The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-terrifying-reality-of-longterm-unemployment/274957/ <comment><USER3> This doesn't surprise me at all. One thing I've come to learn in life is the importance of social proof.

Social proof takes many form. It's why MIT and Stanford CS grads have tech companies come to their campuses and throw money at them (these institutions don't have a monopoly on good engineers). It's why if you have Google/Facebook/Twitter on your CV you are pretty much guaranteed a job. It's why academic staff who have a Harvard degree have a much easier time than those that don't.

How long you've been out of work is more social proof. Were I in this situation I would absolutely without a second's doubt invent fictitious employment and get a friend to back up any reference check and I wouldn't feel the least bit bad about it. I know employers are filtering on superficial things and those that have had difficulty finding work is a pretty quick and easy filter.

There is another side of this that the article doesn't touch on: home ownership.

10+ years ago I remember reading a study in Europe that showed the rate of unemployment was directly proportional to the rate of home ownership across the entire EU with a very high correlation. Spain had the highest rate of home ownership and unemployment. Britain (then) had the lowest for both.

We push home ownership as a political agenda. While it has benefits for creating stable communities it also creates an inflexible labour market as people won't move to where the jobs are.

<comment><USER4> >>There is another side of this that the article doesn't touch on: home ownership.

Oh boy. There's so much I can say about this topic, and none of it is positive.

Basically, the way our culture mindlessly promotes home ownership is insane. _Absolutely insane!_

Every time I hear people complaining about "throwing away money" by renting, and how they would rather put that money into a house, I want to hold them by the shoulders and shake them violently. It's like the housing market crash did not teach anyone anything!

It comes down to this: a house is a terrible, terrible means of investment. It's a fixed asset that, contrary to popular belief, is not guaranteed to always go up in value. In addition, people don't really take into account the negatives. Primarily, a house ties you down. You have zero mobility as a labor market participant if you own a house, and this significantly reduces your leveraging power when it comes to negotiating salary. Besides that though, houses have a ton of expenses, and as fixed assets they are subject to a lot of uncontrollable risk (fire, floods, earthquakes, the neighborhood depreciating, etc.).

Instead of having that money tied down on a house, people are much better investing in the stock market, which has, over the past 100 years, gone up by 7% annually.

The only time a house makes sense is when raising kids. The stability of the environment has a lot of positive benefits for their growth. It also makes social integration easier.

/rant

<comment><USER5> A few things you're not accounting for:

* Leverage. (The most you can leverage a stock investment is 2x. For homes people can leverage their money up to an insane 20x, for example: by buying a 500k home with 25k down. The proper comparison is not to compare buying a 500k home vs 500k worth of stocks; it's buying 25k or 50k worth of stocks vs a 500k home.)

* Mortgage deduction. (Imagine if you could invest 500k in the stock market with only 25k, and then the government let you deduct your interest payments!)

* Inflation. (I've heard of people living in Manhattan in apartments they bought in the 1980s that pay a mortgage of $500. Inflation has reduced their mortgage debt to negligible levels. Time has in a very real way erased much of their debt.)

<comment><USER6> What leverages up can (and will) leverage down. The problem with the housing collapse was that people with low or zero down-payment mortgages found that the property value fell, wiping out their entire stake (if they had any at all). More skin in the game should (though there's some research suggesting otherwise) make the market more stable by reducing the ability to speculate. This is a lesson that goes back to the crash of 1929 and the Dutch tulip bubble.

The mortgage deduction is priced into your home (as are low interest rates). Absent the deduction, real estate prices will fall. As interest rates rise, housing prices will also tend to soften.

What inflation giveth, it also taketh away: your mortgage costs are reduced, but so is the appreciation of your house.

<comment><USER7> Each of those is an contribution to risk and and potential reward, I guess it still comes down to whether people think their house will appreciate or not faster than inflation.

There is also:

* Closing costs. 5k to 10k can easily go to that only. So just buying and selling constantly could end wasted eaten "transaction costs"

* Chance of moving. Are you likely to move? If so think twice about a house. This is offset in the software world by working from home.

* You effectively get a 4% loan and pay it off in 30 years. That could be hundreds of thousands of dollars over the cost of your house you end up paying to the bank in 30 years. That completely escapes many people. Now there is inflation and the opportunity cost to do something else with the money but:

* You have to figure is your salary going to keep up with the inflation? You hope so right...right?

* Opportunity cost. Could you make more by buying some stock, and sell it after 30 years?

* Do you think housing is going to go up again or is the stock market going to go up faster. Same compounding for interest rate goes for reinvesting stock dividends.

<comment><USER6> Add to the "chance of moving" cost: your opportunity cost in lost income (or additional expenses) by being unable to sell your house in the course of a move. Either you lose out on the income opportunity (which is what this subthread started with), or you're left with the higher costs of renting out your home (likely not covering mortgage) while renting at the new location.

We saw this last situation for a new hire who last year was unable to sell his underwater midwest home while finding rents in a markedly hotter housing market much higher, especially when proximity to good schools and low crime rates were factored in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "It's time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed."

What the fuck? If you measure something you do not like, the immediate response should not be to grab a hammer and try to kill it. It probably exists for a reason. Understand the reason. Then take action. It may be that there is nothing you can do -- directly. Only a small few percentage points of the problems in the world go away through direct action.

Prima facie, this argument seems to be that if employers don't like an attribute in a job applicant's resume, we should either make it illegal for them to discriminate based on that attribute or "fake out" that attribute in some other way.

It seems like anything I'm going to say is blindingly obvious, but I'l say it anyway: we cannot provide "recent experience" in X simply by hiring somebody and giving them a nametag that says "I do X!". It doesn't work that way. Employers want experience, not simply words on a resume. You can't create lots of experience for a job position in a market that simply might not have that many job positions of that type available. In addition, sometimes (not always by any means) companies let go the people who are deadweight first.

I could go on. There's a plethora of various speculations I can make about why this measured observation is true. More research, most likely by job seekers themselves, is required to fix this. Politics by correlation, just like management by correlation, is a terrible way of running a ship.

<comment><USER9> Eh, there is something to what he's saying. The idea that the labor market behaves rationally is a childish fantasy. Employers are not rational. They do all sorts of irrational things, and discriminating against the long-term unemployed (and also women returning to the work force from motherhood) is one of those irrational things.

It's almost a dating mentality. They jump to the conclusion: "well if nobody else wants him, why should I?" In reality, people can be long-term unemployed for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with them being a bad potential employee. Maybe they have really specialized skills or want a really specific kind of job--the nature of such situations is that there is going to be gaps in how long it takes to find the next employer looking for those very specific skills.

<comment><USER10> Well if they act irrationally they will be sufficiently punished by the market (no childish fantasy required). There aren't enough jobs? Then create more jobs. Starting a company, at my last check, is incredibly simple to do. Of course, turning a profit is hard, which is why people turn to the government to provide them with work rather than take the risk of starting a company. The government doesn't need to turn a profit, it collects taxes. Therefore it's a very attractive alternative to the cold, hard realities of the market. Of course, there's only so much tax money to go around..

<comment><USER11> Companies will eventually be punished for acting irrationally, but, in the short term, they can be rewarded quite handsomely.

This reminds me of an old trick I've heard used on multiple occasions. We've all read the Hack News posts about how no amount of programming can compensate for a poor personality. Image that you're looking at an applicant and their former employer tells you:

"He was a good coder, but he had a serious anger management problem. You should do code reviews over the phone if you don't want books thrown at your head."

You're probably not going to hire this candidate.

Now, imagine that you're a manager who has a great, professional programmer who is leaving your organization. When other companies call for a reference, you could tell the truth, causing your competitors to hire her and their business to improve. On the other hand, you can make up a story about poor inter-personal skills and keep this talented worker out of the workforce. If you can't have her, no one can. On the reverse side, you give glowing recommendations to your worst coders so that their terrible practices fill your opponents sites with massive security holes and performance bottlenecks. As an added bonus, when your current employees figure out that they'll have a hard time finding a new job after working for you, you can keep their salaries below market rate.

Now, this won't work in the long term, since you'll eventually gain a reputation as a liar and your recommendations will be ignored. However, as long as you remain small, it will take you quite a long time to get this reputation. Is the CEO of FerriDyne systems honest or a liar? Meanwhile, you can keep a promising employee out of the job market for six months until they come crawling back for their old job at a fraction of their old pay.

This technique also makes recruiting difficult, since your employees won't recommend their competent friends for new positions. On the other hand, you can just get in the habit of hiring other people with large gaps in their record. If they're incompetent, then you let them go and recommend them to your competitors. If they're good, you hire them on at a discount since they haven't been able to find a job in six months.

Granted, I'd never do this and I'm sure you wouldn't either. It's underhanded and, ultimately, irrational. Lying leads to a breakdown of trust that weakens the whole financial system. However, if you're leading the charge towards that collapse, you can make a lot of money on the way.

<comment> UK-AL How common is this sort of stuff?

<comment><USER12> I think not common, at least not in the US. The risk of liability is too great. My company has a strict no-comment policy, and won't affirm anything beyond dates of employment and job title. This seems to be the norm for corporations.

Smaller business who don't have their own HR and legal departments protecting them may be a bit more forthcoming, but probably not much.

<comment><USER13> Big companies find other ways to do it though. Don't believe for a second that nut job managers won't do everything they can to screw your career if they feel slighted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been on both sides of this divide. I've interviewed people who have been unemployed for more than 6 months, and I've been without formal employment for longer than 6 months.

If all you've done is watch TV and send out resumes, nobody's going to hire you. You have to be able to say that you've done something. The easy answer is to go back to school. That costs money -- hopefully there's a government program you can take advantage of. But it gives you something you can put in that hole on your resume, and hopefully gives you relevant skills.

The other good answer is "I worked on X", where X could have been pretty much anything: a failed business, an open source project, volunteer work, or just making stuff to sell on Etsy. I didn't even care if it was remotely related to the position. I just wanted to see some initiative and passion. There's nothing wrong with a forced sabbatical as long as you do something with it.

The question is whether or not you should put your "forced sabbatical" projects on your resume or not. They'll plug the hole, but I imagine that it will also cause you to be filtered out by HR departments in big corporations if the work isn't "relevant".

<comment><USER4> >>The other good answer is "I worked on X", where X could have been pretty much anything: a failed business, an open source project, volunteer work, or just making stuff to sell on Etsy. I didn't even care if it was remotely related to the position. I just wanted to see some initiative and passion. There's nothing wrong with a forced sabbatical as long as you do something with it.

Ideally, yes. In reality, it's easier said than done.

1\. Most unemployed people need a way to pay their bills. This is not possible if you're dicking around with open source projects or volunteer work. Starting a business requires a certain amount of capital. And "making stuff to sell on Etsy" works only for a tiny minority of people who have the creative skills to make cool stuff.

2\. When you're unemployed, finding work should become your full-time job. You should get up at 8am and look for jobs, make a list, take a lunch break, then spend the afternoon tailoring your resume for those jobs. Then you can get off at 5pm or whatever and do other things. What most people do however is that they do other things during the day, and then in the evenings they sit in front of their computers with Monster.com open and browse job openings, and maybe send out a few resumes. Which doesn't work of course.

Basically, the only people who can afford to work on something meaningful while unemployed are those who have a significant amount of money saved up. In today's economy, most people who are at risk of unemployment don't.

<comment><USER15> "When you're unemployed, finding work should become your full-time job."

This assumes there's enough of a job market "out there" that after more than 6 months you can still burn 40 hours per week on it.

"This is not possible if you're dicking around with ... volunteer work."

This doesn't even make sense. Most volunteer work doesn't require much money. You may be confusing setting up a charity or donating to a charity with volunteer work at a charity. Even something "time consuming" like serving soup at the church soup kitchen can't burn more than a couple hours.

<comment><USER16> I did volunteer work at a soup kitchen and through the connections I made there I worked with someone who kicked my butt and fixed my resume. If that hadn't happened i wouldn't be making the salary I am now.

The ancient wisdom: give and it will be given you is mysteriously powerful. Humans want to help those who help others, it's in our genetics.

<comment><USER17> I can not recommend this advice enough. Give and it will be given you.

<comment><USER16> It is the first step of forming an alliance and symbiotic relationship between adversarial systems.

When two humans want to acquire all the assets of the other and make the other one the slave, the first step in starting an alliance is doing a cost benefit analysis of how things would be easier for both if cooperation was done. Often times the one persuaded is reluctant until one human takes a leap of faith and gives, in expectation of receiving. It's all highly mathematical and I could create an algorithm to describe it. But you wouldn't recommend that either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Two things.

First, I wouldn't want to naysay the idea that unemployment is a vicious cycle, because it intuitively is. But: this analysis is based on resume callbacks. Something that I think is as true as the "damaged goods" stigma is that most Americans do not know how to market themselves during job searches. If your only access to the job market is through a mechanism that is designed to extract basic facts from a resume and screen based on that, _and_ there's high unemployment and so increased demand for every position, it stands to reason that unemployed people are structurally disadvantaged when competing for jobs via resume blasts.

Second: Six months, you say? Can any of us think of a cohort of job seekers that _routinely_ needs to contend with 6+ month employment gaps? I wonder, maybe, just maybe, do you think that has a powerful "objective" stigma attached to it disproportionately often might find it difficult to compete equitably in the job market? I wonder which 50% of the population I might ask to find out more about this.

<comment><USER19> > I wonder which 50% of the population I might ask to find out more about > this.

I assume you are looking to ask the 50% of the population with lower unemployment, shorter median unemployment duration, and lower % long-term unemployed: <http://www.dol.gov/_sec/media/reports/femalelaborforce/>

<comment><USER18> Women are more likely to work in sectors not as hard-hit by the recession. They don't tend to work construction. They do tend to work in the public sector sharply more often than men. You have to take those statistics in context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> About 13 years ago, I was unemployed for about four months.

I've had a few people positively grill me about that blank despite the length of time that has passed and evidence that I didn't spend the time idle (Obtained a certification, did freelance work and eventually pivoted my career).

In each case, it was an older person who upon my asking explained that they saw any extended period of unemployment as blatant laziness.

I ended up getting those jobs, but came to learn a bit about how some people can come to think of life as so straightforward and easy.

In each case the people judging me hadn't had to look for work for at least 20 years. In one, the person judging was the son of a prior VP who was widely despised by his peers for having made a nepotistic ascent through the ranks. In another I ended up seated at a desk next to the son of the judging CTO.

<comment><USER13> >upon my asking explained that they saw any extended period of unemployment as blatant laziness.

What judgmental fucking assholes. It's a shame such people are the ones doing the interviewing instead of the ones rotting in unemployment.

We only get to live one time, so if you see me taking off two months as "blatant laziness" then fuck you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> What bothers me most about the long term unemployed is the lack of visibility into what they have been doing during the down time. I recently got to look at two resumes, both people who had been unemployed for > 6 months, one guy has this big blank spot, the other has a narrative about what he's been doing. The active guy got in shape, he rebuilt is basement drainage system, he did odd jobs helping people with "handy" work (he was a highly paid system administrator at a New York bank before he was laid off) and he's been reading.

I am _much_ less likely to call back the blank spot guy and much _more_ likely to call back the active guy. What I'd like to know is, there any correlation between callbacks and intra-employment activity?

<comment><USER22> Whenever I read a resume, I wonder about blank spots over about 2-3 months. I don't really get excited that they exist, but I do want to get a grasp of the rationale and what they did.

I suppose I am ok with it if someone just wanted to spend 3 months in his PJs recovering from burnout. But I'd rather hear about him spending 3 months doing gardening. Better yet, I'd rather hear about the technical things he did in that time frame. What I try to distinguish is apathy/laziness vs. relaxation/recovery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> 3 years ago I ended 18 months of unemployment by listing every friend, person I spoke with, or acquaintance as one of my clients for my 'very successful' consulting business.

I regularly do help out on side projects or test out ideas with friends so they were more than happy to provide a reference for this period. In the 3 years since i've been able to climb from no income, to medium US income, to top 5% income bracket. Its hard, but not impossible to recover.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's a terrible trend and its absolutely true.

With the unemployment rate so high, employers are now getting absolutely flooded with resumes for every and any job posting. There is a high volume of completely unqualified people applying to positions they have no relevant experience for. There is also a much higher volume of qualified people, and HR departments need some way of prioritizing these applicants. Fair or not, filtering out people by whether or not they have been recently employed is a relatively effective way to find the most promising candidates.

If you are out of work and looking for a job, your best chance is to try to bypass HR altogether by either reaching out to hiring managers directly or by networking your way in. Most jobs are filled long before they are ever even posted online. It's never too soon to reach out to companies you want to work for - they may not be hiring immediately, but you want to be top of mind when a new position does open up.

</comment><comment><USER25> The negative stigma that is placed on long-term unemployment is an issue that needs to be addressed; measuring how long someone has been unemployed is not really indicative of anything.

The rationalization that _"If no one has hired them in X months, there must be a reason not to"_ is just flat out dumb. And while it may be a red flag when purchasing physical goods or real estate, it's a baseless stat when it comes to measuring how well an individual's expertise & qualities may be suited for a particular position.

In my opinion, there are much better stats an employer can take off a job application, and wouldn't mind the federal/state government passing legislation against this type of discrimination if it gets out of control.

<comment><USER26> Hiring is based on flat-out dumb reasoning, as long as it is a stupid reason to exclude someone rather than include them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Not surprising at all.

Same thing happens with real estate (well known) as only one example or even dating as another. (Price with real estate and market conditions are also a factor but a house on the market to long gets stale).

Generally the fact that others have passed on something is taken as a marker to less attractiveness all else held equal.

The question could be raised "if this person or house is so good why hasn't someone else taken advantage of it to date?" With respect to both employment or dating the reasonableness of the person in question could also be a factor.

Lastly, there is the theory of getting a "find" before someone else has discovered something that works in favor of less time on the market.

</comment><comment><USER28> As someone with zero debt, minimal financial needs and enough savings to take voluntarily more than a few months off work, this is downright scary. I guess if it comes down to this, I'll just have to fudge the hell out of it in my resume.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why would you advertise the fact that you were unemployed for 6 months to a prospective employer?

"Unemployed" suggests that you spent 6 months sitting in your pyjamas watching TV. Why not simply say you were freelancing, even if all you actually ended up doing was a few data entry tasks from mechanical turk.

<comment><USER30> _Why would you advertise the fact that you were unemployed for 6 months to a prospective employer?_

This. No one is unemployed any more. They are just "freelancing" or "self- employed" or "working on personal projects". Anybody can make up (and preferably actually do) some resume items that makes your non-working time look incredibly productive.

<comment><USER31> And do you think the screeners won't start screening out "personal projects" if enough people start doing that? "Freelancing" for eight months after a career of working for other people, and suspiciously little to show for the freelancing... I wonder what that's about?

<comment><USER32> It's already happening.

Last time I applied for a job was after just shy of two years of contract work full-time. They asked for a portfolio which I sent over. I was confused when they asked for _more_ as I had already picked my best work. After supplying some more samples I asked the hiring manager why they had requested more and was essentially told they were looking at not only quality, but also quantity. _They wanted to make sure I had been doing this for two years._

Personally, I think this is good. Saying you're freelancing when you're actually unemployed is no less dishonest than saying you have a degree you don't have or you worked at [X] BigCo for six months longer than you actually did.

I worked my ass off when I was a consultant and I'd be pretty upset if John Q. off the street has been resume blasting everyone for six months while drawing unemployment and saying he's been "consulting."

<comment><USER29> To be clear, I'm not suggesting somebody flat out lies and claims they were consulting when they were really playing xbox.

I'm suggesting making some actual effort, saying "part time freelancing whilst seeking other opportunities" sounds better than "collected unemployment"

<comment><USER30> Absolutely. I think padding a true blank spot is a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It seems that from a hiring manager point of view the logic is this:

-Good people are hard to find

-If I find a good person, I snap them up right away

-Other hiring managers in my industry probably do the same

-If someone hasn't been working for 6 months they've probably been on a bunch of interviews

-In those interviews, no one thought the candidate was good enough to hire

-Odds are the candidate probably isn't worth hiring

Real world example, one of my co-workers was hired less than a week after his large corporate investment bank employer collapsed. Main reason was that it was obvious that he was smart, hard working and organized.

<comment><USER26> Also it's obviously not his fault that the bank collapsed, whereas we will blame someone if they do not have work in a few months

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This article hits home for me. I graduated from a Top 20 university here in the UK in 2009 with a First Class in Computer Science. I have always been the type that never really knew what they wanted to do with their life and made the mistake of not forcing myself to pick a career path.

The first year after leaving uni I worked in a job unrelated to my degree. I left and decided to take the grad scheme slog that is so common. I applied to 10-15 big companies' grad schemes in their Tech departments (IBM, MS, investment banks etc) and reached at least the first in-person interview for around half of them. I had a few offers but turned them down since I realised I was not passionate about the role (big mistake).

Since then I have spent the following 18 months unemployed. I work voluntarily at my parents' business, again, in a field unrelated to my degree, while doing some freelancing and hacking on some personal projects.

I am scared to apply for programming jobs now because of the gaps in my employment and lack of 'formal' experience. I have a massive fear of the rejection, mixed with a good amount of Impostor Syndrome.

It's a vicious cycle. I am scared to apply and be rejected, which is in turn adding to my unemployed period and making the situation worse.

I have had some savings which meant I could survive unemployed comfortably (probably worked against me in hindsight), but it is quite a depressing realisation and I feel as though I have wasted my degree and am starting from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's not a terrible metric. There is an actual correlation between long term unemployment and being unemployable because of lack of skills and incompetence, or serious personality defects, such as drug addiction, mental disorders, criminality, violent behavior and laziness.

Few long term unemployed are long term unemployed for no reason at all. It's hard to take the claims seriously of those such as the article author who are unable or unwilling to acknowledge this.

If authors and social workers are concerned with advocating on behalf of the small minority of long term unemployed who are actually employable, it would be more helpful to have articles that address the issue of how to find the small number of long term unemployed who would make good team additions, without having to spend far more time interviewing bad candidates than one does when hiring currently employed and short term unemployed persons.

Advocating for the government to hire unemployable people for positions in government is one of the worst suggestions I have ever heard. Things are already bad enough with endemic incompetence and corruption in government bureaus without seeking out even more of the incompetent and dangerous and giving them the power and influence that comes with government positions.

<comment><USER36> > There is an actual correlation between long term unemployment and being > unemployable because of lack of skills and incompetence, or serious > personality defects, such as drug addiction, mental disorders, criminality, > violent behavior and laziness.

There is an actual correlation between being black and drug addiction, criminality &c.

Discriminating on skin color is illegal, though.

<comment><USER37> If you read two resumes that were identical in every way, except that one had experience listed and the other had none, wouldn't you go for the first one? If not, what's the point of listing experience at all?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Here's an idea. Think outside of the box: If being employed in the past six months is really such a big deal, just start your own LLC and do contracting work of some sort. Hey, look at that. Now your resume shows that you were employed during that period. Sure, you might not have made all that much money while you were employed at your own business, but at least you were employed.

<comment><USER39> If finding contracting work were easy, the person wouldn't be unemployed for 6 months now, would he?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> So, being unemployed is being taken as a proxy for being incompetent/unemployable. I'd think getting fired after 6 months or less would be a much better indicator (even if you just look for once, rather than repeatedly to control for having gotten a crap boss)... is this just a case of HR departments being overconfident of their own collective skills?

<comment><USER41> Part of the theory is that the first people to be fired at a company are among the least productive or least competent. Therefore, the longer someone has been unemployed, the less competent they are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Do you have some tips for someone like me ? Unemployed for 3 years, graduated from IT but worked in another industry (nautical charts). I have little to show. I got an interview quite often, but that's where it ended. 80% companies just have HR department and don't ask any technical questions.

Should I focus on building my portfolio ? (recently focused on Django)

Is it easier to find a job in some "common" field, like software testing or PHP, or rarer like Django where there are much fewer offers but also less competition ?

</comment><comment><USER43> This seems to also affect software engineers. I used to split my time between 18-24 month consulting projects and then would take 3-6 months off to travel. I've been lucky to see all of the US and parts of Africa, Europe, Japan, Australia and Mexico. This was pretty easy to do in the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, after the last time I traveled, it took quite some time to find another contract. It seems much riskier in the current economic climate.

</comment><comment><USER44> The worst thing about the interventions into the labor market is that they prevent people from being hired.

It would be far better to hand aid to the working poor directly than to have a minimum wage or impose regulations that make hiring the working poor more expensive.

Many people seem to think making the employers pay somehow reduces their profits with no other ill effects. But in reality, it is also likely make prices go up. OR the take home pay of workers go down or rise more slowly.

Just because these effects don't happen immediately doesn't mean they don't eventually happen or that they don't accumulate. And just because you don't understand how artificial prices interfere with supply and demand doesn't mean the effects aren't real.

If you are one of the least productive laborers, your labor may not be worth the minimum wage to anybody. You're completely shut out. Good luck finding a place to live under the nearest bridge.

</comment><comment><USER45> At some point the pendulum may swing the other way, and employers may not hire anyone who even _has_ a current job, using "loyalty" as a filter. "If they're so bold as to take time off work to go interview here with me, why would I ever trust that they won't just lie for a day off and leave me high and dry in the future?"

If we want to affect quick change for 'long term unemployed', start offering tax breaks to employers (hasn't this been done/tried already?). Reduce payroll tax by 2% for every year a person has been unemployed (2 years = 4% reduction, etc). That would, I'd think, get employers' attention.

<comment><USER15> "why would I ever trust that they won't just lie for a day off"

That's just bizarre. I've been around a couple decades and I've always taken a personal or vacation day for interviews. I guess there are people who call in sick although thats not my style. I've never even heard of an employer so controlling that they get to decide if my day off activities are "worthy enough". Salaried jobs I just took off for an odd lunch hour.

<comment><USER45> People will rationalize anything. Who might have predicted years ago that we'd be in a position like this:

Employer: "I just can't find any qualified people to work! I'll have to import people from overseas who've never done this work before!"

Person: "But... there's load of people right in this city who have these skills who'd like to come work for you."

Employer: "WTF? They've not had a _job_ in 9 months!"

Person: "That's because your competition closed down and you're one of the few places in town that needs their skills but you didn't want to hire them, even though you need workers to keep up with demand."

Employer: "BUT THEY HAVE NOT HAD A JOB IN 9 MONTHS! NEXT MONTH IT WILL BE _10_ MONTHS!"

Yes, I understand that long-term unemployment can bring about changes in people wrt skills and perhaps socialization (keeping 'normal' hours, etc). That's not what's in play all the time. We had a HUGE increase in job seekers - employers had their pick of whoever they wanted for most positions, and some will continue to make the criteria harder to fill if it means they'll get something out of it (tax breaks for hiring long-term unemployed, relaxed immigration bills for cheaper foreign workers, ability to keep wages down in their region, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> "In other words, the first thing employers look at is how long you've been out of work, and that's the only thing they look at if it's been six months or longer."

This seems intuitive to me. With the large number of people applying to jobs, there has to be a way to quickly filter resumes down.

It's unfortunate, but HR probably decided that six months or longer is probably a signal that there is something wrong with the applicant. Because of the vast amount of resumes being sent in, they can afford to miss out on the diamond in the rough that is hidden among the mass of resumes of people out of work for 6 months or longer.

</comment><comment><USER47> Not surprising. I know quite a lot of professionals that took a couple of years off to care for babies and can't find work.

As a corollary, I've also seen quite a few engineers that were just slightly out of date get passed over.

</comment><comment><USER48> At some point wouldn't it be easier to create their own jobs?

It seems like a waste of energy to organize a protest with "We want work" signs when they could be starting a business or something.

</comment><comment><USER49> If you can't land a job in your desired field, get another job that pays a wage you can live on. Then in every single free moment you have, do work in the field you're interested in. Even if you have to do it for free (assuming the free work looks really good on a resume). It lets you keep something current on your resume and develop skills in the field. Doesn't work for every field and situation, but I've found it useful.

</comment><comment><USER50> Then did extending unemployment insurance to 99 weeks actually screw the people it was intended to help?

I have not read the details of the original study but this article seems to indicate that a recently employed person in a different industry has an easier time getting a job than a long-term unemployed person with industry experience.

</comment><comment><USER51> Long term unemployment is unfortunately a signal of low productivity. While being long term unemployed doesn't necessarily unproductive, it is highly correlated with low productivity.

The same thing happens for race,unfortunately.

<http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html>

</comment><comment><USER52> In tech itself, open source organizations should make a push to hire long-term unemployed developers. Promise to give them recommendations and references if they do a good job during the interim.

The downside is the long-term unemployment problem is probably not as significant in software, compared to other industries.

</comment><comment><USER53> a question:

any engineer would recognize the symptoms of what may be a systematic failure in a system. There was no mention in the article of studies fo studying the hr system from a sysatem perspective.

My thinking is that the drastic increase in applicants for any job posted acts as a feed back loop adjusting the system into chaos as hr personnel choose to reduce workload via reducing quality.

Is thee any studies somewhere where a team took on the task to study the problems as a system?

even my assumptions could be wrong..it would be nice to attack with some actual facts based on some science.

</comment><comment><USER54> If you are unemployed, please read _Ask The Headhunter_.

</comment><comment><USER41> >> It's time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed.

Hiring them to do what? The government not only has to hire people it doesn't need, but it has to hire from the 'unwanted' pile that private employers have already selected the best from?

>> Or, at the least, start giving employers tax incentives to hire the long- term unemployed.

What happens after a year, when the tax credit expires for that newly hired person, and another unemployed person comes along and applies for that job? Fire the first guy and hire the new guy so you can get that tax credit for another year?

</comment><comment><USER55> I wonder if the same effect applies if you took a couple of years off to do a Masters or PhD full-time?

<comment><USER56> Short answer, yes.

Long answer, I happened to teach at undergraduate level during my days ad grad school (not really a T.A. but a sort of associate professor position that in the US is normally filled by PosDocs). At the time it seemed like a great idea and I was proud to "not having a single day of unemployment in my record".

The problem was when I decided to go back to work in industry instead of pursuing an academic career. Most employers would see me not as a fresh graduate from a prestigious graduate program, but as "just a teacher" trying to "switch careers".

It took 4 and a half months of eroded expectations, biter exchanges with H.R. folks and learning the ropes of the hiring game to find someone to actually give me a chance to prove myself in a support position that required no advanced degree and minimal technical skills (basically: speaks English, knows ksh and SQL). Then came the appalling realization that after 9 years of post K12 education I was apparently not qualified to answer the phone properly.

Of course, your mileage may vary. Much of my experience not necessarily comes from being in grad school, but from lack of soft skills and the ability to manage perception of potential employers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> The Corporate System is actually collapsing. That doesn't mean that corporations themselves are going to go out (that won't happen for another 100+ years) but they're no longer an efficient way of turning human efforts into salable work.

The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do) and independent creative work's value is going up exponentially-- _but_ there is a massive unsolved problem of how we pay people for the latter, given the high skill requirements and intermittency of payment. What kind of insurance system must we build?

Convexity will end the Corporate System for good. See: [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/gervais- macle...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/gervais- macleod-21-why-does-work-suck/)

Unfortunately, we have a regime in which the Satanic Trinity (housing, healthcare, and tuition fees) have not only eaten the middle class, but have left people utterly dependent on a monthly income. Also, we have _generational_ creative poverty. There is generational poverty, which is cultural as much as it is physical. Then there is the American middle class, which lives not in material poverty, but in a de-culturized zone that annihilates human creativity. That _is_ generational and hard to reverse (parental and peer expectations). We have millions of people bred to be middle managers and junior executives that the world no longer needs, because the grunt work is increasingly being done by machines.

The generational cultural poverty, coupled with _actual_ material scarcity since 2008, has left a generation unable to survive as the Corporate System ceases expanding and begins its decline.

<comment><USER18> The share of Americans working for enterprises larger than 500 employees is rising, not falling.

I think this analysis is more wishful than factual. It'll get upvoted because of course tuition and health care are satanically expensive.

<comment><USER58> My organization is hiring for ops and java engineers right now. We pay well. We're having a hard time finding anyone who wants to work full time. Most people we're talking with would rather work on project basis or work part time.

After working in IT for 12 years, I can't blame them. If you can, why sit at a desk for at least 5 days a week, at least 8-10 hours a day each day.

<comment><USER18> It's going to be hard in this thread to shake off all the biases high-end software people bring to the table. We are, as a collection of people engaging with any topic, particularly bad at seeing things through anything other than the lense of our own experiences; maybe that's because we spend so much time in a heavily-amplified online echo chamber.

<comment><USER58> I agree very much with your post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Hire half unemployed to dig holes with a shovel all day, and the other half to fill them and pay them 30% below minimum wage. Or do something useful - <USER2> is always infrastructure in need of repairs. If won't cost much compared to wars and will do wonders for the self worth of the people.

<comment><USER60> You've just invented the Public Works Administration! A huge proportion of America's infrastructure was built in the 30's by the PWA - including the vast majority of infrastructure in federal and state parks.

They had to stop because that's socialism - and as we all know, socialism is unAmerican and bad.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Personal timesheet? - <AUTHOR> Is anyone using personal timesheets to track eg how much time they spend on learning a new topic or time spent on a (side) project ?<p>What are your experiences and what tools do you use for this ? <comment><USER2> I have a four monitor setup, I tried to dedicate one of them to use Asana and tried multiple tracking software to be organized. Didn't stick.

Then I purchased a big vertical whiteboard and bunch of colored markers, writing down my to-dos and to-learns/ideas. Usually I try to do it monthly, but some tasks remain for longer than a month. I make many grids on it, and distribute client requests, my personal stuff, some random notes once in a while.

I tried to use some iOS paid apps but I realized I don't want to look at my phone more than I already do.

In the past I tried to use regular notepads, bought many kinds but I couldn't follow my notes anymore. So far my whiteboard was my best friend because it is huge, whenever I turn my head I see it. But for time tracking, I have no clue. Get a whiteboard, no matter what you do, you will use it.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you don't need minute-by-minute accounting, you might like TagTime [1]. It will pop up a window at random times and ask what you're doing. Over the course of several weeks it can build a good picture of where your time is going in aggregate without the hassle of having to manually punch in and out of a timesheet or the potential privacy problems associated with completely automatic tracking.

[1]: [http://tagti.me/](http://tagti.me/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I use timing.

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

</comment><comment><USER5> I use an automatic time tracker for all my side projects:

[https://wakatime.com](https://wakatime.com)</comment>


Kondoot to take on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus with video - <AUTHOR> http://www.couriermail.com.au/business/brisbane-social-media-service-kondoot-to-take-on-facebook-twitter-google-plus-with-video/story-e6freqmx-1226117720274

<comment><USER2> Headlines like "taking on FB, Google and Twitter" seldom end in success. That said I think that Chatroulette left a lot on the table and that if you can get the dynamics right there's clearly still something big to be built in live video chat

</comment><comment><USER3> That's too bad the article is written that way. It really gives bad press to Kondoot.

"take on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus". Seriously?

"already is making a splash on the web". It is barely visible on Alexa: <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/kondoot.com>

"is currently working 18-hour days". You aren't productive while missing sleep

And it looks like that's not the only article written this way. A related article is about "Mass exodus from Facebook due to fatigue"

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not convinced video is what people want from online interactions with their friends.

</comment><comment><USER5> In French, "kon" means idiot and "doot" means doubt. Still time to rename your product?

</comment><comment><USER6> What happened to Diaspora?

<comment><USER7> Duke Nukem Forever.

<comment><USER8> So you're saying it was released to a critical reception and terrible reviews?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Know what, video means I have to put on a shirt and comb the cereal crumbs out of my beard. Who wants to make that effort? I'm using a computer so I don't have to.</comment>


'Zeno effect' verified: Atoms won't move while you watch - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/10/zeno-effect-verified-atoms-wont-move-while-you-watch <comment><USER2> Sometimes I feel that people writing about physics are having great fun with deliberately confusing people by making stuff sound magical and illogical.

This particular effect has nothing to do with whether or not anyone is looking at an object. It's the methods of making it visible that cause the effect.

<comment><USER3> could swear I've had some debugging / system testing sessions where the effect of me looking into it changed its state :-)

<comment><USER4> We call those "heisenbugs" \- one of the most terrifying and maddening things you can encounter prior to a launch. I'm almost positive that I remember reading a sort from a game dev who ran into one of these right before a release, where printing some variable caused it to have the correct value; in this case, it was left in the game.

<comment><USER5> Well, I know that I ran into a situation (and may once have posted about it) in a C program where I was doing printf to debug a program, and it ran fine. Whenever I removed them, the program would crash. Finally discovered that the printf debugging was forcing garbage collection which took care of a bad pointer somewhere else in the program. Honestly can't remember if I ever found the pointer or just left the printfs in the code...

<comment><USER6> Thank goodness we have Valgrind these days. Though I don't know how well it would handle a C app with a garbage collector.

Calling printf can (will) change what's beyond the stack of the calling function, so if the pointer in question pointed outside the active stack, printf may have put a safer value there by coincidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I understand correctly, what's going on is... Suppose you have a system rotating between state |0> and state |1>, like f(t) = cos(t) |0> \+ sin(t) |1>. If you measure at time t, you get |0> with probability cos(t)^2. After measuring, the system starts rotating again, but reset to |0> (assuming you measured that). If you measure n times per rotation period, the chance of measuring the state |0> every time (i.e. of effectively keeping the system in the |0> state) is (cos(τ/n)^2)^n per period. That converges to 100% as n gets large.

So, by measuring more and more frequently, you can effectively stop a system like that from transitioning between states.

It's an interesting example of measurement unavoidably affecting quantum systems, where the problem clearly isn't due to kicking or perturbing the state.

<comment><USER8> So, imagine you have a ball and a slope

           o
        __/\__

(ball should be on top in the middle).

The ball will slowly start rolling down one or the other side of the slope (because gravity).

You have a robot hand that keeps checking if the ball is still on top by grabbing it and then releasing it right in the middle. There is some leeway when the hand grabs the ball but none when it releases it.

        __|__          _|_
        | o |    =>    |o|

So effectively, if you do this fast enough, you keep "resetting" the ball on top of the slope.

Is this a good analogy?

<comment><USER7> Not really. A minor problem is that it fails to capture the fact that this process will also hold the qubit stable in the |1> state. More importantly, it fails to capture the limiting behavior of the success rate; it should move smoothly towards 100% as the measurement frequency increases but the ball-and- slope would instead jump discontinuously from not working to working as the hand went from being too-slow to fast-enough.

A better example might be... a series of polarizing filters? If you have a series of polarizers but skip all the way from vertical to horizontal with nothing in between, no light gets through. If you put a diagonal polarizer between the horizontal and vertical, some light gets through. If you have a big long series of very gradual steps from vertical polarizer to horizontal polarizer, almost all the light gets through. More frequent measurements causing the zeno effect is like to adding more gradations of polarizer direction causing the all-light-gets-through effect.

<comment><USER9> Er, I am fairly sure that polarizer example doesn't work, and still no light gets through, as polarizers don't rotate the light, but simply cut off components that are orthogonal to the polarization direction. So stacking slightly rotated filters through to 90 degress would still leave you with no light.

EDIT: On second thought, it might just be you wording making it seem weird. The analogy works if you don't look at the whole stack, but the after adding each polarizer. Still, the same effect is had as simply gradually rotating the 2nd polarizer.

<comment><USER7> You're one of the lucky ten thousand today. [1]

Following a vertical polarizer with a horizontal polarizer will block all light. But putting a diagonal polarizer in between will result in some of the light getting through. You can find videos and explanations of this effect on youtube [2] [3].

1: [https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/)

2: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm2LCsM_S5o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm2LCsM_S5o)

3: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM2TkM0hzW8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM2TkM0hzW8)

<comment><USER9> Hah, nice! Looking at it now, of course it makes sense. I guess I just short- circuited by thinking of the polarizer as blocking light only, and not that the reduction in intensity is the result of the projection of the previous wave direction onto the new wave plane!

EDIT: not that this makes the quantum effects any clearer ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> *while illuminated by a bright laser. By dimming the laser the quantum behaviour returned, and you watching the atoms or not had no effect on the phenomenon.

Despite the misleading title, I imagine affecting the quantum behaviour of atoms with lasers has all kinds of nice use cases!

<comment><USER11> Affecting the quantum behavior of atoms with lasers is pretty much the entire field of ultracold quantum gases :) A handful of Nobel prizes have been awarded for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Layman question: what constitutes observation in the world of quantum physics ? The article suggests that stronger light means less quantum effects, but isn't observation a binary thing, so something is either watched or not.

<comment><USER13> Observation means: Interaction with a 'classical system'. Now because of entanglement this also works if we look at chains of interactions: Interaction with another single atom for example is no observation, but if this other atom interacts with a 'classical system' at some point earlier or later we have again an 'observation'.

Now 'classical systems' are systems made of so many elements that we can only make statistical statements about it because we can't ever determine the state of each of it's constituents.

I suspect for some time now that this is also the source for the "quantum randomness". In principle, everything is deterministic, but to observe something we always have interactions with a "big classical system" (in the end it's always our brain). And because we don't know the exact state of those systems but only statistical averages, quantum mechanics looks random for us, even if it's perfectly deterministic in itself. But that's my personal view of the matter.

<comment><USER14> The first couple of paragraphs are a great summary. Prof. Binney has some interesting observations on the non-physicality of quantum measurement (the formalism).

One of the postulates of QM is that after a measurement the system is in a well-defined state (the one we measured). But this is aphysical.

It's an artifact of the deliberate choice to formally model measurement in a way that simultaneously recognizes that all measurements disturb the measured system, while also wanting to abstract away the particular hardware used.

So, I'm starting to see wavefunction collapse and the whole Copenhagen interpretation as artifacts of the the formalism, not any kind of physical truth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would there be a difference in result when only the computer looked at the individual positions, logged the measurements, determined them and noted the level of quantum behaviour to test this hypothesis? I read this thread on the physics stackexchange [http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/110488/consciousn...](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/110488/consciousness- causes-collapse-interpretation-or-free-will-excluded-by-quantum)

..and it is said most professional physicists don't believe in this 'consciousness (human or otherwise) causes collapse' Neumann-Wigner interpretation (and that of John Wheeler and Henri Stapps) and most amateurs do, but has it been tested in this way also by ruling out far out psi effects like retropsychokinesis by deleting or encrypting the data in such a way it can only be verified by a 'team' of independent artificial scientists (networked statistical software)?

<comment><USER16> "Looking" means "interacting". It does not mean a human is looking, it means the particle is doing something with another particle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Many measurements == little change? It sounds vaguely familiar of overloaded computing systems. Maybe we'll run timing attacks on whatever the quantum world is.

<comment><USER18> I hope we can hack the universe at some point. I think it would be very beneficial for humanity if we could break out of our universe.

<comment><USER19> Or even achieving privilege escalation would be good enough for most.

<comment><USER16> What if you caused a crash and core dump instead?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "emergent classicality" is my new favorite phrase.

</comment><comment><USER21> _don 't blink_

</comment><comment><USER22> I really wish more science writers would explain what "observation" actually means. This article is better than most, but generally one leaves quantum- effect discussions with the impression that atoms can literally tell when a human brain is perceiving them, presumably through magic science brain waves.

<comment><USER23> When writing in English, unless the writer specifies otherwise, the word "observation" means what the dictionary says it does.

The writer of this article is saying that the particles behave differently after being observed.

Perhaps that is a lie.

My point is, if it's a lie, let's call it a lie, not bad writing.

<comment><USER24> I guess it depends on the presumed audience. As a layman, observation is a passive event. After reading through some of the comments, I can see that physicists have a different meaning for that word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is this not basically saying the same thing that is shown in the double slit experiment?

Short video on the double slit experiment for the layman:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc)

</comment><comment><USER26> Natural languages have evolved around the human scale of things and humans actions on those things. When you try to describe nature using these concepts you will always get weird and unintuitive explanations.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm curious as to how the scientists confirmed that tunneling was taking place when the atoms were not being illuminated. Does anyone know how this is typically done?

<comment><USER28> I hope I understood your question correctly. It's very very very difficult to take a photograph to catch the atom while tunneling.

The atoms in this experiment form a lattice, and the lattice acts a trap, so the atoms can be only in some fixed spots. To go from one spot to another spot, it has to have some minimal energy, so it's equivalent to climbing a hill to go from one valley to another valley. The atom usually get that energy by random movements, but in this experiment they are very cold, to avoid this possibility, so they are trapped in one of those spots.

By quantum mechanics, they can travel from one spot to another spot without enough energy. This is equivalent to going from one valley to another valley without energy to climb the hill, so the tunneling nickname. The probability is something like exp(- distance * energy_difference * constants) so it's harder to go to a spot far away and it harder to pass a tall hill (I must be missing a the time variable there, look at Wikipedia for the exact expression.) And it's exponentially harder, not jut harder.

To answer your question. It's very very very difficult to take a photographs of the atoms while tunneling. If you turn off the laser and you take a photograph from time to time, you see that some atoms jump randomly from one spot to another between photos while "no one" is watching :). If you turn on the laser, the "laser" is watching, so the atoms don't move between photographs. But don't expect to get a photograph of the atoms while tunneling.

EDIT: after a coffee and a shower, I changed "impossible" to "very very very difficult"

<comment><USER27> I re-read the article, and combined with your answer, it makes much more sense now. What was originally confusing me, was how the scientists were confirming the presence of tunneling when the laser was off.

I was mistakenly assuming that they were using some special method to infer that tunneling was taking place.

But of course they don't need to, like you said. The tunneling can be inferred from the change in positions of atoms in different photographs. They don't actually need to see the actual tunneling in-progress (even if it were somehow possible/not very difficult to do so). Makes sense.

Thanks for that answer, it's very helpful for someone like me whose last brush with quantum physics was the physics/chemistry courses in year 1 of engineering.

Cheers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> what i really don't quite get (amongst a large number of other things as well), is how you could have observed an atom without disrupting it's quantum state...

<comment><USER30> The Zeno effect is basically due to disruption of the quantum state. You measure repeatedly in some basis and this basically pins the state down (in this basis representation) even though it would not stay in this state if you did not interact with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I guess that measurement introduces energy into the system and that is what keeps atoms in places.

I haven't seen refutation of this in the article.

</comment><comment><USER32> I was convinced this was already known and verified long ago. I've certainly told people this was True.

<comment><USER33> You're thinking of the double slit experiment

<comment><USER32> No, I'm definitely thinking of the fact that observation inhibits change in a quantum system. I'm fairly certain I was taught this was the case and was experimentally verified. 'Long ago' here means ~20 years ago.

<comment><USER34> It says at the start of the article that it has already been experimentally confirmed for spin, this experiment confirms with respect to motion. I don't know when the spin one was done, maybe someone can provide more info.

What I don't know is if the different quantum properties are independent of each other. If they are then presumably one would have to verify this Zeno effect on each property of a quantum particle. So maybe we can now say that the Zeno effect has been experimentally verified for two quantum properties now. Looked at this way you were both correct and incorrect.

If spin and momentum are 'connected' in that if you experimentally verify some meta-property about one it verifies it for the other (such as, in this case, observing a property of a quantum particle freezes that particle) then this has been proved True and you were correct.

Does this make sense? IANAQP.

<comment><USER30> You can do this e.g. with photon polarization. Measuring here is very simple since it is achieved by sending your light through a linear polarizer.

If you send light through a chiral medium, the orientation of the polarization would normally rotate. However if you measure the polarization often enough (by putting enough polar filters that are all oriented in the same direction in between), this rotation will not occur. This experiment is rather simple since you only need a standard optical bench and not any low temperature setup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> 'In the quantum world, the folk wisdom really is true: "A watched pot never boils."'

<comment><USER36> And yet it does boil. The folk wisdom is wrong, so is the experiment wrong as well?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> could you freeze someone/something in time by watching all those atoms?

<comment><USER22> You really should read the rest of the article. The imaging laser does nothing to impede normal movement, only quantum tunneling, which only happens frequently/reliably at near-absolute-zero temperatures anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> So I guess it's safe to hypothesize (for now) that when we're not conscious, we are in a quantum superposition?

<comment><USER38> Why the downvotes? Has no one read about the quantum mind theory? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind)

<comment><USER39> Downvotes are sometimes harsh on HN. I think the majority of HNers perceives the Quantum Mind theory as described in this article: [http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quantum_consciousness](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Quantum_consciousness) .

<comment><USER38> Yeah, also some people can't take a joke...</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Colorblind Leading the Blind (critique of the Netflix charts) - <AUTHOR> http://waxy.org/2011/01/colorblind_leading_the_blind/ <comment><USER2> I'm not even colorblind and I had trouble distinguishing some of the colors from one another.</comment>


Download Amazon Prime Movie and Shows for Offline Viewing - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1003016691

<comment><USER2> This feature, although insanely underrated, has been around for a while. It's one of the few reasons I still use a Kindle Fire.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I really surprised me when I found it, I couldn't believe I had missed it before. Yes, you can watch an entire 13 show series on one cross country flight :-)</comment></comment>


What is your opinion about Ukrainian based development agencies? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
We are a software development company from Ukraine. A few days ago I've found a nice thread with a lot of feedbacks about Indian developers.
What can you say about Ukranian developers? Your feedback a very important for me and my business.
Thank you. <comment><USER2> Most people will stereotype developers from any region of the world. Your stereotype is: much better than India, a bit worse than Western Europe, a lot worse than the US.

A couple of my colleagues worked with Ukrainian dev shops and interestingly enough, the stereotype was reinforced — the shops produced mediocre results. They got the job done (eventually), but it was nothing to write home about.

How are you positioning yourself?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback. I know a lot of internal information from Ukrianians dev shops. Sometimes it can shock people.

About myself. I don't like term "dev shop". Its business model is sell dev with max price, hire dev with min price and don't care about a project. I prefer term "product or service outsourcing" for now and my goal is "product or service co-ownership".

What I know about the difference between West Europe, USA and Ukraine it's product mindset.</comment></comment>


One of the Earliest Industrial Spies Was a French Missionary Stationed in China - <AUTHOR> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/porcelain-corporate-espionage-china-missionary-dentrecolles <comment><USER2> Even earlier were the Byzantine monks who smuggled silk worm eggs out of China. Arguably not espionage, unless you consider the eggs to be DNA packages.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you find the subject interesting I suggest reading "The white road" by Edmund De Waal. It gives a more human, broad and intimate insight into the history of porcelain both in China, Europe and... the USA.

</comment><comment><USER4> Weren't the Dutch even earlier with [Delftware]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delftware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delftware))?

Weird to not even mention the Dutch.

<comment><USER5> > After much experimenting they managed to make a thin type of earthenware > which was covered with a white tin glaze. Although made of low-fired > earthenware, it resembled porcelain amazingly well."

They did not produce porcelain, but a product designed to look like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "[A]n effort to implement mercantilist economic strategies of technology transfer."

This is an amazing euphemism.

<comment><USER7> It's not. Calling it theft when technology is transferred to China, is an exaggeration.

<comment><USER8> In the short term, it is called IP theft and is considered negative. In the long run, it is called the diffusion of technology and is considered positive.

<comment><USER9> Not everyone believes in intellectual property or in the notion that copying is theft.

<comment><USER8> True. As a counterpoint, not everyone believes that technology diffusion is good and desirable.

<comment><USER9> Good for whom?

The ones who already "own" most of the intellectual property? Or the ones who don't own it?

Those who create it, those who distribute it, those who sell it, or those who consume it?

<comment><USER8> Yes. Isn't good and bad usually relative to ones own interests?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>