U.S. Banks Curtail International Money Transfers - <AUTHOR> http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/immigrants-from-latin-america-and-africa-squeezed-as-banks-curtail-international-money-transfers/ <comment><USER2> The US has a 3rd world banking system and I had just about enough of it. These mega mergers and deregulations don't help.

      - Some banks charge more than $60 USD for an international wire which is beyond reasonable. Plus you have to go into the bank fill out a form. Why can't I do this online?
      - The US does not use IBAN instead it uses a system which is setup for middle banks to take a stake out of transfers.
      - Core of US banking is done with paper checks like in the middle ages. Sending money to someone in many cases actually gets a check printed (the check printer is another 3rd party taking their stake out of the system).
      - Bank employees are underpaid and under-skilled workers who don't give a damn (why would they?). Don't expect good service unless you are at a expensive private bank.
      - You constantly have to check your accounts to make sure there isn't all of a sudden a large amount missing because a check was cleared wrong or some new fee has been added.

The system is so broken that even people who want to fix it (e.g. Bank Simple) where unable and are now just another online bank.

<comment><USER3> hsbc charges zero dollars to transfer money between countries you have account with them.

and recently they had to pay a billion because they facilitated drug money laundry, even city bank being mentioned in the same report facilitating larger amounts and getting no penalty for whatever reason. im almost sure the system is corrupt to the core.

anyway, back on topic, this move is to remove power form migrants because now that the US is past its little depression, we don't want them sticking around. and if you don't understand this, I'm happy for you. keep the good live going in affluent san francisco. only neighborhood problems are buses driving property prices down or some other shenanigan.

<comment><USER4> >hsbc charges zero dollars to transfer money between countries you have account with them.

Only if you have one of their "rich people" accounts. You have to have something like $100k in your current account or a half million dollar mortgage. Something like that.

Needless to say, agricultural day laborers sending remittances don't qualify. They have to pay up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This attempt to control the flow of money seems like another unwinnable war, like the war on drugs. The money will find other paths, which may well include informal or underground banking services, which are even further away from government oversight.

Many recent immigrants want to send money home - this is non-negotiable, because it's one of the main reasons that they emigrated. So they will find ways to send money.

<comment><USER6> All you need is the Hawala network: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala)

<comment><USER3> money transfer based on honor?

thats even more fragile than bitcoin

<comment><USER7> Honor is what honorable people call it. Others call it gang.

<comment><USER8> I don't think it deserves downvotes, OP is right.

Honor can function both in a group of honest citizens and in a group of obdurate criminals. It's a game-theoretic trick raised to the level of virtue and it's independent of group morality.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for saying that. I guess I should have explained further.

Hawala is originally from middle-east and has distinct Islamic flavor to it. So I can understand why someone can find my comment offensive.

Hawala has a history of being used in nefarious activities in India so I know better. Black-marketing gold, traceless transfer of money for terrorist activities etc. Gangs have spawned over it and gangs have survived over it. Since it is also used for sending remittance from Saudi to South-Asia by labor/slaves who have their password taken away from them, it is still tolerated socially though not legally.

<comment><USER7> *passport not password!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Making it more difficult to transact in the official economy will drive more volume and sophistication to the black market, cryptocurrencies, criminal syndicates, System D.

That means less transparency, less control, less tax revenue, reduced government influence.

Seems counterproductive.

<comment><USER10> >That means less transparency, less control, less tax revenue, reduced government influence.

That doesn't sound good to you??

<comment><USER9> That used to sound good to me, when I believed that Government Is The Source Of All Bad Things.

But then I grew up, got some life experience, and learned that there are even worse things than taxes and regulation.

I'm pretty sure I don't want my community ruled by a local chieftain with rampant gang and tribal warfare, organized crime syndicates, protection rackets and an official religion.

You can see it happening right now when a state loses its monopoly on violence.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1aPWH0_crU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1aPWH0_crU)

<comment><USER10> I thought ISIS _is_ the state now? The Taliban certainly were, and they did similar things.

Not to mention 15th C Spain.

<comment><USER11> > I thought ISIS is the state now?

ISIS was a non-state actor that had the goal of creating a new state on the territory administered by some existing states, and has to some extent managed to do so as those existing states failed. The failure of a state in maintaining its "monopoly on violence" is almost inevitably followed by another state-like actor displacing it in that role -- there is no shortage of actors wishing to impose their will and no shortage of actors willing to use violence to do so in the absence of an actor with the resources and will to prevent them from doing so.

<comment><USER10> Agreed :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While financial remittance regulation is held up as a save-the-children, anti- terrorist poster child, in reality it's primarily a political, surveillance and profiteering tool.

This move will directly benefit businesses such as Western Union, criticized by consumer protection groups for preying upon immigrants and other disempowered groups. (Western Union has an extremely long history of abusing and maintaining monopoly... see [http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2011/05/how-the-robber-ba...](http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2011/05/how-the-robber-barons-hijacked-the-victorian-internet/2/) )

For an impressively useful World Bank resource on typical remittance prices, see [http://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/en](http://remittanceprices.worldbank.org/en)

</comment><comment><USER13> I used to work in the money transfer industry. Years ago, my team and I built many of the systems that Banorte uses to link the organizations mentioned in the article to paying locations in Mexico (and other regions).

I left the industry shortly after we sold our company to Banorte in 2007. I left the industry for the same reason that we sold the company: a nearly intollerable level of regulatory risk. It got to the point in 2006 where a number of our profitable and otherwise-healthy competitors went out of business just because they couldn't keep their bank accounts open. Their bank would get a visit from an OCC examiner, or would ask the FDIC to approve a merger, and instructions would be issued to close all of the money transmitter accounts.

In other words, much of what this article talks about is not new. Here's a very similar article from nearly a decade ago (some of the same people being quoted):

[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/16/nyregion/16remittance.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/16/nyregion/16remittance.html)

What is new here--what's interesting--is the fact that the banks themselves seem to be shutting down their own remittance services. I had always attributed previous "crackdowns" to regulatory capture: certain banks saw a wealthy, highly-fractured niche, and used their connections in DC to turn up the heat on the non-bank players in order to weaken them and take market share. One of the most infuriating things about what we saw happening in 2005-2007 was that while banks were closing the accounts of non-bank service providers, the banks themselves began offering the same services to their own customers, often through the same networks that the non-bank financial institutions were using. Bank of America was the most prominent actor in this regard; but now, even they have stopped offering money transfer service. Go figure.

It's really unfortunate that such a cool area of tech (international remittances) draws such negative attention from regulators. If it weren't for that regulatory risk--existential in nature, really--I would still be working in the space. Ironically, this is also why I don't think that Bitcoin is a solution for international remittances.

See, the problem here is cash. No one is complaining about the lack of availability of SWIFT-based wire transfers between bank accounts. The transactions being discussed here transit through a secondary banking network that sits atop SWIFT; it is faster (seconds vs. hours), cheaper ($5-$10 per wire vs. $30-$50) and more available (24x7 vs bank hours) than SWIFT, but most significantly, because most of its payouts are made using cash, its participants don't need bank accounts.

Cash payouts are made out of necessity. The majority of international remittance recipiants don't have bank accounts, and the cash they receive from their emmigrant relatives goes to immediate consumtion needs (as mentioned in the article). Unless those recipients, many of whom live in rual areas, were able to cash out their bitcoins on the spot, a bitcoin transfer would be worthless to them. And the bitcoin ecosystem faces the same challenges with regards to bank access as the remittance industry does.

If you want an explanation as to what is driving this "crackdown", I would attribute it to some desire to significantly curtail the use of cash in these kinds of transactions. The low-income people who depend on remittances are collateral damage in service of that objective.

<comment><USER14> One important distinction is that Bitcoin wallets are free where bank accounts aren't. Phones that can display QR codes have become cheap now.

Ignoring fees for a moment, if there are Bitcoin ATMs on both ends of the remittance transaction, it's pretty easy for the participants. Probably even competitive.

<comment><USER10> >Ignoring fees for a moment, if there are Bitcoin ATMs on both ends of the remittance transaction, it's pretty easy for the participants.

Why wouldn't international BTC transfers be regulated the same as international currency transfers?

<comment><USER15> Decentralized P2P bitcoin transfers are not easily regulated; It would be like regulating other P2P technologies like BitTorrent or encryption software. Of course, if a centralized business is in the middle, you can regulate that, but it's not a necessary piece of the solution.

<comment><USER16> Such centralized businesses will be swiftly shut down by legislation if bitcoin cannot be regulated. If shutting down the centralized businesses isn't enough, bitcoin will be outlawed. Identifying users is easy enough due to the nature of the network.

<comment><USER14> That is not the direction the government is currently going.

A ban of the technology would pretty bad and unprecedented, but if push came to shove, Bitcoin traffic could be disguised as other traffic.

<comment><USER17> What will the government do with Bitcoin the day a report comes out that American citizens have been killed in a terrorist operation financed by bitcoin?

<comment><USER14> What did the government do the day evil things happened over the internet using encrypted communication?

<comment><USER18> It banned the export of cryptography.

<comment><USER14> And yet a little "https" logo smiles at me in the address bar as we speak.

Point being that the government can't and doesn't ban everything that can be used for evil, be it from incompetence or rationality. Bitcoin will probably be heavily monitored though, as it is very suitable for that purpose.

<comment><USER18> I was referring to a mainly historic, very strict export ban that categorizes cryptographic software as munitions:

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

HTTPS _was_ crippled, since Netscape shipped only 40-bit RC4 internationally.[1]

PGP's source code was printed so it would fall under First Amendment protections, since binaries weren't legal for export.[2] (See also DJB's _Bernstein v. United States_ )[3]

OpenBSD/OpenSSH is still based in Canada to avoid being subject to the laws.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

1 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_in_the_U...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_in_the_United_States#PC_era)

2 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_in...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_investigation) and [http://www.pgpi.org/pgpi/project/scanning/](http://www.pgpi.org/pgpi/project/scanning/)

3 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States)

4 [http://www.openbsd.org/crypto.html](http://www.openbsd.org/crypto.html)

<comment><USER14> I know, but in the end they couldn't keep it that way forever.

<comment><USER18> Yes, of course.

Isn't it conceivable that the government would implement a similarly short- sighted (and ineffectual) policy if Bitcoins were seriously used to harm the US? :-P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Even if banks invested in new software to screen for worrisome transactions, they would still have to manually investigate many suspicious activities and report them to regulators. Banks fear that a single mistake could lead to costly penalties like the $1.9 billion settlement that the British bank HSBC agreed to pay over money laundering issues in 2012. HSBC has stopped paying out remittances at its Mexican branches."

Huh, no. HSBC has paid a $1.9B fine not because of a single mistake, but because it knowingly let drug lords launder money through its counters.

<comment><USER20> This is a popular misconception, but the article is right and the popular misconception is wrong. HSBC was fined for insufficient oversight of risky transactions. They did not "knowingly" launder money in the sense no executives were knowingly and provably involved in laundering money.

<comment><USER21> So the Chair of the Senate Investigation committee was a liar? "HSBC's chief compliance officer and other senior executives in London knew what was going on but allowed the deceptive conduct to continue".

<comment><USER20> Things that congresscritters say are not held to the highest standard of proof, but it might behoove you to look up what 'deceptive conduct' means in the context of this quote.

Actually, I'll save you the effort that you didn't bother to spend yourself, and tell you what it means, to the best of my understanding.

HSBC affiliates (not HSBC itself) in some countries were processing certain transactions that were exempt from a certain regulatory requirement concerning transferring money to people designated to be terroists. HSBC built a computer system to enforce this regulatory requirement. The affiliates omitted information in internal reports to avoid triggering the computer filter for these transactions, and HSBC was like "can you include this information?" and the affiliates were like "no, these transactions are exempt". This is what the quote refers to.

So this quote is blaming HSBC for not demanding other banks file transactions internally in a way they weren't required to so as to not automatically trigger a computer system they weren't required to automatically trigger. It is this practice that Congress is calling 'deceptive'. The committee doesn't identify to what extent this is a crime, probably because none of the transactions were identified by the committee as violating the regulation that nobody--not HSBC, not Congress--was requiring them to follow.

<comment><USER22> To boil it down more simply, the USA had sanctions on Iran long before other parts of the world did. Thus someone wishing to send money from the UK to Iran, for example, could do so through HSBC in London. Those transactions might well end up interfacing with US controlled infrastructure in some way and the US parts of HSBC were then routinely interfering with those payments, because America doesn't believe in sovereign independence. So now these local HSBC affiliates or divisions have a problem: their customers want to make perfectly legal transactions (legal in those areas) and the American computer systems are getting in the way. Simple solution: don't use any keywords that the USA doesn't like.

Years later this practice would be described as "money laundering" and "sanctions evasion". However it was in reality just a reasonable way to tackle an unreasonable problem.

<comment><USER21> HSBC was about Mexican drug money largely. ""These traffickers didn't have to try very hard," Breuer said at a press conference in Brooklyn. "They would sometimes deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in a single day into a single account using boxes designed to fit the precise dimension of the tellers' windows in HSBC's Mexico branches."[1]

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-12/hsbc-mexican- branch...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-12/hsbc-mexican-branches- said-to-be-traffickers-favorites.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm guessing we'll start seeing more competetion for similar services from Hong Kong, Singapore, and some of the newer Easter European banks with pretty innovative and low-cost financial services.

I'm not sure this bodes well for the American banking system in the long term; today's migrant workers are the parents of tomorrow's entrepreneurial children.

<comment><USER24> That's unlikely. U.S regulations are enforced worldwide when in comes to "national security".

<comment><USER25> They're not particularly. But if a bank deals in dollars, then they'll often be routed through New York, exposing the bank to US regulation, as BNP recently learnt. It's not a case of the US going after foreign banks so much as it is the US banking system being so big that it is hard to avoid if you are an international bank.

<comment><USER24> It's not the size of the U.S banking system at all. It's the role of the dollar as the world's reserve and trade currency that gives U.S authorities a special gatekeeper role as most of these transactions have to technically touch New York.

Linking national security to this role and levying completely disproportionate fines as in the BNP case is clearly an abuse of the special powers the U.S has.

<comment><USER25> The role of the dollar is a function of the size of the US banking system.

And the BNP fine is kinda light for funding genocide, if you ask me.

<comment><USER22> There are double standards at work here. If BNP is guilty of funding genocide, then what happens when Somalians stop being able to afford food because the last banks stop routing money there? This is already about to happen in the UK where the last bank is trying to lose their Somalian remittance business and being blocked by a lawsuit filed by immigrants.

Not to mention that the government handing out these fines is responsible for far more devastation than any bank.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Here's an idea: Let's close down our road network. It's being exploited by drug lords, murderers, rapists and terrorists every day!

<comment><USER4> Better yet, privatize it and hand it to an oligopoly to run.

That way even with a light touch regulation they'll just shut off portions of it and tell us to get off their roads until we've learned not to inconvenience them with laws.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There's a real opportunity for startups to solve real-world problems, not the "We are Dropbox meets Quora for AirBnB" type ones. Transferwise has a neat approach, which involves the currency never actually leaving the country, albeit at the cost of a couple of days of delay (essentially, they do peer to peer matching of needed cash flows); Remitly is slightly more traditional, but is still way cheaper than Xoom or Western Union. There's a lot of money to be made here while solving a major pain point.

<comment><USER27> You're very correct! Regarding online: Transferwise is interesting but a little cumbersome to based on business model. Remitly is cool, but for now only servicing the Philippines (very competitive). Xoom also does great stuff, and will continue to grow. Western Union and MoneyGram both have online offerings but have substantial room for improvement.

Look for additional players to enter. We're soon launching WireCash, essentially "Expedia for Money Transfer". We've partnered with many of the existing players to offer their services online in one central location for consumers. Want to empower consumers with choice, freedom, and options, as well as great/competitive service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is it possible to use paypal for this? It seems like both parties could just sign up for a paypal account, and a bankless immigrant could load their account with cash, right?

<comment><USER29> And do what with it? How will they spend it locally? They can basically only spend the money with US merchants - that doesn't help them very much.

<comment><USER19> You can withdraw money from a PayPal account.

<comment><USER29> Isn't that precisely the point of the article? That it's becoming hard to do exactly that?

Paypal is not immune from the same problems the other banks are having.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Most Latinos I worked with in the Restaurant industry didnt even use a big bank becuase there was no way to get a bank account from them. Most of the time they used western union or some other money transfer.

There are actually smaller banks that cater to latino immigrants but apparently the fees are higher and it is very tough to get started. I believe they had to deposit a big chunk of money to get started.

</comment><comment><USER31> While, I completely agree with the fact that the Government is trying to deal with financing terrorists and anti social elements, I think what will now happen is services like xoom.com is going to bloom. It would just shift the transactions from one place to the other. Also, someone can always use a US debit card to withdraw money in local currency from Mexico, no?

</comment><comment><USER32> Can someone summarize the article? NYTimes not letting me read without logging in. Thanks in advance. What are the new limits?

<comment><USER33> Put your browser into porn mode and NYT will let you read without registering.

<comment><USER34> And delete the query string at the end of the URL ("?...").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It looks in my opinion like opening for BTC and "crypto coin" markets and also simple Paypal transfers. "Why learn about crypto currencies" if people can simply use Paypal to transfer money.

Anyway they will have to pay something for the transfer.

I personally see it as a positive thing because it opens market for new solutions.

</comment><comment><USER36> This is how failing nations pay the bills. Print a bunch of money, and then stop letting people take it out of the country on bogus national security claims.

<comment><USER37> >and then stop letting people take it out of the country on bogus national security claims.

What is the motive for keeping the money in the country? I'm not disagreeing I'm just unsure why that is a stipulation.

<comment><USER38> Makes it a lot easier to manipulate the value (especially if you aren't importing a lot) of the money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Isn't this a good thing for Bitcoin?

<comment><USER40> Yup. I am convinced this is another move by the NSA to increase the usage of Bitcoin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Interesting. Export controls of currency are usually a symptom of a failing economy and an attempt to prop up the value of the currency by increasing scarcity.

It's also something that nations who are planning war do.

</comment><comment><USER42> What about WireTransfer ?

</comment><comment><USER43> Bad decision

</comment><comment><USER44> $51B leaves the US in the form of remittance -- imagine all of that being USD->BTC->USD instead. The daily trade volume would be astronomical compared to today's.

Where remittance ends, forex begins.

<comment><USER5> I see some problems with this. Okay, moving bitcoin is effortless* and almost free. That part works great, but what happens at each end?

Exchanging between bitcoin and local currency is somewhat difficult and incurs fees. In fact, in the US one of the key reasons it is difficult is that government is naturally trying to close off this potential loophole, because that's what organizations of this nature do -- really this brings us back to the issues of control that are raised by the original link.

It would be interesting if this kind of increasing pressure on financial gateways led immigrants to start demanding payment in bitcoin, but there's no sign of that happening yet. They need to be familiar with it first.

Immigrants have an extremely limited selection of places to spend bitcoin in their home countries. Though if the demand existed, then the market would grow. Ironically, the most developed bitcoin economies are the US and Europe. In the US, there is a pretty wide selection of goods available, thanks to big retailers like Overstock and Newegg, but even there, one is still limited to a small subset of stores.

* edit: I should add that, with the current state of the software, it's not the safest way for an average person to handle large amounts of money. Obviously, there's lots of potential for improvement there.

<comment><USER45> Three years ago, smartphones were rare in Mexico. I had to go to a specialty dealer who unlocked AT&T iPhones to get mine.

This year, I've been shopping for phones again in Mexico. Every network and every shop is full of nothing but smartphones. Almost all monthly plans come with data. Accessory shops with cases and covers and headphones and stuff exist in every town.

Mexico's bitcoin infrastructure is ready to take over the money transfer business if the government and the banks make it hard or expensive to go through official channels. All it will take is enough expense to make it worth learning to use bitcoin. The network of small entrepreneurs that would do the actual cash exchange already exists: Mexico is a land of small shops and informal businesses.

Erecting arbitrary barriers is more likely than ever to create a black market.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Insert long comment about the virtues of Bitcoin here.

<comment><USER47> Government fiat is to snail mail what bitcoin is to email.

And it's all very well to move to a cashless society, but even so, much of the bureaucratic overhead, premine (ie instamine), trusted systems and centralization would still remain, right?

<comment><USER48> I think you meant to say "Government fiat is to bitcoin as snail mail is to email."

<comment><USER47> Yep. I stand corrected, thanks, although on second thought, both versions might work if you're receiving a government cheque by post, versus some email that declares some funds have been sent to a bitcoin address.

I think the centralization of fiat is the real problem when you have the dregs of society attracted to it in order to manage or control it. Furthermore, government in general affords power that could not otherwise be obtained so easily by such dregs, thus leading to siphoning and general corruption, eventually causing blowback into society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> > _Some Latin American immigrants say they regularly send three remittances a > week to pay for last-minute school supplies or rent._

One solution is making up for rising transaction costs with lending. Someone reliably transferring money can just as reliably service a loan.

Suppose an American is sending $100 three times a week to Mexico. You lend the American $1 200 at the beginning of the month. This is sent to a Mexican bank with instructions to disburse, in $100 installments three times a week, to a beneficiary. The American, instead of sending money to Mexico, services the domestic loan. You retain a lien on the funds deposited in the Mexican bank, which would revert to you in the event the American defaults on their loan. Similar cash flows, one international wire.

<comment><USER50> Or you just put a $100 bill in an envelope and put a stamp on it.

<comment><USER51> I had always heard this was illegal, but it turns out it is ok as long as you are conducting a legal transaction. It is discouraged, but legal.</comment></comment></comment>


Pivot – Rows to Columns - <AUTHOR> http://modern-sql.com/use-case/pivot <comment><USER3> Ahh, love the old pivot. At my company we had a horribly designed schema for our MVP and our postgres DB was getting hammered running our daily analytics. We had like 6 replicas going at one point and each of them getting maxed out... Then we hired an older gentlemen with plenty of DB experience and as soon as he got onboard he wouldnt stop talking about 'pivoting' our data. Nobody really listened to him for a month or two but after we did a few prototypes it was like holy shit this is revolutionary! Fully implemented the redesign of our DB with a pivoted schema and that sh __has been powering our service for 3 years without a blip.

<comment><USER4> Could you elaborate please, how switching from rows to columns made such a difference?

<comment><USER5> A lot depends on what he changed, of course, but in general pivoting like this reduces the overall amount of data that's both transmitted down the wire and processed through the CPU. For instance, a lot more work can be done on a single pass through the table than before, it takes less memory to keep the calculation, and the end result is smaller - sometimes by an order of magnitude.

Those things all stack up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe I haven't understood the article fully but I don't understand the use case here. Showing data in columns vs rows is purely about representation of the data as opposed to how it is stored in a database. The first query with one value per row seems like a perfect way of representing the data in the database.

In addition, the author claims that very poor performance comes from using an EAV model due to joins. In reality with the right indexes, joins can be very high performance and an EAV model can give you better performance than de- normalised tables. Performance degradation often comes from attempting to pivot the data into a de-normalised structure.

Take the example the author uses where the attributes are name, email and website. The proper EAV normalised structure would have three tables, one for name, one for email and one for website. With the three tables you can enforce the constraint of one value per entity so you don't have to use the MAX hack and the joins between the tables will be more performant than joins on a single table. With this database structure, lots of operations are more performant than using the de-normalised table. For a given submission ID we can get the name, email, website (if they exist) faster by using three queries in parallel. Each individual query will operate faster because the index for each table will be smaller than the index for the de-normalised table.

<comment><USER7> >The proper EAV normalised structure would have three tables

But then it's not EAV. In this case he is creating a single table to hold all of the attributes. The pros of this model are that once the business decides they also want to record which browser was used, there are no database changes required. In your case, you'd have to spin up a new table (and then another one once they want to store the time, and another where they want to store whether this is a returning customer, etc.)

I'm not suggesting EAV is the _correct_ solution, but the model has its merits... rarely :).

<comment><USER6> I see what you're saying, I think my definition of EAV is probably not the correct one. In a real EAV where you have just one table and you only change data not the table structure you can only really query for a list of attributes. In that case there is no performant way of querying for a specific attribute.

The value of this style of database seems limited because you have to change the application in order to make good use of the new attribute you've added but you refuse to change the database at the same time. The best systems are where application and database match; either both contain knowledge of an attribute or neither contain knowledge of an attribute. The case of neither having knowledge is only useful where an outside party (such as the end user) alone can interpret the attribute. For example listing device specs where the user alone can compare them and not the application like: backlight = LED, subpixel = PenTile, power-supply = switch-mode.

<comment><USER8> Your model is perhaps EV - you don't need the attribute if the data is in separate tables? It seems like normalization on steroids - I was going to joke about 6NF, but turns out that's a thing: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_normal_form](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_normal_form). I'm one of today's lucky 10000!

One thing EAV is really good for is allowing for user-defined attributes - some privileged users are allowed to add a new user defined field, and there's a UI that allows regular users to view and maintain them. A pain for reporting, but you can either update a view as UDF's are added or drop and recreate a materialized view at set intervals. I've worked with applications where there's a user-defined screen for each entity in the system, it can be a great get-out-of-jail card for a lot of late/ad-hoc requests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In case anyone wants to use crosstab for postgres, here's what I learned so you don't have to: [https://github.com/makmanalp/sqlalchemy-crosstab- postgresql](https://github.com/makmanalp/sqlalchemy-crosstab-postgresql)

</comment><comment><USER10> The R package tidyr - a tidyverse package - makes this incredibly easy [http://tidyr.tidyverse.org/](http://tidyr.tidyverse.org/). Just wanted to note that if you're considering trying out R and work with SQL, you will probably love the tidyverse. The SQL-like task replacements in tidyr, dplyr, and others, are how I came to love and appreciate R.

<comment><USER11> i was looking into this last week. spread is what i found but i need to pivot on 2 keys, which I dont think is supported

<comment><USER12> You want the data.table [1] implementation of dcast and melt. They support multiple pivot values, inline aggregation, are super fast, and are easy to use compared to trying to wrap your brain around gather/spread. Frankly I think Hadley went a little too far with those tidyr functions, the dcast/melt interfaces he created in reshape2 are much, much easier to intuit and the DT versions are just improvements on that.

[1] [https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/vignettes...](https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/data.table/vignettes/datatable- reshape.html)

<comment><USER13> Huh, I feel the exact opposite here. melt/gather feel very similar, but spread seems like a massive improvement in UI over dcast.

Used to be a big data.table fan, until I realized I could read my dplyr code as easily a week later as when I wrote it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just had to deal with this. In my case, I needed two columns pivoted and aggregated per "slot." (So each "slot" would have an aggregated A and another aggregated B column.) I couldn't find a syntax that allowed me to do that, though I'd still love to find it, for instructive purposes.

<comment><USER15> I highly recommend you search about that on stackexchange and ask question if not already present. Seem easily doable but HN comment are not a goo place to get specific feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is doing something like the author suggests

SELECT submission_id , MAX(CASE WHEN attribute='name' THEN value END) name , MAX(CASE WHEN attribute='email' THEN value END) email , MAX(CASE WHEN attribute='website' THEN value END) website FROM form_submissions GROUP BY submission_id

actually faster than doing the equivalent using joins? I would think the opposite, since you are going to have a unique key on entity and name for sure, and you can't really use the name part of the key in the group by syntax. Or can you?

<comment><USER15> Of course you can, GROUP BY take as many columns as you want according to standard.

And it's way faster too on my typical use cases.

<comment><USER16> It's not the group by that needs to take the key into account, it's the case. I would think you get the result from the where/ group by clause first, but then for each row in that result check if it matches the case criteria. I don't think the case check is going to be able to take advantage of te fact that the name is the second column of a composite key.

<comment><USER15> I'm not sure to understand (and again stackexchange is a better place to seek advices) but I still think it doable. If I get you right you just have to put the aggregate function inside a CASE instead of the opposite.

One limitation of an aggregate function is that you can't nest aggregate function in the same SELECT clause. But you can perfectly nest it inside a non-aggregate expression.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If anyone wants to play around with an implementation of PIVOT without installing anything, check out data.world (supports PIVOT and UNPIVOT). Check out [https://docs.data.world/documentation/sql/concepts/advanced/...](https://docs.data.world/documentation/sql/concepts/advanced/PIVOT.html) (Disclosure: I'm an employee at data.world)

</comment><comment><USER18> Is there anyway to support N months? This one has them hardcoded in, but what if I don't know how many months are going to be in the dataset?

<comment><USER19> The example still groups by YEAR. So you won't need more than 12 months.

Regardless: SQL is a statically typed language. Also the type of the result—i.e. the names and types of the columns—must be known in advance. Some databases offer extensions for "dynamic pivot".

<comment><USER20> Markus is modest; he is the author of the top post, and imho is up with Joe Celko in offering great techniques to use SQL effectively (both at [http://modern-sql.com/](http://modern-sql.com/) as above and [http://use-the- index-luke.com/](http://use-the-index-luke.com/)). I'm a fan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Transposing and cross tabulation are common tasks in maths and stats, and languages like R, Python, SAS, or even tools like Tableau are much better suited to it.

Using SQL for transposing data is using the proverbial hammer because you lack better tools.

<comment><USER22> when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> in postgres there are also alternatives you can use with json fields, which will allow you to return an arbitrary and variable number of columns - <USER2> only trick is that the "columns" are in a json object.

Here is an example if anyone is interested: [http://dbfiddle.uk/?rdbms=postgres_9.6&fiddle=5dbbf7eadf0ed9...](http://dbfiddle.uk/?rdbms=postgres_9.6&fiddle=5dbbf7eadf0ed92f8d6a49fc5be8f3f2) \- jsonb_object_agg is the secret sauce.

</comment><comment><USER24> Good explanation of the options. I needed this half a year ago and found a solution and stackoverflow. Using MAX and CASE still feels like an ugly hack, though.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the most elegant instruction set - <AUTHOR> Let's optimize for hand written assembly and developer sanity but also fun.
What is the best instruction set / assembly language?
I'll accept both virtual machines and hardware. <comment><USER2> My own preferences: 6809, 68K, ARM, and if x86 would be on the list at all it would be dead last.

Developer sanity would be my main driver for the lineup, with the note that of course a 6809 is a bit of a limited environment and there never was as far as I know a 68x version in 64 bits.

<comment><USER3> Never used the 6809, but considered it for a project. Seemed to me to be a very clean true 16 bit design. Also was on the verge of being obsolete when it was released.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Which Machines Do Computer Architects Admire? (2001)

[https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/admired_designs.html](https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/admired_designs.html)

<comment><USER2> That's a bit like asking the butcher which butcher has the best meat.

<comment><USER4> No, these are architects in 2001 looking back at earlier machines that influenced them.</comment></comment></comment>


Coffee may be associated with a reduced risk of prostate cancer - <AUTHOR> http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/05/17/jnci.djr151.abstract?sid=a627bd2d-b499-4220-ae7d-09fcd2b2224e

<comment><USER2> "We observed a strong inverse association between coffee consumption and risk of lethal prostate cancer. The association appears to be related to non- caffeine components of coffee."

De-caff will do ya...

</comment><comment><USER3> The effect is much higher for lethal prostate cancer than the usual version almost any male would get if they lived long enough. I haven't seen what they consider the cutoff in any of the news briefs.

I had Gleason 3+3 prostate cancer, which is low on the lethality scale but if you have 4+4 or more the outlook isn't so good. And yes, I used to drink tons of coffee, maybe that bumped my Gleason score down, who knows.</comment>


Barter Exchanges - Startup Idea - <AUTHOR> http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/03/unemployment-recessions-and-barter-a-test.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting idea, but it presumes that our current recession is caused by insufficient liquidity.

Most of the evidence suggests that the liquidity-induced portion of our recession is over (AD/production/etc have recovered). Our high unemployment appears to be caused mainly by the fact that many workers produce little of value and it is hard for such workers to find jobs.</comment>


Basic Income as Common Dividends: Piloting a Transformative Policy - T-A https://www.thersa.org/events/2019/05/basic-income-as-common-dividends <comment><AUTHOR> I use to be a proponent of UBI, but in recent months have changed my mind after moving to a shared accommodation(mostly students). In this house there are 4 students and 2 non-students. These two guys don't work, are living on government dole outs and the whole day and night play video games, and not only are they themselves not working, but they have started setting a wrong example for the students. And it is not that jobs are not available, it is just that because the government is paying unemployment benefits people don't care even if jobs are available. There should be no free money as I have started seeing negative side of this policy in recent months.

I think governments should provide free education and healthcare to everyone and peg the prices of housing to some standard price index. That's it. No blanket free money.

<comment><USER2> > There should be no free money

The video states that 60% of the wealth in the U.K. is inherited, which is essentially free money for the receiver. Why is it okay for rich people to receive free money but not everyday people?

<comment><USER3> > "The video states that 60% of the wealth in the U.K. is inherited"

I hate statements like this because they are completely misleading. other similar ones like "top 1 % controls ~50 % of wealth" etc.

This goes by networth. Imagine this, there are about 20 million college students, nearly all of then have a negative net worth. By that logic, if you hand a homeless person a single $ bill, they 'control' the wealth of at least 20 million Americans. you can add in tons of americans who have a positive net worth to make up for all that negative net worth. Its an absurd way of thinking. its especially problematic since most net worth is paper net worth (stocks that not even the owners can really touch).

Surely someone who just graduated college and has 100k negative net worth is far better off than a starving person in a desert, distended belly and all.

<comment><USER2> Are you really saying a statistic about wealth inequality shows exaggerated inequality because we have lots of people heavily in debt?

<comment><USER3> thats only one issue, there are many others. there are also a ton of people who just dont save/invest any of their money, even those making 100k a year. furthermore, we are in a bit of bull market for stocks, which networth overly focuses on.

also networth is just a terrible metric. it ignores income streams, it ignores things that produce income like degrees, etc. it over inflates paper wealth as mentioned before.

<comment><USER2> I understand that a person's networth isn't the same as their value. It's still a reasonable approximation of someone's current financial position.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Have any proponents of Basic Income policies ever proposed instead of handing out money, we hand out tangible assets instead? A basic house, clothing, food, access to education and healthcare (and maybe some transportation in less walkable areas) seems like it would cover everything a person needs to live without any other source of income, and through economies of scale these things could all become cheaper to provide as opposed to having to depend on sources of money to fund dividends.

<comment><USER5> I think there should be much more focus on this kind of plan. People dont need income, they need housing etc. My concern is that if you swap out welfare and services for basic income inflation will eat away at it and sooner or later BI wont mean very much and we now have no services either.

<comment><USER4> Indeed, as housing becomes prohibitively expensive everywhere that people want to live in the US, I doubt someone living off basic income will even be able to afford any kind of home.

If however, we had government built apartment buildings that could be partitioned out and made available for free only to those who need it, that would actually help solve _real_ problems, and wouldn't even disrupt those who depend on their property values rising. Imagine such buildings right here in San Francisco.

<comment><USER6> Those exist in SF, and some of them are colloquially known as the projects[1]. The nice thing about UBI, is it avoids the issue of the 'welfare trap'. UBI isn't meant to directly impact the housing situation in SF, it's meant to help in places like Detroit, where the collapse of the auto-industry could have been mitigated somewhat had there been a UBI to help support the affected individuals and keep money flowing into the local economy. And this would also have a second order effect of relieving pressure on the high growth economies like NY/SF/LA, as folks would not need to immediately migrate away from low/no-growth areas in search of work.

[1] [https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Life-at-the-bottom-S- F-s...](https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Life-at-the-bottom-S-F-s- Sunnydale-project-3228433.php)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is also "Negative Income Tax" policy that tries to solve the same problem that Universal Basic Income is trying to solve.

</comment><comment><USER8> For UBI to work smoothly, it will help if it goes hand-in-hand with another economics policy called the Modern Monetary Theory[0] (MMT).

[0] [https://www.marketplace.org/2019/01/24/economy/modern- moneta...](https://www.marketplace.org/2019/01/24/economy/modern-monetary- theory-explained)

</comment><comment><USER9> Pdf: [https://www.progressiveeconomyforum.com/wp- content/uploads/2...](https://www.progressiveeconomyforum.com/wp- content/uploads/2019/05/PEF_Piloting_Basic_Income_Guy_Standing.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER10> Wouldn't it be best to launch UBI in a nation with stronger socialist mores first? It seems like it'd be a smaller jump, and probably more likely to succeed.</comment>


The Problem With The Macbook Pro's Retina Display - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/106640475803914092337/posts/ZDEgQKKUMR5

<comment><USER2> It's disappointing that Apple didn't include some obvious retina friendly system preferences. System font size, ui scaling, true native retina resolution, etc.

That said I think the sky is falling impression here is overblown:

"It means my Retina display, while being 125% sharper than my the HD display on my Sony, has 44% less screen space!"

Isn't this only true if 100% of your screen is taken up by ui elements from non-updated applications? Isn't this the sort of problem that's common with early adoption?

"What it does is render the whole screen at a different resolution, say 1920×1200, and then scale it up, using the graphics hardware, to 2880×1800! This means everything gets blurred. I.e. I get less crispness than a native 1920×1200 display would give me."

There are third party apps that will display at true 2880 x 1800:

[http://osxdaily.com/2012/06/18/3-ways-to-run-a-retina- macboo...](http://osxdaily.com/2012/06/18/3-ways-to-run-a-retina-macbook-pro- at-2880x1800-native-resolution/)

<comment><USER3> > It's disappointing that Apple didn't include some obvious retina friendly > system preferences. System font size, ui scaling, true native retina > resolution, etc.

They did. Granted not all in one menu, but all exist within system preferences. It even asks you after first install if you want to be at "Retina Optimised" resolution or native resolution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can run at true 2880x1800 using switchresx. <http://www.madrau.com/indexSRX4.html>

Thing is, this resolution is not really usable as everything becomes too small. I personally think the way apple did it makes perfect sense. Increase pixel density & sharpness while retaining the size of UI elements.

<comment><USER5> I do this when developing and it's great. I don't mind things small if I can see twice as many of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "What it does is render the whole screen at a different resolution, say 1920×1200, and then scale it up, using the graphics hardware, to 2880×1800! This means everything gets blurred. I.e. I get less crispness than a native 1920×1200 display would give me."

No, it does nothing of the sort. It renders the whole screen at 3840x2160 and scales it DOWN to 2880x1800. As a result everything designed for retina is razor sharp. Everything that is standard resolution is blurry, but no more so than when running at 1440x900 equivalent.

I run 1920x1200 equiv. on my rMPB all day. I even run Adobe CS6 on it. No problems. Seriously, all the complaining I've heard about "unusable" Adobe products on this machine are bunk. It hasn't effected my photo editing, or page layout work even a tiny bit. I don't use MS Office much, which is indeed blurry at any resolution, but LibreOffice is sharp.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks heaps for the helpful links. I had googled for solutions before writing that rant but couldn't find anything.

I ended up using Change Resolution ([http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com/tiki- view_blog_post.php?pos...](http://wineskin.urgesoftware.com/tiki- view_blog_post.php?postId=51)) to do what I needed.</comment>


Children of Men: 2016's most relevant film - <AUTHOR> http://www.vulture.com/2016/12/children-of-men-alfonso-cuaron-c-v-r.html <comment><USER2> I actually didn't know this film bombed, I heard about it in my capoeira class - the only other film I ever heard of there was Kill Bill and Fight Club so I figured it was a big hit.

Also I saw it 5 times.

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazing film, can't recommend it enough.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great movie, recommended it to all my friends.</comment>


How much caffeine do you drink a day? (infographic) | Articles - <AUTHOR> http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/9859.aspx <comment><USER2> The alcohol + caffeine equation is confusing correlation with causality.</comment>


List of mathematical symbols - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_mathematical_symbols <comment><USER2> This has been one of my favourite wikipedia pages for a long time. It's a shame that it's so hard to search through.

<comment><USER3> Detexify allows you to search by drawing math symbols:

[http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html](http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd also like to point out these articles:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_letters_used_in_mathemat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_letters_used_in_mathematics)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_letters_used_in_mathemat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_letters_used_in_mathematics,_science,_and_engineering)

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

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

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematical_notati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematical_notation)

</comment><comment><USER5> I was very happy to see the tilda in the list and defined. I have been signing most emails for more than 5 years with ~Keith as I think that this accurately conveys that email poorly approximates my intention. After signing emails this way many coworkers now put prefix symbols to their sigs because they think it looks cool, but I suspect only the geeks have an inclining as to why I do it.

<comment><USER6> I don't fully understand the relationship with that method of signing and the mathmatical notation

I don't think you mean that if you perform a series of transformations on the body of your message you will get Keith

I don't think you mean that your body of text is approximately equal to Keith, or Asymptotically equal to be precise.

I don't think you mean that your body of text is essentially the same as you.

Though all of these are somewhat close to what a signature means, I suppose.

I've seen the ~Name notation around a fair number of times, I assumed it was just a form of notation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It doesn't cover the angle symbol with a small "s" in the angle. Never known what that is!

<comment><USER8> I have never seen this notation used, but perhaps it is mean to represent steradians (the unit of solid angle)?

<comment><USER7> Not sure... But there is a Unicode symbol for it:

[http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/299e/index.htm](http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/299e/index.htm)

P.S. thanks for the new term - steradians! It's amazing how many terms are in the mathematically universe :-)</comment></comment></comment>


German Court Says Domain Registrars Are Responsible for Content on a Website - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedomains.com/2014/02/07/german-court-says-registrars-are-responsible-for-content-on-a-website/ <comment><USER2> Ridiculously misleading headline.

No, this is not what the court has said. In fact they pretty much explicitly said the opposite, i.e., in principle they are _not_ liable.

The court has said that a supplier that clearly knows that it is supplying services to an illegal operation should stop supplying those services.

There's nothing wrong with that in principle, it is applied to all kinds of things. The problem comes when it is applied to alleged copyright infringement, and it becomes even more problematic when it's indirect, like with torrent indexing sites.

That is something that is very difficult to ascertain, and it should not be left up to ISP's, registrars, telco's and alike to decide whether or not copyright infringement is going on.

<comment><USER3> > There's nothing wrong with that in principle

There kind of is. It's making the assumption that an "illegal operation" is a binary thing deserving of absolute condemnation. It isn't saying that you can't, for example, sell a counterfeiter a money press, but rather that you can't provide him (or any other "criminal") with a loaf of bread, or a tank of gas, or a room for the night in winter, or a phone, etc. It's practically a death sentence without even a trial, and on top of that it makes no allowance for the proportionality of the sanctions to the alleged offense. Sorry, you're a known litterbug, no one may sell you insulin for your diabetes.

And so it is with domain names. You turn off somebody's domain name, you're taking away their forum to inform the public of your error in wrongly accusing them of misconduct. You're turning off their email and disabling their ongoing correspondence with their attorneys and their community. It's blanket censorship. You're not turning off their infringing operation, you're turning off their existence in the communications network. And to the extent that you aren't, the sanctions will be ineffective at preventing the alleged misconduct. As a policy it makes no sense.

<comment><USER4> No, you've shut down that one domain, not made it impossible for them to own legal domain names, or otherwise be on the internet. Not that I agree with the law, but you seem to be rather overstating the repercussions.

If I was renting to you, and found out you were cooking and distributing meth in the house, I would evict you. That would not mean you could never live in a house again, just that you can't do your crime on my property.

<comment><USER3> > No, you've shut down that one domain, not made it impossible for them to own > legal domain names, or otherwise be on the internet.

Haven't you? If you shut down example.com and they go out and buy example.net and point it back to their website, the registrar would be obliged to do the same thing with example.net, would they not?

Moreover, the ability to get another name is kind of the point: Evaluate the two possible alternatives. On one hand, say it's easy to disseminate the new name (or your IP address) to everyone you may want to communicate with. Then taking away the domain name is ineffective to prevent the alleged misconduct, so there is no reason to do it. On the other hand, suppose that it's difficult to let everyone know the new name. That presents the other problem: A million people come to example.com and you have a platform where you can tell them what's going on and why the accusations against you are false; replace example.com with a page of unproven allegations against you and now your audience has no way to hear your side of the story because they don't know where to find you.

> If I was renting to you, and found out you were cooking and distributing > meth in the house, I would evict you. That would not mean you could never > live in a house again, just that you can't do your crime on my property.

I don't think you're distinguishing between what you're _allowed_ to do and what the law _obliges_ you to do. If you evict someone because you don't want to rent to a meth cook then that's all well and good, they can go live somewhere else and rent from someone else. But if the law prohibits anyone from renting to someone thought to be a meth cook then where is an accused meth cook supposed to live?

<comment><USER5> That's not what the law says though. It only says that if I'm renting to you and I find out that you're cooking meth I should evict you; not that I should refuse to rent to you because I heard you've cooked meth. I'm responsible for meth being cooked on property I own, whether it's me cooking or not. In the same way, if I find out you're doing something illegal (file sharing for example), I should stop you.

<comment><USER3> > It only says that if I'm renting to you and I find out that you're cooking > meth I should evict you; not that I should refuse to rent to you because I > heard you've cooked meth.

How are you distinguishing between those two things, "I find out that you're cooking meth" and "I heard you've cooked meth"? They appear to be the same thing. The tense doesn't get you anywhere because unless you only have to evict the person at the very second you catch them in the act, any such eviction has to be based on historical behavior. And under the silly instantaneous interpretation the eviction would only be necessary for so long as the criminality is ongoing -- you must evict but as soon as the criminal is finished with crime for the day (or claims to be) then he can move right back in? That would be nonsense.

Maybe your point is that "finding out" requires more evidence than "hearing" \-- which really gets to the heart of it, doesn't it? Private parties aren't judges. They don't have all the evidence, they don't have a perfect (or for that matter even remotely accurate) knowledge of the law, they're biased and prejudiced and are highly likely to be heavy handed when the alternative is to have to fight somebody else's fight. It's imposing the duty to enforce the law on people with no capacity or inclination to do it properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yeah and Mercedes is responsible for my speeding ticket. They purposefully make their cars able to exceed the speed limit of 50km/h inside cities.

<comment><USER7> I have always wondered why one is able to sell a car that can go over 100mph when the maximum speed allowed on the roads in my country is 70mph and being caught going 100mph will land you in jail.

We already know people cannot be trusted to "do the right thing" so high speed incidents will, and do, occur.

As Richard Miller wrote in SQUED [1]

"Show me a man that has never broken the law and I'll show you a man that has never driven a car."

[1] [http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/richard+m...](http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/richard+miller/squed/4929163/)

<comment><USER8> I don't know about your country, but in some countries there are private race tracks where you can speed legally for a few thousand bucks.

<comment><USER9> And in Germany you can drive as fast as you want on the Autobahn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As other people here addressed correctly: That ruling is not final.

But it is true, that particularly lower German courts (some names are in the news again and again) have a long record of decisions that just show one thing: Many German judges have completely not understood computers and the internet. While judges might not needed to in general, they at least should take advice -- possibly by their own grandson? -- before they just make that kind of decisions.

<comment> pi-err Judges (continental Europe) apply the law. It's a different tradition than common law. They do interpret it though it leads you so far.

My guess is that what those decisions mean is that the law needs a big change, especially on responsibility regime inherited from the Napoleon code.

<comment><USER10> It is right, that in continental Europe, there is less freedom to judges interpreting the law. In theory they are bound to the law and have no own judging freedom as in the US.

BUT: This is theory. When you see the details of many decisions (I did not look into this one), there is still plenty of freedom to "interpret" the law. Also what they have to do is, analyse the situation to interpret the law. When the analysis is wrong, the decision comes out wrong. In many cases, the analysis just showed up plenty of disregard of computer reality.

One example lately happened, when a judge thought, that it would be possible to prohibit the viewing of images without the surrounding html file. Everybody with some knowledge of internet knows, that it is not! Thus the judging came out ridiculous ... it must still be challenged.

I don't want to defend German laws of course -- they are oftentimes ridiculous to! But there are just plenty of cases, where no law regarding computer techniques plainly exist. Then judges have to go by common law and interpret it for computer usage ... and there the situation analysis is crucial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thank god there's no other way to address a server on the Internet, and that this measure will once and for all stop all copyright infringements, whilst being utterly implementable and policable.

<comment><USER12> And thank the lord that governments like those of the UK don't already send out unlawful extrajudicial domain termination requests to registrars. Thank god systems like NameCoin and P2P distributed websites are not being developed as we speak by internet visionaries.

<comment><USER13> I'm also thankful for non existing information on non existing technologies:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin#Uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin#Uses)

[https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions- old/wiki...](https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions-old/wiki/OT- Replaces-DNS)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Original article is much more informative. [http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/tech- industry/3501030/german...](http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/tech- industry/3501030/german-court-finds-domain-registrar-liable-for-torrent-sites- copyright-infringement/)

<comment><USER15> And totally different from the post here.

> The Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe had already ruled that DENIC is > generally not liable for rights violations, the verdict showed.

> However, the Regional Court of Saarbrücken found that the rights violations > of h33t.com were obvious and easy to identify, said Brüß.

> Since the album was still shared through h33t after several requests sent to > the website's operator by Key-Systems to stop the infringing activity, the > registrar had to act to stop the infringement, the court found.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This ruling is not final yet, and Key-Systems is likely to go into revision. (see [1], German)

Especially the consequences this would have for DNS changes etc., it is highly unlikely that a higher instance won't overturn the ruling although IANAL.

[1] [http://www.golem.de/news/landgericht-saarbruecken-domain- reg...](http://www.golem.de/news/landgericht-saarbruecken-domain-registrar- haftet-fuer-bittorrent-tracker-h33t-com-1402-104441.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> That's like saying the president is responsible for all crimes in the country.

</comment><comment><USER18> People like to complain about laws/regulation/tax/etc. in the US but it is on an entirely different level in the EU.

<comment><USER19> It is also important to note that in difference to the US court rulings cannot be used as reference for future cases in Germany.

<comment><USER18> No way? I thought the supreme court was like ..... supreme?

<comment><USER20> Courts within Civil Law systems are there just to interpret and enforce the law, not to create it. What individual courts decide is not binding on anyone but the involved parties.

<comment><USER21> Even if not binding they are important references.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > _A domain name registrar can be held liable for the copyright infringements > of a website it registered if it is obvious the domain is used for > infringements and the registrar does nothing to prevent it, the Regional > Court of Saarbrücken in Germany has ruled._ //

The court is going to have to define what "obvious use of a domain for copyright infringement" means in order for companies to make such a decision.

For example a torrent tracker isn't copyright infringing, it may be considered in court to be a contributory infringement [? don't know German caselaw on this?] but that's a non-obvious call for a company to make without the benefit of expert advisers.

Trackers point to [not exclusively] infringing material, like Google/Bing point to infringing material.

Indeed it may be impossible for a tracker host to establish the legality of any particular torrent without court powers to seize evidence and call witnesses and such.

</comment><comment><USER23> This isn't the first time the German government is doing something like this. Previously, they've established laws that dictate the way in which buttons must be presented on ecommerce websites[1].

1: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxBaDs0sGPw&t=38m18s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxBaDs0sGPw&t=38m18s) \- Shopify CEO discussing international expansion.

<comment><USER24> Except this time it wasn't the German government but a single (local) judge - whereas the "Buttongesetz" was indeed promoted by the federal minister of justice, who was trying to address end-user complaints.

A better comparison would be that people with an open WiFi are liable for what their users do in Germany. Which means that small shops rarely offer WiFi, and large chains track people's identities as if they were Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interestingly, this sort of request isn't limited to registrars. I did a bit of work with a registry for some new gTLD's (not a program I support; my former employer became involved in the business) and they had already planned for dealing with takedowns of domains at the registry (not registrar) level.

</comment><comment><USER21> A most dangerous precedent.

It would be nice if common norms in this regard were codified EU-wide.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't see how this enforcement would be practical.</comment>


Ask HN: What is your biggest business expense besides salaries? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Health insurance in San Francisco which according to my quick research using Blue Shield[1] is some of most expensive.

Most people who work at tech companies in the bay area don't pay for their insurance, or pay very little. It's just considered part of benefits.

I think they'd be shocked if they had to pay full retail price for it. Also, the government subsidies only apply if your making less than 50k a year, so most likely everybody would be paying full retail price if not for their employer.

      [1] -
      Blue Shield monthly cost for Silver 70 PPO
        Downtown San Francisco $462.54
        Downtown San Diego $388.22
        Santa Barbara $372.58
        Beverly Hills $342.53

<comment><USER3> Take downtown SF ($463). If you pay for your own health insurance starting at age 26 and stopping at 76, you will have paid:

$450 * 12 * 50 = $270,000

No wonder pharma companies in the US make a killing.

<comment><USER4> And at age 50, it is ~$750 p/m.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1\. Health Insurance

2\. Marketing & Advertising.

3\. Rent.

4\. Employer Share of Payroll Taxes.

5\. Other Insurance (eg. Workman's comp, General liability, etc.)

6\. IT (Including AWS).

7\. Legal & Accounting.

</comment><comment><USER6> AWS fees. We're an email marketing platform, we send around 150m emails a month, all of which we need to store and process clicks/opens on.

<comment><USER7> Are you using AWS for compute (ec2) only?

Because if so, there's plentiful of cheaper option where you could easily reduce your cost by 60-80%.

<comment><USER8> AWS for ses I assume

<comment><USER6> Use it for both EC2 and SES. Our customers link their own SES account to send out campaigns, so the advantage of being on EC2 is that many of them don't pay a penny. Server costs is about 10% of our revenue, so will weigh up the pros/cons of moving in the near future, I'm sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Health insurance is by far the largest, but I generally consider that part of salary when I'm thinking about costs.

After that it's hosting (we have no on-prem infrastructure), AWS is probably 85% of that cost.

<comment><USER9> Just to add, I forgot about office spaces.

We're all remote and most everyone works from a home office- except myself and one of my developers. Our combined office space leases (WeWork and Regus) in Seattle and Portland still don't eclipse what we pay the likes of AWS, DO, and Vultr.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looking at some of these comments, it'd be great if more of them were contextualised with the particular line of business.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you have access to a market research database you can get statistics on this kind of stuff for different industry sectors and different countries. For subscription services you may be able to get access via a public library or university library.

e.g. here's an estimate of costs in Australia's IT consulting sector, as percentage of total revenue:

      wages:	40%
      other:	26%	incl. insurance, advertising, cleaning, repairs & maintenance
      purchases:	16%
      profit:	11%
      utilities:	5%
      rent:	2%
      depreciation:	1%

</comment><comment><USER12> At the moment, aggregate SaaS costs and data licensing but I expect marketing to eventually become the biggest cost after salaries (or even the biggest overall).

</comment><comment><USER13> Office Space, after salaries and employer taxes is our biggest per employee cost.

<comment><USER14> Any reason to not consider switching to remote work and minimizing office space, or have you already done that?

<comment><USER15> Do people seriously ever think that maybe not everyone likes working remotely? I have been working remotely for about a year from home and I plan on working from coworking space next month from now on.

Of course, I started working remotely because I freelance, but I actually prefer having an office away from home for working purposes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Marketing and ads and site Support. All other expenses like hosting, rent, etc are very small compared to these two.

</comment><comment><USER17> i think now forex is the best choice | aplikasi keuangan | [https://www.finansialku.com/aplikasi-keuangan- finansialku/](https://www.finansialku.com/aplikasi-keuangan-finansialku/)

</comment><comment><USER18> Hardware prototyping related expenses. After that, office space and lawyers are looking about equal right now.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hosting. I'm a co-founder at [https://wonderproxy.com](https://wonderproxy.com), so our product is having servers all over. It starts to add up after a while.

Jumping down an order of magnitude we've got: software, bank fees/processing fees, insurance, taxes.

We were really happy when our salaries passed our hosting bills and stayed there.

<comment><USER20> Your company has an impressive number of locations. What's your hosting situation like to ensure service in so many locales?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Credit card processing fees.

<comment><USER22> That is very surprising. What kind of business pays more for card processing than hosting or rent?

<comment><USER21> The one in my bio :) The hosting bill is under $1000/month, the credit card processing fees are not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For e-commerce, logistics.

</comment><comment><USER24> Marketing

</comment><comment><USER25> 1\. Salaries

2\. Benefits

3\. Contracting

4\. Rent

</comment><comment><USER26> 30% platform tax

Servers

Advertising

<comment><USER27> > 30% platform tax

That's like a wholesaler saying the mark-up the retail store charges on their products is a business expense.

<comment><USER26> It's something we have to consider when deciding where to spend our time and resources.

Those are dollars coming out of our customers' wallets that don't end up in our bank account.

If we can acquire an open web user instead of a walled garden user it increases our gross profit by 43%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Legal

Advertising + Trade Shows

Travel</comment>


Diversity-Related Training Meta-analysis - <AUTHOR> https://heterodoxacademy.org/diversity-related-training-what-is-it-good-for/ <comment><USER2> _Members of the majority group are told to listen to, and validate, the perspectives of people from historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups — even as they are instructed to submit their own feelings and perspectives to intense scrutiny._

A common effect I've observed is that diversity training often seems to trigger defensive behavior. People of the majority group perceive that the organization cares much more about the feelings of the minority group than their own, and so members of the minority group become dangerous. For example, you might be willing to tell Steve his new hairstyle looks stupid, but wouldn't say the same thing to Shanice.

The response to this change in perception is defensive disengagement. The majority begins restricting their interactions with the minority. They don't make idle conversation with them. They avoid joining projects with them. They don't become friends with them after-hours.

Now, the opposite certainly exists. I've been in companies that were a pure good ol' boys club that would say the most outrageously racist things standing five feet away from a coworker of that race. As far as my experiences have gone, though, the middle ground is dead. There're very few companies where you can just treat all your coworkers like people.

<comment><USER3> Your post makes me think about how great diversity training was in my place. It was mostly about

\- diversity is good - it increases a pool of workers and ideas to pick from

\- we all are minorities in something, so please be nice. We're in this boat together

\- everyone has unconscious bias. Including you. Beware

\- please make an effort to be inclusive: being the only black/white/green person in the team sucks

\- don't do anything illegal

Kinda reasonable approach, I'd say, but I doubt they do it anymore.

<comment><USER4> Sorry to kind of jump off of you here, but what do you mean by "diversity is good"? Diversity of what? If we have 5 people that all think the same but they're all different races, is that good? Is that better than or worse than 5 people of the same race with diversity of thought?

From my point of view, I believe diversity of thought enables groups of people to consider new ideas and positions that wouldn't be considered, i.e. thinking outside of the box, but I don't understand why this is extrapolated to different races, gender identities, immigration statuses, sexualities, etc. I am not claiming you brought them up but they tend to be common "diversity" points the modern populace loves to clamor around.

Why do any of those imply anything about how people will think? We've all seen some creative people that are of our own race, or that were also our own sexuality, etc.

All of this is of course at the expense of speed, in that greater variance in thought/ideas leads to slower movement, which I think is important in business (a solo or very tight knit organization can move much faster).

<comment><USER5> Many (but not all) diversity advocates are looking for evidence to back up their preference for racial, gender, and other forms of non-ideological diversity, so they make the (often true) assertion that people of different backgrounds bring different perspectives. This is ideology searching for evidence (often known as 'motivated reasoning').

<comment><USER6> I remember when this was known as 'prejudice', in the strict sense of pre- judging aspects of a person (such as their perspective) based on e.g. their race.

It was considered to be a bad thing, so it's been very strange to see it used as a premise by diversity advocates.

<comment><USER7> I've seen it justified as every single member of the marginalized group has some life experience that no member of the majority/powerful group has. So although it's a prejudice, it's a correct one. That's different from traditional prejudices that aren't true for every individual.

<comment><USER8> Just to note, it _is_ possible for an academic who is not part of a group to interview many members of the group, and combine other sources of information, and end up knowing _more_ about "the experience" of that group than most individual members of that group. Because it's not a single experience.

It is even possible that, say, the black son of a black doctor, raised in a rich neighborhood, knows less about the plight of blacks in ghettos than the white son of a white janitor, raised in a ghetto with lots of blacks—even if the latter made no deliberate study. One could also consider Africans who immigrated to the United States as adults. They do have the experience of _being_ a certain race, but that may not imply nearly as much as people seem to think. (In fact, I would hazard a guess that the members of "marginalized groups" that _do_ get hired for the highly professional jobs that diversity advocates talk about, are very disproportionately likely to have come from well-off backgrounds, and to have no direct ghetto experience.)

<comment><USER9> > Just to note, it is possible for an academic who is not part of a group to > interview many members of the group, and combine other sources of > information, and end up knowing more about "the experience" of that group > than most individual members of that group.

This is a common fallacy. Statistics don't substitute for qualia. (much as we say the plural of anecdote is not data, it is also not firsthand experience or even necessarily understanding)

Further, "Having experience with the ghetto" isn't what people are discussing when we discuss the importance of diversity. There are still common experiences between wealthy racial minorities and poor ones, that white Americans don't experience. Try reframing this fallacy in terms of say, women and men, or gender minorities. It doesn't work.

<comment><USER8> Nor do qualia substitute for statistics, or for different qualia. Almost every woman will have the experience of menstruation, yes, but, for example, how many of them have been sexually harassed by a man? Some of them have _never_ had that experience, others have had it dozens of times. If you have a woman in your group and you assume she knows what it's like for women in general, you may be very wrong. Yet that assumption seems pretty common—I've seen a decent number of accounts of people who belong to some group, complaining that progressives assume they speak for everyone in that group. There's an example upthread.

I'm not saying _everything_ can be gotten vicariously through research, but a lot of things can be. And then the question becomes, which specific things do you want, and what's the best way to get them? I think the diversity discussion rarely gets that far—and if it did, strategies would end up very different.

<comment><USER9> > for example, how many of them have been sexually harassed by a man? Some of > them have never had that experience, others have had it dozens of times.

How does knowing that 80% of women will be sexually harassed in their life substitute for having had that experience? Speaking for myself, a man, I've been sexually harassed before (not in the workplace), and it's absolutely not an enjoyable experience, but my qualia, and the qualia a woman who is sexually harassed has are still going to be different.

And yes not every woman has the same experience. That's obvious. But who is more likely to have qualia that are more representative of woman's experience? A man who studies women, or a random woman? There is indeed the place for expertise (and similarly: data), but neither expertise nor diversity is a substitute for the other.

> I'm not saying everything can be gotten vicariously through research

Qualia cannot be. If you entirely discount the value that qualia have, that may not matter to you, but there are good reasons to believe that that's a bad idea.

> I've seen a decent number of accounts of people who belong to some group, > complaining that progressives assume they speak for everyone in that group

Indeed, but this isn't unique to progressives. It's just a problem that minorities have to deal with. And that's absolutely not a good thing (and awareness of this is good!). But again, it's not a progressive attribute (or one caused by diversity initiatives) to assume that the "other", whatever group it is, is cohesive in ways that the groups you are familiar with aren't. (e.g. When a member of a minority group commits a crime, you have reactions and narratives that minority crime is on the rise, or that this specific minority are criminals etc.)

A great way to fix this, by the way, is to interact with various people who are members of the other group, and see them disagree and debate. This can only really happen if you have a diverse enough group that you have multiple people of whatever minority to interact with. And this is good for everyone! It broadens majority perspectives and reduces microaggressions.

> And then the question becomes, which specific things do you want, and what's > the best way to get them? I think the diversity discussion rarely gets that > far—and if it did, strategies would end up very different.

I'm not really sure what you're saying here. Whose goals'? The business? The employees? The minority's? To explain why I'm dubious of the whole "data can solve the problem", someone has to drive the research to gather the data. By and large, if you want this to be done _reasonably_ , you need to have input from the group under discussion. There's tons of hilarious-if-they- weren't-horrible examples of this if you're willing to look. The ML community is full of them (Gender Shades is perhaps the seminal example).

That is, with relatively few exceptions, for research to be done correctly, or in many cases, to be done at all, you need someone who is like the people being researched in important ways to be able to champion, contextualize and guide the research. Without that, a culturally unaware researcher is, if history is a guide, more likely than not to misconstrue cultural signals or make harmful and long lasting mistakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a little offput by diversity training that, to me at least, essentially challenges folks on a spiritual and moral level. I think everyone should challenge themselves spiritually and morally, but I think the power imbalances inherent in work and academic training contexts make that kind of content patronizing or even inappropriate. I could see it being counterproductive in many cases.

It's probably true that employees, faculty, and some kinds of student leadership should be aware of ethical and legal obligations when it comes to diversity, though. So I think it would be hard to argue against _all_ categories of diversity content.

It's just many (most?) recent forms of anti-racism content crosses the line from "meet these expectations about professional conduct" and into "proactively improve yourself as a person". I don't think it's appropriate for superiors to mandate the latter. A spiritual advisor, counselor, mentor, or mental health professional? Absolutely.

To be fair, I do think it's appropriate for employees to face consequences of their own racist behavior. Even, in many cases, when that behavior is unintended.

<comment><USER11> _It 's just many (most?) recent forms of anti-racism content crosses the line from "meet these expectations about professional conduct" and into "proactively improve yourself as a person". I don't think it's appropriate for superiors to mandate the latter._

Can you give an example of what kind of content you think is common that is crossing this line?

<comment><USER10> Content that advocates for a particular moral framework. For example that outcomes matter more than intent. This is an area of philosophy that has been under continual discussion for thousands of years.

In addition, curriculum that has participants take some sort of personal inventory. Also having them go through some sort of confessional process.

Again, these are all healthy things to do. In the right context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if corporate D&I initiatives would be more successful if they allowed for genuine debate. When no debate or challenging of the initiative's assumptions is allowed, I suspect that:

\- Intelligent employees become cynical, and assume a hidden agenda.

\- The opportunity to change the minds of employees with reasoned doubts/objections to D&I claims is squandered. In fact, it raises (reasonable, imho) suspicions that the D&I proponents know that some of their stated positions are weak, and don't want them subjected to scrutiny.

\- Proponents of D&I may remain sheltered from valid counterpoints. So they lose an opportunity to refine their positions based on productive discussion.

This is based on my experience working in corporate environments for a few decades. And IME, the problem is definitely more pronounced at large companies than small ones.

<comment><USER13> I would very much like to know for sure which of my co-workers are willing to defend racist points of view

<comment><USER12> Apologies if I'm misunderstanding, but I think you're saying that you'd condemn them for admitting to hold that viewpoint. I think many of us would as well.

It seems to me a downside to that approach, though, is that we'd never learn _why_ they had those views, and probably never get a chance to reason with them about why they should believe otherwise.

Perhaps I'm too optimistic about the possibility of talking things out. It's hard to tell.

<comment><USER13> I think the problem with your approach is that no sane person would publicly defend racism. Because they would be outing themselves as a racist to all of their co-workers.

I believe that I understand very well WHY people have racist points of view. Racists are incredibly common and their motivations and beliefs aren't a mystery. I'm not sure what you would hope to change by talking things out.

Prejudice is by definition irrational, because it involves pre-judging. You can't really reason with someone about an irrational belief.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find these approaches to be borderline abusive. I understand the desire to attempt to put people in another persons "shoes", but I find that this makes a broad assumption that the minority members "shoes" are in the worst state. That is, not being able to voice opinions while also being criticized is the worst state. It is a terrible generalization. I would only feel comfortable with this training if listening was the only requirement and reflecting and sharing opinions was encouraged for all.

If you have seen some of the videos of the older white woman (whose name escapes me) that used to give the blue eyed/brown eyed experiment her approach strikes me as being abusive. I understand what she is attempting to teach, but I deeply dislike her delivery. I feel that she is trying to scar (not scare, scar) people into compliance.

<comment><USER15> > I find these approaches to be borderline abusive.

They are not only abusive but based on a racist ideology, since these "training" sessions are often racially segregated therefore imply that some races are inherently racist. It builds up resentment and division, which is exactly what corporations want, employees at odd with each others so they won't question actual abusive management techniques designed by the higher ups. This is cunning.

<comment><USER16> I read earlier this year that Whole Foods were calculating the risk of unionisation across their stores and that they believed that this correlated with factors within a store including lower levels of ethnic diversity.

[https://archive.is/zqIGa](https://archive.is/zqIGa)

Whether, with all other things taken into account, this remains a factor, and whether there is causation, I don't know, but they did see fit to mention it specifically as a "Store Risk".

<comment><USER17> Much more realistic perspective. I don't think increased ethnic diversity must play a role in inhibiting formation of unions, but it can be.

If I would need to implement a divide and conquer approach to any group, I certainly would start with benefiting certain members above others. Conflict is almost guaranteed this way. Oldest trick in the book.

Some diversity proponents try to mandate solidarity will indeed undermine efforts for workers rights. That approach might even be more subtle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The problem with the mandatory diversity training is that it does very little to win hearts and minds. Refuse to go, dare to say anything that isn't 100% in support of it etc. and you will be targeted to be purged from the organization and possibly publicly tarred and feathered.

Sure, some people, who tend to respond better to negative re-enforcement will be convinced to change their ways using that technique. That said, an arguably larger number of people will respond better to the carrot. Thus, they won't be convinced via the negative re-enforcement, but do not want to lose their job, be put on a secret whisper network "do not hire" list etc.. So, they pretend to play along and then find groups of people where they can let their hair down. It is not un-like the secret clubs that would break off from super conservative church groups to do some drinking (which usually ended up as binge drinking), speak easy's during prohibition, underground sex clubs etc..

Many of those groups experienced a litany of un-intended consequences from rigid views about alcohol, sex etc.. Un-surprisingly, the same appears to be happening with diversity efforts as well.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've done a number of diversity & inclusion trainings and I'm always confused by the opposition to them. Being more aware is generally useful.

As a hiring manager, it's been helpful for me to be thoughtful about asking things like, "how did you get here, car, train?" \- as this implies socioeconomic status, and if you reflect on why you asked that, what you wanted to know about it, and how it affected your thinking in general, and were honest, there's a chance it might have affected your opinion of the person in a way that has nothing to do with their ability to do the job. This opinion could be either good or bad, and isn't necessarily dependent on whether the person you're interviewing is from a marginalized class.

I still have bias, everyone does, these trainings do not aim to eliminate bias, they aim to inform people that it exists, and to offer them tools to be thoughtful about those biases, and to challenge folks to question the biases that potentially harm others, even if unintentionally.

<comment><USER10> Everyone struggles with being selfish. It's good to be aware of our own self- interested impulses and work towards counteracting them. So why not have mandatory training at work that teaches us that we're all selfish at some level and that we need to address that character flaw?

<comment><USER20> >Everyone struggles with being selfish.

Sorry but that's just a completely baseless assertion. Not everyone is selfish, nor is it a struggle for everyone to not be selfish. Assuming that others think as you think is what we call in poker, "first level thinking". The same concept can be extended to those who obsess over "diversity" and insist, "everyone is racist". Its flatly wrong, and frankly, idiotic to make such an assertion. Saddling everyone with the insecurities and deficiencies carried by a few is counterproductive and wrong.

Your employer has every right to be concerned with your behavior at work, and take any sort of punitive or corrective measures that your misbehavior may merit. Your employer should have no role making sweeping judgements about your beliefs or personality traits that have not been manifested in the workplace, much less mandating Soviet-style re-education which hinges on their baseless (and flawed) assumptions about human nature.

<comment><USER10> You disagree with me but then you reiterate my rhetorical point.

<comment><USER20> If you equate judging people on their actions rather than making sweeping judgements about them to being selfish, then your problems extend far beyond selfishness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > In wake of George Floyd's murder

To be fair, murder has not been established. Journalists typically say "the death of George Floyd"</comment>