Murdoch: We'll probably remove our sites from Google's index - <AUTHOR> http://mumbrella.com.au/murdoch-well-probably-remove-our-sites-from-googles-index-11366 <comment><USER2> I hope he carries through with this threat, because only actually doing it will provide hard evidence on who loses the most on this type of action: the content producer, or the content aggregator.

I think that News Corp will be the biggest loser, and I think it would be really good if they got to learn this lesson the hard way, but I also think the people in the blogosphere banging their chests and proclaiming the final demise of Old Media are wrong, yet again.

<comment><USER3> _Only actually doing it will provide hard evidence on who loses the most on this type of action: the content producer, or the content aggregator_

If I was a betting man I would put my money on Murdoch loosing money. This is what happens when some CEO who doesn't know anything about how the web or how search works goes on a rampage. I wonder if Murdoch even knows what a browser is. (Reference to Google's "What is a browser?" video series.)

Edit:

I was just laughing while watching the video. Murdoch didn't even use YouTube's name. He said "that, that huge video site that was such a runaway success." What I get out of it is he's just jealous of Google. I bet he wants to buy them out and add them to his portfolio.

<comment><USER4> People said the same thing about the MySpace deal, and look how profitable that turned out to be. I don't think you give Murdoch enough credit.

<comment><USER5> Isn't MySpace supposed to be dying under News Corp? Tell me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER6> Myspace has been losing share, while facebook has been gaining a lot. If you look at it that way, mySpace is losing. I am not sure how well it is performing for Murdoch.

You have to give kudos for him trying to get into a new market.

As for how he will lose if he removes his sites from google, time will tell. I assume he has done a lot of work looking at the area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What makes everyone think they haven't done a lifetime ROI analysis and discovered that search referals aren't profitable ? - the only thing we have is speculation. What Murdoch has is hard data about visitors and ad-click through rates. I'm willing to bet they have a much better understanding of the value of search referals than anyone here.

Going pay-only is a risky strategy, everyone knows that, but the only way they'll know if it works if they do it. Business isn't always about accepting the status quo, sometimes you have to gamble.

<comment><USER8> Sure you have to gamble, but the only way this will make money for Murdoch is if makes less money on people who comes to his site from a search than it costs to serve that page; unless he has gotten the worst bandwidth-deal of the century.

<comment><USER9> That's not true. You can't compare one business strategy with _nothing_ and conclude that it's a good strategy. You have to compare against the alternatives.

If Newscorp has 10 million visitors per time period, and makes a net of $0.01 per visitor, that's better than nothing, but if they can go down to 1 million visitors per time and net $0.15 per visitor, it's better. Murdoch seems to think that they can do the latter. I don't have any data to refute him, and neither, I'd guess, does anyone else in this thread.

It's possible that Murdoch is totally off his rocker, but it's usually a fair baseline strategy to assume that the guy who runs a multi-billion dollar company has a bit of business acumen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I hope he includes MySpace.

</comment><comment><USER11> I look forward to it.

<comment><USER12> It's not in the bag yet

When Murdch originally bought the WSJ he said he would bring the pay walls down on WSJ.com:

"(WSJ.com) is an excellent site but we charge for it, which limits it to about a million in circulation. We are studying and we expect to make that free, and instead of having a million, having 10 or 15 million people in every corner of the earth keeping up to date minute by minute with all business and economic news from around the world. We think that will attract very large sums or, relatively large sums, anyway of advertising revenue."

[http://paidcontent.org/article/419-nws-dj-murdoch-we- expect-...](http://paidcontent.org/article/419-nws-dj-murdoch-we-expect- wsjcom-will-go-free-have-to-modernize-dj/)

I'm very curious to see what convinced him to do a complete 180. It was only two years ago when he made that statement.

<comment><USER13> My guess would be a CPM somewhere around $0.15. It would appear that he was correct regarding traffic though: <http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wsj.com/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think this just may improve the quality of news on the internet! Hopefully more independent news outlets with forward thinking mindsets can take advantage of the reduced noise and actually start to put out material that will be of a better quality. Perhaps we will start to see more journalism from around the world with different points of view? more individual journalists and blogs with relevant and accurate information for a change.

I for one hope he does go through with this!! I think its just going to end up hurting his core business more...which is a good thing really. He is just accelerating the demise of the paper/tabloid and big media as we know it.

I think a lot of people will have a different opinion, but I think this is great news.

<comment><USER15> > journalism from around the world with different points of view

Journalism isn't supposed to have a point of view. It's supposed to give you the facts and stay neutral.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Vaporplan? As far as I'm concerned, when a business leader says their company might do something, it's as good as not saying anything at all. Even when they say they _will_ do something, they often change their minds.

<comment><USER17> Unless he's trying to gauge what his advertisers will do after saying such a thing in public.

<comment><USER16> This is probably the reason, but if he can throw a thought out there just to see what the response is without actually knowing he's going to follow through, why wouldn't the advertisers do the same thing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> His idea than random surfers are worthless to advertisers seems very odd to me.

I'd think that the random surfers are MORE likely to click an ad. After all, they aren't committed to your site -- They got there by accident. If a related ad is there, it seems likely that they would follow it more readily than someone who went to that site specifically to get their news.

<comment><USER19> Not all ads are about the clicks. I'd expect NewsCorp's online properties to be more concerned about impressions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm confused about something. I thought newspapermen (Murdoch and that AP guy in particular) had a problem with news aggregators, which to me means things like Google News and Digg and HN, and maybe even RSS/Atom readers. Are they actually mad about having links to content from Google results pages? Or is there some misunderstanding here?

</comment><comment><USER21> To understand Murdoch's motivations, you must realize that the man has a true love for the printed word, especially in newsprint form. The only thing that makes sense to me here is that he is intentionally sabotaging the internet to make his beloved newspapers more appealing. It's not going to work, but bless his heart for trying.

<comment><USER22> Are you serious?

This man runs his news(!) organizations to spread his personal ideologies as opposed to actually providing news. The only thing he really cares about is maximizing profit (nothing wrong with that), to say that his action was a result of his love for printed media is pretty silly, really.

<comment><USER21> Yes, I'm serious. Thanks for asking. And no, Murdoch is widely misunderstood. Profit comes first, not his political ideologies. He basically supported Barack Obama in the 2008 election. <http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8220054890220213491> is interesting.

<comment><USER23> Speaking as someone who grew up surrounded by a Fox News target demographic (religious conservatives), I'll also note that many of them _hated_ Fox's entertainment programming for undermining family values through violence, indecency, poor role models, and all the usual complaints directed at anything edgier than "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood".

Murdoch's news outfits may be blatantly biased, and overlap his own ideology to some substantial degree, but the primary goal is pandering to the audience's sensibilities (read: profit), not promoting his politics. Step back and think about it. Has commentary on Fox News ever convinced anyone to change their mind?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> One thing's for sure: this plan is so crazy it's either really smart or really stupid. Only time will tell.

</comment><comment><USER25> Why don't they negotiate with Google?

I don't see any point of trying to threaten Google. Just be a man, mate, the Aussie way.

</comment><comment><USER26> Mr. Murdoch should consult his referes log before executing on that strategy.

<comment><USER27> Perhaps he has, in fact almost certainly. (btw sp: referers(sic), yes it's not referrers!)

Some fictitious scenarios:

1) they give away the news, only ad revenue from 100% of current readers who are mostly too cheap to pay (that's me!)

2) they sell the news to 5% of current readers, targetted ad revenue doesn't alter as these readers buy stuff, and buy stuff online to boot

I'm going to go ahead and assume that most people come to the prestige newspapers The Times (of London) by a search for the papers name - now they're not going to delist themselves just stop putting all their stories up online. Indeed I'd expect them to have lead summaries still in SERPs. If most paying customers and most ad following customers come via the reputation and not specific stories then it seems there's little to lose.

Even if it works but not as well as liked it's only going to work better if more news centres follow suit - the less freely available well written news online the greater the value of pay news (and the less they'll need to charge).

Personally I think Murdoch can probably pull this off for some of his larger news providers - do I like it, not one bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> He showed just how incredibly oblivious he is to the workings of new media.

<comment><USER29> Would you say many businesses in the new-media internet sector are equally oblivious to _viable_ and _sustainable_ revenue models?

Seems to be a gross sense of entitlement amongst consumers if you ask me. It kills off quality content providers in favor or knee-jerk social media and mediocre content generated by algorithms to maximize SEO/SEM juju.

My point is, there are two sides to this coin and somewhere in between is a happy medium. I don't feel either side has the best solution — yet.

<comment><USER23> _Seems to be a gross sense of entitlement amongst consumers if you ask me. It kills off quality content providers in favor or knee-jerk social media and mediocre content generated by algorithms to maximize SEO/SEM juju._

The situation you describe is what is generally known as "supply and demand". If low-quality content is all that many people actually _want_ , the supply is nearly inexhaustible and so the value of content does exactly what you'd expect. There doubtless remains a smaller market for higher-quality content who can be convinced to pay for it, but that's not the mainstream and probably never will be--and while outfits like the WSJ and NYT may be the best of the old mainstream stuff, they're still on the wrong side of the shifting market.

Most of the traditional media is in the unenviable situation of being neither sufficiently high-quality to reach people who will pay, nor sufficiently cheap to reach the new mass market. The only sense of entitlement going on is the media companies bellyaching that the market has moved and left them behind.

Murdoch is a hack and doesn't have the cojones to provide _real_ quality, but at his age he'll probably be dead before his mistakes fully catch up with News Corp. In the meantime, if quality is what you're after, have you considered buying a subscription to The Economist?

<comment><USER29> Supply and demand is not the issue here. My point was about SEO/SEM in terms of "gaming" the system AND producing low quality content.

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124173784714798437.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> That's so crazy it JUST might work! Nah, it won't.

</comment><comment><USER31> Good. Hurry it up then, I enjoy schadenfreude.

</comment><comment><USER32> dito, it's really his funeral, I guess they won't really do it, he obviously doesn't know what he's talking about, he'll find it out soon enought to change his mind.

</comment><comment><USER33> Good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER34> personally, I would be willing to pay for news content. However I do not want to subscribe to NY Times, and wall street journal, and Forbes, etc I read articles from all these sites on a daily basis but I would hate to have to pay $100 a month in subscription fees... i wouldn't.

<comment><USER35> >personally, I would be willing to pay for news content.

That makes you an exceptional case. Most North Americans haven't paid for news content in well over a century. Since the advent of advertising-based newspapers, we've paid for _distribution_ , but not the content itself.

<comment><USER36> I don't think the guy on the street buying a news paper thinks to himself "good thing I had a dollar to pay someone for distributing all this free news content to me", but rather "good thing I had a dollar to buy a news paper".

The economics behind the scenes may very well be that his dollar pays only for printing and distribution, but that's not what people _think_ they're paying for.

<comment><USER37> It's not what people have actually paid for, it's what they think they've been paying for. They think they've been getting news for a quarter or a dollar, when their subscription price goes up because they arn't just paying for distribution anymore, but rather all the things that advertising used to pay for, will they not perceive that as an increase in the cost of the news?

<comment><USER35> > It's not what people have actually paid for, it's what they think they've > been paying for.

I would argue that the distinction is irrelevant in this case. If the news was priced according to the cost of creating content tomorrow, the number of buyers would be correspondingly smaller than it is today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Never underestimate the power of wishful thinking ... for shooting oneself in the foot with a bazooka.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's his funeral.

<comment><USER27> I somehow doubt even if one of Murdoch's papers went down he'd feel the pinch at all.

<comment><USER40> Well, the press would be terrible. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Hahahahahahaha

hahahahahahaha

hahahahahahahahahaha...

 _pauses_

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha</comment>


National Intelligence Estimate: The Chinese Cultural Revolution (1967) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0001095914.pdf

<comment><USER2> It's interesting to look back at the Cultural Revolution with an intelligence document like this that was written in the beginning of it. Its analysis and predictions are very accurate in many ways (especially the parts about Zhou Enlai, Maoist Dogmas eventually disappearing) but in it fails to express the significance and and potency of what was going on, which is understandable as I don't think anyone really thought it would last the better part of ten years. It's amazing one man was able to cause such drastic changes in the different structures of a country the way Mao did.

I've always found that the most enlightening aspect of the Cultural Revolution is that many of the principles it was against eventually became defining aspects of post-Mao China. As a social revolution, it seems to be alone in this regard. I am unsure if this outcome is surprising or not, as the Four Modernizations were originally proposed in 1963.

<comment><USER3> _... many of the principles it was against eventually became defining aspects of post-Mao China. As a social revolution, it seems to be alone in this regard._

Maybe I misunderstand what you're saying, but isn't that the typical outcome of revolutions? Something along the lines of "thesis - antithesis - synthesis", I guess.

If you look at the French Revolution, the post-Revolution society in France oscillated between the Royalist and Republican extremes for the better part of two centuries before settling on a balance where both the left and right segments of French politics can today claim to be inheritors of the Revolution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This was a pretty good read.

</comment><comment><USER5> What really happened during this time? I often hear about it but not sure what was experienced by the Chinese people and what the long term effects were.

<comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution)

I have had this described to me by people who lived through it. They were relocated to the countryside as slave labor, as described in the wikipedia page. It was a bad time.

"The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution, was a social-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 until 1976. ... The movement paralyzed China politically and significantly affected the country economically and socially.

...

Millions of people were persecuted in the violent factional struggles that ensued across the country, and suffered a wide range of abuses including public humiliation, arbitrary imprisonment, torture, sustained harassment, and seizure of property. A large segment of the population was forcibly displaced, most notably the transfer of urban youth to rural regions during the Down to the Countryside Movement. Historical relics and artifacts were destroyed. Cultural and religious sites were ransacked."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Remember when the intelligence community produced useful work, instead of playing with armed drones and spying on kids' cell phone nudes?

<comment><USER8> I don't doubt they continue to write these kind of documents, we've just added the other 'responsibilities' to their budget.

<comment><USER9> looking at the events that took all by surprise - 9/11, Sunny insurgence and sectarian violence in Iraq in ~2004, Arabian Spring, ISIS - i'd say that the "responsibilities" replaced instead of having been added.</comment></comment></comment>


What I learned from being laid off twice in 6 months. - <AUTHOR> http://livinginreview.blogspot.com/2013/04/what-i-learned-from-being-laid-off.html

<comment><USER2> Way to keep things in perspective. So much respect for you. Keep going!</comment>


Where could I find small companies that rely heavily on influencers marketing? - <AUTHOR> Hey guys! I'm validating a business idea and I'm trying to reach companies that rely a lot on influencers for marketing, but that cannot afford an agency. I've been using LinkedIn, Indiegogo and Kickstarter, and of course, influencers, to find them but it's a reaaaaally specific search.<p>Any ideas? <comment><USER2> I'd check specific hashtags on Instagram to identify influencers and then from there identify companies that have been promoted by influencers. From there, check to see if they do other types of marketing or if they're heavy on the influencer marketing.</comment>


Delight VR – Declarative Virtual Reality for the Web - <AUTHOR> https://delight-vr.com <comment><USER2> This is looking pretty cool. I actually really like the idea of VR escaping the "walled garden" it could become with players like Facebook in the space, but then again maybe this tech will get acquired by them.</comment>


Re: Hakin9's new Nmap Guide - <AUTHOR> http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2012/q3/1050 <comment><USER2> It looks like Jonathan Brossard was the author: <https://twitter.com/jonoberheide/status/251902357720403971>

I doubt this is widely known on Hacker News, but Hakin9 is one of the most spammy organizations in infosec. They constantly beg everyone with any relationship to security online to write articles for them and it seems impossible to get them to stop. The creation of this epic troll was likely a direct response to that.

The articles they do get tend to be more centered around using and running tools, which isn't that useful and doesn't help you grow, and are filled with typos and errors. I wouldn't be surprised if there were also egregious examples of plagiarism hidden in their magazine like what was discovered at the Infosec Institute (<http://attrition.org/errata/plagiarism/infosec_institute/>).

<comment><USER3> Actually, @fygrave put together the document (using scigen and a draft from jonathan), so both of them should get credit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have dealt with Hakin9 a few years ago and was extremely disappointed by how they handle themselves. After publishing my article (a piece about overwriting system calls by rewriting pointers in the system_table and practical uses) it took them close to 10 months to be paid and only did so after harassing them for months.

Its hilarious, albeit not too surprising, that they published this without even bothering to read it (they crowdsource their proof reading and expect beta readers to report if they are about to publish something inaccurate or outright stupid).

</comment><comment><USER5> Quite an old tool, but SciGen ( <http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/> ) is great for generating this style of satirical paper using choice buzzwords.

SciGen has famously been used to get falsified publications into several "real" journals - citations are available on the SciGen page linked above and worth checking out.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hello everyone,

My name is Ewa Dudzic, I have been the chief editor of Hakin9 for the last 15 years. I would like to make a statement concerning the article which you are mentioning in this post. First of all I would like sincerely apologize to everyone of you and all our readers for what has happened. I have to admit that it was the unintentional mistake on our part. It should not have been published but for some reasons, which we are currently investigating internally, it was published causing as I can see a lot of negative opinions. Mentioning that I would like to thank you for all your reactions. As negative as they sound I humbly accept them and take full responsibility for that mistake on our part. I can only wish that this hopefully one-time error will not undermine the general perception of Hakin9 as professional magazine offering the highest standard possible. I would also like to kindly ask you not to pass the judgment on authors collaborating with us (who devote their professionalism and heart to the content of each issue) basing on this example. I can assure you we will investigate the matter to prevent such "accidents" in the future. If you have any other questions or comments please do not hesitate to contact me via email: firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER7> No idea if that is actually Ewa Dudzic, but this post is similar to past responses to previous hakin9 spam. All useless in stopping them. She also appears to no longer be listed as their chief editor on their website.

Also - hakin9 has only been around for 7 years, not 15. Sigh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "...pushing CPU microcode updates to the Windows 8 kernel..."

"...we asked (and answered) what would happen if mutually noisy flip-flop gates were used instead of virtual machines..."

"...J. P. Ito's seminal treatise on suffix trees and observed effective USB key space..."

Lovely. They've been SocialTexted!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair>

</comment><comment><USER9> Outstanding. My personal favourite is,

 _"Our experiments soon proved that exokernelizing our fuzzy Knesis keyboards was more effective than making autonomous them, as previous work suggested. Our experiments soon proved that microkernelizing our PDP 11s was more effective than exokernelizing them, as previous work suggested. We note that other researchers have tried and failed to enable this functionality."_

<comment><USER10> Is this SCIgen? It looks like the same style, and "exokernel" vaguely identifies it as the right co-conspirators. :-)

<comment><USER11> As I understand it, it was a SciGen paper that was enhanced to make it more readable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pretty funny - found this one that made me laugh:

"Despite the results by Qian et al., we can disconfirm that the much-touted real-time algorithm for the improvement of the transistor runs in Ω(2n) time. This may or may not actually hold in reality. Along these same lines, the frame- work for NMAP consists of four independent components: wireless methodologies, voice- over-IP, the appropriate unification of systems and Byzantine fault tolerance, and robust theory. This seems to hold in most cases. Therefore, the framework that our application uses is solidly grounded in reality."

</comment><comment><USER13> "The rest of this paper is organized as follows. First, we motivate the need for A* search. Second, we place our work in context with the previous work in this area. As a result, we conclude."

</comment><comment><USER14> The "Rogue MD5 signing" value of d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e is the MD5 of the empty string.

</comment><comment><USER15> Trying to read some of that 'paper' was really funny. Definitely worth a look.

</comment><comment><USER16> I routinely get spammed by Pentest Magazine affiliates asking me to write for them, was thinking about doing something similar but these guys beat me to it. Well played!

</comment><comment><USER17> This is awesome.

Anyone have a link to this?

 _There is even an ASCII penis in the "sample output" section, but apparently none of this raised any flags from Hakin9's "review board"._

<comment><USER18> It's in the output of DICKS:

      |--[ Exploiting remote IP stack pool overflow:
      | Anti ROP kernel heap non exec stack payload bypass
      |8</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>> ((

</comment><comment><USER19> Hum ...? or did they?(got punked!) i am starting to believe on negative viral campaigns

</comment><comment><USER20> Hilarous. Great job, writing team, now I want to buy this magazine.

</comment><comment><USER21> hackin9 got punk'd!!! Get down guys!

</comment><comment><USER22> absolutely brilliant</comment>


Uber proposes policy that would pay drivers a minimum wage of $21 per hour - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/28/uber-proposes-policy-that-would-pay-drivers-a-minimum-wage-of-21-per-hour/ <comment><USER2> >Uber is circulating a petition urging people to "protect ridesharing in California." In the petition, Uber advocates for a policy that would offer drivers a minimum of $21 per hour, paid time off, sick leave and compensation if they are injured while driving, as well as a collective voice and "the ability to influence decisions about their work."

Uber circulating a petition to ... urge Uber to do a thing?

Why don't they just do that thing?

<comment><USER3> They believe they can bear the expense of this policy better than their competition, and in particular they don't want to compete with lower-cost- lower-quality firms. So it's both a (presumably sincere) ethical position and a form of anti-competitive regulatory capture. I think most minimum wage laws have some of this Baptists-and-bootleggers effect.

<comment><USER4> So first they evade regulations, then they propose regulations?

<comment><USER5> First they evade regulations, then they propose a new policy that is enticing to potential employees (or whatever they call them) - but the policy is so generous that most competitors would have issues keeping up.

How many companies can afford to pay 21$/hr minimum for example?

So somehow it's both a great step forward and terribly anti-competitive at the same time.

<comment><USER6> Seems very competitive, not anti-competitive.

<comment><USER7> Uber paying their employees $21 is very competitive. Uber lobbying for their competitors to have to pay their employees $21 is anticompetitive. The latter is what is happening here.

<comment><USER6> Uber paying their employees $21 doesn't make sense, they will get undercut on pricing by race for the bottom competitors. There really isn't anyway to grant a viable minimum wage except via legislation. Paying more to the driver isn't the same thing as paying more for top-tier engineer. It isn't like getting a nascar driver in the seat is going to justify higher wages. So what do you recommend?

<comment><USER8> >> they will get undercut on pricing by race for the bottom competitors

If Uber unilaterally increased minimum salary, then those competitors would have to do the same, otherwise they would lose all their drivers to Uber. So, if Uber really cared about drivers they would just do it. Instead they are making PR stunt by "demanding" government regulation.

<comment><USER6> I don't think that is true, they'd have a bunch of drivers sitting around not getting paid to give rides because they are being undercut by the competition. It is not skilled work so its always going to be a race to the bottom, the bottom has to be set by some governmental body. Without some reasonable minimum drivers are being sucked into quicksand.

<comment><USER9> > It is not skilled work so its always going to be a race to the bottom, the > bottom has to be set by some governmental body.

It's not actually a race to the bottom because it's still a competitive market. Even unskilled people have a choice between being Uber drivers or janitors or stock clerks or fast food workers, or anything else that someone will pay them to do. If Uber pays less than Walmart then people can quit Uber and go work for Walmart. That creates a floor for the pay of Uber drivers independent of anything the government does.

And if the government is going to do something, it's much better to raise _that_ floor, which minimum wages can actually do the opposite of because people have non-monetary job preferences. If a $21/hour minimum wage appears then you have to pay Uber drivers $21/hour, but suppose they have $15/hour in expenses (fuel, wear and tear), so that's really only $6/hour. Meanwhile a work from home job might have paid $10/hour -- a real $10/hour -- but now that's well below $21, so is no longer available. So now you're paying $15/hour to make $21 instead of paying $0 to make $10, which means you make _less_ , and Uber gets to pay $21 when they would have otherwise needed to pay $25 to actually be competitive. And the same thing (to various degrees) with ordinary commute-to-work jobs vs. stay at home jobs, or jobs with longer vs. shorter commutes or in higher cost of living parts of the city or that require some training or other expense that ultimately has to be paid for out of wages, or the job is just downright less of a grind and people are willing to accept less money in exchange for easier work. By removing options people used to have, you only make them more desperate for the remaining ones and require them to accept worse options even if they're better on paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _" while on a trip"_ \- Uber PR.

Not per hour worked. Not when going to a pickup. Not when waiting for a ride. Only "while on a trip". That alone probably means about 1/3 off. Which puts them below SF's $15/hour minimum wage.

Then, Uber counts the entire amount paid to the driver as "wage", not including their renting the driver's car. That takes off a substantial amount.[1]

And if drivers were employees, Uber would have to buy the bottled water.

[1] [https://www.ridester.com/uber-lyft-driver-costs-and- expenses...](https://www.ridester.com/uber-lyft-driver-costs-and-expenses/)

<comment><USER11> How else could they do it though? They'd have to telling drivers they can't work or scheduling them, otherwise there'd be a flood of people chilling in their cars waiting on rides and being paid by uber.

The "gig" economy seems to work by offering people a fairly open choice of pay and work. Though Uber could be more transparent about expected earnings.

<comment><USER12> Similar to cloud based server prices.

Paid for time that you're actually online.

If you're only logged on for 20 mins (a third) of the hour - you get $7 min wage ($21 / 3).

<comment><USER13> Are you seriously comparing a saas service to a service based on real humans? You do realize how different turning a server on from being off vs. getting a driver to pick you up from whatever that person was doing before?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > our community relies on to supplement their income, _support_ _their_ > _families_

While their marketing promotes driving as a fun side gig, their PR defending their labor practices includes supporting families.

It's not surprising coming from corporate PR, but the selective choice of arguments is pretty obvious.

But then again, in a society where the general populace's basic welfare is largely left to market forces, maybe it's not a stretch for corporations to make the claim that supporting families is among their side-effects (but not objectives).

<comment><USER15> Just like how McDonald's actually recommends it's employees get another job.

Companies in the US are utterly out of control with regards to paying a living wage.

<comment><USER16> You can't really expect to be paid a living wage at a job that can be done by 14 year olds, can you? There is also a greater supply of low skilled labor available, lowering price of labor. I think you should work 1 to 2 crappy jobs building skills until you can find a single good job. McDonald's also has programs that offer college tuition assistance.

<comment><USER15> > _You can 't really expect to be paid a living wage at a job that can be done > by 14 year olds, can you?_

I expect everyone to be paid a living wage at every full-time job. That's the very _definition_.

<comment><USER16> Do you have a source to back that claim? I can't find anything that states "full time" equals "living wage". Only referring to the minimum number of hours an employee has to work from receive benefits "part time" employees typically don't get, like paid time off or health insurance.

Additionally the Fair Labor Standards Act (for US anyway) does not give any formal definition of "full time" work, and is up to the employer. Only that covered nonexempt workers working more than 40 hours are entitled to overtime.

It's fine to disagree, but at least provide some sort of substance to your argument...

<comment><USER17> Personally, it is in the name: full-time job.

It takes your full job time, it says that there is a measurable amount of job you can have and that it is full with that one. Following that logic, if you fill all of your available job time, there is an assumption (mine and others) that it would provide simply because if you can't, you need more job to do so, making it not a full-time job.

<comment><USER16> The problem with your logic, is that you still don't define what "full time" equals. There are 24 hours in a day, so is full-time working 24 hours/day? Obviously that's not practical, but then where do you draw the line?

Any conclusion you come up with is completely subjective, and might fit for some people, and might not for others. Maybe someone's full-time job is someone else's part-time job.

<comment><USER18> That's not a problem with their logic, that's a problem of your pedantry.

Draw the line wherever you think it should be drawn. Their argument is still true. The argument doesn't change whether full-time is 25 hours or 75 hours.

Every single adult working whatever society agrees is "full time" should be able to live comfortably on those wages.

<comment><USER16> > Every single adult working whatever society agrees is "full time" should be > able to live comfortably on those wages.

I agree that would be nice, it's just not possible in a free market. Is there any country where everyone lives comfortably working full time at any job?

<comment><USER19> It's great that you understand how supply and demand works, but look beyond that.

At some point in the mid-term future, automation will take over enough labor that a sizeable chunk of the (educated, motivated) population won't be able to find a job at all. Supply non-zero, demand zero, ergo price zero.

In that world, should we just let people starve?

<comment><USER20> That seems like an argument for basic income or similar. The topic at hand is raising minimum wage, which could only accelerate job loss due to automation.

<comment><USER21> Raising minimum wage might reduce the number of jobs, but 100% * ~0$ < 10% * 15$.

Many companies have wages low enough that people receive significant public assistance while working full time. That's a terrible trend, either the work is valuable enough to pay a living wage or or does not need to be done. Allowing companies to pay below living wages is simply an inefficient drain on the economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >"minimum of $21 per hour while on a trip"

Am I the only who notice the last 4 words? This will effect very few drivers as most are already making > that "while on a trip (and not stuck in complete grid lock)".

</comment><comment><USER23> I assume at $21/h the driver has to pay car expenses? How much does that cost per hour assuming a driver does full time driving?

Shouldn't Uber instead be guaranteeing how much drivers are paid _net_? If $21 really is before expenses then it's not even $15 for most drivers after, maybe not even $10?

Also: I was assuming the pay was while working, not while driving passengers. Otherwise isn't it even worse?

What if Uber instead just guaranteed drivers a living wage plus benefits _net_?

<comment><USER24> I don't think it costs anywhere near $10/hour to operate a passenger vehicle, even after insurance and maintenance.

<comment><USER25> Depreciation is a large cost as well.

The IRS sets a standard rate of 58 cents/mile for deduction of vehicle-related expenses. There's obviously a wide range of actual costs, but that's in the ballpark for an all-inclusive amount. If you average 20MPH then you'll exceed $10/hr.

<comment><USER26> The IRS numbers are very generous.

<comment><USER25> They almost perfectly match the TCO numbers from AAA. They show an average of $8,849/year at 15,000 miles/year, which is 59 cents/mile. The cheapest vehicle type they list is small sedans, which are $6,777/year or 45 cents/mile. [https://newsroom.aaa.com/auto/your-driving- costs/](https://newsroom.aaa.com/auto/your-driving-costs/)

It seems large because we aren't used to looking at TCO per mile, and only think about the cost of fuel.

<comment><USER26> I meant 59 cents/mile is generous for estimating your Uber driving costs.

The AAA average includes pickup trucks, which hopefully you wouldn't be using for Uber.

Edmunds puts the TCO for 5 years (includes insurance and gas) for a Prius @15,000 miles/year at $30,600. That is 40.8 cents/mile. 59c is 45% higher.

(This assumes you start with a brand new Prius; you may optimize better as an Uber driver)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Let's not leave the rest of it, threatened with its drivers unionizing Uber tries to play the individualism card to dissuade collective action.

"California drivers deserve access to flexible work." [https://www.independentdriver.org/](https://www.independentdriver.org/)

I wish rent was flexible. How about food prices, they should be flexible. Car repair costs. Flexible. Gas prices should be flexible. In general life should be flexible. Everyone should negotiate. Things should not be that predictable. It's better for everyone.

<comment><USER28> Prices are indeed flexible.

<comment><USER29> Prices are mostly driven by market forces. That leaves little room for flexibility.

<comment><USER30> Everything in that list involves choice: where you want to live is a choice. (based on family size, crime rates, school quality, access to transportation, whether you have pets, etc, but still a choice) Even the things that have static prices involve consumption choices (ie, how much gas you consume)

<comment><USER27> Living wage covers the floor of these things. Even that is not being offered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I hate to be _that_ person, but $21 / hr minimum is more than EMTs, and even most surgical Residents make (at least in the US).

I don't know how to interpret this in that context: is this proposal absurd, or is the medical / labor system in the US absurd? (or both??)

<comment><USER32> I would argue that EMTs and surgical residents are ludicrously underpaid if that's the current reality.

<comment><USER33> Surgical residents are being apprenticed for their expected $400k-$1m job later in life. They are far from being impoverished, and if they need more than $50k/year, any bank will gladly lend to them at a low rate.

<comment><USER34> They get paid 50-60k a year to work absolutely ridiculous hours. I had a surgical resident for a roommate. He'd get home and if he went from the door to the bed without showering or relaxing he might be able to catch 5 hours of sleep before he had to get up and be off for another shift. We'd buy protein bars so he could eat something on the run otherwise he'd never have anything to eat on a full 24 hour shift. That goes on for 5+ years after already having been in school for 8 years. And it's not like they're just sitting around all day watching real doctors work or something. And the average pay for a general surgeon as of 2017 is 350k (before malpractice insurance).

<comment><USER33> I got paid even less (around negative $40k) to spend every waking hour 4th year of college to complete coursework, do varsity athletics, search for a job, and do an honors thesis. But these were investments in human capital.

<comment><USER34> I'm not sure I understand your point. They have already gone through 8 years of school which they definitely didn't get for free. Surgical residents then work for 5 more years working 100+ hours a week.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This appears to be a joint effort with Lyft.

A joint letter by Uber and Lyft CEOs: [https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Open-F...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Open- Forum-Uber-Lyft-ready-to-do-our-part-for-13969843.php)

Lyft email campaign advocating minimum earnings: [https://p2a.co/xcA3Bg3](https://p2a.co/xcA3Bg3)

</comment><comment><USER36> "wage" is a confusing term to use in this context if they aren't very specific about what things the driver has to pay out of that $21/hr. Self employment tax, employers share of FICA, vehicle wear/tear/depreciation, fuel, health insurance, commercial vehicle insurance, benefits, etc.

They seem to want you to make a straight comparison to a W-2 hourly rate which isn't honest.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is an attempt to push Lyft out of CA by raising the cost side of the equation but that cost will eventually have to be passed to riders, which will dramatically drop demand. If the minimum wage law passes and they subsidize rides long enough to edge out Lyft then they finally get the monopoly they've been promising investors for the last decade but they also lose a huge amount of their TAM. The laws of supply and demand will eventually come into play.

And of course once they get their monopoly they will raise prices further to get profits and at that point I'd guess they would only be slightly less expensive then Taxis were before all this gig economy craziness.

<comment><USER38> I also think it's an attempt to ward off a nascent unionization push.

Regarding a different, recent "olive branch" type proposal:

"The one thing they don't want to give you is the thing that you need to get. This offer from Uber and Lyft is like a kidnapper offering you a softer blanket, as long as you agree not to ever escape. No thanks. These companies know very well that once their workers become actual employees, they will get a host of benefits automatically, and they can formally unionize to win themselves many more benefits and increased pay. These companies, which have never made a dollar even while exploiting their workers, fear this. So they offer some concessions." [1]

[1] [https://splinternews.com/if-uber-wants-it-its- bad-1835514222](https://splinternews.com/if-uber-wants-it-its-bad-1835514222)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> > Ensuring drivers would earn a minimum of approximately $21 per hour while on > a trip, including the costs of their average expenses.

This simultaneously reduces the race to the bottom of pricing for ride sharing while capping what Uber will pay at $21/hour[0].

[0] "While on a trip". Gotta love that.

</comment><comment><USER40> What is the right payment for Uber drivers? Will 21/hr really cover costs plus give a living wage?

Seems to me that's the starting point before decing whether it's a good wage or not.

<comment><USER41> The right amount is the amount set by the market. I don't understand these people protesting... no one is forcing you to work for Uber.

<comment><USER42> The market is to a large extent set by those at the top of it--who unsurprisingly decide that they are worth the most, and pay themselves billions of dollars.

It's true that nobody is forcing you to work for Uber. You can always go to one of the other companies inside the same system with the same incentives that cause them to treat their workers in the same way.

<comment><USER43> The market is certainly not set by the "people on top" and this weird FUDy argument about some elite ruling class only hurts peoples ability to find better paying careers (a gig economy job is not a career)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Call me a cynic, but I don't see how this doesn't hurt drivers. It sounds good, but it's too good to be true. I'm wondering if they are factoring in only the amount of time actually driving. So if you have a 5 minute drive in 60 minutes, at 21.00 per hour you only make 1.75. I'm guessing their hourly wage doesn't include reimbursement for car mileage, gas etc. too. That seems like a raw deal to me. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER45> The IRS vehicle mileage rate for 2018 is 54.5 cents per mile. If a driver averages 20 miles per hour, then their effective hourly rate is cut in half from depreciation/fuel/maintenance/etc.

<comment><USER44> That is true, and the company doesn't have to reimburse you for that. They can leave that to you to factor in your yearly taxes, effectively putting the burden on you to track and submit all of that.

<comment><USER45> yes, but it's on your taxes because it's an actual unreimbursed expense you've undertaken. It factors into your net income, not just a tax savings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's wise to look a gift horse in the mouth when it comes from an amoral corporation, but I suspect this is fairly honest, not because Uber is doing it out of the kindness of their own hearts, but because Uber wants to avoid regulation.

People who claim that regulation only makes things worse should take note of this: even the _threat_ of regulation can be enough to get corporations to at least try to appear to do the right thing.

That said, I think there are two problems with this:

1\. Long-term results of this will just be Uber trying to avoid regulation for as long as possible, while figuring out more and more clever ways to maximize profit at the expense of both drivers and passengers.

2\. Any payment agreement which doesn't include health insurance in the US needs to be considered as significantly reduced. Back of napkin math ahead: Health insurance can run as high as $700/month and after taxes someone getting paid $21/hour takes home closer to $10.50, meaning some drivers will have to work ~65 hours/month just to pay for health insurance. Assuming Uber drivers drive 160 hours/month (which is conservative), paying for their own health insurance is a ~40% reduction in pay. This means that, pre-tax, that $21/hour looks a lot more like $12.60/hour would in a country with a reasonable healthcare system. Of course, there are some worst-case scenario numbers included here (most people's health insurance _isn 't_ that expensive) but at least some Uber drivers, particularly with expensive-to-treat preexisting conditions, are going to be receiving a _much_ lower wage if health insurance isn't included. I suspect this singlehandedly is why Uber is even making the $21/hour offer: as a way to avoid regulation that would require them to pay for health insurance.

<comment><USER46> What's so amoral about it?

<comment><USER42> Are you asking what's amoral about Uber?

Saying "amoral corporation" is almost redundant and isn't specific to Uber-- almost all corporations are fairly amoral.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> The article is written confusingly.

It seems to really be, Uber responds to proposed legislation in CA, by asking for it to be changed to allow uber drivers to remain 'independent contrators' \-- but they're willing to take legislation, apparently, that would guarantee a $21/hour guarantee, along with paid sick leave and vacation?

Or maybe they're saying if they don't pass any legislation at all, they're willing to do those things voluntarily... presumably just in CA? I'm a bit confused, the article is poorly written.

This is a lot more than many Uber drivers currently get.

There are people quoted in the article saying $21/hour still isn't a living wage in the bay area.

But if Uber is suggesting that $21/guarantee with paid leave is only fair, presumably they'd be willing to commit to that nationwide, not just in CA where they are threatened by legislation? (Just kidding, I obviously don't presume that).

I know many people who do or have driven for Uber in other parts of the country who would find it quite an improvement to get a guarantee of $21/hour and paid leave.

</comment><comment><USER48> The article was updated and the headline changed to "Uber proposes policy that would pay drivers a minimum wage of $21 per hour while on a trip" to clarify the misconception that drivers would actually receive $21/hr. I think the headline should be changed here to avoid similar misunderstandings

</comment><comment><USER49> Is this after accounting for gas and insurance? Or are they just hoping everyone confuses them with employees?

<comment><USER50> From the proposal:

"drivers would earn a minimum of approximately $21 per hour while on a trip, including the costs of their average expenses."

<comment><USER51> > "drivers would earn a minimum of approximately $21 per hour while on a trip, > including the costs of their average expenses."

"while on a trip", aka "not really $21/hour", because even in extremely dense areas, drivers have downtime between trips, during which they typically have to either drive around aimlessly, find a place to idle/park, or drive to their next pickup.

<comment><USER52> Is that different from how normal taxi drivers get paid?

<comment><USER51> > Is that different from how normal taxi drivers get paid?

Yes, but it's not the point - it's misleading to talk about a minimum wage that excludes some time on the job from the denominator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Is this really a wage or do you have to deduct your petrol and motoring costs from it? Are you working when waiting for a customer Or only when actually driving?

</comment><comment><USER54> "$21 per hour while on a trip"

As many have pointed out, this is the key. Not possible to have 100% utilization, so most drivers would probably earn 50-75% of this number.

</comment><comment><USER55> So... it sounds more and more like Uber is going to need to provide drivers insurance, etc... which means they will probably need higher requirements from their drivers at some point. Maybe even licensing and...

wait, is Uber slowly becoming a taxi service?

</comment><comment><USER29> Anything short of employment with the health insurance and no personal investment in the car it seems like it's going to be bad for drivers in the long term.

<comment><USER56> "no personal investment in the car"

That seems excessive. Plenty of professions require significant investment in equipment. Many truckers own their own trucks. Mechanics buy their own tools. It's just part of the equation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This from the same company that hasnt turned a profit..

</comment><comment><USER58> What do driver expenses look like on a per-hour of driving basis? Gas, oil change, tire wear, etc. on a modest Honda/Toyota type car?

<comment><USER59> $0.58 / mile according to the IRS.

<comment><USER60> Is that based on total cost of ownership? AAA claims to have some info on that: [https://newsroom.aaa.com/tag/driving-cost-per- mile/](https://newsroom.aaa.com/tag/driving-cost-per-mile/)

<comment><USER30> Then the IRS is being generous, as most of the vehicles in that linked page cost less than $0.58/mile.

<comment><USER61> They're including depreciation which makes sense for small businesses that turn over their fleet every X years.

If you're not swapping cars ever few years depreciation per mile is basically irrelevant because age and what you use the vehicle for will dominate depreciation.

<comment><USER62> You can't drive Uber in an old car, can you?

Edit: apparently you can, and drivers leasing new cars to drive are getting creamed.

<comment><USER30> In many markets, the car can be up to 15 years old.

[https://www.uber.com/drive/houston/vehicle- requirements/](https://www.uber.com/drive/houston/vehicle-requirements/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> What is it that Uber is proposing?

I understand that they're "advocating for a brand-new policy that would strengthen protections for drivers" but what is that policy? What policy are they suggesting be put in place to make sure protections for drivers are strengthened?

</comment><comment><USER64> Not entirely clear what _policy_ exactly means, does it mean Uber will pay the minimum wage or it wants the government to pay that? (I am not from U.S. so its unclear how it works)

I guess, its the government, since people drive for both lyft and uber.

<comment><USER65> (Some of) the drivers are advocating for a (California) government policy (law) that would make drivers be treated as employees and therefore require their employers to pay minimum wage while on duty, have regulated minimum and maximum shifts with regulated breaks, etc etc.

Uber is saying don't do that, instead proposing a new government policy (laws or regulation) of a minimum rate of $21/hour while providing a ride. Like minimum wage, this would be paid by the employer/client, but the government sets a price floor.

Note that how this compares to minimum wage for employees depends entirely on the occupancy rate for the vehicle: if you've only got a fare for half of the minutes in a hour, that's $10.50/hour which is under the 2019 California minimum wage of $12 or $11 for small employers.

<comment><USER64> Thanks. I get it now. The amount seems on the lower end then since it is against the actual time spent driving and not the time you are online?

<comment><USER65> Yes, but the headline rate of $21/hr sounds better than minimum wage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Maybe I'm dense but if drivers aren't finding the expected wage acceptable then why don't they simply choose not to offer their services to Uber? I'm not saying that in the "cruel capitalist" way, I'm observing -- they still choose to work, so there must be demand for it at a low wage level.

Seems to me we have an oversupply of labor of people willing (or needing) to work for pennies. Having a minimum wage isn't going to improve that. It's going to lead to fewer people taking rides, and fewer people being able to become Uber drivers, but slightly better for the ones that can remain drivers. Classic minimum wage problems.

Why don't we make it $30 per hour? or $50? That would be even better.

<comment><USER67> > why don't they simply choose not to offer their services to Uber?

You assume there are other options without barriers to entry. You've learned how to drive uber, you've got a vehicle and payments to make - now take a risk on some other gig with a million unknowns?

Now it's possible that uber cannot shoulder this cost by lowering their margins, and it will pass directly to the consumer as you suggest - but it's not guaranteed. The fact that uber is behind this suggests that they can shoulder the cost.

<comment><USER68> > You've learned how to drive uber

That's a bit of stretch. Also worth noting, many of the jobs did not even exist before Uber created a market for it.

> why don't they simply choose not to offer their services to Uber?

Collective bargaining, aka unionizing, does essentially just that, only with more leverage.

<comment><USER67> ok...?

I'm sure driving for uber is not difficult, but making money driving for uber is 100% a skill. When to go out, where to be, how long your shift should be, what rides to skip, etc. That's all invested learning.

> Also worth noting, many of the jobs did not even exist before Uber created a > market for it.

Their trophey is in the mail. Just because you create a new job, does not mean it's a good job.

> Collective bargaining, aka unionizing, does essentially just that, only with > more leverage.

yes! it seems clear to me that uber drivers would benefit from unionizing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Presumably the $21 per hour is before driver expenses (gas, depreciation etc: drivers often ignore that their shiny new Prius loses about $0.10 in value per mile driven).

</comment><comment><USER63> Does anyone have a link to the actual policy Uber is advocating? It doesn't appear to be linked from the TC article or the independentdriver site linked from there.

<comment><USER70> [https://p2a.co/H9gttWA](https://p2a.co/H9gttWA)

<comment><USER63> Yes, that's the link from the TC article.

What it says is:

"Instead, Uber is advocating for a brand-new policy that would strengthen protections for rideshare drivers by:

Ensuring drivers would earn a minimum of approximately $21 per hour while on a trip, including the costs of their average expenses.

Providing drivers access to robust new benefits, such as paid time off, sick leave, and compensation if they are injured while driving with Uber.

Empowering drivers to have a collective voice with rideshare companies, and the ability to influence decisions about their work."

What are they actually proposing? I see what they want their proposal to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Key words in this story: "while on a trip".

This isn't actually $21/hr. It could very easily end up being under $10/hr. Just depends how lucky the driver is.

</comment><comment><USER72> In Brazil the drivers would get better salaries than our doctors... ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment><comment><USER73> is there an interview process to be an Uber driver? Or do you just download the app and turn it on? If it's just the app then why wouldn't everyone just download the app and start making $21/hr

<comment><USER74> I have the same question. I'm guessing its $21/hr of driving time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Thats $42,000 a year.

Are they doing this in only certain areas?

<comment><USER45> $21/hour only includes time when you're on a fare, not time when you're logged in and available.

And it doesn't include the gas, maintenance and depreciation on your personal vehicle driven 30-50k miles per year to reach that amount. The IRS estimates those costs to be $0.58/mile, which would reduce the income by between $17,400 and $29,000.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> What is the right payment for Uber drivers? Will 21/hr cover costs plus give a living wage? That's the starting point before decing if it's good or bad.

<comment><USER76> > What is the right payment for Uber drivers?

Whatever the future union (that the drivers are asking for) can negotiate.

> Will 21/hr cover costs plus give a living wage?

No it won't, see the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> And what will this do to fares? If they stop being the cheapest fast option between two points, I don't feel like I'd be alone in going another way.

<comment><USER78> Raise them to the point to create an entitled taxi monopoly ripe for disruption by an aggressive industry defining competitor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> I presume they'll talk up the $21/hour price point in PR while pretending gas, insurance, maintenance, etc. don't cost anything.

<comment><USER80> I'm not defending Uber here and it is very likely they are spinning this in their favor, but they claim that rate does include expenses:

> Ensuring drivers would earn a minimum of approximately $21 per hour while on > a trip, including the costs of their average expenses

[https://p2a.co/H9gttWA](https://p2a.co/H9gttWA)

<comment><USER79> "While on a trip" is very slippery here.

<comment><USER43> It's actually very well defined, so I have no idea how it's a "slippery slope"

<comment><USER81> ceejayoz didn't say _slippery slope_ \- they mean slippery as a synonym for "tricky" or "furtive"

For example, "$21 per hour while on a trip" could mean that, if a driver takes a fare 30 minutes out of town then returns empty, they are only paid $10.50 for the hour's work because returning empty was not "on a trip"

<comment><USER62> It's not "could" it's clearly the meaning. Out of town drives have surplus charge for this reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> tl;dr Uber/Lyft/gig workers are organizing to get themselves recognized as employees (rather than contractors).

> "These petitions are clearly Hail Marys by Lyft and Uber to try to prevent > the passage of AB-5, which seeks to codify the ruling established in Dynamex > Operations West, Inc. v Superior Court of Los Angeles. In that case, the > court applied the ABC test and decided Dynamex wrongfully classified its > workers as independent contractors based on the presumption that 'a worker > who performs services for a hirer is an employee for purposes of claims for > wages and benefits…'"

Uber's proposed policy is somewhere between what those drivers get now (no guaranteed wages, no benefits, no protection from unfair labor practices) and what they'd get as employees under California law.

Their response:

> "'$21 isn't a living wage for any category of worker in the San Francisco > metro area except a single adult or two adults living together,' Gig Workers > Rising tweeted. 'What they're offering is the floor, while hoping to kneecap > any efforts to raise wages down the line & create a real union.'"

<comment><USER62> Is there a reason you can't commute from Oakland to a SF job?

Maybe SF should ban single-passenger cars and solve this Uber problem once and for all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> And they arent employees?

<comment><USER30> You can guarantee a contractor an hourly wage.

<comment><USER68> How does that account for time waiting between rides? With increased wages, we can expect increased supply of drivers, leading to more drivers waiting. That is unless they apply a cap to the amount of active drivers, which would cause its own issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> It's not clear from the article, is it a flat fee of $21/hr? Or is it only $21/hr of passenger time?

</comment><comment><USER85> This makes sense, Uber should be a premium service, back in my day having a private driver on call was expensive as it should be, the wear and tear om the vehicle is ridiculous, the vehicles are nice. You want a cheap ride, get a cab that someone may have shit in OR innovate in your life and buy your own vehicle.

<comment><USER86> This is absolutely the WRONG message. Everyone should not have their own vehicle. That is insane. Especially in big cities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Kicking away the ladder.

</comment><comment><USER88> $21 is not enough once you add in operating costs that the drivers must swallow.

</comment><comment><USER89> Minimum wage policies in this sector are such a boon to self driving car companies. It will accelerate the end of uber and lyft using human drivers dramatically. I hope these unions realize what they're doing.

<comment><USER90> Unions or not that change is coming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Ok, now how about a sincere focus on safety and driver accountability?

I started using Uber and Lyft several years ago in NYC because the taxis were horrible. More than half the rides would feature a driver on the phone, severe road rage, and reckless driving.

Now it seems to have come full circle. Ridesharing is almost as bad as taxis used to be. Some drivers are great, but many are rude and seem to use the roads as an outlet for pent up aggression. In SF, around 1 in 10 are obviously stoned. More are overtired and easily distracted.

So I'm back to driving or public transit. I love ridesharing and would use it all the time if it was safe, but I'm not putting my life or a family member's life in the hands of companies that can't guarantee a competent driver.

<comment><USER92> At least with ridehailing apps you have a feedback mechanism to flag these drivers. If enough people have negative experiences, they won't be able to drive for that platform.

<comment><USER93> I don't use that feature unless the infraction is very major (like the guy who swerved into incoming traffic while texting). The reason being is I don't want to look like I'm complaining for the sake of complaining or trying to get free rides/Uber credit.

<comment><USER94> It's important to rate poor drivers with low scores because a) you won't be matched with them again and b) you're potentially helping remove them as a driver to the benefit of other riders.

If they want to give you credits as well, so be it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Their Noonday Demons, and Ours - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/books/review/their-noonday-demons-and-ours.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> When I was a seminarian, acedia was a word often spoken of during spiritual formation. The answer given was meditation. Some things never change. We were even quoted passages from the Fathers of the Church mentioned in this article.</comment>


Apple may be developing a Tile-like tracking tag - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/17/apple-tile-tracker-find-my-iphone-replacement/ <comment><AUTHOR> > [...] when you've denoted a tagged item as lost, any Apple device can read > the information and you'll receive a notification when someone has found it. > That's a clever way for Apple to take advantage of its enormous number of > active devices, and give its tag a leg up over the competition.

The network effect is what will likely make this thing stand out from the competition. Exploiting the huge number of iPhones and iPads around is something startups like Tile were and will never able to do.

</comment><comment><USER2> As someone who has spent the last year of their life developing a network that aims to find missing pets using this technology, this is fairly discouraging.</comment>


Chef Andrew Zimmern says restaurants are facing a near-extinction event - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/andrew-zimmern-on-restaurant-extinction-problems-in-the-supply-chain-2020-4 <comment><AUTHOR> >> _"....you have restaurants opening, mandated in some cases by state laws to only be open with 25% of occupancy. Yet we're paying 100% of our rent. The numbers just don't add up."_</comment>


Zerigo no longer offers Free DNS plan - <AUTHOR> http://www.zerigo.com/managed-dns/pricing

<comment><USER2> Just got the email yesterday.

Going to spend Saturday transferring DNS records and migrating name servers.

The only reason I had set up with zerigo to start with was because my friend's registrar only allows name server access, and zerigo was free and easy to use with Heroku.

I'm a bit miffed at the short notice before an essential service is terminated. I would have appreciated having until the end of Feb to make DNS management decisions and ensure the name server migration goes well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use a zerigo free DNS plan and have not received any indication of a change in support of this plan at this time.

Edit: Just received an email. "If you would like to continue to utilize Zerigo DNS services, you must convert your account to a paid Zerigo Virtual DNS plan by January 31st, 2014."</comment>


Machine Learning in Python Has Never Been Easier - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bigml.com/2012/05/04/machine-learning-in-python-has-never-been-easier/

<comment><USER3> Prior Knowledge (<http://www.priorknowledge.com>) has a very similar API but a more interesting underlying model. They model the full joint distribution of the data, so any variables can be missing not just the outcome. They also are able to return the joint probability distribution over unknowns, which is extremely useful in terms of quantifying uncertainty.

The model itself appears very flexible:

<http://blog.priorknowledge.com/blog/beyond-correlation/>

I'm not affiliated with these guys but they are clearly doing the most interesting work in this area.

<comment><USER4> Looks really interesting. Any chance you know where to get an invite code for the beta?

<comment><USER3> They are pretty responsive from my experience. The beta is definitely open.

<comment><USER5> True I had my invite in a couple of hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks fun and certainly simple - but I would guess that for many, the actual training of the model is not the show-stopped before "automated, data- driven decisions and data-driven applications are going to change the world."

If you already have clean data in tabular form, with a single target class to predict, and enough training data, the last step was always sort of easy. Much harder is the fact that people expect Big Data and ML to be fairy dust, just give it my DB password and MAGIC comes out. And instead of a clean two-class classification problem you have some ill-defined a bit of clustering, a bit of visulisation and a bit pure guessing -problem.

<comment><USER7> <quote>This looks fun and certainly simple - but I would guess that for many, the actual training of the model is not the show-stopped before "automated, data-driven decisions and data-driven applications are going to change the world."</quote>

totally agree, indeed whenever I train a machine learning model (for a ranker or a classifier) I spend most of the time building the workflow to generate the datasets and extract and compute the features. I actually haven't found yet a good open source product that cares about that, last time I had to work on a ML related stuff I relied on Makefiles and a few Python scripts to distribute the computation in a small cluster. I needed a more powerful tool for doing that so during my spare time I've tried to build something similar to what I've in my mind. I came out with a prototype here: <https://bitbucket.org/duilio/streamr> . The code was mostly written the first day then I did a few commits to try how it could work in a distribute environment. It is in a very _early stage_ and need a _massive refactoring_ , it is just a proof of concept. I'd like my workflows to look like [https://bitbucket.org/duilio/streamr/src/26937b99e083/tests/...](https://bitbucket.org/duilio/streamr/src/26937b99e083/tests/workflows/example2.py) . The tool should take care of distribute the workflow nodes and cache the results, so that you can slightly change your script and avoid to recompute all the data. I hadn't used celery before, maybe many of the stuff I've done for this prototype could have been avoided (i.e. the storage system could have been implemented as celery cache)

<comment><USER8> Cool project on your side of things. I'm spending a bit of time myself trying to put together a compositional tool chain for machine learning tasks myself. Are there any major design choices you've thought out for your own project youd care to expound upon?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd rather use the very good scikits.learn and have full control over what I'm doing.

</comment><comment><USER10> What type of algorithm (or at least what general class of algorithm) is generating the model? I'm just curious because I'm wondering if the input data has to be linearly separable or if it has a limited number of classes(I think that the iris dataset is only linearly separable in one case)?

<comment><USER11> Looks like good old decision trees to me (with some discretization for continuous input values).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice, but just like Google Predict you are trying to violate the "no free lunch" theorem.

<comment><USER13> Luckily, our universe has exploitable structure. The No Free lunch theorem is as much a headache to Searching as the Halting problem is to programming - <USER2> really one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seems a little _too_ simple -- how can you generate predictions without even specifying which is the class variable and which are the predictor variables?

<comment><AUTHOR> In the absence of any input or objective field arguments, the API assumes that the final column in a flat file is the objective field, while the rest are input fields. It will also try to determine the appropriate types for all fields.

You can, of course, override any of that if you wish. Check the documentation for more details. <https://github.com/bigmlcom/python>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> sincere question - Is your only data ingest mechanism by uploading gzipped csvs, or other files? it seems that if people really have big data, then by definition that approach won't work

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll be supporting cloud file bucket locations soon: S3, etc. We're also working on handling streaming data, e.g. logs.

<comment><USER4> Have signed up for the beta. Look forward to checking it out. I've looked at the Google prediction API, but it doesn't do what I need.

<comment><USER16> What do you need?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How does one get control over the predictive model? What classifier gets used, for instance. Maybe there is something in the API, but I didn't see it in the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> We provide basic classification and regression trees for now, and we can decide which one is appropriate from the objective field type. Once we start adding in other types of models we will add a model type parameter for the relevant API method.

<comment><USER18> Do you plan on exposing parameters that control the fitting process? E.g. loss function / tree depth / min samples per leaf? Or will the fitting process always be a black-box automagic call with no user-controllable knobs?

Is there any plan to provide some assessment of model accuracy via the API - e.g. K-fold cross validation with respect to some specified loss function?

<comment><AUTHOR> We do a little automagic currently, but we'll expose some of the knobs soon, probably first via the API. Expressing model confidence and handling loss functions are being worked on right now.

Did I mention we're hiring? Someone with the right combination of big data and machine learning skills can make a big impact. <https://bigml.com/team>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> decision trees are a rudimentary ML technique.

at most they could be used for entry-level didactic purposes

<comment><USER20> ...not when you stick a few hundred of them together and train each on bootstrap samples...

(my random forest can beat up your kernel machine any day)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: NDAs at corporate hackathons. sign or don't sign? - <AUTHOR> In Europe there are more and more corporate hackathons popping up. Many come with NDAs and require participants to sign them.<p>Question: do you sign them? why/why not? Is this normal? Is this common in the US? <comment><USER2> Don't sign any NDA you don't have to.

Fuck that and fuck the people hurting workers with them.</comment>


How Apple Gets At-Home Workers To Work - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/28/how-apple-gets-at-home-workers-to-work/ <comment><USER2> I get the impression Apple's at-home workers discussed in this article aren't engineers or otherwise involved with core product development? The weird training and mock customer calls tells me it's customer support, or something similar. In which case the comparison to Yahoo's recent closing of its work at home program doesn't really seem apt (since, as I understand it, Yahoo's _was_ mostly engineers).

<comment><USER3> Exactly. It's like comparing apples to oranges. I can imagine the scrutiny when it comes to support reps working from home. But when it comes to engineers, it's a total different ball game. I hope they change the title to "How Apple manages at home Support Reps"

<comment><USER4> I tried to classify your comment into apple as a company or apple as a fruit and it failed. :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _One certified Apple trainer told me that managers closely scrutinize every call_

This will be a myth, otherwise you're paying a manager's rate plus a low-level employee's rate for every call. It's likely what they _tell_ the employees to put the fear of god into them.

My money is on Apple recording every call and having the managers listen into the odd one here and there, and if there are specific issues on a past call, the recording is there... just like any other large call centre.

<comment> jmcdonald-ut I worked at eBay customer service back in the day, and this was exactly how it worked. In fact, they had automated call statistics not surprisingly. If you had calls within the average handle time (AHT), and high satisfaction and resolution scores you were mostly ignored. Managers pick a random call or two from the team, screen it, and move on. If you're struggling they're likely to listen to your calls and give you advice. If you're doing well, they tend to pull a call and analyze it in a group meeting for others to pick up your tricks. The managers at eBay at least (and Apple I suspect) are only concerned about their overall team statistics.

Many managers think fear works to improve stats.

<comment><USER6> My first job when I left Uni in the 90s was tech support for Gateway Computers. I was told that my time per call was too low for someone who had been there for a short time, and they didn't know if I was good at solving calls or ditching customers early. And they had no way of knowing. And they didn't actually listen to any of my calls to check.

But I did get hold of their official expected call time list and after that my stats were perfect, plus I trained up other staff in how to meet management expectations.

There's a good reason Gateway got a reputation for extra bad customer service.

<comment><USER7> Oh, goodness - I bet we could swap stories. I was Gateway tech support for a short time in 2000. I assure you - it got worse.

The "last straw" for me was when they essentially forced techs to sell hardware. Techs would lie through their teeth (oh, that BSOD is because you don't have enough RAM) and of course management blindly looked the other way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Notice how the hub cities are all small to mid-size with low costs of living. There are none in California or New York. This probably makes paying the workers only $9-12/hour much more viable than in parts of the country with higher costs of living. Essentially, they've "outsourced" to the less- expensive parts of the US, rather than to India or the Philippines.

<comment><USER9> My great-uncle said the USA was a rich country with a poor country inside of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Maybe it's just me, but such a training would just push me to quit.

I work from home once a week and it is the only day where I get a good amount of coding done, because of fewer interruptions.

It takes certain kinds to work from home. I do not think I could work from home every day, it would be too hard to motivate myself; but who knows, I haven't tried.

<comment><USER11> The training is for people who will be taking support phone calls. Apple mostly does not allow engineers to work remotely. Of course, that means that the article has little relevance for us, unless we're going to be hiring phone support people who will work from home....

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd be interested in seeing data from other large tech employers regarding productivity and ROI (on both the training required and the work that could be/ _is_ done at home). Author should've been more clear between engineers and support reps.

</comment><comment><USER13> By the way, I see Coursera more like a nursery for future employees than an online university. If they coupled employment with high MOOC competency, maybe that would motivate people. That would solve their problem with monetizing and motivating students to take it seriously.

</comment><comment><USER14> Yeah the story definitely isn't core-apple. The people I knew in design and engineering who worked at home while at Apple were not watched at all really...

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not convinced that people will be more productive like this, but it will certainly make sure they keep moving their mouse cursor.

</comment><comment><USER16> The first few days talking about company culture. Bleh. Kill me now.</comment>


Behind Irish outpouring of relief for Navajo - <AUTHOR> https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2020/0513/In-each-other-s-shadows-Behind-Irish-outpouring-of-relief-for-Navajo?j=312538&sfmc_sub=27907397&l=1215_HTML&u=11383268&mid=10979696&jb=68&cmpid=ema:Weekender:20200516&src=newsletter <comment><USER2> Since the article only very lightly touches on it and some may be understandably confused about the "solidarity" between the Irish and Native Americans, the "Potato Famine" was only so deadly in Ireland to the Irish due to years of colonial rule -- not because the only food in Ireland were rotten potatoes.

Ireland had plenty of food at the time. They even continued to export food to England. It's just that due to systematic oppression, Irish natives couldn't afford anything that weren't (now blighted) potatoes.

That's where the parallel comes from with the Native Americans.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_\(Ireland\))

<comment><USER3> A more accurate portrayal of the situation is to say that Ireland of the time was a state whose economy depended on the export of premium food products - cattle, dairy & grain - whilst the majority of the population were subsistence tenant farmers who grew that produce in order to pay for their farm tenancies, whilst growing a side crop of potatoes in order to sustain themselves. When the potato blight occurred, they were still expected to pay their farm rents using the produce they produced despite this leaving them without a food crop for their own sustenance. Despite what's believed from the common narrative, most of the landlords, middlemen and exporters facilitating the trade and export of food from Ireland at this time were Irish, and many were Catholics; and they were operating within an economic system were these actions made sense. As they would have seen it, stopping the export of food stuffs would have caused economic collapse.

In a modern state with well developed central government, the state would have been able to step in and take appropriate actions. But governments of the 1840s simply didn't have the scope of action available to a modern government, or the necessary vision of their role to accompany that. The result was a tragedy of truly enormous proportions, and which certainly more could have been done to avoid; but to suggest that it was simply due to 'systematic oppression' is to greatly simplify the divisions that existed within Irish society at the time, or the motivations of those involved.

<comment><USER4> No, most of the landlords were of British descent. The rest were under control of the crown and the crown got their taxes. The upper classes, mainly British and some Irish systematically bled the vast majority of the people.

>As they would have seen it, stopping the export of food stuffs would have caused economic collapse.

They knew very well that it would have caused economic collapse only for the people in power who were at no risk of dying. And they knew very well what they could do to save the lives of people they saw starving all around them. To say they could do nothing because 'it's the system' is ridiculous. The people with power were the system. The people who starved had no real representation and that's they way it was designed by the people in power, namely the landlords and the government.

Even before the famine the reason a lot of the tenant farmers emigrated was because if they managed to be in any way extra productive and make some profit for themselves it was immediately taken from them in the form of some tax (see for example the 'window' tax). This was systematic and the people in power were responsible.

<comment><USER3> > No, most of the landlords were of British descent.

So landlords of British descent can't be considered Irish? Even if their families had been present in Ireland for several centuries?

> To say they could do nothing because

Excuse me, where did I say they couldn't do anything? I was only trying to put some context on the original comment, but it seems people are more interested in being outraged.

<comment> hakka-nyu-su > So landlords of British descent can't be considered Irish? Even if their > families had been present in Ireland for several centuries?

There are people in 2020 whose families have been present in Ireland for several centuries who still do not consider themselves Irish.

They're called 'Unionists' and rather consider themselves British, and hold annual parades celebrating historical defeats of Ireland.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is a similar story described by Robert Cialdini in his classic book, _Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion_ [1]:

"In 1985 Ethiopia could justly lay claim to the greatest suffering and privation in the world. Its economy was in ruin. Its food supply had been ravaged by years of drought and internal war. Its inhabitants were dying by the thousands from disease and starvation. Under these circumstances, I would not have been surprised to learn of a five-thousand-dollar relief donation from Mexico to that wrenchingly needy country. I remember my chin hitting my chest, though, when a brief newspaper item I was reading insisted that the aid had gone in the opposite direction. Native officials of the Ethiopian Red Cross had decided to send the money to help the victims of that year's earthquakes in Mexico City...Despite the enormous needs prevailing in Ethiopia, the money was being sent because Mexico had sent aid to Ethiopia in 1935, when it was invaded by Italy."

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28815.Influence](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28815.Influence)

<comment><USER6> Extraordinary thing to happen at the time of Band Aid and the big donations from the UK to Ethiopia following the first disturbing pictures of the famine being broadcast on the news.

Disturbing pictures on the news are now so routine as to be ignored .. or vanish altogether.

<comment><USER7> More likely ignored because there's things that draw more views happening elsewhere.

Hong Kong protests took over the news for a while, but then there was the Coronavirus and suddenly the Hong Kong protests seem to no longer be a thing and the people forgotten.

<comment><USER6> _Are_ the Hong Kong protests still happening? Or did everyone stay at home during the pandemic?

It looks like the situation is now "punchup in the legislature, but everyone is wearing facemasks": [https://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/politics/article/3084822...](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong- kong/politics/article/3084822/hong-kong-lawmakers-thrown-out-key-legislative- council)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I read this -- very proud of the efforts of the Irish but proud also that they didn't forget those small acts of kindness. Showing gratitude is important and I think this shows gratitude for the solidarity shown in the past.

We're also aware 'Choctaw' and 'Hopi' and 'Navajo' are all different tribes and Native Americans aren't a monolithic group. It's just hard if not nigh on impossible to give back to the exact people that helped us. It's the sentiment that counts in this sense.

<comment><USER9> The hundreds of Native American tribes of centuries past were as different from each other as they were different from European cultures. In fact the many different regions of Europe have always had much more in common with each other than the original tribes of North America had with each other.

<comment><USER10> Well, perhaps the commonality in this case is that both the Irish and the Native American tribes involved were oppressed by Anglo cultures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> When I see stories like this I wish there was some way on Hacker News that I could spend some of my karma points to give this story more than one up vote.

<comment><USER12> As someone who's still internalized pre-voting internet discussions, and just reads things without voting 99% of the time, I saw your comment and upvoted. Some real karma for you :)

<comment><USER13> I run a problem validation forum[1] where I'm experimenting with the karma system; one can donate karma to 'Down Vote' but not for an 'Up Vote'.

'Up Vote' privileges requires minimal karma(2), 'Down Vote' privileges are rather high(20).

Karma is visible only to the owner and the moderators.

Rationale being, people shouldn't be discouraged to post their problems however small or trivial it may sound and others to share possible ideas to solve that problem or existing solutions without any prejudice.

Ofcourse this raises the issue of people not willing to part their karma to maintain forum sanctity, but as of now that's manageable when compared to discouragement from down votes.

[1][https://needgap.com](https://needgap.com)

<comment><USER14> > Ofcourse this raises the issue of people not willing to part their karma to > maintain forum sanctity, but as of now that's manageable when compared to > discouragement from down votes.

Not a problem on Stack Overflow. And the website is a neat concept too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Having an Irish dad, there's a common sense of solidarity between Irish people and other groups who are often seen as oppressed. My Dad and uncles etc. would identify with the Black Panthers, and the PLO, as and a kid (in Australia) I'd wonder why these groups that were so far away and so different were important, and they'd say something along the lines of "because they're us" \- like this is the most obvious thing that anyone should know.

There's good and bad here (there's a tendency to see the world as 'oppressor' and 'oppressed'), but it comes from good intentions.

<comment><USER16> A similar dynamic is at play with Celtic fans (historically Catholic football club in Glasgow) and support for Palestine.

[https://medium.com/@JohnWight1/celtic-football-fans-and- why-...](https://medium.com/@JohnWight1/celtic-football-fans-and-why- palestine-matters-997c009d035d)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> In 2015 my local town erected a sculpture to commemorate the event. Maybe that's why the story is fresh in Irish memory.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_Spirits_(sculpture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_Spirits_\(sculpture\))

[https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/kindred-spirits- sculptur...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/kindred-spirits-sculpture)

<comment><USER18> Seeing the donations coming in (and making one myself) I was reminded that this sculpture is the reason I know about the event in the first place and, saw the significance of the help, and felt moved to donate. It made me think a lot about how public art and the things we commemorate with public art can have a tangible impact on our actions and our beliefs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've already read the story a number of times (incl. here IIRC) during the recent weeks so, despite it's cool, heart-touching and inspiring, it's nothing new.

What impressed me this time, however, is the quick read / deep read switch articles on this website have. It's the first time I see such and I bloody freakin wish every website had it!

<comment><USER20> Maybe we need a little badge for articles that are inverted-pyramid compliant and you can stop reading whenever you like

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's always a bit sad to see people rely on the chance charity of others, even if, in most cases, these others come through. The Navajo people have been let down by the people ruling over their land (no, I don't mean the Navajo leaders.)

But the Irish/Choctaw friendship is one of my favorite uplifting stories if only because it's about those who have little giving it away to people in a similar predicament. It's still sad but there's so much kindness in that gesture.

I think I remember a similar story where an Indian or Shri Lankan city sent some livestock to a starving European city, but can't find anything at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER22> Hear is another similar story with a twist from English royalty:

[https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/generous- turkish-...](https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/generous-turkish-aid- irish-great-hunger)

<comment><USER23> That is particularly galling. It is interesting that the story was challenged in its totality when (ex) president Mary Robinson mentioned it during a visit to Turkey (she incorrectly stated that the heraldic coat of arms of Drogheda town contained a star-and-crescent in gratitude for this act, whereas it was the emblem of an earlier English military governor).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have great respect for the Navajo and Hopi people of Arizona and New Mexico.

<comment><USER25> I have great respect for the Scottish people of Scotland.

<comment><USER26> My first wife's Scottish ancestors came from Ireland.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn0QH- khhr8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn0QH-khhr8)

</comment><comment><USER28> As is the case in a lot of discussion that touches on Irish History, in this thread there are a lot of really bad takes - for anyone interested in a good, well balanced, summary delivered by experts in under an hour - i really recommend the BBC 'In Our Time' podcast on this subject - as with all of these shows, its pretty dense with info and facts from a number of sources:

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003rj1](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003rj1)

</comment><comment><USER29> There is an amazing podcast series — [https://irishhistorypodcast.ie/category/podcast/the-great- fa...](https://irishhistorypodcast.ie/category/podcast/the-great-famine/) — about the Great Famine if anyone is interested in learning more.</comment>


Oculus Rift - TF2 Gameplay - <AUTHOR> http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/454560-testing-oculus-rift-development-kit-team-fortress-2/

<comment><USER2> It feels like there is more vertical space, because there _is_ more vertical space. The panel is 1280x800, but the effective resolution is 640x800 (for each eye, which combine into a single 3D view), so you see more vertically.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, while watching the video I realized that I had never seen (noticed?) that much of the TF2 sky. It really becomes apparent with those goggles on.</comment></comment>


The effects of extraterrestrial impacts on life on Earth - <AUTHOR> http://orbitalindex.com/archive/2020-02-06-Issue-50/ <comment><USER2> The tie between an Ordovician ice age, the Great Ordovician Biodiversity Event, and the L-chondritic Parent Body Breakup is completely fascinating. The Decorah, Iowa crater has even yielded a bunch of unique fossils: [https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/jgs/article/175/6/865/54850...](https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/jgs/article/175/6/865/548502/The- Winneshiek-biota-exceptionally-well-preserved)</comment>


Google has free music downloads in China since 2009 (with record label support) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/technology/companies/31music.html

<comment><AUTHOR> You can find pretty much every major label and album:

<http://www.google.cn/music/>

[http://translate.google.com/translate_c?hl=en&rurl=trans...](http://translate.google.com/translate_c?hl=en&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=zh- CN&tl=en&u=http://www.google.cn/music/)</comment>


Cloudflare has switched from ReCaptcha to hCaptcha - <AUTHOR> https://community.cloudflare.com/t/stop-using-hcaptcha/158968?u=judge <comment><AUTHOR> Here's a page that triggers the challenge if you'd like to try yourself: [https://judge.sh/captchatest22](https://judge.sh/captchatest22)</comment>


MinoHubs: Let's improve the developer ecosystem - <AUTHOR> http://blog.minohubs.com/minohubs/

<comment><AUTHOR> We're looking for feedback on what we're doing. Happy to discuss views on monetization and what works / doesn't work in your experience.</comment>