irrelevance of postmodernism, its influence is undeniable.

Few academic fields have been left untouched by postmodern thinking, and you'll quickly run into it if you're studying art, literature, philosophy, architecture, social science, feminism, political science, and more.

A religious person might rightly point out that Darwin's theory of evolution hasn't changed his faith in a higher power, but it's foolish of him to fail to notice that the world around him has been revolutionized.

<comment><USER3> "Few academic fields have been left untouched by postmodern thinking, and you'll quickly run into it if you're studying art, literature, philosophy, architecture, social science, feminism, political science, and more."

Though, if you're studying philosophy in the analytic tradition (most English- speaking philosophy since the turn of the 20th century), postmodernism and its antecedents in continental philosophy have been consciously rejected in an attempt for greater linguistic precision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Okay, I have yet to understand what the heck postmodernism really is. Apparently, everybody I've asked cannot define it without resorting to incomprehensible explanations. Could anybody shed some light on what has become the whipping post of philosophy?

<comment><USER6> From <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/>

[..] it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.

In short: it about bending language to such extent that all meaning is distorted to the point of being broken.

<comment><USER7> Oh, so they're bullshit artists. I wonder how much of my tax dollars get paid for these people to talk out their asses.

I'll stick with people who actually produce things that move the world forward.

<comment><USER6> Well, it's a pretty important, and counterintuitieve, property of language that it is even possible to do the things they do. In The Matrix terms: they show us just how deep the rabbithole goes.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The cold fusion race just heated up - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-01/30/cold-fusion-energy-advances-2015 <comment><USER2> Oh, the E-Cat again. The E-cat takes in electric power, and supposedly puts out more heat than would be expected. The electric power to resistance heaters is input in a "proprietary waveform", and is measured with a wattmeter.

This is a typical thing with "free energy" scams. The same thing was tried back in the "piezos" era, when putting resonant piezoelectric devices in an oscillating tank circuit was supposed to produce more power than went in. (But it did not, of course, run self-sustaining, without outside power).

Measuring wattage of unusual waveforms is hard. W = E*I, or watts equals current times voltage, but you have to integrate the instantaneous product over time. Many wattmeters don't do a full integration; they're mostly for sine waves, and may have frequency limitations. The E-Cat guy won't let observers use a scope to see that "proprietary waveform". All it's doing is driving a resistance heater, so the waveform should not matter to the heater.

A simple RF wattmeter, which has a resistor whose heat output is measured, would clear this up.

<comment><USER3> A better experiment is a double blind trial. Fill one hydrogen tank with standard hydrogen and another tank with deuterium. Code both of them with a scramble. The e-cat should fail with deuterium and should work with hydrogen.

This does not require any access to internals, and could even be done on the sly without alerting rossi.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It doesn't matter if it's a fraud, a con, or even real; this article is terrible and should never have been published in any reputable news source. These claims of being "verified" or "replicated" are completely false, not least of which because there aren't any claims as to what is going on the first place.

The claim "I have a magic box" isn't science, it's ... well, magic.

<comment><AUTHOR> (submitter here)

It's true that you _cannot_ replicate Rossi's allegations independently because he refuses to reveal the way his alleged reactor works. However, the "independent report" mentioned in the article basically tested this thing as a black box for more than a month; Rossi was present at the start and at the end, but not during the test, and all the equipment and so on was not his but procured independently. Even if Rossi did some screwy stuff, it cannot explain the 1.5 MWh gain for more than 32 days - the only thing that could explain this, assuming it indeed is a con, is unreliable heat measurement. While it is true that there has been some doubts expressed on that subject, the researchers have a lot of experience performing such measurements; and they are far from being disreputable researchers or shady characters. One of the authors of the subsequent paper is also, by the way, the previous head of the Swedish skeptics society - someone that does have some experience in debunking bullshit claims.

I'm not saying this thing is working as advertised, mind you; but this report is troubling and warrants further research. And the article isn't only about the e-cat: it's about another researcher, Parkhomov, having set up a similar experiment based on what he could glean from Rossi's alleged reactor, and witnessing similar excess energy production. This other experiment _is_ , by contrast, completely open and can be verified/replicated/debunked, so I suppose it's just a matter of time before someone attempts such a replication and confirm or infirm this new experiment.

<comment><USER5> That's not independent verification; it's not even vaguely close to independent verification.

"Even if Rossi did some screwy stuff, it cannot explain the 1.5 MWh gain for more than 32 days"

Sure, he could have literally hacked the instruments. But, 1.5 MWh over 32 days is a fairly small amount of energy as in 2kW * 32 days a lot of chemical processes can get you there. Also, measuring heat output is really easy to mess up. Something as simple as putting an insulating blanket under the device could significantly alter the measurements. The point is he was there when they were setting up the experiment so he could have easily lead them astray.

PS: As to _warrants further research_ nope, sorry the correct response is to declare this a clear scam.

<comment><USER6> The correct response is to _prove_ this a clear scam. Don't just say it.

<comment><USER5> Nope, the default assumption is always there running a scam. You need to prove you're not running a scam.

EX1: All those reporting requirements for public companies.

EX2: Credit checks before you get phone / internet service / rent an apartment etc.

EX3: Passport check at the border.

EX4: Metal detectors at sensitive locations.

EX5: Professional certification requirements for Doctors etc.

EX6: FDA

ect ect.

PS: There are also a lot of hidden ones such as the dress code at many nice restaurants which significantly reduces people dine and dashing. And camera's at gas stations. Or even just locked doors.

<comment><USER6> It's fine for that to be your default assumption. But saying it, without evidence, is slander.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Scientists have never been allowed to examine the E-Cat, details of the supposed physics have never been revealed, and even the identities of his US business partners were only discovered by online sleuthing.

for fucks sake, why even publish such a bogus article

<comment><USER8> Because it's not all about the E-Cat. "Parkhomov has openly revealed his reactor design, ingredients used and experimental process, which is not terribly complex, and this allows for further experimentation to take place in the public domain, not under a cloak of secrecy"

I'm still a skeptic until plenty other people replicate it, but it's nice to see that some cold fusion researchers are acting like scientists now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's the one true test for any new generator: If there's a working prototype, they could be selling power to the grid.

There is no need for publicity, investments, or shows. It doesn't matter if someone can replicate your device. If it works, sell the power and build more of them.

If it doesn't work, I guess just keep on trying to get money from other people.

<comment><USER10> Your measurement for "what is true cold fusion" only works for devices that are extremely showy and easy to put together (aka, Hollywood cold-fusion reactors). For everything else, I see three problems with your statement:

Firstly, is it only cold fusion if you can build and operate your reactor for cheaper than the price of your local utility? Would it not be a scientific breakthrough if it were not immediately economically viable? Hard to make money to build money for your proof when it costs you money to sell to the grid.

Or, if it does manage to output energy cheaper than the local utility can produce it, you have to factor in return on investment as well. If your device costs $100,000 to create (which I think could easily be a low-ball estimate) and generates $1 of energy a day for the grid, you're looking at a _long_ time for your return on investment, and your proof.

And the above is only for devices that just magically output AC/DC power with no extra infrastructure. If your device only generates waste heat, then you're looking at building steam turbines, high pressure pipes, holding tanks, and all the other expensive stuff a traditional energy plant takes. In order to do that, you need a large investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The con is not on us. He is not conning the public. He is not trying to get a science foundation grant.

The targets are aging millionaires who lack science education. The US (Florida) is full of people who made millions on the rise real estate and are looking for a new investment. They are old enough to have seen the rise of the internet and think they can get in on the ground floor of the next big thing. They can believe in magic boxes because, for people who haven't seen a classroom in 40 years, Google looks like magic.

Who knows how many "investors" this guy has fooled into handing over their retirement savings. No doubt they are bound by scary non-disclosure agreements and are afraid of speak out. The best person to con is one who, upon realizing they are conned, will not have the resources to fight back. This guy doesn't want Elon Musk's money. He wants you grandmother's.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm on record [1] as skeptical of the heat measurement techniques, especially on the output side.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8435322](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8435322)

<comment><USER13> this whole [0],[1] thing is so retarded

<comment><USER14> Be constructive, suggest something better.

<comment><USER15> Allowing links? This is after all the web...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This smells like a con in so many ways. I'm less curious about how it supposedly works than I am about how he managed to trick those researchers. He was on site, so presumably he could of had the opportunity for meddling with the experiment.

<comment><USER17> _" The total net energy obtained during the 32 days run was about 1.5 MWh"_

If Rossi has found a way to hide that much energy in his rod and/or materials, then let's just go with that and skip researching all the fusion stuff.

<comment><USER18> If he hid 1.5 MWh within the materials, then it is an impressive invention regardless of if it is cold fusion.

If he manipulated the sensors to show a higher energy output then was actually the case, it is considerably less impressive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The claims of cold fusion still seem quite dubious. I remember having a lot of doubts about that paper claiming "verification" of cold fusion, and given the behavior of a number of members of academic community, it isn't too surprising that you might find some academic somewhere that would be willing write sketchy papers just to get published. Until a big national lab gets behind this you may as well file this with N-rays: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N_ray)

</comment><comment><USER20> I remember another jackass from the 1990s who made outrageous video compression claims. He would give demos of his super-secret technology showing wonderfully high def video...

Turns out he was running a coax cable underground to the table on which the monitor sat.

Scientists are often good at determining what flaws of logic are causing anomalous results, or teasing out subtle unknown processes.

However, they do poorly at debunking conmen because conmen are quite literally trying to game all the tools that scientists use. Unless they slept in the lab in sleeping bags, who is to say that there wasn't someone coming in the middle of the night to give it a little boost?

All we have now is one crank from some backwater university in Russia who claims to have reproduced the effect.

</comment><comment><USER21> Why isn't this bootstrapping itself? That is, if it's generating a substantial amount of excess heat, why can't that heat be used to drive a generator to power the device? I'd love to see a long-running E-Cat that's plugged into itself.

<comment><USER22> That would convince me. The fact that it isn't done is telling.

I'm sure steam-turbine generators are neither cheap nor easy, so up to a certain point I can see skipping the expense and the hassle. But were I strongly suspected of being a fraud, I'd put a self-sustaining setup high on my list. I think the (incredibly high) interest in the device after such a demonstration would make the effort worthwhile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Everybody says it's a fraud. But you have to admit it's a very long fraud (5 years?) and nobody complained about loses yet. It's not a fullfilled fraud therefore it's not a fraud yet. To me Rossi looks more like a good entertainer performing a magic routine: he pretends to pull energy out of nowhere, the energy seems to appear, nobody loses money and nobody can use that energy (at least not yet) and the enthusiastic public screams "it's a fraud !!!"

<comment><USER24> Three words "Moeller Air Car"

The point being that longevity of a fraud doesn't make it less likely to be a fraud. Rossi as been pushing this thing for a long time but his inability to actually use it to make excess energy he could use to sell to the grid is a huge red flag for anyone who has looked at it.

<comment><USER25> Heh, is there some internet rule about the mention of that car in any discussion?</comment></comment></comment>


There Is No .bro in Brotli: Google/Mozilla Engineers Nix File Type as Offensive - <AUTHOR> http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/10/10/2212233/there-is-no-bro-in-brotli-googlemozilla-engineers-nix-file-type-as-offensive <comment><USER2> This is starting to go way too far.

What next they get rid of the "man" command in Unix because of gender issues? People find the "kill" command to be a trigger word so it too gets changed?

<comment><USER3> I find the "fsck" command to be vulgar because it reminds me of "fucking". I prefer the term "making love".

I also find the "cp" command to be a trigger word, for the abuse I suffered as a child.

Everybody should be made to use the "cat" command to copy files. Cats are warm and fuzzy and everybody likes cats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm really trying to stay open-minded here, and keep in mind "you don't know what you don't know." I _want_ to say "This is one of the most brain-dead stupid things I've ever heard of in my life", but I'm going to try and withhold judgment. I try to be as sympathetic to the interests of feminists as I can, but being male, there _are_ things I've never experienced, and a perspective I can never have. Maybe there's a way in which this makes sense, but I honestly don't see it right now. Nonetheless, it's a change that doesn't appear to be hurting anybody, and if it somehow, someway, contributes in even a microscopic way to fostering gender equality and diminishing negative aspects of our culture, then I guess maybe it was worth it.</comment>


Show HN: Windows 98 VanillaJS Boot, React OS Implementation w/ Component Library - <AUTHOR> https://packard-belle.netlify.com <comment><AUTHOR> Things of note:

Has been designed to hopefully allow easy optimisations via JSON files once things get refined down, please look through the context folder of the repo for more info. I'd really appreciate some suggestions for how to improve this without overcomplicating it.

Already has some persistent state in the form of the customisable backgrounds (see Control Panel), hoping to expand on this with notepad files pretty soon

Next goal is to export this full block (launch screen excluded) as a npm package of its own with limited customisation on the desktop and start menu

Is not trying to be a full fledged implementation but I want it to be flexible enough to be potentially used as a story telling tool of sorts (i.e. recreating online drama people had on their families old computer that they were given in the early 00s).

Getting it to be at all mobile friendly was very very very hard

Component library was quite ill advisedly written heavily via scss mixins, this does however allow it to work as independent of frameworks/libraries [https://github.com/padraigfl/packard- belle/tree/master/css](https://github.com/padraigfl/packard- belle/tree/master/css)

I'd greatly appreciate feedback on ideas to expand on the above things and/or suggestions for how to keep them all on track along with general code critiquing and whatnot. I wrote a lot of this in bursts without much quality control so I won't be too offended!

</comment><comment><USER2> that is so awesome I can't believe it. it's so fast.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Hiding the initial load behind vanillaJS probably helps haven't tested it beyond my own environments so I don't know how well it runs tbh.

What device are you running it on? Iirc I had to disable animations on mobile because the css for transitions on absolute positioned elements was a disaster, I've since gotten better with transforms so might be able to resolve that

<comment><USER2> mobile, $120 redmi

it's just incredibly cool what you've done.</comment></comment></comment>


EyePong: Play Pong With Your Freaking Eyes (built at Barcamp Vancouver) - <AUTHOR> http://www.techvibes.com/blog/just-for-kicks-vancouver-developers-build-ipong-or-is-it-eyepong

<comment><AUTHOR> Should also add a link to one of the developers blog posts on the project: <http://jonchui.wordpress.com/2010/11/21/492/>

</comment><comment><USER2> Thanks for the link @nick! I should also mention that I wasn't the only dev on the project at all. @appskicker built the backend & started it.</comment>


Alzheimer's Disease Projected to Cost U.S. up to $7.7 Trillion by 2030 - <AUTHOR> https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180125005667/en/Alzheimer's-Disease-Cost-U.S.-7.7-Trillion-2030 <comment><AUTHOR> In 2016, almost 20% of medicare and medicaid was spent on caring (not treating) Alzheimer's Dementia. [1]

[1] [https://www.alz.org/documents_custom/2017-facts-and- figures....](https://www.alz.org/documents_custom/2017-facts-and-figures.pdf)</comment>


Google is stealing away Microsoft's future corporate customers - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/243321/google-is-stealing-away-microsofts-future-corporate-customers/

<comment><USER2> Mail is a strange case.

If you are a tiny .com, mail deliverability is a big problem. I switched to gmail because I couldn't post to W3C mailing lists from my own .com. Mails from gmail are less likely to end up in the trash than from nobody.com and if you are trying to sell something you can't have stuff get trashed.

Fortune 500 companies have the resources to fight deliverability issues, also there are a lot of biz people who handle insane volumes of email who swear by Outlook.

As for other stuff, Google docs is a joke, it is so hard to maintain and add features to software that revolve around async communication. Whatever you think about Win 8, Office 365 kicks ass. (The async comm problem is so bad that it is easier to port Office to Android than Win 8)</comment>