I've met very very few IT workers who are happy with their jobs - <AUTHOR> http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.762361 <comment><USER2> I used to read the Joel On Software forums. The awful life of an IT drone was a common theme, it would show up about twice a week. The sad thing is that I recognize some of the posters' names and it's the same people who were posting the same complaints 6 years ago. If you're still complaining about your career after six years, the problem is you, not your job.

I would rather not draw that crowd over here, or have their stories reposted, or even links to that forum. That sort of negativity is boring at best and poisonous at worst.

<comment><AUTHOR> I voted you up.

But I don't fully agree with you. Maybe you didn't mean it but your tone sounds a bit too condescending to me -- like some Wall street rich guy saying if you were poor and still are poor, then it's your own problem, just get out of my sight -- not everybody has a dream job at a dream work place, in fact, I would argue most don't, regardless of industry. Should we care why many IT workers are not happy even if some individuals can't escape the blame? Shouldn't we be a bit more tolerant and listen more so that hopefully we will make the IT a better industry to work in?

Last but not the least, the Joel on Software crowd is not really drawn here with similar submissions, even though I will probably refrain from submitting similar moody articles here, wherever they are from.

<comment><USER2> My comments are specific to the Joel on Software forums.

IT can be a crappy job and complaining from time to time is a good way to blow off steam. But consistently venting about the exact same thing for 6 years is pathological. It also set a pretty lame tone at the JoS forums. Certain people would show up in nearly every thread about anything to snipe it down and remind everyone that life sucks and then you die, that's just the way it is kiddo, you picked the wrong job and there ain't nothin' you can do about it now. We just don't get any respect! It was like a Rodney Dangerfield sketch on repeat, except it wasn't supposed to be funny.

One of my theories is that in addition to providing an alternative to sites like ExpertsExchange, Joel Spolsky joined up with Jeff Atwood to start Stack Overflow partially because his own forums got spoiled by a bunch of bad apples who wouldn't leave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I absolutely _love_ what I do and can't imagine doing anything else.

 _However_...I have had very few jobs where I was happy. I think there are 2 primary reasons.

1\. I want to work on what I want to work on. When I work on anything else, all I can think about is what I really want to work on. In a job situation, I rarely work on what I want. (OTOH, a job that has me working on what I want is usually a great job.)

2\. I want to work when I want to work. Sometimes, 8 to 5 works, often it doesn't. We were simply not meant to sit in cubicles without windows all day long. Enough said.

There are lots of other things most of us don't like (difficult people, crappy code to maintain, poor management, difficult deadlines, etc.), but those are all part of the territory. I could live with them if I could work on what I want when I want.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder why so many happiness complaints in Joel on Software forums always talk about working in "IT" (as opposed to "engineering")? I've never been referred to as "IT", but I've only worked in companies where producing software/Internet services was the core competency and either as production operations engineer (i.e. customer facing systems, not internal systems) or as a software engineer.

Is the case with these posters that they're working in places where making a technology-oriented product/service is _not_ the core competency (or if it is, they're not working in the departments that are responsible for core products/services)? Why do people stay in these environments, if they have/want to have any sense of _passion_ about what they do (rather than merely think of their job as a way to make money)?

The other big factor is that I _am_ based in Silicon Valley. Could this be another factor, that outside of SF Bay Area/Seattle/Los Angeles and select other metropolitan areas anything computing-related is referred to as "IT" and treated as a cost center vs. a core competency?

Seems like there's several conclusions:

I. These people are passionate about a subject, but are working in an environment where passion is _not_ expected or even appreciated.

II. Either for some reason they're unwilling to switch to a field or environment where their passion will be rewarded (pay/hours/benefits?), or that option is not available to them (due to geographic locale?)

<comment><USER5> Your 2nd paragraph is dead on. Working at a company where you are viewed as an overhead expense, rather than as an R&D cost is no fun. It's the third tier software job, but there are a lot of these jobs out there. I'd put working for a company that sells software as tier one and working for a software consulting company as tier two. This is why those jobs are so subject to outsourcing, if you bring in another company to take over those functions, at least the employees of that company are working towards their core competency.

One "solution" to this is to get more involved in the business or mission of the organization you support. Of course, the bureaucracy may resist this sort of move.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think he confuses unhappiness with annoyance. Let me give a real world example.

Almost everyone has been in line for an ATM at one time or another and been stuck behind someone who clearly can't comprehend the machine. It's very annoying. If you talk to a person waiting in line under those circumstances they will seem like an unhappy person. But talk to them once they are on their way and they'll not only seem happy but probably hold no ill will towards the person who couldn't grasp the machine (because they realize the person had no malice they just couldn't do that paticular task).

To me that's a little what IT is like. You catch someone in the middle of fixing a few seemingly stupid mistakes or after a day filled with them and they'll seem unhappy.

Same with programming. Nothing's more annoying then spending a half hour tracking down a problem only to find someone didn't increment in a loop (or some other stupid mistake). But given time the rational mind kicks in, realizes everyone makes mistakes, and is back to being happy with their job.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's a living-to-work vs working-to-live question, really.

As it turns out, far more people choose to compartmentalize their work-life into an annoying, necessary evil than to dial back their standard of living while dramatically increasing their work responsibilities.

And this is true of more than just programmers. I've heard similar from accountants, lawyers, cooks, bank reps -- basically everyone I've ever worked with.

They'd all much rather do the sort of work they're currently doing, but at a smaller company or on their own. They just never make a change because, in the end, they value the increased leisure time and higher standard of living more.

(To be fair, in the US some aspects of our economy also have a big impact on that choice. Namely, retirement and insurance opportunities that don't really exist for the self-employed and small businesses.)

<comment><USER8> I think small businesses get about the sweetest retirement packages in the United States which do not involve backstopping by the taxpayers of California. With the SEP plan (one of a few options) you can sock up to, essentially, $5k + 25% of salary (capped at a very generous number) in a tax advantaged retirement account. It is like the IRAs available to regular wage employees, except superior in just about every way. (You lose out on employer match, you gain on sickening tax efficiency.)

Another fun option, especially for young entrepreneurs, is the Roth IRA, which is such a good deal it ought to be illegal. Pay taxes now at your low "I do not make much money rate". Watch investments compound for a few decades. Then it is yours, tax free, allowing you to avoid the significantly higher rate you'll be facing when you're significantly wealthier, and also letting you do some fun tax structuring if you also have taxable investments and/or income during retirement.

If you start saving young, $1 put in a Roth IRA today buys you $1 in tax-free income a year, for perpetuity, starting at retirement.

<comment><USER9> I might be wrong, but Ive always though $1 in my business is worth a lot more than $1 in any sort of retirement account I wont need for 40 years.

Business-exit is my retirement fund.

<comment><USER10> Maybe diversify a bit, just in case?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Someone recently commented, here on HN or elsewhere, that IT is often viewed as a cost center, not a profit center.

Anyone who has spent any significant amount of time in corporate life knows what happens to cost centers. They are at best "tolerated" and are squeezed as hard as they can be. Anytime the bottom line needs a bump, the first thing requested is a list of "cost centers".

(I typed a bunch more, but I think I'll leave it at the above, for our mutual benefit.)

<comment><USER12> That was me :-)

<comment><USER11> Cheers! (From the voting, I think I owe you a few upmods! :-P )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unless you are passionate about programming you are never going to enjoy programming. I have been programming for the past 19 years. I am a fanatic programmer. I have to code every day (learn new frameworks, try out different algorithms, come up with problems and write code which solves those problems, optimize your earlier code, redesign or rearchitect, try out code project samples etc). Again you will really enjoy if you are going to do what you wanted and that to solving challenging problems. I can code even when I am 70.

<comment><USER14> I can understand that. But really, truly braindead code _hurts_. There's interesting sifting and recombination of details. Then, there's such wrangling of concepts which is just drudgery!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can't seem to link to an individual comment, so I'm just going to repost it here. It's by Katie Lucas. Begin Quote:

 _The problem with IT, generally, is lack of respect. Because it's something that looks easy and looks like something anyone could do, people don't respect experience and talent.

For some reason this just doesn't work in other fields. While everyone feels they can put a sticking plaster on a cut, they go to a doctor for more serious stuff. Any fool can build a garden wall, but if they want a tower block one hires an architect and a construction company and lets them do decisions.

Whereas, it's quite common in IT for micromanagers to overrule the professionals.

It doesn't happen in building. Managers simply aren't allowed to say things like "Oh, I don't think we should RSJs in those load bearing walls". If the architect says they're needed, then they go in. We also don't hire doctors by picking the tools they'll use. When you want a doctor to take out an appendix, you want a qualified general surgeon. You don't ask them whether they prefer a #3 or a #4 handle on their scalpels.

And yet it's pretty common to see projects which have picked a technology first ("Oh we're going to use J2EE for this") and THEN hire the team around that ("Wanted, tech arch, 5 years exp with J2EE, C , C++, JAVA, Perforce, Apache, Perl, Python.") and only at that point produce the spec. And then if the job isn't one the technology is suited for, that ends up being the developers fault and they're the ones who work overtime to put that square peg in the round hole.

It's scarcely surprising that a) almost nothing works properly, b) there's constant chaos and that therefore c) almost no-one finds their work rewarding in ways other than money.

I freely admit that a lot of my time, I feel like some sort of thief. I sit in projects which are doomed. They're more doomed than a plane that's lost both wings and is on fire. I see the people around the project running about setting more of it on fire as it hurtles towards the ocean and removing more control surfaces and making it worse. And I watch developers switch in and out of seats as we trail wreckage and smoke down. And it's always been like this. The project is a free-fall disaster before I join and after I leave and there's just nothing, nothing, nothing I can do to rescue it at that point in time. And yet I'm being paid to be there.

And I feel bad about that. I feel that I ought to be being paid to achieve something. But usually I'm just being paid to sit in a seat in a vehicle performing a ballistic trajectory straight into its crash site. And even if I quit then the next thing will be the same and whoever takes my place in this seat will be in the same situation.

And this is not how I wanted to work. I wanted to build things that people wanted. Not turn up at an aircrash and fill a seat in it for a while. And while it's financial fulfilling, it's not very emotionally fulfilling.

Most bridges don't fall down. Most patients don't die. Most IT projects are a failure in one way or another. It's like being a surgeon back in the days before anaesthetics or antibiotics. Most of our patients die... and that's got to be bad for morale.

And I can't help but think that this really has its roots in the fact that people think software is simple enough that they can exercise control over it at a level they ought not to be and that they also don't want to pay what it actually costs. Architects generally don't compete on price and you don't get to tell architects that their idea of how strong structural steel is is an underestimate you can feel you can ignore in this project. But people time and time and time again pick the cheapest option for software, design it like they'd design a tin shack and then act surprised when the end results turns out to be flimsy tin shack instead of a tower block. Katie Lucas Thursday, June 25, 2009_

<comment><USER16> Reversed engineered the HTML with firebug: [http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.762361#...](http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.762361#discussTopic762411)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's weird because I have met very, very few IT workers who aren't happy with their jobs. Maybe they'd rather be working for themselves or would change something about the process that's used but most people I know fundamentally love the work. I'll admit though in these times when I feel like I have slightly fewer options I tend to feel more upset about little things that I would otherwise let slide but I try to keep that in check. I can't speak for other professionals inside the IT umbrella but I love programming and most other programmers I know love it too.

</comment><comment><USER18> I consider IT to be the systems maintenance and administration role -- programming is another occupation. While I love the technical stuff, I can tell you very specifically why I hate my job:

1\. Constant interruptions. I cannot accomplish anything of any degree of complexity when I get nipped at at all sides for a piece of my attention.

2\. Micromanaging boss. My boss has this peculiar trait where he insists on observing everything I do that he doesn't understand. He still doesn't understand it when I'm done, but somehow he thinks being there helps me.

3\. Idiotic end users. There is no semblance of any sort of competency requirement for an employee of the business and computer usage. I've received calls before on broken computers only to find the computer was OFF.

In my experience, this is pretty much pervasive in the industry.

<comment><USER12> _I consider IT to be the systems maintenance and administration role_

Even programmers often consider the sysadmin/DBA/network admins to be "mere technicians". Infrastructure is a) at least as complex as software and b) if we screw up we don't have legions of QA to catch it 6 months before ship date, it takes the system or the site down there and then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'll admit that I am _very_ unhappy with my current job.

Part of this is whining, I know, but just hear me out.

One major, major, major problem with my job is that I work for a small company, and am the only person here that knows tech at all.

This was really great for me at the beginning. I am very proficient in BSD and Linux, so everything (mailserver, file server, FTPs, VPN, firewall, etc.) was built on one the two. I've had the opportunity to work on some really fun projects. One of my favorites was building access points out of soekris boards and ubiquiti wireless cards (this was before ubiquiti started offering their own, vastly superior, vastly cheaper solutions).

I'm also pretty proficient at python and perl. Because of this, I've had the opportunity to build some really fun in-house stuff that people have loved. I built us a contact management system on python, and I've built countless extraction tools (grrr...text files) on perl. Currently, I'm working on a content management system for our marketing department. This is all really fun and great, but remember how I said I'm the only person here?

My typical day involves arriving here at 8:00 (or so, my commute is an hour long), then sitting in front of my monitors for about 9 hours, until 5:00 rolls around.

During the day I CANNOT get anything done. I'll end up reading HN, or working on my own website. (errr..this is inaccurate. What I mean is that I don't get any of what I consider _real_ work done. Just managing the little problems that the users have)

Why is this?

Well, a major part of it is the almost constant flow of interruptions from people who's computers are "broken" (I am "the I.T. guy" [a title that I despise], so every problem from a phone cord with a loose connection to a user that has pressed the insert button on their keyboard and now how a "broken email" gets handled by me). I'm sure that every coder here can relate to the frustration of getting halfway into a problem, then being rattled out of it by something like somebody not being able to figure out a numlock key and why, after they press it, their "numbers don't work". The overwhelming majority of code I have written has been done from the comfort of a barstool sitting at a local bar that I like. For some reason, I can get more work done there, or sitting in my backyard in a camping chair in my pajamas playing fetch with my dog, than I could ever even DREAM of getting done while actually sitting where I am now, at my desk.

But that is just one part.

Another part is that I am the the _only_ person here who has even a basic understanding of computer systems. Remember the wireless network that I mentioned earlier? Here is how it works. It lives on a physically separate switch from the rest of the network. On this network lives an openBSD machine running openVPN. If a client on the wireless network wants to connect to anything on the "other side" of the openBSD machine (which has three interfaces, one of them on the private lan, another on the wireless lan, and another virtual interface that is a VPN tunnel between the two) it has to authenticate with openVPN.

Pretty cool, huh? (maybe not, but I think so).

Nobody here understands this. Is this narcissistic whining? OMG THEY DON'T APPRECIATE ME! Yes. Yes, it probably is, but it is difficult to get motivated to do anything when there is no payoff of "good job" from the boss. (judge if you would like). The only thing that gets noticed is that things aren't broken. Holy hell though, when they are...

There was one time. One of our T1s went down (there are two, one of them for our private LAN, another for the internet lounge that we offer to our customers). My solution to this was to take an OpenBSD machine that I had sitting in my office, put it on both networks, and make it act like a gateway for our private lan so that we could route outbound traffic through it, and out the working T1.

This wasn't a problem, but it took about an hour (at first I was going to try and do it without NAT, the problem was getting the router on the public LAN to route traffic destined for our private subnet back to my new gateway).

Nearly the entire hour was spent in front of a terminal in our server room with my boss standing over my shoulder going "what are you doing? Why isn't this working yet? Blhack, we REALLY need this to work RIGHT NOW! I don't think this is going to work. We really need to think about another way to fix it, can't we just use the wireless (the public LAN has a wireless network available, I hope I do not have to explain why this would not work). Can't you just try it this way? (this person does not even have a basic understanding of routing, or what it is), have you tried rebooting it. Here, I'm going to reboot it. Just unplug it and let it sit for a while!"

 _sigh_

I apologize for the stupid senseless whining here, guys, work can just suck sometimes when you're the _only_ one here, ya know? Gets kinda lonely :(

Thank the gods for HN.

<comment><USER20> Let me get this straight. You intentionally built out a custom DYI enthusiast IT infrastructure out of a random collection of OpenBSD and Linux boxen and then complain that nobody but you understands it? Unless you've completely documented how everything works and fits together you've made it very difficult for anyone else to maintain it. That's one way to ensure job security.

<comment><USER19> What are you talking about here?

The mailserver is Postfix, the file server is samba, the FTP daemon is VsFTPd, imap is courier imap.

Are you a microsoft rep or something? None of this stuff is even remotely "enthusiast".

The Contact manager is just a web-frontend that I made for that sits on top of (and supplements) an existing system (as/400 green screens that they hate).

I'm sorry, but this is kindof insulting. What do you mean "enthusiast DIY"?

<comment><USER20> My apologies for offending. DIY is "do it yourself". An enthusiast (like myself) would prefer to use OpenVPN or FreeSWAN instead of a Cisco ASA, would rather use iptables on a Linux box than a commodity firewall, would rather slap a wireless card into an OpenBSD machine rather than to buy a commodity access point, etc. This is cool and all, but it makes it harder for other folks to deal with. Let's say your on vacation and there is a problem with the wireless. If you had used a commodity access point, somebody could have just reset it, as opposed to have to log into the OpenBSD box and unload/load the kernel driver, or frobbed it with ifconfig, or whatever.

<comment><USER21> Small companies and large companies have entirely different time/money tradeoffs and it can be hard to make the transition. At my previous employer it was fine to spend a week making something work by cobbling together existing projects with some glue code. It was fun and I learned a lot.

So when I started this job (working with _large_ companies) helping out with a co-worker's task I started trying to solve a particular problem the skinflint way, ok we can repurpose this box here to serve a filesystem while the other box is down for the vendor to swap the firmware and then...

My co worker (rightly) pre-empted me and recommended $20,000 of SAN equipment to replace the problematic device.

Neither way is _better_ in the absolute, it's a question of what variable you're optimizing for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I was having a conversation with my mom the other day, and she mentioned how the software her company bought wasn't as good as the old off-the-shelf stuff and how all those "Computer People" in the IT building should get off their lazy asses and fix it.

This, gentle(men|women), is why I will never work outside of tech

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm a freelancer, and I have 2-3 long time clients. For several reasons this year I haven't looked for new ones, so work is not much.

A couple of months ago I did something between risky and impolite. I started insisting, as hard as I could, that they only used phone/ymess for emergencies. Normal communication like feature requests of bug reports should be either by mail, a bug-reporting app or monthly face to face meetings.

It was ugly, to say the least, and at one point I thought I would have to choose between the policy and one client, but it worked out in the end. It helped that I was always very prompt with the owners of the businesses, but they had little time to call me anyways.

Anyways, why did that do my job better? For one thing, I am much less stressed. I barely get one phone call per day. Second when I start working on a project I don't solve just one bug at a time anymore, so I'm a lot more productive and a lot less prone to mistakes. And third, a lot of problems which were false alarms don't even get to me anymore. Writing a mail is apparently different enough from grabbing a phone that even the total number dropped (which is made up in the face 2 face meetings, when I press them for bugs and features).

Anyways, even if it made their experience worse (at least for a while), I think it was well worth it. I don't know how this would work if you were employed, but I'm guessing obtaining 2-3 hours per day of closed phones/messengers/emails from your boss would make a lot of difference.

</comment><comment><USER24> Health care eventually recovered from quackery. It's bound to happen in IT.

</comment><comment><USER25> Like anything else the vocal minority shouldn't be allowed to represent everyone. I like my job a lot. Even when I was just getting started and doing technical support and desktop support I liked it because I knew it wasn't a long term thing -- just a stepping stone to something better. I think in any career some people get complacent and don't want to work to move up but somehow want their current job to become more satisfying, pay better, and get them more respect. It's not going to happen unless you invest the time and energy into making it happen.

</comment><comment><USER26> I have met very few IT workers that I consider engineers. Most consider it their job and have the same attitudes as others who have a job.

</comment><comment><USER27> the reality is that engineer types are often conditioned to be spineless and that is what leads to the attitudes by management that you always hear about. if a company will fire you for standing up for yourself then you shouldn't be working there. you have to establish the rules of the relationship early and be consistent.

</comment><comment><USER28> I like the thinking part of my job. It's the sitting and typing that I find (literally) painful.

</comment><comment><USER29> Maybe some of those IT workers are unhappy with their life rather than with their job. Or their job is not great enough to compensate for the rest of their life. Or their identity/self-esteem/life is wrapped up too much in their job...

</comment><comment><USER30> Workers in any field that requires creativity, yet is subject to industrial production and economic realities, will likely air the same sentiments.

</comment><comment><USER31> Fuckers need to try cleaning chemical reactors.

<comment><USER32> Could you go into more detail? That sounds pretty interesting.

<comment><USER31> Depends on the size. Small ones might be removed from their housings, and a worker basically crouches inside cleaning it manually with gloves + gasmask. The one advantage of work like that is seeing yourself accomplish something in a known unit of time. The disadvantage is that it is horrible work, compared to sitting and typing and having a vague sense of ennui.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How is NSA able to hack phone systems in different countries? - <AUTHOR>

I thought  it would be impossible to hack phone systems of different countries? How is NSA able to do it?? <comment><USER2> Well, the vendors for many of telco products are US-based, so they may (un)voluntarily cooperate with the NSA. AT&T (though, a provider, not a vendor) for example has a proven history of voluntary cooperation with the NSA.

Then, companies with subsidies in the US (or US-owned local providers) might also be subject to US law.

And for the GSM stuff... well, we've seen countless threads about pwning GSM with equipment for less than $3K. The NSA has antennae e.g. in embassies (Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich to name a few), so it's dead easy for them to do GSM snooping.

Furthermore, we know about the coding quality of Huawei/ZTE consumer equipment - I bet my *ss that their "enterprise grade" stuff isn't secured any better, thus making hacks easier.</comment>


How I Made $2k in a Month from One Medium Article - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/how-to-monetize-a-medium-article-b4c1aeb7fdae?source <comment><USER2> If this article was written in September and referred to earning over $2k in August does it really count as $2k per month? Sounds more like "I earned $2k in a month" rather than "I earn $2k per month"

I'd be interested in seeing longterm stats in the future

<comment><USER3> I can guarantee you the answer is somewhat related to the term "clickbait"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My main takeaway from this is providing people with value results in value being returned. There is no SEO "hack" that results in long term success. He's honestly providing information that people find useful, and in return he is receiving value. This is a great example of authentic, honest marketing. Good job!

<comment><USER5> Except the problem is he basically asked them to give him more money in exchange for guaranteed long term mention in the article.

To me that's a bit shitty because you're no longer recommending them based on what they offer but more so based on how much money you receive from them.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. He went from helping readers to helping himself. And now that I know his opinions are for sale, he's lowered my trust level for everything he writes in the future. I'm sure the same is true for any editor who he approaches about a new piece.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It certainly helps that most potential customers looking for an instagram bot are probably from the marketing department and have little technical knowledge. Many times what seems obvious to use HN people completely flummoxes non technical users even when they're directly responsible when the CEO says "get us on Instagram!"

</comment><comment><USER8> Why are all the author's twitter account suspended anyhow? Maybe too much blog spamming?

</comment><comment><USER9> ".. and then I decided to create an article on exactly how I did all this, and posted it to Hackernoon, earning me yet more income. Also it was likely to be picked up by HN, which would increase traffic even more, and provide me - through their excellent comments - some neat tricks & tips on how to improve my campaign even further." :)

But I appreciate all the efforts, and the original article is good-quality content, I guess (I'm not into Insta bots).

<comment><AUTHOR> Good guess, but i'm not the author.

I have some things of HackerNoon in my follow-list, he had an interesting novelty on increassing commission through contacting the websites in specific.

And then i click on "Post to HN" :) (i'm not kidding, [https://gyazo.com/122a7939fe26a2a76836d4deae03aaab](https://gyazo.com/122a7939fe26a2a76836d4deae03aaab) )

<comment><USER10> What script / plugin is that? Looks interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a web application of mine, it's not ready yet ( performance wise)

What you see is rss import and custom actions ( eg. A button to add a new link to post to hn).

I dogfood it as a bookmarking web app and rss-reader currently, but it can do a lot more

<comment><USER10> Nice, what's it coded in if you don't mind I ask?

<comment><AUTHOR> Asp.Net MVC with Entity Framework.

I added some other stuff also, eg. Tag Properties.

Because a tag can have properties ( eg. Html field or a textbox input). Perhaps i can explain it better with an example.

I add a story that has a HN comment section.

So i add a url ( like here) and a title. As tag, i add a COMMENTSBYHACKERNEWS tag.

It loads the properties endpoint and adds a textbox. In the textbox, i add the Item Id of hackernews

When you press discuss on the article, it loads custom javascript, so the HN comments are loaded.

=== I also added Actions on buttons ( eg. Post TO HN goes to a HN url with the Title and Url) Or the button can use ToggleTag, which would make it usefull for task management.

=> Item has a tag "todo", click on the button done, launches the actions => SwitchTag: todo and SwitchTag: "finished"

So you go from tag: todo to tag "finished".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't the first rule of affiliate marketing "Don't out your niches?"

<comment> crooked-v But now he can make money each month from articles about making money each month.

<comment><USER12> This is both the affiliate endgame and signal that everyone who could make money in the market already did and they're getting out.

Sometimes it's the result of hubris, though.

<comment><USER13> Ya, a lot of time, it is hubris. Everytime I have started making money in a niche, there are always idiots that start making money and telling everyone they know about how they are making money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Apparently the answer is to use the word "rocket" a whole lot of times in the first couple paragraphs, accompanied by animated gifs of rockets, to illustrate potential marketing success.

</comment><comment><USER15> TLDR: Affiliate links

<comment><AUTHOR> and ways to increase commission (new) and increase clicks ( old)</comment></comment>


Frivpn – A multi-threaded OpenVPN client - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/znuh/frivpn <comment><USER2> This is a very interesting project as all our today's processors, even the Raspberryian ones, are multicores.

I assume the author does not want to rewrite OpenVPN from the scratch. Because "Multithreading", "networking" and "cryptography" immediately raises the head bells when it comes to C. People write this in Rust nowadays, isn't it? ;-)

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure I would want to do crypto multithreaded in any language. Too easy to leak information via timing even with a single core.

<comment><USER4> Can you clarify what you mean? You seem to imply that using multiple threads is not a good idea, but then also express that not using multiple threads is also not a good idea. What's left?

<comment><USER5> I think encrypting independant packets on each thread is fine, what I believe he is refering to is encrypting a single packet on multiple threads. One of the many angles of attack against cryptography is side channel attacks, where for certain algorithms the path taken by the code depends on the value of the key/data. In which case you can leak some information by measuring the time it takes or power usage. Modern algorithms are carefully designed to not be path sensitive, which is hard enough when the algo executes on a single thread, but becomes really complex to manage on multiple threads. Just more opportunities to shoot oneself in the foot.

<comment><USER2> That's a fair argument, however we also want to exploit computational ressources. It's nothing new that clock speed stagnates but everything points to manycore architectures. Parallel crypto maybe hard but it is somewhat inevitable to research, investigate and implement.

<comment><USER6> Clock speed does not necessarily equal computational speed. I remember how ~15 years ago people predicted that single-core performance was not going to improve any longer, and that we would get more and more CPU cores over time.

My first multi-core machine was an Athlon64 X2 with two cores running at 2GHz. Today, my work laptop (ThinkPad L540) has a dual-core CPU (plus 2-way SMT) running at 2.6 GHz (3.2 GHz with TurboBost). But single-core performance has improved notably. Not as much as was common in the 1990s, but still. And for most desktop systems[1] more than two or four cores seem to be pointless, anyway, since they will sit idle most of the time.

[1] I am not talking about developer workstations, CAD machines or other high- end use cases, but the kind of machine where some office drone runs Outlook, Excel, and a web browser.

<comment><USER7> Most of this single core improvement, if I understand correctly, comes speculative execution and larger caches (rather than shorter pipelines), which -- in the context of crypto -- means that implementations go to great length to avoid the features that speed up execution, specifically BECAUSE they leak information.

<comment><USER6> Fair point.

Now, I know just enough about cryptography to know I know nearly nothing about it, so maybe someone can put this into context: Wouldn't a multi threaded crypto implementation open up a whole bunch of new potential attacks?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't know if you are aware of it, but "Fri" means "Free" in Swedish so I thought you picked a rather interesting name for your project. Looks cool!

<comment><USER9> Is it pronounced like the German Frei or the English Free?

<comment><USER10> English Free, also Danish Fri is the same, but the end of the e sound gets swallowed a bit.

<comment><USER11> Is the 'r' in 'fri' in Danish and Swedish pronounced as a trill (Russian 'Ру́сский'), tap (Spanish 'pero'), or an approximative (English 'red')? Is it dental, alveolar (Spanish 'pero') or postalveolar (Hanover-German 'Rachen')?

<comment><USER10> Is this the linguist counterpart of trolling? :)

Anyway I don't know, it is definitely not the English r however.

<comment><USER11> I was not trolling in any way. I'm dumbfounded. Why would you think I were trolling?

<comment><USER10> sorry, it just seemed absurdly overspecific, wanting to know if r is pronounced like any of multiple pronunciations of r that you would have no reason to expect I had any familiarity with. It just seemed like a linguistic joke of some sort, like are you putting me on with this stuff? However - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCScmkh8hQg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCScmkh8hQg)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the video! I often painted what one has to do with their vocal tract to illustrate how to create a certain sound, and I also use a finger in the mouth to show people how to pronounce the 'ch' in the german 'Ich', for if you try to pronounce the english 'sh' but have a finger in your mouth on the tip of your tongue you automatically produce the german 'ch'.

But instead of painting positions and stuffing things in mouths, one can also exchange information about this by just using text. That's what I did in my comment. So, no joke whatsoever. Just a specific question about how to pronounce a specific sound _exactly_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> But that doesn't help if the server isn't multithreaded, no?

Also these days I switched to IPsec. I just get way better performance than with OpenVPN (I am talking about 600 Mbit/s vs 350Mbit/s). But it is quite a beast and you need to have some basic cryptographic knowledge for IPsec.

EDIT: Seems like my first question is only relevant if we are talking about powerful CPUs on both sides. If multicore on client <= single core on server, then this client makes sense.

<comment><USER12> One thing I hate about OpenVPN is its not really an Open standard, and more Open Core then open source.

This is probably the reason its not included by default in a lot of OSs whereas macOS, iOS, and I think Windows all have built in support for IPSEC. Yeah you can download an app, but there is no really good (free or paid) app for mac and the official iOS client sucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is pretty neat. I looked at the current limitations, though, and a lot of them are things that damage performance, or greatly limit compatibility (TCP- only, no client certs, lzo compression required, only one choice of algorithm). I expect many of these will get fixed over time.

<comment><USER14> It was originally written to work nicely with IPredator first, simply because that's our current VPN service of choice. UDP support will probably come, but it actually severely impacted performance (about 30% slower). Trying to squeeze out as much bandwidth as possible, we focused on the TCP part for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Since sandy bridge, I thought all CPUs had AES-NI baked into the silicon. Hardware based crypto is much faster than software based so why is core count a concern?

<comment><USER16> Performance isn't strictly bottlenecked by crypto operations. Latency is a huge problem with VPNs. This means you want packet-per-second(pps) performance to be optimal as well as full duplex packet processing.

Multi threaded means payload that has already been through a crypto operation wouldn't need to block further crypto ops or wait for other crypto ops to be processed further (just one obvious example of a performance advantage). Also - plenty of people don't even use AES,even for those that do AES-NI offloads the actual AES operation,not things like CBC,GCM and CTR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Now switch to WireGuard for even better performance.

<comment><USER18> Is the WireGuard protocol stable? Are there any high performance implementations for platforms other than Linux?

<comment><USER7> Is there a high performance OpenVPN implementation at all?

<comment><USER19> Question not a statement: how does SoftEther look in terms of OpenVPN performance?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


American truck drivers could lose their jobs to robots - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2016/8/3/12342764/autonomous-trucks-employment?utm_campaign=drvox&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter <comment> tuna-piano The other question you need to ask in order to understand this future scenerio:. Shipping costs will significantly decrease, what will consumers and shareholders spend the extra money on?

Who knows what they will spend the extra money on, could be healthcare, boats, TVs, whatever. But new jobs will be created in these expanded industries.

It really, really bothers me the constant "x technology will drive x people out of work, therefore we need Universal Basic Income, so they won't starve!"

Imagine telling a farmer in 1850s America, when 64% of America farmed, that in 2016 only 2% of people would be farming! Imagine the distopian horror (1)! If we had established UBI then, and people could get paid to sit around, imagine the state we'd be in today.

Instead of UBI, people were forced to leave farming and went into other endeavors, leading to the enormous improvement in production, income and standard of living since then. If 64% of people still farmed, or 2% farmed and 62% were on UBI - who would have had the time or incentive to create computers, software, advances in healthcare, etc?

I'm not claiming the transition is easy for someone who's laid off - it can be an extremely tough process, but it's absolutely necessary for the improvement of humanity.

(1) [http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/20/us/farm-population- lowest-...](http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/20/us/farm-population-lowest- since-1850-s.html)

<comment><USER2> Don't kid yourself. New jobs get created, but fewer. And many of those who lose their jobs don't get retrained—for a myriad of reasons—and end up leaving the workforce entirely. Many just end up on long term disability because it's the only path they have.

Jobs are disappearing. They aren't "coming back" in greater numbers. And the new jobs, by and large, aren't for the previous workforce.

We already live in a world where many jobs are unnecessary. A large portion of government jobs are, essentially, welfare jobs. One of the systematic reasons of for the expansion of government is "job creation". Politicians will create jobs, but those jobs add nothing to society. We've got people pretending to work a job to collect a paycheck. It's welfare.

The industrial revolution replaced muscle with machine, but brainpower was still a required input. There was a clear shift: from doing the work to using a machine to do the same work, but faster. There was enough demand that things didn't collapse.

The current shift is replacing both muscle and brainpower. Outside of creative jobs, what is left for the human to do? Make the brain smarter? We are already entering into a time where the machine makes itself smarter without the advent of the human.

New jobs will be created, sure. But those jobs will not be for the 1.8 million truck drivers. Instead the government will likely end up soaking it up through one program or another. Tens of thousands will end up in welfare jobs. Hundreds of thousands will end up on long term disability. The numbers aren't small.

UBI is an inevitability. You've got some 40 million people on food stamps, about 9 million on disability. Millions more working pointless government jobs like directing people from one TSA employee to another. At what point to we recognize that the future does not look like the past?

<comment><USER3> UBI is inevitably doomed, because the equation doesn't hold.

You are right that ongoing elimination of jobs is a problem leading to huge social unrest, and UBI fits the bill to be a good solution for this.

The only problem with UBI is that it is unsustainable and therefore impossible. The balance just doesn't check out. The mere retirement schemes are in grave danger of collapse; the money there are long spent. UBI is huge, and there is no way to get this kind of money from anywhere (even if you strip away all capital from the top 1% and send them to labor camps, as it was done elsewhere, the money from this will fuel $1000/month UBI for about 2 years tops).

Antigravity would be an excellent solution to our space travel challenges, but we don't know any way to make it work. It is exactly the same with UBI.

<comment><USER2> People will have to adapt to a new way of life. We are going to move into a world where full employment means 50% of people don't work, because there is nothing for them to do. Like the computer, the cost of everything will begin to decline rapidly when general purpose robots and automation take over human tasks. The UBI equation may well balance. When there are no human costs the only cost is energy. In theory, you will need far less income.

Honestly, I'm excited to see what happens as it will happen in my lifetime. 30 years ago we had the first general purpose computers. Look at where we are now. Today we have the first general purpose robots. Imagine where we will be in 30 years. It's hard to imagine.

Drivers, construction workers, doctors, lawyers—it's all going to be dramatically different 30 years from now. Forget the US. All those jobs making everything from iPhones to t-shirts will also be at risk. When you don't need specialized equipment and you can buy a robot that can make t-shirts for a few thousand dollars you don't need the human anymore.

If not UBI, then what? What do all these people do?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm skeptical about the timelines of these reports. Certainly we'll never see all 1.8 million drivers lose their jobs overnight. These guys are predicting auto-truck apocalypse in 5-10 years, and we still don't have a single commercial system on the road that's capable of even lightening the load on a driver, much less replacing him. I think truck automation will go in 2 ways at the same time, and we can watch the progress of each:

Systems to ease the strain on independent drivers. Ones that can cruise on the highway without supervision indefinitely, but need help with city streets, parking, maintenance, loading and unloading, keeping manifests, dealing with whatever company is loading and unloading the cargo, etc. They may need somewhat fewer of this class of driver, since the trucks will be able to run more continuously and there will be less need for second drivers and probably fewer trucks. Motels and truck stops will hurt some when the truckers can sleep while the truck drives instead of stopping. I think we're at least a decade away from this existing at all, much less being common.

Full automation for tightly integrated logistics chains. Maybe the Wal-Marts, Amazons, Fedexes, and other huge companies that own the entire logistics chain will be able to figure out how to use fully automated trucks, that can drive from one company facility to another, complete with parking and maneuvering, driving local streets, and letting other company systems handle the logistics of loading and unloading and keeping track of what items are where. I bet at least one of them will start experimenting with something like this in the next 5-10 years, but probably at least 20 years before it works well enough for them to cut down on the number of drivers they employ.

There will be job losses, but it will be slow and gradual. There should hopefully be plenty of time for the economy to adapt, and hopefully either create new jobs for all of these people to do, or move towards something like UBI. I think we'll have to have a massive cultural shift before anything like UBI would be considered or even possibly make sense.

<comment><USER5> I dunno. Even if "all" the first generation can do is freeway driving (and let's say, not even urban freeway, just "easy" rural portions of freeway) that seems like it still would make the vast majority of long-haul trucking jobs vanish -- just by definition of "long-haul."

If you ship something from New York to Chicago by truck and it takes 14 hours, maybe the first and last hour or so are getting in an out of the source/destination cities. That leaves 12 out of 14 hours where the truck can drive unattended, eliminating the need for about 12/14 of the truckers (or their work hours) that drive that route.

It depends on what proportion of truck drivers today mostly do long-haul as opposed to short haul. I have no idea.

<comment><USER4> I'm not deep into the freight industry, but I have a few acquaintances who are, and reportedly a lot of the actual shipments that take place are between unrelated companies who only moderately trust each other. The freight company is contracted by one or the other for the route, and usually the truck itself is owned independently by the driver, with the freight company providing the routes and organization of loads.

The truck owner isn't going to trust some random other driver halfway across the country to drive his truck, even if he trusts the auto-driver to navigate the freeway safely. The freight company isn't going to just trust the shipper and receiver to load and unload the right stuff properly and not disturb anything else on the truck. The shipper and receiver aren't going to just trust each other and the freight company to ship the right stuff to the right place - they all want somebody in the truck there who knows what's going on.

Basically, the drivers don't just drive, they're the glue that holds together a whole complex system. Even if we had a perfect auto-drive truck today, it would probably take decades to figure out systems that work well enough that shipments work right without somebody who knows what's going on in the truck. Like I said, I think the best we can hope for short-term is to take some of the load of actually driving off the drivers, leading to longer trips and fewer stops.

That's also why I said that the only companies in a position to really use auto-trucks are those who already have integrated logistics chains, where drivers who work for the company drive company-owned trucks between company warehouses to move goods that the company either already owns or has taken responsibility for tracking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yeah, I've been thinking lately as well, why are we doing that? I mean as a society? (I recall a phrase said by someone, that we are consciously building a future nobody wants to live in.) What exactly are we getting from that?

Ultra-rich, namely car companies owners and shareholders, will become even more rich. (Why are they doing it, by the way, don't they have enough super- cars, mansions, yachts already?)

What am I getting from it? Basic goods will become 7% cheaper? Who needs that? I am happy with current prices.

And then dozens if not hundreds of millions people worldwide will lose their jobs and even more the very means for their existence. What will be the impact on their families, communities?

I may be terribly wrong but it seems like yet another round of value extraction by a small cohort of ultra-rich from general society.

There are technologies that are genuinely useful, like space exploration, scientific projects, disease fighting, urban development, planetary computer network, and so on.

And there are "comfort gimmicks" like refined sugar (and sugary drinks), tobacco, toasters, etc. that produce effects from which people living consciously and healthy would want to get rid of. And that are propelled only by "economic factors". Which are a paperclip maximizer.

<comment><USER7> I am pretty sure Luddites had very similar arguments back in the 19th century. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite)

If you look back at it, they were on the wrong side of history/argument. Automation is going to keep going, no matter what, and it is mostly a good thing. Yes, we might have few years of uneasy adjustment times, but things will sort themselves out on the long run.

Think of it, one modern excavator is much better than 50 people digging ditches. One operator with one machine replaced 50 manual workers, yet the world didn't end, but I think it got better over time*

*Whoever protects manual labour vs machines, hasn't lived through deep poor communism. Most eastern Europe didn't have the capital or means to have productive machines in the workplaces, and they replaced them with human labour. Over time the stark differences between west and east became very apparent.

<comment><USER8> Viewed from another perspective the Luddites were self employed, worked from home, and set their own hours. They didn't want to work 8 to 8 in a dangerous factory for a rich guy.

<comment><USER9> Also, they were lucky to live past 40.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The only people who really benefit from innovation are entrepreneurs, investors and shareholders. The majority of the population are actually worse off because of innovation (at least this is the case right now - The value is just not trickling down).

The worst part of this will come when even highly educated people start losing their jobs to machines... We will have a situation where entrepreneurs, investors and company shareholders will earn massive incomes while many of the world's smartest people (who fell through the cracks of the system) will struggle to make ends meet - I think many engineers already feel that this starting to happen now.

Money used to go mostly to employees, but as employees become less valuable in the workplace, it will go mostly to shareholders (owners of capital). This is why tax on income is making increasingly less sense - We need a tax on capital holdings instead.

When you consider the massive role that luck plays in becoming a successful entrepreneur, it does bring into question the fairness of the entire system.

The balance is shifting; we are moving from an economic system which not so long ago seemed 'mostly fair' to one which is becoming 'mostly unfair'. Maybe something like Universal Basic Income would be a good first step.

What we have now is no longer capitalism, it's increasingly an Oligopoly.

<comment><USER8> The majority of the population now don't starve when there's bad weather, have indoor plumbing, healthcare, don't die from playing tennis without socks.

What do we need money for now, and why? Houses mostly, because a) hand built, and b) scarcity.

<comment><USER11> In case anyone else was wondering about the tennis without socks death: [http://www.snopes.com/horrors/poison/coolidge.asp](http://www.snopes.com/horrors/poison/coolidge.asp)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _1.8 million American truck drivers ... well-paying working-class jobs_

Those two items right there are exactly why they are being automated (in addition to additional efficiencies and cost reductions). If companies can eliminate those costs, they will if there's a way to do so. That is the unfortunate reality.

What to do about the aftermath that affects actual people and families as pay is reduced or eventually eliminated over the next 10-25 years? Well, that's the new problem. Not one that the companies that employ truck drivers will be looking to solve, but the one everyone else has to cope with in some capacity -- whether directly affected by the reduced jobs, or indirectly affected by those now looking for work in their community.

<comment><USER13> Our education system needs to adjust to prepare our youth for highly technical jobs. Instead of truck drivers we'll need engineers to build the automation systems and programmers to write the complex software behind it.

<comment><USER14> There is no economic reason to automate things in order to replace 1.8 million drivers with 1.8 million engineers.

Automation happens when you can replace 1.8 million drivers with 0.18 million engineers.

<comment><USER15> Except the extra 1.62 million engineers can be working on other things.

There's no shortage of useful things to build. It might be hard to think of things for 1.62 million people to build, but the good news is you and I don't have to think of those things ourselves right now. Those 1.62 million people will be thinking about it too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a perfectly reasonable intuition – that there will be large net loss of jobs as trucks are automated – but we should not mistake the intuition for evidence. There is a long history of believing that massive job losses are imminent due to technological advance.

The problem with mistaking this fear for a fact is that it often leads to an incorrect intervention. (I call this a WMD argument.)

We'd be much better served with much greater caution about what is actually, observably, measurably true. In this case, we'd have to discover the yet- unfound correlation between technical advance and employment rate.

</comment><comment><USER17> It isn't that simple. The robots will never be a drop-in replacement for all the various tasks that a "driver" actually does. Driving, negotiating the vehicle down the road, isn't the entire job.

(1) People will still be needed for inspections and maintenance, however that will be done. Much of that is now covered by drivers (the little things) and cannot be automated.

(2) Insurance companies may demand that a human, a certified driver, at least ride in the truck as backup/security and to deal with awkward situations.

(3) Boarder crossings will still need humans.

(4) Hazmat loads will still need humans on board for safety reasons.

(5) Winter driving. I have yet to see any autodrive system capable of attaching chains or deicing a clogged brake line.

(6) Automation will open up new areas for drivers. By driving shipping costs down, more trucks may hit the road, requiring more people for the jobs listed above.

It may be a wash. The concept that every driver can/will be replaced by an autodrive bot is naive.

<comment><USER18> Each are edge cases and nothing which can't be fixed by further work.

>The concept that every driver can/will be replaced by an autodrive bot is naive.

The premise is that the driver aspect will be removed, the things you mentioned are not strictly what a driver does.

<comment><USER17> > the things you mentioned are not strictly what a driver does.

They are according to the drivers I know. Long haul truckers are not like pilots. They are much more involved with their rigs. They are actually responsible for maintenance. They are the ones talking to the cops when/if they hit an inspection station.

<comment><USER19> It's not that every single driver will be gone - just a lot of them will be. There used to be a lot of jobs at stables, horse shoe replacement, etc. Today there are a lot of jobs changing oil, mufflers, tune-ups etc, that will go away with the switch to electric cars, but one big truck can carry a lot more freight than a big wagon train, and it needs less human labor. EVs will still need work, they are designed and made by humans (at least for a while, ha ha) so they can break like anything else. But you will need fewer humans probably.

I heard a story on NPR last night where an insurance company was planning for new businesses, because they expect there to be less need for them with less human drivers and a lot fewer accidents. Not next year, but in 10 years.

Just like one truck can do a lot more transportation than a wagon train with 10 hourses. You have some jobs taking care of trucks, but fewer than took care of horse trains. Horses didn't travel as far, so you needed a lot more places for them to stop and feed and water. I think it will hollow out the middle of the us even more. I'm not crazy about that, I'm from that middle of the country that already has continued to hollow out even without robot cars.

<comment><USER17> > Today there are a lot of jobs changing oil, mufflers, tune-ups etc, that > will go away with the switch to electric cars.

But that isn't much of an issue with big rigs, nor with cars generally. The engine/powertrain isn't a big maintenance item on new cars. Engine internals are a very evolved and reliable bit of kit. It's the other things like brakes, wheels, control systems and electrics are the source of most maintenance costs. Those aren't going away with a shift to electrics. Some things will transfer over (air filtration) and new things will appear (battery systems maintenance) and, looking at teslas, powertrain maintenance will still be a thing.

With autodrive, there will be a host of systems that now need new maintenance. And, given that the driver isn't there to fix the little things on the spot, there may be an increase in demand for mechanics that can travel to locations.

Lastly, any switch to autodrive may radically increase trips to the mechanic. Plenty of cars drive around with engine warning lights on permanently. If you know what the problem is, sometimes you just live with it. Just look at the number of cars with blown headlights. An autodrive system might not be so willing to tolerate faults. We may have to keep the vehicles to a higher standard, increasing maintenance needs. (Also a great day for parts manufacturers.)

<comment><USER18> Those points are all very weak. You seem to be in denial that the vast number of automotive jobs are going to be eradicated even when they are reskilled to cater for the newer systems that are coming.

<comment><USER17> And you seem to have converted to a tech that has yet to see the road. Come back when we have some actual labour data, not speculation. I've seen many automotive techs come (FI, antilocks, engine management, collision avoidance, onstar) each with warnings about diminished labor costs, warnings mostly from people who couldn't change their own brake pads. Yet little has changed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Vox writers should be more worried than drivers. Driving a car, dealing with other users on the road, making regulators happy are all difficult problems.

Meanwhile, I have already seen Reddit bots which summarise submissions. How far off are from one that will rehash 2-3 articles and toss in an infographic (created elsewhere)?

<comment><USER21> Kinda already happening, see: [http://motherboard.vice.com/read/i-used-to- write-apocalypse-...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/i-used-to-write- apocalypse-survival-guides) "the practice of article spinning, in which the same human-written article is quickly reorganized and reworded to create one or more additional "new" articles. (This is often done by software that has a built-in spintax that replaces keywords in the text with synonyms.)"

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What I don't get is, if we're so close to this becoming a reality, why isn't the lower hanging fruit of train/locomotive automation already here?

That seems to be an order of magnitude simpler issue to solve, and yet we don't seem to be there yet. Granted, forms of automation have penetrated that industry - deadmans switches, automated signalling and such. But there's still a human at the helm of every freight loco.

Smaller scale urban light rail deployments seem to have got close to full automation, presumably due to being able to embed all the necessary elements into the end-to-end installation of the system (signalling, stock, cameras/sensors etc).

How can the kind of full automation that would put truck drivers out of work, arrive before the kind that would put train drivers out of work?

<comment><USER22> Trains may be easier to automate, but 100 train cars already only have 1 driver. There is a lot less cost that can be removed there than for trucking.

Even just deskilling trucking offers the opportunity for bigger cost savings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't know about the US, but here in Australia, truck driving is an "old man's job". The _average_ age of a truck driver here is 47, apparently. Automated trucks probably won't get here in time to dovetail with the natural retirement of these drivers...

</comment><comment><USER24> Once all the robots take over we'll probably need Universal Basic Income [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income)

</comment><comment><USER25> What then? Progress, perhaps. ::eyeroll::

Disclaimer: In 1997 I was cut off by a semi (in the middle of trying to pass him), who did NOT signal, on a 2 lane road (I-5 in California, speed limit was 85 or so), and ended up entering the ditch and rolling over 8 times and shattered my hand (it's fine now, but it took a while). The driver never stopped. I was lucky to walk away from that one.

Sorry, truckers, but your job can eat a bag of dicks.

Lest we forget, the only reason trucking is so huge is because train cargo wasn't maintained (conspiracists say the oil industry lobbied for trucking).

<comment><USER26> Trucking is so big because it is far more efficient than trains. Lol trying to just in time your inventory using trains.

<comment><USER27> This comment, together with its parent, is a nice example of a false-choice. They both are built upon an assumption that there is some sort of total ordering between cargo transportation systems. Trains are better. No trucks are better. No trains are better.

In reality trains and trucks are part of an incredibly complex cargo transportation system in which the most appropriate transportation mode is dependent on the nature of the cargo, the geography of the source and destination, the infrastructure available, the current price of fuel, weather conditions, capacity constraints and on and on and on.

There is no total ordering of efficiency of transportation modes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's scary and understandable at the same time especially when you multiple the number of drivers with their salary, then you get a yearly cost of 72.000.000.000$

That's more than Uber's latest valuation.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is the answer an "Uber for robots"? Rather than an organisation owning all the robots, individuals could own a robot and rent it out though an online marketplace. It would be a continuation of the "owner/driver" model, without the need to actually be a driver.

Maybe the problem is that if it's a lucrative opportunity the group running the marketplace will want to keep all the profits for themselves, by owning the robots and locking out small players?

<comment><USER30> At scale, the value truckers provide is being a driver, not offer there trucks. Yes, there will be companies that provide logistics as a service, but it's hard to imagine a business based on a single robot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> At some point everyone gets phased out. The question we should be asking, is how do we prepare to transition people from one job to the next more quickly. Coal miners are a perfect example. They're largely stuck. They haven't the money to send their kids to school to do something else, nor do they have the $$ to do it themselves (and likely not the time either). We need to rethink (as a planet), how we deal with churn.

</comment><comment><USER32> Don't see it happening anytime soon. Self driving cars directly create convenience for the end user, and the public may be willing to accept a few crashes here and there in exchange for that convenience.

The first time an unmanned Fedex truck kills a family of 6 in a minivan people will decided they would rather pay a few cents more to have trucks driven by humans.

</comment><comment><USER33> Robots might destroy jobs, but also create new jobs for us.

It's like innovative products - which might make some products obsolete but also makes space for more innovation and other products that would've not existed otherwise. :)

</comment><comment><USER34> Entropy and diminishing returns from readily accessible energy sources will kick in at some point. My guess is it'll happen before the robots are more adaptable to changing road conditions than humans.

</comment><comment><USER35> [https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four- futures/](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/)

Take your pick, or interpolate between them.

</comment><comment><USER36> I bet developers will start to lose jobs to AI. Maybe before truck drivers do. The reaction here on HN will be something to behold.

<comment><USER37> It's already happened. Those AIs are called compilers. Compilers get more powerful every year. If you took them away, there aren't enough people on the planet to do the same job with assemblers.

<comment><USER19> Brilliant comment! I guess devs are lucky to have enough jobs left to work.

<comment><USER37> What happens is pretty straightforward - the more powerful the AI devtools get, the more is demanded of them. I look at programs I wrote 20, 30 years ago, and am bemused by how trivial they look today.

I'm calling a compiler an AI tool, because what is it other than you type in what you want the computer to do, and the compiler figures out how to do it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Civil war against robots is what will happen:

[http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com/2016/03/get-ready-for- our...](http://fourlightyears.blogspot.com/2016/03/get-ready-for-our-first- civil-war.html)

</comment><comment><USER39> Simple solution: Ban self-driving trucks.

I'm surprised that in the land of (apparently ) limitless legal liabilities, so many people are bullish on self-driving cars, let alone self-driving trucks.

You should be highly concerned that the push towards this by big players is going to lead to laws where ultimately nobody will have to take up personal responsibility for accidents anymore.

<comment><USER40> Grandparents killed by truck driver on speed. Robot drivers can't get her soon enough.

<comment><USER41> its surprising this isn't mentioned more often. truck drivers do meth. its the only way for them to stay focussed and awake driving across country.

so, from both sides, we have drivers with long term substance abuse problems controlling really heavy metal whacked out of their skulls. and we have an economy which can only function by effectively ruining people's lives by turning them into machines.

if we were a remotely moral society we would be horrified

<comment><USER40> I THINK that truck driver on speed use is down since log book tampering has gotten harder over the years, but I am sure it is not perfect. If you can only work 11 hours a day and need a day off every 3 days of work, less incentive to speed.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


2012 has been the greatest year in the history of the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-week/leading-article/8789981/glad-tidings/

<comment><USER2> I looked up a couple of sources for the facts I was interested in.

Extreme Poverty:

"Progress is within our reach. Since 2000, extreme poverty has been halved. This proves that with political will and the joint commitment of States, outcomes can be achieved. To succeed, we must redouble our efforts to combat new forms of poverty and social exclusion. We must also understand all aspects of poverty in order to tailor our response appropriately." [1]

Life expectancy in Africa (2009):

"... the increasing availability of antiretroviral therapy has reduced the spread of the epidemic, and the mortality due to HIV/AIDS has been decreasing since about 2005, allowing life expectancy at birth to increase again: average life expectancy at birth, in Africa, was 51 years in 2000, whereas it was almost 54 years in 2009." [2]

[1]: [http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=43307&Cr=po...](http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=43307&Cr=poverty&Cr1=#.UMnvaXPjli5)

[2]: [http://www.who.int/gho/mortality_burden_disease/life_tables/...](http://www.who.int/gho/mortality_burden_disease/life_tables/situation_trends_text/en/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> "The doom-mongers will tell you that we cannot sustain worldwide economic growth without ruining our environment. But while the rich world's economies grew by 6 per cent over the last seven years, fossil fuel consumption in those countries fell by 4 per cent. This remarkable (and, again, unreported) achievement has nothing to do with green taxes or wind-farms. It is down to consumer demand for more efficient cars and factories."

Statement is made that it's all because of capitalism - yet no evidence is cited or even presented. The chinese reference is amazing too, because we all know the Chinese government has had nothing to do with the economic boom they have undergone in the past decade.

Let alone how nearly 2 generations have been raised to "reduce, reuse and recycle" through educational programs promoted by Government initiatives.

But no... it's all consumer demand that fixed emissions issues. Simple arguments for simple minds.

<comment><USER4> "because we all know the Chinese government has had nothing to do with the economic boom they have undergone in the past decade."

No I do not know that. Please provide a reference.

<comment><USER3> I'll leave it up to you to research why I possibly might have inferred that the Chinese government has a hand in their economic boom.

<comment><USER5> It isn't responsibility of people reading your comment to research why you're correct. If you make a claim, you need to be prepared to back it up if you want it to carry weight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Come on you incorrigible pessimists, lighten up. There is obviously some tongue-in-cheek and inaccuracies in the article, but also some profound truth. This is the greatest time in history to be alive as a human and we might as well recognize that.

<comment><USER7> Thank you. Please never forget about the problems going on in the world, but take the time to appreciate what you got, and what we indeed have accomplished, during the last couple of years. We're doing good, but we can do even better. I don't see any harm in celebrating that.

<comment><USER8> But I do see harm in attributing the reasons for achievements to the wrong things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article is light on criticial thinking and evidence, and heavy on bullshit.

> "This remarkable (and, again, unreported) achievement has nothing to do with > green taxes or wind-farms. It is down to consumer demand for more efficient > cars and factories."

It has to do with tax rebates for more efficient cars, ever increasing EPA fuel efficiency standards, ever increasing EPA factory emissions standards, heavy subsidization of renewable energy not just by the West, but by China, etc.

> The number of people dying from Aids has been in decline for the last eight > years.

The last eight years? You mean the time period encompassing 2003-2008, when GWB committed $15 billion to addressing HIV/AIDS in Africa?

<comment> Tuna-Fish > It has to do with tax rebates for more efficient cars, ever increasing EPA > fuel efficiency standards, ever increasing EPA factory emissions standards, > heavy subsidization of renewable energy not just by the West, but by China, > etc.

All of that, and the effects mentioned by the author, are a blip compared to the effect of nat gas becoming cheaper than coal in North America. In fact, the reduction of CO2 output caused by natural gas replacing coal is actually larger than the total reduction of CO2 output -- that is, without fracking, US CO2 output would have grown.

<comment><USER10> So what happens if the price of natural gas goes up again? Isn't this just another example of a lucky break that won't last forever (much like the history of cheap oil)?

Granted, it doesn't at all take away from this being a good year, but the original article seems to imply that things are getting better and will always get better.

It's during the good times that you're supposed to think about and prepare for the bad times. But too often, it seems like people just want to sit back and congratulate themselves. Ant vs grasshopper, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For context the Spectator is the British weekly magazine for the political right (relatively smart and definitely NOT far right) but that is important context for this article.

As others are pointing out in various comments there seems to be a mix of facts, errors and potentially spurious causal links in the article. Though I think it is important to remember how good most of the world has things right now (wouldn't want to be in Syria at the moment or Gaza for the last 40 years) although we shouldn't be blind to the risks ahead.

</comment><comment><USER10> What I didn't like this article was that it was so full of self-congratulation and completely bereft of any mention of serious problems visible on the horizon. Unbounded self-assurance is the doorway to destructive optimism.

There are many things to be concerned about, ecologically and economically. But if excessive optimism leads people to believe that these problems are only being made up by "doom-sayers" and "chicken littles" (like, say, the few who predicted serious fallout from the real estate derivatives market), then nothing will be done about them. Causing pain and suffering which could otherwise have been avoided or reduced.

Fortunately, there are serious people doing serious work to address potential risks. Articles like this one are primarily aimed at simple-minded people who can't really understand the hard questions, and need a certain amount of fluffy encouragement to keep them getting up in the morning.

<comment><USER12> > Unbounded self-assurance is the doorway to destructive optimism.

That's a bit melodramatic. The author points out that media as a whole has the "serious problems visible on the horizon" stuff well covered. It's probably over-covered to an extreme degree such that we never hear about any good accomplishments at all. So he wrote one article listing out the good. All you have to say is that the article was vapid because it ignored what is already over-covered?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the worst offenders of making claims without citing any sources I've seen in months. This article is rubbish.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. I really wanted to agree with it because it has a nice sentiment, but when the author claims that war has historically been mankind's biggest killer, I completely gave up hope.

<comment><USER15> He might be alluding to Steven Pinker's argument, which is about the decline of violence of all kinds, not just organized warfare.

<comment><USER9> I think jwoah is referring to infant mortality, i.e. historically mankind's greatest killer.

<comment><USER14> Sorry, I should've been more clear on that. I was figured disease might be the biggest killer, certainly more than war anyway. Whatever it may be, I'm pretty sure it's not war.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What? Ruining nature and specifically groundwater with fracking and toxic chemicals is an "amazing breakthrough"?

<comment><USER16> It's probably less bad than burning massive amounts of coal. In the same way that moderate poverty is less bad than extreme poverty and dying from cancer is less bad than dying from childhood AIDS, this represents a form of progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think that it is more valuable to spend one's time focusing on problems and how they can be solved rather than celebrating the fact that things are better than they used to be in many, many ways.

That being said, it is important to periodically remind one's self that things are generally getting better around the world. Failing to keep problems in perspective can not only be discouraging, but can skew your perception of how sever those problems are. Don't let yourself fall for the "Good Old Days" myth.

<comment><USER18> "celebrating the fact that things are better than they used to be in many, many ways."

Yes, that's certainly an invitation to regression of all battles won for the better, with civil rights and other gains. We're not moving in any particular vector, necessarily, we have to actively ensure we're pushing to build on these victories and the victories of our predecessors.

<comment><USER17> yes good point - "progress" isn't quite single-dimensional. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> According to Adam Smith, the basis of prosperity is the division of labour. When people specialise, they get better at whatever they do, because they practice it, spend more time thinking about how to improve it, and don't spend time adjusting to different tasks.

But specialisation is limited by the size of the market: if you are _too_ specialised, then there aren't enough people who want what you do for you to make a living. But within a larger population, maybe there will be.

Therefore, prosperity is driven by increased market size, including: globalization; increased human population; more people being raised out of poverty (and so can buy more).

From a producer's point of view, these factors enable you to make a living by specialising in _exactly_ what work you really want to do, that you find most satisfying and rewarding, that best suits your talents and ways of working.

</comment><comment><USER20> You lost me on this one...

 _The amazing breakthroughs in 'fracking' technology mean that, in spite of the world's escalating population from one billion to seven billion over the last two centuries we live in an age of energy abundance._

Well hell let's all go buy Hummers and crank up the heat!

</comment><comment><USER21> "Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity."

That seems unlikely to me, given the recent growth of the world's population. I would guess there are now more people hungry than there were people alive some centuries (or couple of thousand years?) ago. Wasn't there an article recently about human population being down to a couple of thousands individuals at some point?

Maybe he is talking about percentages, or just the 20th century, or something like that?

</comment><comment><USER22> "Germany was perhaps the most civilised nation in the world in the 1920s."

Hmmm... define civilised. In the 1920s Germany was devastated after losing WWI, on the hook for gazillions of war repayments under the Versailles treaty, and experiencing some of the worst inflation ever seen in a developed country. It took something like a wheelbarrow full of Deutschemarks back then to buy a loaf of bread.

<comment><USER23> Actually Weimar Germany is a lot more complex than usually presented. To adress your points:

1.) Germany was not devastated by WWI, in fact the fighting did take place outside of Germany.

2.) The Versailles treaty was large enough to serve as a nazi-propaganda tool, but not large enough to stifle the economy.

3.) The hyperinflation was in 1923, in the other years Germany had generally high, but not that high inflation. ( Something like 5 - 8 % )

In addition the Weimar republic worked culturally quite well, it won about half of the nobel prices in physics and chemistry between 1918 and 1933 [1], had the Bauhaus [2] a very influential school of design and represents with Authors like Thomas Mann and Berthold Brecht an important period of German literature.

On the other hand, the political system was never widely accepted, the judicial system was completely dysfunctional and the entire thing was never far away from a coup or a civil war. ( Not to mention that it ended catastrophically. )

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates> [2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus>

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > the same UN extrapolations that predict such threatening sea-level rises for > Bangladesh also say that, in two or three generations' time, it will be as > rich as Britain.

Can anyone find a reference for this one? Seems a bit outlandish considering the current situation on the ground in Bangladesh.

</comment><comment><USER25> Also thanks to fracking, U.S. groundwater contamination is at an all-time high! Go us!

<comment><USER26> Please switch to a different news provider. Your sentence is nonsense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The year haven't ended yet.

</comment><comment><USER28> Greatest year in the history of the world!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

<comment><USER28> What's with the downvotes? The notion of a "greatest year in the history of the world" is silly.

<comment><USER29> HN tends to reward responses that clearly point things out in a non-silly manner, and punish purely silly responses, even if those responses were pointing out how silly something else was.

<comment><USER28> Thanks for the explanation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Before the East India Company - <AUTHOR> https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/east-india-company <comment><USER2> Timely, I'll add it to my reading list. I've just (yesterday) finished "The Corporation that Changed the World"[1], that combines history of EIC and current (well, 2006) corporations and globalisation. It jumps about a fair bit (intentionally), as he draws lessons from the now mostly repealed regulations to stop EIC happening again, but well worth a read overall. Not afraid to dig into history of an utterly out of control corporation. A darker rendering than others I have seen with some surprises. Might have been even more interesting had he published a year after the 08 banking crisis.

We've failed to remember Adam Smith's take on the corporation into modernity, just the Wealth of Nations. One for me to dig into further, as his actual views on companies don't seem to match up with what we think he thought. :)

There were calls to wind EIC in, or wind it up going all the way back to the 1610s, and to give India back almost from the moment they arrived. Which continued constantly until it was finally forcibly wound up. All those dodgy stock splits, Theranos and Enron type frauds, countries wondering how to tame the out of control tech titan? EIC got there first. Just as willing to defraud Britain as anywhere else. As the first English joint stock company. As a near independent sovereign corporate with powers of justice, war and currency.

Ain't nothing new then.

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/844131.The_Corporation_T...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/844131.The_Corporation_That_Changed_the_World)

<comment><USER3> Imagine a company like Google had an army that invaded countries that would not deregulate privacy. That would be a modern equivalent to the HEIC. It would suck.

<comment><USER4> The Murdochs' News Corp is arguably in that position already, albeit with the one extra step of needing to lobby politicians whose constituents are already in its thrall.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=murdoch+iraq](https://www.google.com/search?q=murdoch+iraq)

<comment><USER3> United Fruit Company (present day Chiquita) has done messed up things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > In the course of this, in what seemed to many of its wisest minds an act of > willful self-harm, the English had unilaterally cut themselves off from the > most powerful institution in Europe, so turning themselves in the eyes of > many Europeans into something of a pariah nation. As a result, isolated from > their baffled neighbors, the English were forced to scour the globe for new > markets and commercial openings further afield. This they did with a > piratical enthusiasm.

Cor, perhaps it was deliberate, but I was so sure this was leading up to a comment on the current political climate.

</comment><comment><USER6> My wife and I used to debate which were the most important inventions in history but both of us agreed that the joint stock corporation was in the top 5 along with the wheel, gear, and control of fire.

<comment><USER7> A gear is equivalent to a wheel with a large coefficient of friction. Is there a particular reason you consider it to be a separate invention?

<comment><USER8> invention (n): the action of inventing something, typically a process or device.

device (n): a thing made or adapted for a particular purpose

The purpose is different.

<comment><USER7> Sure; I'm arguing that the leap necessary between wheels and gears isn't really all that huge. A gear is basically just a wheel–regardless of whether you think it's a separate invention or not it's not really that impressive as going from nothing to the wheel.

<comment><USER9> Gears provide mechanical advantage -- i.e. gear ratio.

<comment><USER7> So do two wheels of different sizes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For a more honest perspective, see;

 _" Empire in Asia: How We Came by It. A Book of Confessions"_ by W.M.Torrens

[https://archive.org/details/empireinasiahow00torrgoog/page/n...](https://archive.org/details/empireinasiahow00torrgoog/page/n11)

<comment><USER11> For more honest than what, exactly? Did you read the linked article? Your comment sounds like reactionary nationalism

<comment><USER10> Hmm... You seem to be triggered by my dismissal of Dalrymple. And yes, i have read the article (and a even better excerpt in The Guardian earlier).

The problem i have is that, he is too far removed from that time and too much inclined to keep things "nice" rather than calling a spade a spade. You cannot look at the actions of the EIC from a purely mercantile viewpoint. You have to acknowledge the inherent racism and rampant thievery with a complete absence of ethics/morals which were disguised under the garb of "Trade" and "Civilization". There is a reason for the existence of the phrase "Perfidious Albion" to describe British treachery over the ages.

William McCullagh Torrens was an enlightened Irish Politician of the 19th century when India was still suffering under Colonialism. He wrote in detail about how the Indian Kings/Nawabs were lied to, duped and fleeced of their wealth and power via promises made but never kept. There was absolutely no regard for the common man's life. He writes (page 7);

 _" Our duty is not to judge others, but ourselves; to beware of covetousness and of being betrayed into passive complicity by unpardonable laziness to seek, or still more despicable cowardice to own, the truth ... We are accountable, as a free-speaking and freely represented people, for all that may hereafter be done in our name; and if upon investigation, which with honour and in conscience we are not at liberty to elude, we are convinced ... that a great debt of reparation is due to India by this country, we are bound to use every just and fair occasion to press for restitution..."_

In this age of expediency, no British Historian/Journalist would ever utter such a thing. I highly recommend going through the Torrens book.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I recommend reading this book as a supplement. [https://www.amazon.in/Inglorious-Empire-What-British- India/d...](https://www.amazon.in/Inglorious-Empire-What-British- India/dp/1849048088)

</comment><comment><USER13> India was one of the richest countries in the world, if not the richest before the East India company and Islamic, Dutch and British invasions. It used clay pots, not plastics and its population of 200 milloin plus had plenty of fertile land to develop agriculture and cotton - the oil of the time. It was the land that gave the world yoga, Ayurveda and the numerical system. Not to mention Indian food. Britain called it the jewel in the crown for this reason, no other country gave it more wealth than India. You could argue that the British are incredibly innefficient in one regard that they survived it's meagre population of 10 million people off the back of this and made them wealthy whilst making a larger country impoverished. India didn't need the industrial revolution, Britain did. India had natural leaf plates, Britain's and west gave it an industry that it now has to rely on which is driven by coal production and climate change driving industries. What a mess

<comment><USER14> No idea why this is getting downvoted, as it presents a historically correct fact. India's GDP % before the British invasion was huge:

[https://www.quora.com/How-much-was-Indias-GDP-before-the- Bri...](https://www.quora.com/How-much-was-Indias-GDP-before-the-British-rule)

<comment><USER15> Probably because it's a bit misleading as your link shows. GDP per capita was low everywhere, barely above subsistence. Their % dropped when others started growing rapidly.

<comment><USER16> Nope, India/China's GDP dropped upon invasion and decimation of trade routes by the Western countries with the GDP gain.

People underestimate how key the US was to the opium trade in China. The US was a bigger trader than the UK/Germany/France combined at one point.

<comment><USER15> The data linked doesn't indicate that was the primary reason, there is a small dip in GDP per capita (-10%?) for India/China but it was basically flat.

Looks like before industrialization the richest countries were only moderately better off. Once it began to take off that gap became enormous.

<comment><USER16> Yes the data linked is limited in scope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'll stick this here for anyone wanting to know the real history of EIC and not some fancy, all-so-rosy version presented by EIC apologists. As a constant reminder of the atrocities, plunder, destruction of culture and tradition carried by EIC in the garb of "Industrialization" and establishing "Democracy" for which Britain has never apologized:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4)

<comment><USER10> Read also the book;

 _" Empire in Asia: How We Came by It. A Book of Confessions"_ by W.M.Torrens for a hard-hitting look at what the British actually did in India

[https://archive.org/details/empireinasiahow00torrgoog/page/n...](https://archive.org/details/empireinasiahow00torrgoog/page/n11)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> For a more general overview of world trade during the early modern era, I recommend Fernand Braudel:

[https://www.amazon.com/Wheels-Commerce-Civilization- Capitali...](https://www.amazon.com/Wheels-Commerce-Civilization- Capitalism-15th-18th/dp/0060150912/ref=mp_s_a_1_4?keywords=fernand+braudel+civilization+and+capitalism&qid=1569737710&s=gateway&sprefix=fernand+&sr=8-4)</comment>