Keynes, Explained Briefly - <AUTHOR> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/keynes <comment><USER3> This is not brief. It's not one of the better things I've red on Keynes. It doesn't treat alternative economic theories seriously. And lastly and most important of all, economics discussions on hacker sites are as bad if not worse then political and religious discussions.

<comment><USER4> I agree, it's a rather poor summary of Keynes. The author seems to be writing it in order to cheerlead government intervention, not because Keynes is particularly relevant to the current causes of the financial crisis. A great deal of ink has been spilled since Keynes on topics like the endogenous money supply and debt deflation. The author doesn't seem to show any awareness that there are both post-Keynesian and non-Keynesian insights that significantly complicate his neat little package.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a direct summary of Keynes' book _The General Theory_. Have you actually read it? Keynes has often been misconstrued by later writers.

<comment><USER3> Keynes is self contradictory, he's not the most unambiguous of writers, a particularly bad case of the two armed economist.

And as the parent pointed out, there are both anti-Keynesian theories, and there are also many post or neo-Keynesian theories. There's lots of things, and this doesn't concern itself with any of them. Which is fine, you can write what ever you like, I just don't like seeing it on HN.

I don't like seeing on HN because there can not be good discussion from it.

Economics is just complex and interesting enough that geeks easily get into it, have that great light bulb moment of understanding, and immediately start opining about it, long before they've reached a deeper understanding.

It's akin to someone understanding Newtonian physic, being elated about getting it, and getting into internet arguments with people who understand the theory of relativity.

And you can't explain the differences between Newtonian and relativistic physics in a short post And the time required to explain it to random Joe on the internets, is just not worth it.

Thus good discussion is impossible.

<comment><USER5> I think what you mean is that because political economy is closer to dogma than to natural science, rational discussion focused on discovering objective truth is just a waste of time. Economical political decisions are made by men to serve other men, and should be adjusted accordingly not to be incontestable dogma supported by spikes of intellectual masturbation. Eppur si muove!

<comment><USER5> I ask HN fellows to reply with arguments not with anonymous downvotes.

<comment><USER6> No, arijo, biohacker42 didn't say anything close to "rational discussion focused on discovering objective truth is just a waste of time". It's just your idea, and a stupid idea to boot. I downvoted both of your comments accordingly.

<comment><USER5> Disussing dogma is a waste of time and energy. Economic decisions should focus on solving real people problems in pragmatic terms (in an agile way if you wish). Elaborate intellectual theories, though eye-candy, do not stand on firm reality grounding (think of Locke's madman concept - one who makes impeccable and rigorous reasoning based on flawed data and assumptions). That's all I was trying to express in my comment above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _So those are Keynes' prescriptions for a successful economy: low interest rates, government investment, and redistribution to the poor. And, for a time — from around the 1940s to the 1970s — that's kind of what we did. The results were magical: the economy grew strongly, inequality fell away, everyone had jobs._

Until the 1970s, where inflation climbed up and up and up and finally peaked at over 15%.

According to my amateur understanding, economists disagree about exactly how the US got into that mess (which is why Keynes was regarded with some suspicion), but it's important to note that the Fed got us _out_ of it by raising the crap out of interest rates and triggering a recession (as Keynes would have predicted).

</comment><comment><USER8> Quote (supposedly "explaining" why unemployment happens):

 _It used to be, Keynes says, that wealthy men just thought investing was the manly thing to do. They weren't going to sit around and calculate what kind of bonds yielded the greatest expected return. Bonds are for wusses. They were real men. They were going to take their money and build a railroad.

But they don't make rich people like that anymore. Nowadays, they put their money in the stock market. Instead of boldly picking one great enterprise to invest in, they shift their money around from week to week (or hire someone else to do it for them). So these days, it's the stock market that stimulates most new investment. _

Even accepting this explanation, it is worth asking _why_ they don't make rich people who invest in building real stuff rather than chasing paper anymore. What happened to the innate human drive, curiosity and so on? Why is it that downturns in 19th century corrected themselves, but now we need more and more government intervention, progressively more every cycle?

In Economics cause and effect are often difficult to separate, but one reasonable hypothesis is that the widespread adoption of Keynesian policies _themselves_ caused rich people to chase paper, leaving it to government/Federal Reserve to manipulate the stock market to try to stimulate investment indirectly. In other words, Keynesian policies beget more Keynesian policies, in the process generating a whole bunch of Keynesian economists who can "correctly" claim "We told you"; we reach the point where the government runs most of the economy, robbing people of initiative ("we don't make real men anymore").

If you travel to socialist countries, you will observe this in effect. The population displays a curious passivity ("that is the government's problem"). No one thinks about taking the initiative because the incentives systems are all wrong.

<comment><USER9> > If you travel to socialist countries, you will observe this in effect.

That is so true. There are countries in which government jobs are the most prized jobs (high salary, flexible working hours and extremely high job security).

This for me at least is a sad phenomenon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _So those are Keynes' prescriptions for a successful economy: low interest rates, government investment, and redistribution to the poor. And, for a time — from around the 1940s to the 1970s — that's kind of what we did. The results were magical: the economy grew strongly, inequality fell away, everyone had jobs._

Retribution and government investment may or may not be good ideas, but they are orthogonal to the problem of the business cycle.

For some reason, Keynes missed the entirely obvious fact that the fall in aggregate demand originates in collapsing credit bubbles. The credit bubbles happen for a very specific reason - a bug in the Anglo-American tradition of banking in which banks do not match their maturities. When the credit bubbles collapse, and people's bank accounts are wiped out, they stop spending. The supply/demand curve for luxuries and durables goes vertical as people cut expenses in a futile attempt to fix their balance sheets. When they stop buying cars, Detroit lays off workers.

The economy was more stable from the 40's through the 70's because the creation of FDIC insurance de facto turned banking into 100% reserve, maturity matched system (de facto, even though it still had a veneer of the old system). Effectively, with an FDIC insured bank, the individual deposits their money with the government, and then the government gives banks a separate license to print money to make loans. This broke down when the shadow banking sector grew up, and started maturity mismatching without the formal backing of the government.

In summary - the business cycle is really misnamed. It's the "banking cycle". To stop cyclical unemployment, fix the banks.

<comment><USER9> Well, the simple fact is that the above quote from the article is completely wrong.

The 80ies was one of the longest periods of sustained US GDP growth (and the 40ies&70ies weren't that magical). During the 80ies the USA tacked on the equivalent of Germany's GDP to itself.

This article is poorly written and a waste of time. I suspect that the author's motivations for it are more political than it is economical. [http://www.blogmybrain.com/stock_apps/graphical_economy/NIPA...](http://www.blogmybrain.com/stock_apps/graphical_economy/NIPA%20-%20Domestic%20Product%20and%20Income/6/1/a/Real+Gross+Domestic+Product%2C+Chained+Dollars+%5BBillion+Dollar%5D/____Gross_domestic_product)

[http://investintaiwan.nat.gov.tw/en/env/stats/gdp_growth.htm...](http://investintaiwan.nat.gov.tw/en/env/stats/gdp_growth.html)

<comment><USER10> The business cycle has since the 1970's has been a bit worse than the cycle from '45 to 75. Nothing like the current financial crisis happened during that time.

I don't know how the overall growth rates compare. GDP calculations are full of subjective assumptions. I think there is some truth to the statement that the rate of economic growth has slowed, but that's a much longer argument, and not relevant to my original point which was about the business cycle.

<comment><USER9> > The business cycle has since the 1970's has been a bit worse than the cycle > from '45 to 75. Nothing like the current financial crisis happened during > that time.

Nothing like the current financial crises happened since the 1930ies. Then again, the structure of the economy radically changed since that time (think globalisation).

> I don't know how the overall growth rates compare. GDP calculations are full > of subjective assumptions.

The 80ies and the 90ies was one of the best and longest periods of economic growth for the USA. Since 1982 (before the current mess) there was only a small recession in 1990 and a quarter long one in 2001.

GDP is probably one of the least subjective measures that there is. I don't know what other measure would be less objective. You also seem to ignore the extremely high inflation in the 1970ies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _You might think this means that someone who actually did the work and tried to calculate expected profits would clean up, taking money from all the people playing musical chairs._

Warren Buffett made his money like this. He's the most successful stock- investor in the world, and the second richest person (after Bill Gates).

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure the point you're trying to make.

But Warren Buffet isn't really a stock investor (he is but thats not where he made his money). So if you're saying he's one of the stock investors playing musical chairs - I don't think you're correct.

Buffet buys "good companies" he invests in businesses more then stocks. If you're saying Buffet made his money by doing what this article said then I think you're right.. ;-)

<comment><USER13> I think you're playing semantic games. Buying stock in a business _is_ investing in it. Either you're buying new issuance, in which case it goes straight into the company's bank account, or you're increasing the stock's price, thereby increasing the price at which new issuance can be expected to be made, not to mention other things like stock options for incentives / hiring, etc.

The other investment is lending, but I don't think you're suggesting that Buffet is primarily making money buying bonds, or getting even more involved with short-term loans.

<comment><USER12> You and Sam_Odio are both correct, it is a semantic argument (and I do realize at the end of the day its all stock...)

I consider Buffet's traditional buy-and-hold strategy to be a different form of investing then those that tend to buy based solely on the expected performance of the stock price.

<comment><USER14> Buffet isn't buying based on the expected performance of the stock price + dividends? Maybe buffet has a longer time horizon than most investors, but that's the only real difference I can see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _John Maynard Keynes' great insight was to see that all of this was nonsense. The job market is a very special market, because the people who get "bought" are also the people doing all the buying. After all, why is it that people are hired to farm wheat? It's because, at the end of the day, other people want to buy it. But if lots of people are out of a job, they're doing their best to save money, which means cutting back on purchases. And if they cut back on purchases, that means there are fewer people for business to sell to, which means businesses cut back on jobs._

Except this applies to all other markets too. If people can't sell stuff, they won't be able to buy stuff, and this effect can balloon in the same manner. Good luck with your economics, Aaron.

</comment><comment><USER15> People believing Keynes is the reason we're in this mess now, and why 'noone' (the Keynesians) didn't see it coming.

Try this on for size: <http://mises.org/etexts/austrian.asp>

<comment><USER16> Another excellent article from mises.org: <http://mises.org/story/2066>

And in case you're wondering: yes, I'm being sarcastic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The rise in unemployment is due to the mass mis-allocation of resources caused by government intervention into the economy.

Principally, the creation of the central bank and it's long term policies of credit expansion (with moral hazard), low interest rates (underpricing of risk) and of debasement of the currency.

Also, the creation of government backed housing lending institutions (also with moral hazard) that made low interest high risk loans (expanding credit and risk) and tax distortions that encouraged investments in overpriced assets.

</comment><comment><USER18> Good read.

One glaring issue I see is that if you redistribute wealth and "give it to the poor, who will spend it on something useful, like food and clothing", then the next time they need money for useful things, where do you think they will look?

This logic assumes that the poor will take the money they need, then go forward continuing to look for employment as if they'd never been given a handout. This is not practical.

</comment><comment><USER19> "Thus lowering interest rates increases investment — it reduces the cost of getting money, which reduces the cost of making stuff, which means more things can make a profit."

The problem with this reasoning is that Keynes only considers the demand side for capital. What about the supply side? Will lower interest rates encourage savings?

<comment><AUTHOR> Huh? Lower interest rates are the result of an increased supply of capital -- by the government printing money.

<comment><USER8> Government printing money increases capital? Do you even know what "capital" means? By your definition Zimbabwe has extreme amounts of capital ... that seems to have done them a lot of good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> We are in the process of debunking Keynes yet again. How many times does his theory have to fail before people stop believing it ?

<comment><USER21> When has it failed? Keynes has not really been followed since Reagan. It is the neoclassists and the neoconservatives that are failing now.

<comment><USER22> I'm beginning to think that Keynesian economics is a lot like communism: "It's never worked because no one was doing it right."

Maybe it just can't be done right. Maybe the problem is people.

<comment><USER21> Oh, but it did work. It worked when it was actually practiced from the late 40s to the 70s when the US experiences the highest rates of economic growth in its history. During the 70s the US had about the highest average income levels in its history too (this was briefly matched during the Clinton administration but then incomes fell again).

<comment><USER20> No, it failed to cure the depression - World War II cured the depression. It was not practiced from the 40's to the 70's. The average family paid 4% in federal taxes in 1950. JFK cut taxes in the early 60's which caused a spurt of economic growth. Reagan cut tax rates (revenues actually INCREASED) in the 80's which again caused a period of growth. We have still not paid the price for FDR (Social Security) and Lyndon Johnson's (Medicare) programs because we have been borrowing money for 30 years. I guess you must think that trillions of dollars of debt is a sign of a good economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm usually outspoken against obvious non-hacker news on this site. I'm being a hypocrite because I've been looking to write up a folksy 'leaves on the fire' economic analogy for a while and this presented a good opportunity.

        Although, honesty, it doesn't have to be things we all need.
        They could hire people to do anything. This is why inspecting
        the stimulus money for waste is so ridiculous - waste is
        perfectly fine, the important thing is to get the money into
        circulation so that the economy can get back on track.

The madness begins. You could hire people to throw bricks through the windows of rich people. And - indeed - you _will_ get the economy moving. Once, perhaps more than once. But people have memories, and your ability to pull this trick declines every time you use it. The actions the government has on the economy change the way that it responds to stimulus for subsequent events. When Keynes wrote his stuff it was like putting leaves on the fire. Whoosh! A century on... it's still like putting leaves on the fire.. except the heat has gone and the leaves aren't getting hot enough to light up.

If you print and redistribute money to the unemployed on a means-tested basis, you are directly punishing the people who have accumulated wealth (the purchasing power of their money is eroded) for the benefit of those who didn't (that's why they're able to pass the means-test). Why would rational people expose themselves to economies that do this to them?

        Capitalism seems to go through frustrating cycles of
        booms and busts. [...] The right solution was to take
        their money away. Give it to the poor, who will spend
        it on something useful, like food and clothing.

No, the right solution is for the government to permanently stay out of it, and let it stabilise of its own accord. That way, over the course of time, people learn to moderate their behaviour, and you don't create moral hazard traps all over the place that take the heat out of the fire.

A commenter wrote, "We are in the process of debunking Keynes yet again." Although the stimulus is "Keynsean", it's operating in an environment that is substantially different to that which he knew and wrote about. For this reason, I don't think it's any more valid to use the current situation as a criticism of Keynes any more than as a valid criticism of capitalism.

Another commenter wrote, "In summary - the business cycle is really misnamed. It's the "banking cycle". To stop cyclical unemployment, fix the banks."

The current system does have a very influential banking cycle. However, the perspective of 'business cycle' is preferable to 'banking cycle'. A certain proportion of people overextend themselves. It's an aspect of human nature. You have correction periods where they get pulled up for these errors. It is a more universal perspective. There is an inevitability about the business cycle regardless of government action, whereas the same is not true of a 'banking cycle'. Adjusting banking policy won't change human nature.

A book about recursion effects (i.e. the way a stimulus event will cause the system to respect to the same stimulus event differently in the future) is _The Crash of 2008 and What it Means: The New Paradigm for Financial Markets_ (Soros, 2009). It's not really about the 2008 crash, that's just a cute veneer he's put on it to sell more copies of a book that's really a book about philosophy with a very economic bent.

For a stronger Keynsean defence, read Read _Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism_ (Akerlof/Schiller, 2009) for a purist criticism of recent politics and defence of the Bush/Obama stimulus. Though I disagree with the core, the breakdown of 'animal spirits' is useful in its own right, and surely a better lens for viewing what goes in in an economy than 'efficient markets'.

Something that's long-term scary about the current situation is that the political might of nation-state governments has reached a point where private banking is being eliminated globally. In the past it was possible for successful people to look after themselves _and_ generate wealth for the rest - but this is being undermined. The Swiss made the mistake of giving the banks too much backing and have sold out whilst saving the furniture, Luxembourg and Ireland are too European, South Africa is too African, Lietchenstein and Carribean countries are too small, Iceland and the UK are beholden to creditors.

The situation presents a huge opportunity for Chile, Australia and New Zealand. Australia has a gun banking sector already with strong foreign exchange services in at least three centres and would be the strong option. New Zealand cares far less about foreign policy links to the US and has a libertarian party already in parliament. The natural party of government in Chile is the left and they'd be suspicious of private banking but the right are polling well. Chile and Australia have added benefit of metals in the ground. Any could implement special trade zones that created private banks with strong reserve criteria not linked to the government and suck all all the wealth. They'd need to do a currency trick to avoid undermining their export economies but could do this by having two currencies that float independent of one another, or just by having the private banking system store the money in gold or against a commodities index like Goldmans GSCI.

<comment><USER24> It seems you are suggesting that the best solution to a stalled economy is not to have government stimulation, but to let it "stabilise of its own accord". Has this been tried? Any examples? For some reason I thought that there was a general consensus that the government needed to prop up banks and stimulate the economy.

edit: Honest question, btw.

<comment><USER25> Yes, it was tried. The attempt was followed by the Great Depression.

It is understandable that some are reticent to repeat the experiment.

<comment><USER14> Smoot-Hawley was "letting things stabilize"? What about the ERA and Reconstruction Finance (spending on infrastructure like Hoover Dam)? How about bailouts for financial institutions and subsidized home loans?

It's too bad Hoover let things stabilize on their own. One wonders what might have happened if he actually did something!

<comment><USER25> People did things, no doubt about it. The wisdom of those things is another matter. The ERA was a protectionist measure that is today cited as worsening affairs. Reconstruction finance was a good idea, but started in 1932, after 2 years of financial disaster. Hoover's initial responses did not take aggressive action to shore up the money supply or failing banks.

Of course debates on the causes of the Great Depression are endless. Which is why I was careful to say that the Great Depression followed, but was not caused, by that action. However many prominent economists including Milton Friedman and Ben Bernanke have concluded that the primary cause was the contraction in the money supply.

In their view the Federal Reserve did not act fast enough to counter the shrinking monetary supply or to prop up failing banks. The result was multiple rounds of bank panics, the closing of over 40% of all US banks within 4 years, and (after Roosevelt came in) the declaration of a national bank holiday, and an executive order forbidding private speculation in gold. The rapid loss of 1/3 of the money supply was both a cause and effect for the general economic disaster.

Whether or not you agree with this theory, understanding that Ben Bernanke believes it will help you understand why he took the actions he did last year.

<comment><USER14> _People did things, no doubt about it. The wisdom of those things is another matter._

Exactly my point. In the beginning of the great depression, they did things. They didn't try letting things stabilize on their own.

<comment><USER25> They did things. But they did not immediately try to shore up failing banks or stabilize the money supply, which are both parts of the recipe that we use now.

On a related note, the full crisis only hit last year after the Fed decided to let a major financial firm fail.

<comment><USER23> Why are you confident to say that the full crisis has hit?

<comment><USER25> Heh.

I must admit that there are many potential financial disasters that could still hit which would make last year seem minor. I have no clue how the fed plans to unwind the what, half trillion in commercial ARM loans that are under water and set to reset in the next year or two. Obama is incredibly dependent on the Chinese willingness to continue borrowing from the USA. We have a lot of work to do to get debt levels back to reasonable amounts. And I'm not at all sure that the disaster was enough to really scare people into becoming fiscally responsible.

However for the moment people seem convinced that the sky is not falling. There are signs of economic recovery out there. There is even a chance that when the official statistics are done we'll be no longer in a recession. So even if a bigger crisis hit, there would be a good cause to call it a second crisis rather than a continuation of the one last year.

And there would be historical precedent for that. Our current problems come from an asset bubble that was pumped up from attempts to stimulate the monetary supply to head off deflation after the dot com collapse. But people don't think of the recent financial crisis as a continuation of the dot com collapse, despite the connection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26>
      *The best solution is probably a small tax on each trade.*

Don't we already have a tax on stock market trades - The Capital Gains tax? And since it is higher for short-term trades this already provides disincentive to engage in speculative trading.

<comment><USER27> The best solution is probably to let the speculators fall on their faces and serve as examples for the rest instead of punishing the responsible investors to create a bail out.

<comment><USER28> Indeed, as long as actual fraud isn't involved. The only way to prop up failure is to punish success.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> [I line-by-lined the entire post for Aaron pointing out some things, and it came out really, really long. By far my longest comment here - Aaron and others, I hope you find some value in this. I'm exhausted, and I've not edited this with tremendous rigor, but I hope there is value here]

I actually know a lot of Keynes. He was a very smart man and had some interesting ideas, but there were a lot of problems too. The original piece had some problems with it, so I'm going to comment here and let Aaron know via email. If it suits him, I would be happy to be republished, or to contribute to his site so as to spread knowledge. I consider myself in the service of humanity, as I believe he does, so the more we can fight ignorance, the better. Last time I made a commentary like this he asked that I email him with it, so I'm doing so this time at firstname.lastname@example.com, and I do so humbly this time.

In the article, there is a mix of interesting ideas, some not-so-good ideas, and some ethical judgments. I think he and I have several of the same end goals, so I'm just going to point out a few points that I think could be tweaked so as to account for secondary effects and make the best world possible.

> But they're typically forced back to the fundamental conclusion of the > textbook: that people are just demanding to be paid too much.

One thing to remember is that an employee's "fully loaded cost" is more than his take-home pay. There's employer-side social security tax tax and unemployment insurance, benefits, and administrative costs on the business side. On the employee side, they pay income tax and social security tax. So a business might pay $107,000 to an employee in annual salary and expenses, but the employee gets $50,000 after taxes. Generally, a gap between fully-loaded costs and takehome compensation increases unemployment.

> But if lots of people are out of a job, they're doing their best to save > money, which means cutting back on purchases.

> Everyone knows why: put some money away today and it'll be worth more > tomorrow.

Okay - why is money worth more tomorrow? Because, the theory goes, by putting it in the bank, you're asking the bank to lend it out for you. The bank guarantees an interest rate to the saver while charging a higher rate to the borrower. The borrower puts down collateral that the bank can sell if they don't pay. So, when people save more, the banks immediately have more to lend, so people who want to do interesting things can take the money and do the interesting things. These interesting things - building computers, cars, producing medicine, improving the quality of circuits, rennovating and improving real estate, building new real estate, and so on - makes the world "wealthier" - that is, there's new cool stuff, and better old stuff in the world. With this new and better stuff, the borrower makes more money. They pay the bank back plus interest, the bank pays the saver their money with interest, and all is good. The saver's money is worth more tomorrow (the money saved comes back, plus the interest) because it was used to better the world, and someone paid for that privilege.

That's the theory anyway - in practice, banks don't actually do that any more. Which brings us to our next point:

> Money isn't worth anything on its own, it's only useful because it can buy > things.

Kind of true, yes - but what you're talking about is what's called, "Money as a fiat currency". Anything can, and has been, money in the past. If I wrote a certificate that said, "Sebastian guarantees he'll work ten hours for you in the future on any legal project of your choice", and you trust me, I'll have just created "money". That's money backed by my labor. In the past, to standardize money, a few things have been done: It's been made into coins made out of precious metals that are of uniform values. It's been a result of trustworthy warehouses issuing certificates about the quality of goods in their warehouse, such as wheat or tobacco. Then people can exchange those certificates instead of carrying bushels of their crops around.

Fiat money (paper money, backed by nothing) is an illusion. And actually, if you look at history, every paper currency eventually goes to zero, because every government eventually ends. And when governments start to end, they tend to get desperate and what's called "debase" their currency by creating more of it. Debase: "to reduce the intrinsic value of (a coin) by increasing the base- metal contents" (from Merriam-Webster online). So that'd be mixing brass in with gold or iron in with silver. Looks like good stuff, but it's not. Governments do this to try to stay alive - from a war, or riots, or going bankrupt, or whatever. You can read about how it happened in Argentina recently, or any Soviet country as it was falling apart, or various African regimes, or the Confederacy during the U.S. civil war. Printing more paper debases a paper currency like mixing iron with silver debases a precious metals currency.

> But if everyone's saving, that means people aren't buying.

In normal banking, you can't save and get interest unless the bank is loaning the money out for people to use. If no one takes the money that the bank is getting in deposits, there can be no interest paid. The bank adjusts rates naturally to a small spread between what people are willing to deposit at and what people are willing to borrow at. It is possible for people to panic and put their money in a mattress and not use it for anything, but this goes against human nature: We like progress. Eventually, people stop panicking and put their resources to use. This is a fundamentally human thing to do.

> This is the multiplier: each dollar that gets spent provides even more than > one dollar's worth of boost to the economy.

I was going to just point out errors originally, but this line is incredibly important and a very important contribution Keynes made so I wanted to highlight it. Basically, every hour someone works on something valuable creates new wealth, which creates an incentive for other people to work, so they're willing to work another hour to build new stuff. It's a good thing. Very good.

> How do you decide how many trucks to make? Obviously, you make as many as > you think you can profitably sell. But there's no way to calculate something > like that — it's a question about what customers will do in the future. > There's literally no way to know. And yet, obviously, trucks get made.

There is very little certainty about the world, but "There's literally no way to know" is a bit strong. There are many ways people work to figure things out, and people have a decent but inexact idea about demand all the time. Yes, people do make bad decisions (too many trucks) and then sell them at a loss at times. Then companies with bad judgment die and their trucks are sold very cheap to recoup as much of the loss as possible, while only the most foresighted/lucky/skilled trucking companies remain. If all trucking companies go under, and people still need more trucks, then new trucking companies will be formed as the prices of older trucks start rising. One of the biggest misconceptions about capitalism is that it's "smooth" - it's not. There's bumps and breaks in the cycle, just like in humanity in general. Under all economic or governmental systems, people are prone to bad judgment. Under general freedom of action, these problems correct themselves over time though it can be really unpleasant. That opens the door to thinking about whether there's any general responsibility for people who make bad decisions or get hit with bad luck - personal ethical judgment, I think there is. The next question becomes where that responsibility, if any, might lie - I tend to think at a smaller level, because it's more prone to reciprocity and good will and less prone to corruption, but people can agree to disagree there. But that's ethics which I'll generally refrain from whilst discussing economics.

> But they don't make rich people like that anymore. Nowadays, they put their > money in the stock market. Instead of boldly picking one great enterprise to > invest in, they shift their money around from week to week (or hire someone > else to do it for them). So these days, it's the stock market that > stimulates most new investment.

Whenever someone buys stock, one of two things happens:

1\. The company is selling the stock, and it gets the money put in. It hires people, buys equipment (say, trucks), or does other things companies do with money, all of which opportunities for work in aggregate. ("in aggregate" is a fancy word meaning "in total" - one truck purchase might be an unused truck somewhere, but all the truck buying in the world creates a demand for more trucks, mechanics, etc)

2\. The buyer of stock buys it from another guy, who gets the money. There's still the same mix of money in the world. Before, Charles had 10,000 shares and 0 dollars. Paul had $10,000 and 0 shares. After, Charles has 0 shares and $10,000. Paul has 10,000 shares and 0 dollars.

So it's impossible for "all the rich to buy stock", thus running out the cash in the world. For every buyer there's a seller than now has the cash, or a company that now has the cash with which to build trucks, railroads, hire a marketing person, or whatever. Actually, it's funny, there's no way to create wealth without actually building stuff. Many of Paul Graham's essays cover this. (Fake paper wealth is eventually destroyed, and is unpleasant when it happens. Whether society has an obligation to people unskilled/unlucky enough to be holding fake paper wealth when it is destroyed is back to the earlier ethical question. Ethically, I have less sympathy for people with fake paper wealth than people whose routine of working is disrupted, but they probably deserve a bit of help too)

> But how does the stock market figure out what profits are supposed to be? In > truth, it has no more clue than you do.

This is akin to asking, "How does an eggplant figure out what dish it should be cooked in? In truth, it has no more clue than you do." I'm NOT joking or being snarky. The stock market is not designed to, and never can, make judgments about what profits should be. The stock market ONLY matches the lowest asking price of a stock to the higher buying price of a stock until they even out and become the same (with people continuously selling if someone is willing to buy for more than what they want, and someone continuously buying if people are willing to sell for what they want). People say, "The stock market reflects value, and people's trust, and blah blah blah..." This is nonsense. The stock market is not smart. It mixes buyers and sellers. The rest is propaganda spread by finance people. If people are buying and selling at stupid prices, then the stock market will be stupid. It doesn't figure out prices. It can't. It just lets people buy and sell to each other at the prices they want to. But...

> We forget about the most basic fact: that nobody has any clue what the stock > price should be to begin with.

...this is untrue. There's plenty of information that goes into it. The easiest is "price/earnings ratio", called P/E. That means, how much does one dollar of profit cost you to buy? I was going to go on to describe P/E and other things of "fundamental investing", but it's beyond the scope of what I'm trying to explain here. There's lots of literature on it. Suffice to say, P/E is rather unsubjective, but the judgments you make on it are. Here's literature for the curious (there is problems with it, it's not meant to be a complete answer, it's just a good jumping off point):

<http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price-earningsratio.asp>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P/E_ratio>

When people are buying things for an idiot crazy P/E ratio, bad things will happen to them. There's few guarantees in life, but that's almost one of them. Idiot crazy P/E ratio, you're getting burned. That almost always happens. "Fundamental investors" - that's people who invest based on how much money a company is making, their sales, their debt, and other objective factors like that, combined with a little information about the industry and an opinion on the company's management - they have ways of valuing companies. They can usually figure out what a company is "worth" beyond the hype and fads and craziness. It is not random or unpredictable.

> It's like a giant game of musical chairs — everybody's rushing not to be the > one left standing when the music stops.

These people are called speculators, as opposed to fundamental investors. They do provide some valuable roles to society (liquidity is the big one), but this is not all the stock market is. Not by a longshot (and I'm not even a huge fan of the stock market, by the way).

> Or, you could say, it's like those newspaper competitions where you have to > pick the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs. The prize goes to > the person who picks the faces that are most picked, so you don't pick the > faces you find prettiest, but instead the faces you think everyone else will > find prettiest.

This is true for speculators - you just described speculating pretty well. But fundamental investing doesn't work like that - if other people don't like a great company, you buy it all up and distribute the profits every year in a dividend to the investors. Companies used to offer dividends a lot by the way, it's just our brave new world where people don't. Why they don't is a long topic, but suffice to say, there is an "out" for people who like good companies that other people don't like. It's getting lots of dividends (profits from the company, in cash). It works pretty well.

> Calculating expected profits is really quite hard.

In new fields, like Facebook's profit in 2011, yes. In volatile fields, like Exxon in 2011, yes. In semi-stable fields, you can usually make some pretty educated guesses.

> It's in the fundamental nature of your strategy that your investments seem > crazy to everyone else.

This doesn't matter. If the company turns a profit, you can get dividends. You don't need people to like your stock unless you want to sell it all, which you don't want to do too often if you're investing for the long term.

> And when your stocks aren't doing well (which is most of the time — they're > long-term picks, remember), people will take this as evidence of your > failures and pull their money out.

This is true. It's also exceedingly stupid. A stock's price isn't what it's worth - it's what someone's willing to pay you RIGHT NOW. That'd be like if someone walked up to you, said, "Hey, I'll give you $200 for your $1,000 watch", and you panicked and sold it to them. It's really crazy.

> And that's scary because — recall — the whole point of the stock market is > to decide the crucial question of what we, as a society, should build for > the future.

You need to be really, really careful writing things like this. The stock market is not a sentient being and has no general sense of ethics. It is a place where people exchange stocks for money at the "clearing price" (where people will buy and sell). There is no value judgment. It does not tell society what to build. It's simply where stocks are all the stocks are sold at the highest price someone will pay, and sold at the lowest price someone will sell, until everyone is stable. There is no intelligence or value judgment. The stock doesn't tell you _anything_ except what the price people are currently willing to buy and sell is at.

> The best solution is probably a small tax on each trade.

That's actually an interesting idea. I always wondered why a company didn't issue stock that said, "Trading this stock requires the buyer to pay the company $1 to gain official voting rights and become legitimate owner of the company. Trying to exchange ownership or control of this stock or otherwise circumvent this agreement consists breach of contract and forfeits the stock." That would slow down stock trading and all speculation would bring new capital to the company. I don't know why it doesn't happen (laws, I'm guessing?).

> Even more perversely, it means economic performance depends in no small part > on keeping businessmen happy.

Everyone is a businessman. Anyone who interacts with humanity in any way is, seriously, a businessman. There is no gap between a businessman and the rest of society. It's a relatively recent phenomenon that large conglomerates provided so much of humanities needs and wants, but we're actually shifting away from that as small businesses can get large-business economies of scale from competing providers. In short, the above quote is false. If the businessmen give up and leave, as long as someone half competent is willing to do anything that others are willing to pay for, the economy will not halt. (Though, talented managers - as rare as they are - are actually woefully unappreciated, and an economy losing them would really take some blows. This happened to the USSR, Red China, Nazi Germany, and various other totalitarian places - when a place gets evil enough, the most talented, enterprising, smart, and resourceful people dedicate all their talent to getting the hell out of there, which does in fact hurt an economy's growth quite a bit - <USER2> fun, look at how many of the wealthy people in the USA, Hong Kong, Israel, and other havens came from direct immigrants or first generation resourceful people fleeing totalitarian places)

> Most costs are pretty clear — you need to buy equipment and hire people.

This strikes me as a general flaw of Keynes - he doesn't recognize that buying and selling are always the same transaction. Any unclear demand is an unclear supply. A clear cost of equipment is a clear price of equipment. Whenever someone "puts their money in stocks", someone else has "taken their money out of stocks", or the company has gotten the money and will (presumably) start putting it to use.

> But since you need to make stuff now that you can only sell in the future, > one of your big costs is going to be money to use in the meantime. And the > cost of money is just the interest rate. (If you get a loan for a million > dollars at 5% interest, you're essentially paying $50,000 for the right to > use the money now.)

Huge Keynes wrongness here - this one is ugly because it seems so correct on the surface. But this only applies to fiat, paper currency. The fake, illusion money you referenced earlier. You can't just "set" an interest rate, unless you're a government that doesn't mind debasing your currency. Debasing your currency makes the value of every bit of your currency go down. "And the cost of money is just the interest rate" - the interest rate is set by the same process everything else is: The price people are willing to sell (deposit) and buy (borrow) meet. Same as the stock market, same as the truck market, same as the labor market. Let's pretend for a moment that the government set the interest rate at zero percent - well, then people would borrow tons of money. But who would deposit it? Who would risk their money to get nothing back?

No one. So the government debases the currency by printing more. Again, "debase" is just the historical term from mixing the metals, it's not a value judgment. We could call it "making the value of all the currency that exists go down by printing more" instead, but the word already exists, and it's "debase". I'm not crazy about the word myself - it's just a historical throwback to people mixing base currencies (iron, brass) with precious metals (silver, gold) to create fake, lower quality, debased precious metal money.

Anyway, government manipulating the currency = debasing or inflating the currency artificially. The former leads to depression, the latter leads to inflation. (Why is complicated - in short, people stop using a kind of money if it gets debased too much - this is actually where ticking off rich people hurts - they stop signing and issuing contracts in USD, instead using something else. Remember, a paper currency always eventually loses all its value. Always, it's happened every time)

> Well, if the interest rate is the cost of money, the obvious answer is the > amount of money in circulation. If there's a lot of money lying around, you > can get some pretty cheap.

The other things I've commented on are general details-based errors, whereas this is completely incorrect. Interest rates on non-fiat currencies in a free market are set at the rate where people are willing to sell (deposit) and buy (borrow) meeting, just like all other markets. The amount of money in existence _does not matter_ \- if someone has a gigantic pile of, say, gold or wheat or tobacco, but they're perfectly happy having a pile of it, they won't lend it out unless you blow them away. But most things have their price - someone credible starts offering 50%, 100%, 150%, maybe you lend your gold or wheat. Or put another way - how much money would you want back to lend a stranger your car? A hell of a lot more than 10%. What if they crash it? Break it? General wear and tear? Don't give it back? But if someone credible offered you, say, 100% of what your car is worth to borrow it for a year, you might just say yes to that. Maybe it's 1000%? Who knows? Yes, generally, more stuff unused will make people more willing to deposit (sell), but not always. Interest rates are set by people talking, negotiating, and where the buying price and selling price meet, just like everything else.

> Which means that, fundamentally, unemployment is caused by a lack of money: > more money (assuming people don't hoard it all) means lower interest rates, > lower interest rates (assuming expected profits don't crash) means higher > investment, higher investment (assuming people don't stop buying) means more > employment, and more employment means higher prices, which means we're going > to need more money.

Keynes made a lot of good points. This part of his work - the "we can play with fiat currency to create wealth" part - is not some of his good stuff. Interest rates artificially low is what we had the last ten years - it meant people got stupid and crazy and wasteful with the free money. Interest rates artificially high means people develop less than they could and progress doesn't happen. With a non-fiat currency, based in real stuff, this balances naturally. Governments playing with fiat currency always - always - abuse it and bring it to zero.

Remember, it's not just the leaders that you like that are insightful that get to play with the currency. For every Thomas Jefferson or Marcus Aurelius, you get a George Bush or Nero. For every good Chancellor, you get a Hitler. These people get to play with the fiat currencies too. They make it go to zero to fund their warmongering and corruption and destruction. But inevitably, every government gets run by a bad person. Also inevitably, every fiat currency goes to zero.

> Money is created by the central bank (the Federal Reserve in the US), which > decides what they want the interest rate to be and then prints new money > (which they use to buy up government debt) until the interest rate is where > they want.

Yes. They got us into this mess with their "low low rates!" of the last ten years. Now people are hoping they'll get us out of it. They've done so, so far, by lowering rates more. There's even talk of having a negative interest rate - paying people to take money! I could point out how crazy that is, and I will if the reason why is unclear, but suffice to say, the people at the Federal Reserve are just as prone to knuckleheadery as the rest of us, if not more so.

> What do you do if the interest rate is zero and people are still out of > work?

A very easy one would be to cut taxes, actually. Let's say currently, for every dollar an employer pays, the employee receives 50 cents. Well, now there's a big problem on your hands - the employee needs to be offered TWICE the money that makes it worth it for him to work to take a job. If the employee wants $3,000 after-tax per month, but the employer would have to pay $6,000 in employer-side taxes, employer-side insurance, administrative costs, employee-side taxes, employee-side insurance, etc, etc, well, you've got a problem. Now, there'll always be some gap - administrative costs, management, and so on. But cutting income taxes always reduces unemployment and fairly quickly. Actually, it's the only answer when the "debase the fiat currency" plan isn't working.

> The government has to step in.

Agreed.

> Instead of waiting for billionaires to build pleasure-domes, the government > can hire people to build things we all need — roads, schools, houses, high- > speed Internet connections. Although, honesty, it doesn't have to be things > we all need. They could hire people to do anything. This is why inspecting > the stimulus money for waste is so ridiculous — waste is perfectly fine, the > important thing is to get the money into circulation so that the economy can > get back on track.

Okay, I was going to make a joke or be snarky, but I won't. This is a fallacy. Debasing the currency just moves the problems around. It means people won't want to hold U.S. currency, and won't want contracts written in U.S. currency. And remember, USD is "illusionary money", as you already mentioned and covered. Debasing it (making everything in existence already worth less) is a good way to get people to stop buying the illusion. Now, I didn't quote it, but you alluded to billionaires not wanting to buy pleasure domes and that being the problem. Actually, billionaires usually don't hold their billions in cash - they hold it in real estate, stocks (as already covered), and other assets. When a currency is debased, the price of everything rises pretty quickly. That means the billionaires get hurt less. You know who gets hurt the worst? That would be poor and middle class people who tend to keep much of their net worth in cash, and also people who have contracts that call for them to get paid a set rate in the future. Debasing the currency means the price of all their materials will rise, making their contracts not profitable at the rates they guaranteed to sell. So the break their contracts. It's a big mess. Debasing isn't the answer, especially past zero percent.

> Another good solution is redistributing income. Poor people are a lot more > likely to spend money than billionaires. If we take some money from the > billionaires and give it to the poor, the poor will use it to buy things > they need and people will get jobs making those things.

1\. This is a value judgment.

2\. Wealth redistribution never hits the billionaires the hardest. EVER. Much of the stimulus went to already wealthy people. Wealthy people get better access to universities, police, parks, and public transit. The don't build public transit to very poor areas, and if they do, the areas become wealthy quickly with the poor people moving out. Poor areas aren't as well policed. And so on. It's very hard to redistribution involuntarily - by definition, you're creating a power vacuum that's supposed to take money and wealth from some people and give it to others. Who do you think is going to win in that arrangement - the most resourceful, educated, sophisticated, driven, ambitious people (the wealthy), or someone else? That's a serious question without any value judgment - I'd very much like to fight poverty. Personally, I fight children's cancers. I've run charity events for St. Jude's Children's Hospital in the USA and Great Ormond Street in London. But I'll tell you, I've seen some sickening things with laws that are meant to redistribute. I know some people that've gotten the money. Then they throw a "cash for clunkers" bone to poor people to get them stuck in more consumerism. A guy pays $10,000 in taxes, and they give him back $3,000 to buy a car he doesn't need or want. I know a guy that owns a bunch of unprofitable farmland and receives the subsidies. He just bought it on the math on government subsidies. But I digress - I'm with you ethically - raising the standard of living globally is important, and some people can have their standard of living go up faster. But "debase the currency" isn't the answer - it ruins nations. Other redistribution plans tend to make the wealthy get wealthier frequently. And if they're very, very successful, you get a USSR situation where your smartest people leave.

> Remember that money is just a kind of illusion.

Fiat money is an illusion, this is true. Debasing ("hey? what the hell? why does a cheeseburger meal cost $12 and a movie ticket cost $18?") breaks that illusion.

I apologize, I was going to go through the whole piece, but I've writing for a quite while and I'm getting tired. Aaron, I'm going to email you - if you'd like me to clean this up so it can be a formal post on your blog, or if I can otherwise be of service to you, please call on me. I'll shoot you an email now, and you have my best wishes. I think you're one of the most passionate, charismatic, and intelligent people I've seen write. I think you can be a tremendous difference maker in the world. I believe our goals are in line, so with the best methods, perhaps we can serve as champions of humanity.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a long post, mostly filled with things that are either irrelevant to what I said or obviously wrong. But the basic place where it disagrees with Keynes is that it adopts the old-time monetarist view that printing money always "debases" the currency. This seems intuitive, but it's been proven just wrong. During the period I mention when we kept interest rates low, the economy grew steadily. When monetarist targeting was tried (under Volcker), we got a huge recession. The recent problem wasn't caused by low interest rates but a housing bubble. If Greenspan had simply given a speech pointing out the bubble instead of repeatedly denying it, it could have been averted.</comment></comment>


Extinct ibex is resurrected by cloning - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/4409958/Extinct-ibex-is-resurrected-by-cloning.html <comment><USER2> Wow, how intrepid.

<comment><USER3> Wow, for some reason I thought I could actually be the first to crack that one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This gives me high hopes for the woolly mammoth clone, although the clones seem to live no longer than a day.

</comment><comment><USER5> why do people care so much about species going extinct? Millions of species have gone extinct before....millions of species will go extinct again. Its the cycle of life.

I mean sure its pretty horrible that a whole species goes extinct...but why does it matter if there are 300 species of goat or 299.

For every species that goes extinct, another 2 spring up to take its place. Adapt or die. Why should we coddle the inferior species? Let the nature take its course. Remember, if the dinosaurs didn't go extinct, man wouldn't have survived.

<comment><USER6> Species didn't used to go extinct the way they do now. Also, new ones don't spring up anymore. We've fundamentally destroyed the natural process by drastically altering every single ecosystem out there.

The reason to care is that we could, very easily, be left with nothing but rats and pigeons if we don't.

<comment><USER7> _The reason to care [about species extinction] is that we could, very easily, be left with nothing but rats and pigeons_

[http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR2...](http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR20.txt)

 _We ought also consider the species of animals whose numbers are increased when the human population increases - chickens, goats, cattle, minks, dogs, cats, laboratory white mice, and canaries._

<comment><USER6> I'm sure it would make the aurochs feel better to know that after we slaughtered it into extinction, we kept the domesticated version around to live in tiny pens and provide us milk and/or beef until we slaughter them too. And wolves will be happy to know their domesticated brethren are in humane shelters everywhere after we gun the last one down from a helicopter.

<comment><USER7> _we slaughtered [the aurochs] into extinction_

Humans also created a similar replacement: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heck_Cattle#Controversy>

_Heck cattle are considered by some the most suitable cattle breed for low intensity grazing systems in certain types of nature reserves, due to their ruggedness and lack of need for human care. Heck cattle today are propagated in some places to fulfill the role of extinct megafauna in the ecosystem._

A replacement was also created for the extinct tarpan: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heck_horse>

<comment><USER6> It's a replacement from the standpoint of humans who want meat and/or labor. From an ecological standpoint, our attempts to create replacements often fail miserably.

<comment><USER7> _From an ecological standpoint, our attempts to create replacements often fail miserably._

Source? What is an ecological standpoint?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> DNA not the whole story: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics>

</comment><comment><USER9> Why didn't they just dist-upgrade a heron?

<comment><USER10> That would be an ibis you're thinkng of?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think you could cross-reference different sources to error-check the incomplete DNA.

</comment><comment><USER12> Sweet. Can we have Jurassic Park now? Why or why not?

<comment><USER13> Apparently finding a full intact DNA sample is "impossible"... but here's hoping. :)

<comment><USER14> What happens if you average over several non-intact samples and take the common denominator? Or layer the DNA over a descendant based on certain markers? Given enough damaged "files" and good diff tools, I feel like hacking together a working one would be possible. Can someone who knows more tell me what I'm missing?

<comment><USER15> DNA is more complicated than that. I don't fully understand the process, but I believe it works like this:

You can't read the atoms in DNA one after the other and make a list. You chop the DNA into pieces and pattern match sections (fragments) against markers. Then you try to put fragments together by matching overlaps.

But if you have sections that repeat, or have a lot of the same atom over and over, you can't directly read those.

Usually when they say: "we published the DNA" they mean the "coding section" - those are the sections that can make proteins. But there is a lot more to DNA, non-coding, or junk DNA that can not be easily (or at all?) read.

So for the comment above yours, I think what they have is fragments, but no overlapping sections, so that can't put it together into a whole. It's not like a file with gaps - it's random pieces of it, of random lengths, in a random order.

<comment><USER7> _You can't read the atoms in DNA one after the other and make a list._

Discrete units of information on DNA strands are not _atoms_. They are _nucleotides_ or _base pairs_. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleotide>

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

<comment><USER15> I know, I was just trying to keep things simple.

Or, you can use the other definition of atom: indivisible part, and an atom of DNA is it's smallest building block :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The coincidence between this and Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex being out clearly demonstrates the power of Linux.

It's even playing god now! All hail our new Canonical master!

Prepare for the Jackalope to become real sometime after April.</comment>


As Housing Costs Soar, San Francisco Seeks Ballot Solution - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/us/as-housing-costs-soar-san-francisco-seeks-ballot-solution.html?contentCollection=us&action=click&module=NextInCollection&region=Footer&pgtype=article

<comment><USER2> It seems like all this would do is push rental prices higher, as investors push the burden of the tax onto the purchaser of the unit, who pushes the burden onto individual renters. As an investor or owner, I don't really care about increased taxes as long as I can float the difference and demand is high enough that I can make it up in the sale price/rent.

</comment><comment><USER3> This makes zero sense. If the supposed problem is that people are being kicked out of their homes due to broken rent control laws, let's fix rent control laws. This tax is likely to punish more than just professional flippers, and even still, won't affect those businesses all that much.

<comment><USER4> How do you figure a 24% tax won't affect flippers much? It raises the price of kicking tenants out then TIC-ing a building by the 24% tax, or 4.5 years of property taxes (probably at the remodeled price), or becoming a landlord.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"You can't legislate your way out of a red-hot housing market, but the Board of Supervisors is trying to mitigate the damage," Ms. Wolf said. "This is a big problem. If you don't care about poor people, you should care about tourism, which is our No. 1 industry. You have to have a service class, and they have to have somewhere to live. If we're all white yuppies, we're not so interesting._

The arguments against rent control aren't premised on not caring about poor people - they are based on not privileging those poor people who happen to live in San Francisco. Being poor has a whole range of potential negative consequences, and that's why we have things like welfare, progressive taxes, and EITC.

Also, rent control benefits a lot of people who aren't poor, for no obvious welfare reason.

Regarding the need for service workers, the market can deal with that: wages will increase if enough workers leave due to rent prices. The outcome will involve higher prices for those services, but according to the second welfare theorem, it will still be an efficient outcome (please look up the second welfare theorem if you are busy typing "efficient for who?").

On the cultural side, I can see the potential benefits from having a mix of different incomes in a city. But statements like _if we're all white yuppies, we're not so interesting_ betrays a certain animus towards Whites.</comment>


Reddit's decision to police "behavior, not ideas" is reckless - <AUTHOR> http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/how-reddit-works-as-an-incubator-of-hate

<comment><USER2> I disagree that Reddit is an _incubator_ of hate, but the article makes a good point showing it's a _channel_ for all kinds of communication, including - apparently indiscriminately - racism and other kinds of hate.

In much the same way 4chan was getting increasingly linked in public opinion with the bad things happening in /b/, it appears that Reddit has similar albatrosses around its neck. At that point, it becomes very difficult to get rid of a worrisome user segment - because of their nature and number, any action to drive them away has a huge potential to backfire.

This is a bad position to be in for a business: you need to placate a growing number of mean-spirited users who constantly probe the boundaries of what they can get away with, and yet you have to do everything you can to avoid the problem that your brand is publicly identified with the hate groups residing on your site.

I want to point out that the goals of a company having these problems are not necessarily the goals of people who want to deprive hate groups from having a public and company-supported outlet.

</comment><comment><USER3> While /r/coontown is place filled with scum that doesn't mean we should shut it down or ban it... These people are going to exist, reddit community or no reddit community. It shouldn't be reddit's (or any internet company's) job to police things people find offensive as long as they are legal (free speech).

Related, I'm a little worried about stores pulling the confederate flag. I don't know where I stand on that. Don't get me wrong I think it's a terrible symbol and the fact it was/is flying on government property is crazy to me (I honestly did not know this was a thing). That said banning a flag or anything product that uses said flag on your platform feels a little reminiscent of not baking a cake for a gay wedding which I'm still conflicted on as well. What about a confederate flag cake or a swastika cake?

Please understand I'm not comparing being gay to being a racist or a nazi I'm just comparing people being made to produce something that is at odds with their personally held beliefs. The example that hits home for me is if I run a software development company and I have a client who asks me to make a product for a political party I disagree with. Do I have the right to refuse to work on the project? (this example happened to be as an employee) Or, hypothetically, someone offers to pay me to make an anti-gay or racist website for their cause/group. It's something I don't quite have my head wrapped around and don't know how to feel about it all. I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on the matter.

<comment><USER4> I see what you're saying but I disagree. I don't think stores should be forced to cary confederate flags anymore than they should be force to cary pride flags (that is, not at all).

However, I don't necessarily think they should be able to deny their offered service to bigots or gays. Services including, potentially, special ordering flags from their manufacturer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kitchen knives can be used to murder people. That doesn't mean we're not going to use them.

<comment><USER6> A kitchen knife's sole purpose isn't to hurt someone.

<comment><USER7> And neither is reddit's. I'm sure /r/programming, /r/mylittlepony and /r/NeutralPolitics, just to take a few examples, would find it very amusing if they see people accusing them of being 'incubators of hate'.

<comment><USER6> The article was talking about a specific subreddit and it's purpose, nice try though

<comment><USER8> The original title was "Reddit Is an Incubator of Hate" so some of the replies you are seeing are referencing the old title.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wouldn't mind hate if it was directed at buzzfeed.

</comment><comment><USER10> I can't believe I fell for buzzfeed clickbait on HN. :(

</comment><comment><USER11> Reality is an incubator of hate. You're not obliged to participate in it online, much like in real life.

</comment><comment><USER12> No, it's not. What subs are you subscribed to?

<comment><USER6> The article is talking about the subscribers of a specific subreddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This post was flagkilled by users, but as we usually do when there's an ongoing discussion, we unkilled it so commenting can continue.

We changed the title to (most of) the subtitle, since some of the flaggers seemed to be reacting to the Buzzfeed headline.</comment>


Google Cloud acquires data startup Cask - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cask.co/2018/05/cask-is-joining-google-cloud/ <comment><USER2> "This has been a great journey with all of you."</comment>


Add Social Sharing Links to your Blog without widget JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AddSocialSharingLinksToYourBlogWithoutWidgetJavaScript.aspx

<comment><USER2> That's awesome! Thanks for the advice</comment>


The Monty Hall Problem - <AUTHOR> https://titan.red/articles/monty-hall-problem <comment><USER2> Doesn't choosing between two choices equal a 50% chance instead of 66.6% chance? You've already eliminated an option.

<comment><USER3> Let's make the fact there are two goats more explicit: One is a Doe`D` and the other is a Buck `B`.

If you chose `D` then `B` must be removed leaving you between staying `D` or choosing `C`.

If you chose `B` then `D` must be removed leaving you between staying `B` or choosing `C`.

If you chose `C` then `D` or `B` must be removed leaving you between staying `C` or choosing `D or B`.

Because your original choice was a 33% chance - by removing a goat - it makes the remaining option a 66% chance of not being a goat. The opened door is functionally equivalent as _opening both doors that you didn 't choose._

So let's pretend the host doesn't open the door in a separate action. Instead you're given the choice to open _both doors_ that you didn't pick and if _one of them_ has the car you win. Would you choose to open your selected door or both other doors?

Your selection is a 33% chance - but opening both other doors would be a 66% chance!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's correct! :) Thanks for the assist.</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing App Coins - <AUTHOR> http://blog.assemblymade.com/introducing-app-coins

<comment><USER2> I'm a huge believer in AppCoins via @naval + @FredWilson, including my own writings on the subject ([https://gist.github.com/fractastical/6e4a6aff1dd329e0a204](https://gist.github.com/fractastical/6e4a6aff1dd329e0a204)), but this is still a bit opaque to me.

Some questions I have right off the bat:

       How many AppCoins are there per app?
       Is this established at the beginning or can more coins be minted along the way?
       How is this enforced? Is it distributed? Does it exist on the blockchain in some way?
       Is there a market for AppCoins? Are they tradable? Or are they only dispensed by the project creator?
       Do the holders of AppCoins have any particular rights besides a potential revenue share?
       Is the revenue share enforced in some way? Legally? Programmatically?

<comment><USER3> I don't see any mention of these "AppCoins" being a decentralized crypto- currency. It's kind of interesting that you assumed that. I did too. It shows how our perspectives have been changed by Bitcoin's existence.

<comment><USER2> If you google "AppCoin" ~90% of results are decentralized crypto-currency related. That's also the context that Naval and Fred Wilson have used it in. It's a bit weird to see it used in another context.

<comment><USER4> The Appcoin that google brings up seems to be unrelated to assemblymade.com. e.g. [https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=475160.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=475160.0) , so who knows how "app coins" from assemblymade actually work. I would guess it isn't a decentralised cryptocurrency, just a token to be used on the site.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


We must ensure ISPs don't stop the next Google getting out of the garage - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/19/we-must-ensure-google-garage <comment><USER2> Corey Doctorow has a thoughtful article on how ISP's are trying to limit internet access for their own benefit. (The title is a little over the top.) Some of these things happen in the US, but seem to be stomped on by the FCC and public opinion. The rest of the world, including the UK and Europe, governments are abandoning the citizens and getting in bed with the ISP's. Corey makes the point that telcos owe us net-neutral access because they are granted a monopoly to lay the wires.

I read a couple of UK nonpolitical blogs, and I find astounding the willingness to compromise what we in the US consider basic rights, like freedom of speech or unfettered telecommunications. I dont like a world with the worst of US IP policy and European speech, privacy and communications policy.

</comment><comment><USER3> The issue of metered billing has been criticized here and in other places. It makes for a pretty popular punching bag, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss it as a non-issue. The ISPs have to manage oversubscription rates. It's a real problem. Total throughput is fixed at various points along the network, and there are going to be times when the demand outstrips the available capacity.

So what should the ISPs do? Time Warner's recent foray into metered billing was obviously moronic. Customers shouldn't be penalized beyond their monthly payment for usage. Their plan also didn't do anything to reduce congestion during peak traffic hours.

I think the onus should be on the ISP to make sure that they can actually deliver the rates that they are advertising, which are clearly far too high. The customer shouldn't get screwed just because the ISP can't manage the oversubscription rate that it wishfully dreamt up.

In this scenario, advertised rates would have to drop substantially, but it means that the customer, not the big media partner, decides on his own quality of service.

This is basically how it has worked for business class circuits for all of eternity. I guess I don't understand why they can't apply the same pricing model to ordinary consumers.

<comment><USER4> I see nothing wrong with metered billing - and it certainly far preferable to ISPs doing deals with favoured partners. Even better, pricing could vary with price of day. There are (or, at least, were) electricity tariffs in the UK that offered low rates for a few hours at night.

<comment><AUTHOR> If this happened, bittorent clients could get an automatic throttling feature built in to minimize downloading/uploading during peak hours, and maximize during off-hours.

<comment><USER3> This makes sense for heavy bittorrent users who are generally bright enough to realize how much data they are sending back and forth, but do you really expect casual YouTube viewers to know how much data is transferred when they watch a video? What about Grandma who wants to video chat with her grandkids? Graduated metered billing makes sense for certain things: electrical power, telephone calls, etc, but it doesn't make sense for Internet usage where there is no good way for users to easily get a handle on the amount of data transfered by their applications.

<comment><USER5> How is bandwidth used any more abstract than electricity used?

Grandma wants to video chat! She doesn't know how much bandwidth it uses! POOR GRANDMA!

Grandma wants to run the air conditioner! She doesn't know how much power it uses! POOR GRANDMA!

Maybe grandma should learn, eh?

<comment><USER3> You're being ridiculous. The marginal cost per kilobyte of data transfered during off peak hours is approximately $0.00. The marginal cost per kilowatt of electric power, while lower during off peak hours, is still material.

<comment><USER6> "The marginal cost per kilobyte of data transfered during off peak hours is approximately $0.00."

This can't be repeated enough when commenters -- as the above one did -- make such disingenuous arguments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> um...the main problem is that ISP's are flat out lying about infrastructure costs to make their money grab seem more legitimate.</comment>


It's Time for Silicon Valley to Create an Underwriter Laboratories of Its Own - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@caseorganic/we-need-to-hold-people-accountable-for-designing-systems-that-fail-b78f9c94f3a0 <comment><USER2> As someone who works for the company mentioned, we already have offers for emerging markets such as this in an innovations team. The unfortunate reality is that manufacturers don't want to go through the time and cost of regulatory certification unless demanded by some agency in power. The innovations team consistently underperforms compared to our EMC and Wireless/RF teams, which performs certification required by government agencies such as the FCC.</comment>


Leila Janah, CEO and entrepreneur who wanted to end global poverty, dies at 37 - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/01/us/leila-janah-obit-trnd/index.html <comment><USER2> Using a throwaway account because I don't usually talk publicly about it.

I did a round of "You're going to die" with esophageal cancer in 2017.

The conversations I had with my peers that were waiting in line for radiation and/or chemo were refreshingly real and focused.

It's interesting where your head eventually lands in these situations.

<comment><USER3> I hope you have recovered fully from this.

<comment><USER2> 2, almost 3 years in with clean CT and PET scans. Supposedly 5 years is the mark for optimism. So, yeah, good so far. Adenocarcinoma, btw. Which is usually driven by stress induced stomach acid over a lifetime. I suspect this is fairly common in our line of work. So, _" see your doctor"_ if you have recurring issues with acid reflux. It starts with a condition called "Barret's Esophagus".

Had I gone in earlier, I could have avoided some pretty radical surgery that removed 6 inches of my esophagus. Men are pretty notorious with doctors for putting issues off and waiting until it's too late.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for sharing your experience! Do you mind disclosing the line of work you were in?

<comment><USER2> Leadership job in the tech area of a mostly non-tech Fortune 500 corp. Software, cloud, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Such an inspiring career and life. I'm sad I have only learned about her and her achievements through her death.

Much respect.

</comment><comment><USER6> Super sad. I interviewed at Samasource early in my career. They had a cool mission, and Ms. Janah seemed really inspiring. Glad she got to do so much with the time she had.

</comment><comment><USER7> shared an office with her in 2008. ;(

</comment><comment><USER8> My condolences to her family. Cancer is truly devastating.

</comment><comment><USER9> She was an amazing and inspiring person.

</comment><comment><USER10> You should test yourself for cancer.

There is an at-home DNA test, which I won't advertise, that tests your genetic predisposition for 36 types of cancer.

If you happen to have a certain mutation, you and potentially your blood relatives should start doing tests, in some cases as early as 25 and every year.

<comment><USER8> I have a lump on my leg and the doctor said it's probably a lympoma but I'm still concerned after reading this. Is there anything I can do at home to test?

<comment><USER10> No, you can't.

An at-home DNA test doesn't test whether you have cancer* - it tests your chances of getting one over your lifetime.

For some people, for example, there will be an 80% chance to get breast cancer during their lifetime, and they should start checking themselves often.

* One exception is a colon cancer test - you can send (apologies) a swab of your poop to test it for mutated DNA that is present if you already have early colon cancer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> RIP</comment>


AT&T will let 50M customers carry over unused data to the next month - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/7/7507863/at-t-will-let-50-million-customers-carry-over-unused-data-mobile-share

<comment><AUTHOR> It's only the previous month of unused data from that month's allotment (and that data gets used first), but that's better than nothing, I guess.

Assuming 15GB plan:

Month 1 (15, 0 avail): Use 10 GB, roll forward 5

Month 2 (15, 5 avail): Use 8, roll 7, lose the previously rolled 5

Month 3 (15, 7 avail): Use 20, roll nothing (lose the unused 2)

Month 4 (15, 0 avail), etc. etc.

So this saves you if you have one outlier month, but it's still not as good as rolling what I've nominally paid for.</comment>


Double Fine chooses Moai - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/05/01/how-two-startups-are-joining-forces-to-fix-the-mobile-silo-problem/

<comment><USER2> this is going to sound like a sales pitch for Unity but ...

Engine + Tools > Engine

Moai = Engine Unity = Engine + Tools

I've got 25 years experience making AAA games. I am continually amazed at how productive people are in Unity. I've got several x-coworker friends from various AAA game companies including Namco, EA, Vicarious Visions, and others that have started using Unity. All of them can't praise it enough. Some of these are even engine guys. In other words, the types most likely to have a "not invented here syndrome".

I've also been watching and participating in game jams and watching the amazing things coming out of them with the largest percentage coming from Unity.

Been to a few "teach kids game programming" events where Unity was one of the options and those kids always come away with more than the kids doing python, processing or JavaScript.

Even GDC had several unity games at the experimental gameplay session, the indie games summit and more.

There's also a large market of 3rd party libraries and editor plugins for Unity that provide many of those things like support for social network X or picture service Y. Unfortunately Unity stupidly made the store for those plugins only accessible from inside Unity, buried in the Window menu under "Asset Store" so that none of it is discoverable from the outside.

Of course there's a learning curve. If you've written your own engine it's easier to get a couple of images/models on the screen by writing code from scratch. But for a real game with a team that initial speed is quickly dwarfed by the amount of work writing exporters to support your artists, level editors to support your game designers and the fact that Unity editor is fully interactive while the game is playing for the ultimate in quick iteration times. You can practically edit functions on the fly as the game runs.

No, I don't work for unity and I actually haven't done more than a couple of tutorials nor have I used Moai but I have written 6 game engines and all the tools and utilities for them and after seeing my various friends and x-coworker's successes and praise for Unity I'm not about to pick something that only provides 1/2 to 1/3rd the feature and therefore have to pick up the slack myself.

<comment><USER3> Unity does not support linux. So how is it even relevant for Double Fine given their stated requirements? Or any other game dev given the possible future of linux based steamboxes?

<comment> adam-a A while ago I spoke to a Unity engineer about this. He told me they have internal builds running on Linux. I think the main thing holding them back from releasing it is the testing they would have to do for each distro. Probably not worth it for the limited use it would see.

If Linux Steamboxes do become a reality they would quickly be able to release Unity for that platform.

Of course I wish they would release the editor for Linux as I would like to use it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I started a games company at the beginning of the year and am constantly researching game engines. If I wasn't working in 3D I would have went with (or switched to) Moai. It looks like a great mix of productivity boosting features and a no-BS, close to the metal way to create cross platform code. I also like their focus on the networking, advertising, analytics, etc features in their SDK.

I'm currently using Unity. Their core product is decent but their team (at least the CEO and the sales guys, I haven't interacted with any tech guys) are obnoxious. I met with their sales rep in Asia (where I'm based) and he told me in no uncertain terms that they don't care about small teams. And that they were horrible at communicating because they don't see themselves as having any real competition. I think it's the fist time I've been heavily invested in a technology and at the same time wanted to see it become obsolete.

One of the best parts of Moai is Lua. I had started with Unity working in C# (seemed like it would be less performance bound) but didn't really like the toolkit until I switched over to the relatively obscure Boo (it has a Python- like syntax). Even with the almost total lack of documentation it's just way more productive than the other language choices. Switching to really terse scripting language has had a big impact on productivity for me.

<comment><USER5> I'm really sorry about your negative interactions with our team in Asia – they don't reflect the fact that we very much feel we're competing with every other option there is out there, and generally never being as good as we can be at serving developers. And not just competing the 3-5 significant other 3D engine companies, but also internal technologies, open source engines, and even very different approaches like picking 2D instead of 3D in cases where both might work.

Our entire business model is built around supporting individual developers and small teams, and while we've more recently started to learn to support bigger customers, it not how we think about our product and company and we've kept building and licensing great tech that we then release to everyone using Unity – the same for all, from the littlest indie shop to EA.

PS. I'm glad that you liked Boo, it's a cool language whose designer works for us doing many Mono and compiler-related projects.

PPS. Apart from being kind of enthusiastic about Unity and the business we're in I'm usually not told that I'm obnoxious, but I can live with it if I have to. In any case feel free to get in touch on twitter (davidhelgason) or by email at david at unity3d.com. Also would love to hear more about your bad experiences in Asia, these are new teams and maybe someone didn't get the memo about democratization yet.

<comment><USER4> Thanks David, it's good to get a more positive response from you guys. I'll send you an email to continue our conversation.

[Edit: I received an email from Nicholas. I'll follow up with him]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Harebrained Schemes (the Shadowrun Returns team on Kickstarter) also uses Moai. Perhaps it's worth a look.

Other than the cloud parts, can anyone compare it with Love2D?

<comment><USER7> MOAI is very similar to Love2D in some ways (Box2D, etc.) but the general application programming model is different - you don't have callbacks to implement features in MOAI, you simply set up the state of various game objects and layers and so on, then let 'er rip ..

I've found myself being very, very productive in MOAI. It took me 30 minutes to build a Path-like custom control for one of my applications, whereas it took me a day or two to do it in Love2D, and its nowhere near as elegant as the MOAI approach.

<comment><USER6> Interesting. Thanks. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > There are two versions of the game running on the same back-end, one for the > Java-based Android games and one for the C-based iOS games.

Someone alert the media that Android's NDK has been available for around 3 years now and allows you to write apps/games entirely in C or C++ for Android.

</comment><comment><USER9> Moai's hosting services are an interesting differentiator (compared to Unity and Corona). I was previously waiting for Unity or Corona to partner with someone like Parse but Moai appears to provide a good offering specific to the social x mobile type games (ie DrawSomething).

<comment><USER10> Thanks for noticing! I work on Moai. Our goal is to enable game devs to build great games, and to do that today you definitely need an online component. Our differentiation from other services is (a) Moai is designed for games, not generic mobile apps and (b) you can write and run your own code, in a gaming friendly language, which enables you to innovate on game features.

Moai Cloud can work with any front end SDK. We do have several Corona and Unity devs building game back ends on Moai Cloud. Robert Nay, the poster child for Corona, is one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Crimson Steam Pirates published by Bungie (the Halo studio) is very impressive and done entirely in Moai

[http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/crimson-steam- pirates/id43805...](http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/crimson-steam- pirates/id438053238?mt=8)

<comment><USER12> Shadowrun Returns, by Harebrained Schemes (the guys behind Crimson Steam Pirate) will also use Moai. <http://harebrained-schemes.com/shadowrun/>

They raised $1.8M on Kickstarter. [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1613260297/shadowrun- ret...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1613260297/shadowrun-returns)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ansca Mobile's Corona developer tools are similar to Moai. Corona uses Lua (including a simulator and debugger) and can publish iOS and Android apps.

<http://www.anscamobile.com/corona/>

<comment><USER12> The Moai SDK has two big advantages over Corona:

\- is open source and free to use (attributionware, CPAL 1.0 [0])

\- It works almost everywhere: Android, iOS, OS X, Windows, and Google Chrome (NaCl). The Linux port is in the works (they mostly need build scripts). See [1] for more details.

\----

0\. <http://opensource.org/licenses/cpal_1.0>

1\. <http://getmoai.com>

<comment><USER14> In addition to these, one will soon notice that you can't really and write some stuff in C to link into your lua engine in corona. The corona system was probably done this way to make it difficult to shoot yourself in the foot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Constantly pushing updates"

This sounds to me like their plan is to constantly be updating the Lua scripts from their cloud server.

There's no way this would be allowed on iOS right? (Although I can see the comparison with web pages running arbitrary JavaScript, which can also be constantly be updated, but still...)

<comment><USER10> Also, updates doesn't always mean code. You need a place to push new images, sounds and data files from as well.</comment></comment>


Looker.com Sold On Godaddy For $50K in 2012 Gets $16 Milion In Series A Funding - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedomains.com/2013/08/13/looker-com-sold-on-godaddy-for-50k-in-2012-gets-16-milion-in-series-a-funding/ <comment><USER2> It's not the "domain" that gets funding.</comment>


Is Covid-19 the cause of all the fatalities in Italy? - <AUTHOR> https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/120443722/coronavirus-is-covid19-really-the-cause-of-all-the-fatalities-in-italy <comment><AUTHOR> An Adviser to Italy's Minister of Health reports, "The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus.

"On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three," he says.</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone moved away from GitHub to Phabricator? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to know the experience of engineers who moved away from github to phabricator. Phabricator is really good but it has no third party app support like github. We use circle CI to run all the tests after send a pull request in github. I couldn't find a support for CI in phabricator. <comment><USER2> I've been trying to. But one big roadblock is the need for all the call signs in Phabricator.

Some of our core work is now on Phabricator, but there are a number of sharp edges to cut yourself on when you make the switch and this holds back the wholesale switch from using Phabricator as a "Project Mangement, Bug Tracker, Wiki, etc, tool", to using it as "Source Code Hosting + Project Management + Bug Tracker, Wiki, etc." and getting all the extra integration benefits for our repos.

Most of these have future answers in the form of work currently on the drawing board by the devs. Waiting for the PEBKAC aka Nuance tools drives me nuts. They are great devs, but sometimes the slow pace of progress on some things hurts. CI tooling via Drydock & Harbourmaster has been in progress for at least 2 years now, Nuance has been in the wiki ahead of proper project creation for quite some time now too.

Really hope that the Launch of Phacility brings them the resources to speed up development.

</comment><comment><USER3> We didn't move away (never were using GitHub), but we've done our CI hooks from inside arc (the command line client for phabricator) and it's worked pretty well (it means you need to be able to reach both phabricator and our CI server, but since phabricator is self-hosted that's not really a problem). A little manual, but pretty straightforward to get setup.

Overall, we greatly prefer phabricator's review tools (batch email notifications) + general git workflow (linear history on master) so haven't really looked into GitHub enterprise.

</comment><comment><USER4> We use both Phabricator and Github together -- it was super easy to set up. I think Phabricator has a CI tool on their roadmap. They also have an API, but it's a bit of a clusterfuck, which may help explain the dearth of integrations.</comment>


Who is Responsible for Your Company's Blog? - <AUTHOR>

Who writes? How do you make blogging efficient? <comment><USER2> 6-person strong content team headed up by an editor and a deputy. Plus a few freelancers making regular submissions for more variety.

Board with each team member's output being tracked through stages from pitching to external sites, to progress on internal pieces and projects.

Research pieces, PR, opinion, news updates etc. And now we're expanding into video too.

We run our main site which is a SaaS business, and then we also have a supporting content site, basically an online magazine pitched at our target demographic for the SaaS side. Let's us show that we're experts in our field and funnel into the business.</comment>


Free Golang Screencasts - <AUTHOR> https://www.goscreencasts.io <comment><USER2> The title should mention the videos are in French</comment>


Blame your lousy internet on poles - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/blame-your-lousy-internet-on-poles-1998a85c3ed9 <comment><USER2> Its not even that, blame local regulation and NIMBYism that doesn't let you put fiber/infrastructure into the ground without huuuuge permitting costs! The poles are the workaround, not the real solution.</comment>


Prisoners 'could serve 1,000 year sentence in eight hours' - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10697529/Prisoners-could-serve-1000-year-sentence-in-eight-hours.html

<comment><USER2> I thought Europeans did not have such retarded views on prison time as Americans (rehabilitation vs punishment/torture).

Seems I was mistaken. Hell, even Germany seems to devolve into favouring punishment over rehab.

Also, what good would 1000 years of "thinking" do to a person with a mental illness? More so, what if that person undergoes a mental breakdown while in "speed up mode"? For me, that is torture. Come on, we're not barbarians.

</comment><comment><USER3> Now we can have the worst of both worlds?

One year, ten or a thousand, time in prison doing nothing is unlikely to reform anybody, and keeping a dangerous criminal out of the public for eight hours is not going to protect the public either.

So of the two things prison is supposed to do, this would do neither.

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, we really need to give a hardened criminal the ability to experience 1000 years worth of cognition in 8-9 hours of real time. It's not like anyone in this situation would hold a grudge or use the time to plot revenge.

/eyeroll</comment>