Here's How Google's New Search Results Will Look Under EU Antitrust Settlement - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/02/15/heres-how-googles-new-search-results-will-look-under-european-antitrust-settlement/ <comment><USER2> There is a lot to like about the EU, but its restrictions on speech (Google is NOT convicted of antitrust violations, this is not a structured settlement, this is extortion) and its censorious libel laws are not among them.

<comment><USER3> I don't know, having lived in Germany and the US, I feel I have more practical freedom of speach in Germany (or Europe).

Over here, kids don't get thrown into jail because they made a bad joke on Facebook.

I also find the gamut of acceptable political positions to be much wider here. Someone with a fairly regular middle-left point of view in Europe would be considered a socialist crackpot in parts of the US. There are restrictions on what you might call "hate speach" which I appreciate. Saying you want the Nazi party back, or want to kill the Jews, or wearing a Swastika is not covered by free speach.

One thing I also like is the strong protection of customers. Decieving your customers is also never covered as free speach. There are some laws that seem silly, governing the way products are advertized. E.g. you must use metric units, if you use imperial units (mainly for screens), the metric units must be displayed more prominently, you must have certain package sizes, you have to display the price for 100g / 1kg beneath goods in shops, etc.. I never appreciated these laws until I noticed how confusing and customer-deciving pricing is in the US. Like Mac & Cheese, 20 cents a package, but in the fine print it says only if you buy 10, otherwise its 80 cents. It's a silly example, but I feel more confident in Germany that I'm not going to get screwed over by a company then elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it interesting to apply the same logic to other sites. Imagine for a minute if Amazon needed to feature product prices from Newegg on each Amazon search. It starts to sound a little bit ridiculous when you apply it that way. I know some will say "wait, Google is so big" but isn't Amazon too? I use Amazon in my examples but there are other good examples. Phooey..

<comment><USER5> Note: I'm not taking any position on whether the EU regulators were correct or not. I'm not familiar with either EU antitrust law or with how Google shopping actually works.

You go to Amazon because you want to see what Amazon is selling. When Amazon in response to that shows you products they are selling, it is hard to see how that could raise antitrust issues, no matter how big Amazon is.

You go to Google's search page because you want to search the web. Google responds by showing you the hits on the web, AND by showing you things they think you might want to buy through their shopping service. They are using one line of business to give a boost to a different line of business. That's the kind of thing that does draw antitrust scrutiny.

An analogous situation with Amazon would be, perhaps, if when you searched for books on Apache or MySQL or other server software, they also showed you deals on AWS hosting.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, like how amazon uses their dominance in "SHOPPING" to sell kindle fires?

*edit for clarity

<comment><USER7> No, nothing like that.

For one, Amazon is not that dominant in the first place (Google has 80% of the world's searches, Amazon has nowhere near 80% of e-commerce -- estimated to get to around 20% in 2016).

Second, they can't really use their (non)dominance in Shopping to sell kindle fires. At most, they can promote them to their users. Most of which haven't bought one, and wont buy one, according to number of Amazon users vs estimated Kindle Fire sales numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm on the fence on this. Google does have a dangerously powerful position in the market, though I tend to support letting the market sort those kinds of things out (when there aren't artificial barriers preventing competition, as in the Internet last mile market, which needs a _lot_ better and smarter regulation). But, I'm not sure if this helps the consumer or not.

On one hand, I use Duck Duck Go (for privacy reasons), and I've come to appreciate the seeming agnostic way in which DDG will pull results from all sorts of sources, with the goal being to provide the best experience. It isn't perfect, and sometimes it does confusing things. I just looked up "what's my IP" on DDG a few minutes ago, and it weirdly came back as a clickable thing that sent me to a map when I tried to copy paste the IP. I have no idea why I would want a freakin' map of my own IP address (I know where I am). Nonetheless, this looks a little like the DDG experience, where you get a variety of shopping options, or a variety of sources for information, and they're all first class citizens.

And, so, Google isn't exactly a walled garden, but it has become a lot less likely to refer me somewhere else if they can monetize what I'm looking for in some way.

On the final hand (I don't know how many hands I've laid out here, probably three or four, so far), these also kinda feel like ads. But, they're ads for companies that are arbitrarily chosen (by whom?). Google now has the power to select who to bless with the mighty Google hammer in these competitor spots. What will they do with that power? Will that actually make the consumer happier? I don't know how it'll play out.

I assume this isn't going to happen on the US results pages, so I guess we'll have some A/B data to compare.

<comment><USER9> Who they should display is specified in the settlement, as magicalist found out: [http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/google_commitments](http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/google_commitments) (in Annex 1 - Selection And Ranking Of Rival Link)

The solution isn't perfect and I'm not a Google basher, but I'm glad about this. Even more important than the actual provisions of the settlement is the fact that Google - like any other big company - should know that they need to be careful how they use their dominant position in one market to try to capture a different market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been following this for a bit and I'm satisfied at the outcome. I don't "hate" Google by any means, but they get away with a lot of sketchy behavior simply because of their brand and with a cult hacker following.

Nevertheless as someone who has tried to run campaigns with Google before and had to go through the hassle, this is a step in the right direction towards allowing better competition.

</comment><comment><USER11> I was under the impression that the difficulty in switching providers was the crux of antitrust law. Surely if it's as easy as typing a different search provider (or shopping one like amazon) into an address bar, how can this be anticompetitive?

<comment><USER12> There are _three_ parties here: Consumers, Google and competing services. Even if there are no immediate benefits to consumers, there may still be anti-trust considerations on the basis that consumers can be hurt long term if competitors to Google are shut out from a large part of the market today.

These competitors are extremely unlikely to be able to affect the search market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is ridiculous.

<comment><USER10> Not sure why this was up-voted as a productive comment, but I'll bite. Why is this ridiculous? I mean when you hold almost 99% of the search market (in Europe at least...in the US there's a bit more competition) you can't pull off these kinds of anti-competitive moves.

Google has a bunch of smart people, and they knew that they weren't going to win this case -- what they were doing was blatantly against antitrust laws.

<comment><USER14> Even in Europe where it's approaching 90%, 99% is quite a stretch. And "what they were doing was blatantly against antitrust laws" is just a ridiculous statement (and kind of puts the lie to your earlier more "measured" response. I mean seriously, was it "blatant" or was it "sketchy"?).

At the very least it would have been a very complicated antitrust case. I don't think anyone but Fairsearch would argue that anything was blatantly against antitrust law (and the settlement would certainly not have only involved including competitor's shopping results if it had been).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> so they're forcing Google to add paid affiliate links in search results?

if I'm an advertiser, how do your they decide which third party ad results must show on Google?

<comment><USER14> It's all in the full settlement.

[http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/google_commitments...](http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/google_commitments_full_2014.pdf)

(in _Annex 1 - Selection And Ranking Of Rival Link_ )

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> More honest about what the ads are _and_ more useful.

<comment><USER17> How is it more honest or more useful? the google shopping and flights promoted results are already clearly marked as ads. All i see more of is more advertising, not more utility.

<comment><USER3> This is a lot more useful. I've never used Google's shopping reccomendations since they changed them a while ago from a price aggregator to a kind of store. The problem is that I don't trust them to give me a full overview of the market, and to find the best offers. Thus I always visited a couple of independent sites _, and relied on the general search results not the shopping ones.

I expect from a search engine - at least a giant general-purpose search engine - that it is completely objective and honest. Only showing certain offers, or products from their affiliates, completely defeats the purpose. But if they are legally bound to fairly represent "competitors" (or products that are sold by sites that are not their affiliates), then I can use their product search without fearing that they are hiding something from me.

(_ In Germany: guenstiger.de and heise.de have price search engines, then I look at amazon and ebay simply because they are so large, and then at a few of the largest specific web sites, e.g. alternate.de for computers. I only trust the "regular" google search results for shopping.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a farce in the same way that the EU forcing the browser choice screen on Windows users was.

If people aren't happy with Google then they can another search engine.

<comment><USER19> Not so obvious on android for most users.

<comment><USER20> Why not? It's just a matter of installing it: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.bing&hl=en)

<comment><USER21> You inadvertently proved his point:

"This item is not available in your country".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Actually the EU result page looks better than the original to me.

</comment><comment><USER23> Much spam. So clutter.</comment>


Show HN: FontEdit – A desktop app to develop fonts for embedded systems displays - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ayoy/fontedit <comment><USER2> Only tangentially related but I've recently looked into how fonts usually work (OpenType, TrueType and the like) and it's astonishing to me how complicated this all is.

For example: TrueType includes the ability to embed small executable programs in your font to adjust little details in the rasterization process (I believe it's called "hinting"). It has its own VM and bytecode for that!

<comment><USER3> If you really break it down, a font is just a pixel shader that happens to embed its own texture atlas.

(I wonder if we could achieve a win by actually having a font-format that _is_ just an abstract pixel shader that could be handed off to the GPU driver for compilation? Either way, we'd probably just pre-render glyph tiles to a texture, so I'm not sure it'd make much of a difference.)

<comment><USER2> I wonder if we could achieve a win by just deprecating OpenType with its weird custom database format and having fonts be ZIP files with images and a JSON manifest (or shaders and a manifest, whatever). The manifest could contain all the meta-information and information about ligatures and kerning and so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very handy.

For anyone interested, there is a nice collection of system fonts available on int10h.org:

[https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc- fonts/fontlist/](https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/)

<comment><USER5> By chance, yesterday I was exploring tiny bitmap fonts and found this collection:

[http://robhagemans.github.io/monobit/](http://robhagemans.github.io/monobit/)

They're in some kind of human-readable text format:

[https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of- bitfonts](https://github.com/robhagemans/hoard-of-bitfonts)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love this.

When I was learning to program games in my teens on the Atari 8-bit, one of my favorite passtimes was making fonts and sprites. This takes me right back in time. And I can use it for mini game assets, maybe tiny raster fonts for code (like log windows). Thanks for making it and sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That's right, and I haven't even thought about it at all. So cool :)

It's a hobby/educational project, but I'm happy to see it solving some people's problems. I once wanted to add a good-looking font to my e-paper display for the air quality monitor project and I stumbled upon a simple MacOS app that converted images with text to byte arrays ([https://luckyresistor.me/font-to-byte/](https://luckyresistor.me/font-to- byte/)). I picked it up, updated to Swift 3 and adjusted to my needs. When I blogged about it, somebody complained that it's MacOS only, so I decided to rewrite it in C++ with Qt (learning some modern C++ on that occasion).

The app was still quite cumbersome as it required you to prepare input images in external software like GIMP or Ps, and people had a hard time understanding the process. I was being asked repeatedly to help generate an image for a given font, so I figured out that the app could (should) be generating those input images programmatically. From there I added a minimal graphical editor to allow making corrections to auto-generated bitmaps (or drawing ones from scratch) and here we are.

Last but not least, I had a great fun learning C++17 and writing a template- based source code generator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While this is cool, I think it would be better to write a set of convertors to and from well-recognised formats like BDF. There are far more professional tools that work with those, e.g. gbdfed, FontForge and Bits'N'Picas:

[https://github.com/kreativekorp/bitsnpicas](https://github.com/kreativekorp/bitsnpicas)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing that, I'll have a read. Knowing very little on the subject, I was missing the keywords to duck-duck-go for to find any info on the topic of generating font sprites for embedded systems.

<comment><USER7> I myself had written a tool like yours for a similar purpose except I needed it done quick'n'dirty, so I wrote it in C with GTK and just used a grid of toggle buttons :D

It all went fine until I needed a variable width modern-looking font, so I wrote a convertor from BDF to the proprietory format the video chip used (vertical middle-endian scan lines arranged in a weird order) and generated the BDF using gbdfed or FontForge, I don't remember which one. I must admit the convertor was horrible :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks, this looks very nice! A similar tool I've used before is LCD Assistant, but there are several limitations (and I had to use MS Paint to create and edit the bitmaps). [http://en.radzio.dxp.pl/bitmap_converter/](http://en.radzio.dxp.pl/bitmap_converter/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Windows also has a built in 'Private Character Editor' [https://www.howtogeek.com/163197/create-your-own-custom- char...](https://www.howtogeek.com/163197/create-your-own-custom-characters- or-fonts-with-private-character-editor/)

</comment><comment><USER10> This kind of reminds me of IcoFX ([https://icofx.ro/](https://icofx.ro/)), which I recommend for pixel-by-pixel editing of small graphics. I'm wondering if this project could turn into a FOSS implementation of the same concept.

</comment><comment><USER11> Well timed! I'm working on an LED matrix project and wanted my own font that would fit my specifics. Started writing something like this using the canvas element and JavaScript, but this should save me.

</comment><comment><USER12> Much needed. Fonts are such a pain on embedded systems. Congrats on shipping.

</comment><comment><USER13> nitpick: font sprite editor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perfect, thank you. I struggled with the naming the whole time, and I seriously hate the current project name, but decided to ship it anyway.

<comment><USER14> 'FontEdit' was also the name of a program published in PC Magazine eons ago, for creating VGA text-mode fonts in executable format. There were probably others that shared the name, but that's the one I actually remember typing in from the magazine printout(!), and it's the one that got me started fiddling with fonts.

I can appreciate the naming struggle - I had to resort to calling my own editor 'Fontraption'. :)

<comment><USER15> I too remember this.. back in school we used to create fonts with messed up characters (backwards/upside-down/invisible) and load them into the autoexec.bat ... Confused a lot of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well done.

</comment><comment><USER17> Or for oldschool demos!</comment>


Court Allowed NSA To Spy On All But 4 Countries - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/30/court-allowed-nsa-to-spy-on-all-but-4-countries/

<comment><USER2> This is yet one more piece of evidence on the mountain that came before that the FISA court is a kangaroo court rubber-stamp approval engine, not a court of thoughtful application of the Constitution. Over 35 years, they approved 35,000 requests and denied 11, while coaching the government (in that nice ex- parte fashion) how to ask in a way that would get approval.

This _should_ be shocking, but all it is is evidence that the court got tired of doing all that one-off rubber-stamping and just got a bigger stamp.

</comment><comment><USER3> On the other hand, there is absolutely no reason to think the NSA follows court orders in the first place, secret or not.</comment>


Basic income is just the beginning as Finland looks to citizen-driven governance - <AUTHOR> https://www.sitra.fi/en/blogs/basic-income-just-beginning-finland-one-innovative-governments-world-looks-citizen-driven-governance/ <comment> aaron-lebo It'll be really interesting to see how this basic income thing plays out over the next few decades. Basic income is most easily testable in small, high income, relatively homogeneous societies that agree on a more communal way of governing. So, the Nordic countries, see Finland.

What is most interesting is how many optimistic and as yet untested claims that basic income advocates make. See this article. Paragraph after paragraph about how this program will work, what the advantages will be, but we don't really have any hard numbers, and even once we get them in a limited setting in Finland, or with random people across the US, we have studies that aren't generalizable, and we have very few. If n=29 means anything in this context, we've got like 2.5 (not a rigorously considered statement, don't hurt me).

The really cynical part of me notices how basic income is like the ideal political promise. "Hey, we're gonna give you money so you don't have to work, and when we do, society is gonna transform into utopia". We'll all be living in Truman Burbank's world, apparently. Because of course people won't squander their basic income (maybe on Bitcoin?) and if they do, so much for a social safety net.

The general populace (not those at the top) are seeing a bad economic situation, so of course their response is yes, meanwhile the people who are the biggest proponents of this as of currently are people like Altman, Zuckerberg, and Musk. The first two have political ambitions, the last is a utopian.

Of course when you break down the numbers, it doesn't work. How do you make up the 3 trillion a year it would take to give everyone $12k when you almost had healthcare repealed? What programs do you decide to cut and how do you expect the two parties to have a fruitful discussion about it (lol)? These guys will never talk about any rigorous plans because they don't have any that would make it through legislation. They also won't talk about how crushing and depressing and difficult it is to live on 12k (they have no clue).

It sounds like a future where the super rich throw pennies to the peasants and at that point it'll be a great excuse. We give you money, why can't you pull yourself up by your bootstraps?

Will someone lay out a realistic plan detailing how you'd implement BI in the US?

<comment><USER2> The reality is that if you want to cover everyone's basic needs with $12K, you need to radically reduce the cost of goods and services. How ? That's the conversation we should be having.

But that than becomes a painful and complex conversation, talking about huge changes in the structure and possibly quality of real-estate, healthcare, transportation and roads, universities, etc and maybe some core tenets of capitalism.

But there's no way for this conversation to be fruitful and have really big changes - until we have a real crisis - because that's how democracies work in general.

but here's a starting point, anyway:

1\. Transforming real-estate, from a system largely aimed at profits, into a system that is focused on offering decent living conditions as cheaply as possible.

2\. Inserting disruptive innovation and real cost reduction into healthcare. And yes, like all disruptive innovation , it probably means lowering quality, at least for some time.

<comment><USER3> > The reality is that if you want to cover everyone's basic needs with $12K, > you need to radically reduce the cost of goods and services. How ? That's > the conversation we should be having.

Why even insist on that $12K number in the first place, isn't that like approaching the problem from the wrong end?

It's something that always puzzled me about economic policymaking, regardless of which country; Changes seem to happen at a pace of years and only with static values, which makes reacting to our modern volatile and interconnected markets, in any useful way, impossible.

Case in point the basic income: Ideally the amount of money people get could be linked to the general living costs, adjusted to their area of residence, and some national economic index.

Sure the first one could be abused by people registering in more expensive areas while living in cheaper ones, but in the long run, and economic big picture this would only lead to rising prices (and basic income) in the cheaper areas, generated through the spending by the "cheaters".

Imho something really underestimated is how much of an economic boost a basic income would be, it'd be like the government directly subsidizing general purchasing power, and lot's of that will come back to the government in the form of taxes. It's like the opposite end version of corporate bailouts and tax giveaways.

Looking at a number like 7 trillion from that side, suddenly makes it way less intimidating and way more appealing. It's not like money is some finite resource that has to be mined in deep and dangerous caves; When it's about saving banks, Big Whatever or waging wars, against something or somebody, there always seems to be more than enough of it?

<comment><USER4> If you make $7tn from thin air and inject it into the economy, consumer price inflation will drastically rise, which for the most part ends up being a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the owners of capital. All you will have done is make the rich richer as the cost of living rises by about $12k/person.

<comment><USER5> If you look up "Quantitative Easing" you'll see that making trillions from thin air is exactly what the world's central banks do. But instead of giving it to people, they buy securities from banks, who are, as a result, the primary beneficiaries. QE-scale market activities aside, this general method is also standard monetary policy and the means by which new money is created.

Seen in that light, BI provides the opportunity for a whole new economic policy lever, by channeling new money to people rather than banks.

<comment><USER6> "If you look up "Quantitative Easing" you'll see that making trillions from thin air is exactly what the world's central banks do. But instead of giving it to people, they buy securities from banks, who are, as a result, the primary beneficiaries."

This is not an apples-to-apples comparison since QE (so far) has been "sterilized" so as not to increase the money supply in the same way as you are suggesting BI would:

"Also, the Federal Reserve has mostly "sterilized" its bond purchases by paying interest to banks for reserve deposits. This removes money from circulation previously added by the Fed's bond purchases. The net effect is to raise bond prices, lowering borrowing rates for mortgages and other loans, without an inflationary increase in the money supply"[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing)

<comment><USER5> Yes, the useful message here is that we can indeed inject trillions into economies without overheating them, if the right conditions and structures are used.

They will be different for BI, naturally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 1\. Government spending on public works and services. 2\. Loans to private sector businesses who are positioned to use that new money productively.

As far as I understand, these are the primary ways new money is issued into the economy (money created). In general, these two methods work fairly well. The first enables worthwhile works and services to be provided that the private sector is unwilling to provide, while the second helps ensure efficient usage of new dollars to create goods and services.

However, there are situations where these two methods are insufficient. For example, after the 2008 meltdown, cheaper loans to businesses hardly increased growth..like pushing a wet noodle. The problem was a lack of dollars in the pockets of consumers. The businesses were chasing too few dollars. Fiscal spending on infrastructurr is often proposed, and certainly can help, but is often inefficient, and diverted away from consumers into corporate coffers.

I believe that a variable basic income where newly created money can be put directly in consumer's pockets could give policy makers a third tool to ensure optimal economic growth.

<comment><USER8> There actually is a small movement in the EU called Quantitative Easing for People which wants exactly that: Why not give central bank money directly to people instead of as loans to businesses?

I love the idea but I am afraid the EU is much too conservative, anxious and in general not an institution serving its people to do something like that.

But what a marvellous world that would be to live in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> More citizen participation in democracy is a great thing, but not as simple as it sounds. Legislating is a complex, time-intensive job. Most bills are long, nuanced and require real study to understand and vet. Armchair voting based on sound-bytes by casually engaged citizens can't work. We need paid people that are dedicated to the activity.

Additionally, legal deal making is a necessary evil. If two parties are at odds with which direction to go, and simply cannot come to an agreement, one way we deal with that is by offering exchanges of laws. One side reluctantly agrees to go forward on one thing, in exchange for the other side compromising on an unrelated thing that they feel more strongly about. That's why many bills contain a cornucopia of seemingly unrelated mandates - it's how we are able to move forward at an impasse. How would independent citizens negotiate with each other?

<comment><USER10> That's argument for arguably one of the most interesting new ideas in "democracy" of this century: "liquid democracy"

It allowed for people to choose to vote on individual issues. But when they recognised the complexity of certain issues, or just couldn't be bothered to make up their mind, it allowed to delegate their voting power to someone they trusted. You could delegate single issues, topics, whole fields of politics or even everything, and the recipient could do so again. The result would be a sort of "net of decision making".

Of course the concept's prominence came and went with the rise and fall of the Pirate Party...

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Most people misunderstand basic income. What they're thinking is "basic income means that everyone will get enough money to fulfill their basic needs". But you can achieve that in the current system, by transferring more money from taxpayers to the unemployed. (Assuming Europe, where unemployed are eligible to small amount of money.)

Basic income is not more welfare, it's a relatively small change to the structure of the welfare system:

1\. Simplification, everyone gets a constant amount of money. It has some advantages but some of the current complexity has good justifications. It allows us to give more to those who need more.

2\. Bigger pay jump when you decide to work. I think this is the strongest argument for BI.

3\. You get the money automatically, no need for paperwork.

4\. Cultural and mindset change.

<comment><USER4> 5\. It ignores entirely the macroeconomic results of printing tons of money, which doesn't end well for society even if widely and directly distributed.

<comment><USER12> Printing tons of money is what is happening even without basic income, BI is the way forward to free human from boring labor. Probably no one has a macroeconomic plan. But the basic idea is simple and powerful. Robots do the menial and boring job of humans and they are taxed that is distributed to people and people spend on robots for services and the cycle continues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The debate about basic income is based on the wrong premise in the sense that people evaluate it based on two different viewpoints of the world.

Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) is based on the assumption there will be no jobs for most humans in the future.

What we have today is CBI or Conditional Basic Income which is conditional based on the assumption that you can motivate people to find jobs and that jobs will be available for most. If there are always going to be plenty of jobs then UBI makes no sense.

But if you believe that there be fewer and fewer jobs for humans, then UBI make a ton of sense.

I am of the latter belief.

<comment><USER14> What about the other benefits of UBI, like increasing the bargaining power of labor?

Do you believe that basic income wouldn't be able to give workers a greater ability to say no to low-quality jobs and wages, forcing (1) automation or (2) an increase in both to attract workers?

<comment><USER13> UBI will always make it worthwhile to take a job because you wouldn't have to give any money back.

<comment><USER15> Financially, yes, economically, not necessarily. UBI greatly reduces the marginal value of the money you get from the job (since it's no longer the difference between paying for basic necessities or not), and since jobs have a cost, even if it's non-monetary, UBI may tip the balance against taking it.

<comment><USER13> Not sure what you mean.

If UBI is, let's say $40000 a year and you do various jobs that land you $10000 you now have $50000.

Why wouldn't I take that?

<comment><USER15> Because the jobs may suck, and while earning $10k is much better than $0, earning $50k is not that much better than $40k.

<comment><USER13> Which will be greatly countered by the fact that if you make $10K more than anyone else you are going to be one of the richest people you know. That $10K extra can buy you a lot of things.

Again, judging UBI based on how things look like today is exactly where the discussion goes wrong.

UBI makes sense if you accept the idea that there are almost no jobs left for humans.

It doesn't make sense in a world where there is plenty of jobs.

In other words, it's NOT a mechanism for getting people to work it's a way to ensure that all those people who have no work still have some way to buy things and keep some economy going.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a poorly written puff piece that reads like it was generated by AI.

<comment><USER17> I think I could write a random article generator full of catchphrases they like, and it'd be upvoted like crazy here, Reddit, and Slashdot.

<comment><USER16> Indeed, the more closely I try to read the article, the less comprehensible it is. Notice a lot of HN commentators using the article title to jump on their soapbox, and nobody trying to engage the substance of the article, which is utterly lacking.

Here's the article's conclusion: "The emissions targets of cities and the C-40 climate leadership network promoting it — as well as YIMBYcon, an international group of grassroots city developers that operates through groups in Facebook and organises events — provide good examples of such inter-city policies and discussions. The YIMBYcon network shares international examples of city development and prepares concrete shadow plans."

My takeaway is that AI is getting better at writing gibberish.

<comment><USER3> The article is only an edited excerpt from this paper: [https://www.sitra.fi/en/publications/from-pause-to- play/#1-t...](https://www.sitra.fi/en/publications/from-pause-to-play/#1-the- new-engels-pause)

The English used is somewhat odd, but I can forgive that considering the authors are Finns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Macroeconomically, giving the poor money through this kind of redistributio will stimulate the economy and in fact ultimately benefit the rich and large corporations! (As well as small businesses). The reason is obvious, poor people are obliged to spend it all, since they have to stay alive.

<comment><USER4> And they will spend it, on things they need to survive, like rent and food. Now the landlords, factory farmers, and Walmart have all the wealth. Oh, and massive inflation raises all the prices so your next check doesn't go as far.

BI is extremely regressive in its effects.

<comment><USER19> > Oh, and massive inflation raises all the prices so your next check doesn't > go as far.

That is not at all clear.

Food is a competitive market. And even the poor in the US currently get plenty of food. Why would prices increase?

For most standard goods we could ramp up factory capacity and actually expect a decrease in cost/unit. We don't have a supply problem.

Rent is heavily tied to location which is tied to job prospects. There is close to a 10x spread for the same kind of housing dependent on city across the US.

When I was poor I had to go where the jobs were and just suck it up and pay the much higher rental price. This meant room sharing in an expensive city.

With BI I would have had a lot more negotiating power. How do you convince me to pay 5-10x more rent to move to your city?

<comment><USER4> > Why would prices increase?

Inflation:

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

You inject a double-digit percentage of all cash that exists into the economy year-after-year -- numbers bounded about in this very thread are on the order of 1/3 of all US dollars in existence, just for Americans to receive a minimal, poverty rate handout -- I guarantee you there will be inflation at levels that have never been seen since the founding of this country.

<comment><USER19> But isn't the idea to take that money in the form of taxes rather than just printing it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For the U.S. this will be a non-starter. Most people in the U.S. don't want lower income people to have access to Universal Healthcare, Universal Basic Income is a joke concept in the U.S.

<comment><USER21> I disagree. Americans are very familiar with the concept of welfare. UBI fits into that paradigm must better than Universal Healthcare.

Also...

> Most people in the U.S. don't want lower income people to have access to > Universal Healthcare

This sentence is leaving me speechless. What a terrible interpretation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How come nobody discusses the countries which already employ universal basic income for their citizens like Saudi Arabia or the UAE?

I guess because it serves as a counter example to many of the claims of universal basic income so it's intentionally left out of such discussions.

But basically Saudi Arabia and the UAE both have some form of universal basic income for their citizens derived mainly from their massive oil profits.

And the irony is for so much of their labor,

They use so much foreign labor that the percentage of foreign workers is actually larger than the percentage of citizens (at least in the case of UAE not sure about Saudi Arabia)

Basically almost all the labor is done by those who aren't eligible for the universal basic income (only citizens get the universal basic income)

And their laws essentially make it impossible (or insanely difficult) to become a citizen

Because once a person becomes a citizen they are eligible for the universal basic income payouts, so you essentially get people sitting on their ass getting paychecks.

I mean I don't see a progressive revolution of art, culture, and modernity with people "following their dreams" since they are untethered by paychecks

Happening in the UAE or Saudi Arabia which is what people say will happen if you had universal basic income.

Heck US, India, and Japan has tons of art/music/culture that they export and none of these three countries have universal basic income....

In fact sometimes I wonder if the massive oil profits played a role in keeping them so ultraconservative since it allowed them until recently to prevent half their population from getting an education and roaming/working/driving freely/indepedently around the country.

If universal basic income was so successful and didn't kill people's willingness to work, I feel like these two countries wouldn't have to keep bringing in low wage foreign laborers.

Don't get me wrong. Universal basic income sounds very cool.

But I'll be honest if I got enough money to cover my rent/transportation/healthcare and I didn't have any loans,

I would immediately quit my high wage tech job

And probably go to Hawaii to teach STEM to entry level college kids to prevent/reduce the number of college kids who drop out of STEM.

But instead since I have massive college loans to pay off because my parents didn't give me a cent for college tuition or housing (they did give me food money thankfully),

I work in this extremely high wage but sometimes rather mundane "tech job"

So I can pay my college loans, housing, car, food, helping out my elderly parents, brother's, etc.

Oh wait shoot I think I basically just said if there was universal basic income

I would end up following my dreams/passion instead of working a job mainly for the wage.

Lol whoops killed my own argument against universal basic income.

So I guess universal basic income might actually be cool haha.

But the thing is there's no way to know how many will just sit on their ass doing nothing, how many will turn to crime or darker endeavors with all their new ideal time, and how many will actually use it effectively.

Like how can anyone do a reasonable analysis to predict the outcome of this system.

Human nature is a mysterious beast.....

I'm sorry I'm just highly skeptical on universal basic income.

It's so counter to all the existing economic theory I was trained/educated in

That I guess it's hard for my brain to accept it.

My apologies.

<comment><USER8> Interesting points about SA and UAE. My take would be that Basic Income requires a certain level of society. Just like democracy, which requires people to be informed and free of the worries of basic needs.

>> But the thing is there's no way to know how many will just sit on their ass doing nothing

I absolutely agree but don't see it as an argument against BI. We can just approach it slowly.

<comment><USER23> "Just like democracy, which requires people to be informed and free of the worries of basic needs."

The world is filled with people that are uninformed (or would disagree with your definition of "informed", even). I don't think you'd be able to find _any_ large group of people that would make this work to a sufficient degree if we go off your premise about them being "informed".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "For example, property consumption and different steering taxes aimed at changing people's behaviour, are possible new avenues of income."

I like the overall sentiment, but these statements are ominous to anyone with a even a casual grasp of the history of the 20th century political developments around the world.

</comment><comment><USER7> As PR,basic income proposals may fare better if branded as the "national inheritance".

<comment><USER14> What about "social security for all"?

<comment><USER7> I understand the impulse. What I like about the others are that they suggest that the payment is not charity or a hand out but a fairly earned profit from owning a piece of the American experiment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The state does not defend us; rather, the state aggresses against us and it uses our confiscated property to defend itself. The standard definition of the state is this: The state is an agency characterized by two unique, logically connected features. First, the state is an agency that exercises a territorial monopoly of ultimate decision making. That is, the state is the ultimate arbiter and judge in every case of conflict, including conflicts involving itself and its agents. There is no appeal above and beyond the state. Second, the state is an agency that exercises a territorial monopoly of taxation. That is, it is an agency that can unilaterally fix the price that its subjects must pay for the state's service as ultimate judge.

Based on this institutional setup you can safely predict the consequences: First, instead of preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision making will cause and provoke conflict in order to settle it to its own advantage. That is, the state does not recognize and protect existing law, but it perverts law through legislation. Contradiction number one: the state is a lawbreaking law protector. Second, instead of defending and protecting anyone or anything, a monopolist of taxation will invariably strive to maximize his expenditureson protection and at the same time minimize the actual production of protection. The more money the state can spend and the less it must work for this money, the better off it is. Contradiction number two: the state is an expropriating property protector

~ HH Hoppe</comment>


Google Analytics unblocks the Web w/ Async support - <AUTHOR> http://ajaxian.com/archives/google-analytics-unblocks-the-web-w-async-support?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ajaxian+%28Ajaxian+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> googles actual post about it: [http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/12/google- analytics-laun...](http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/12/google-analytics- launches-asynchronous.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the NBGA API much nicer: [http://925html.com/code/non-blocking-google- analytics-integr...](http://925html.com/code/non-blocking-google-analytics- integration/)

I usually use an adaptation of this, to take out the extra code that supports prototype and YUI (my choice is jQuery). This thing is super easy to use:

jQuery(document).ready(function() { ga().config({ id:'UA-xxxxxxx-x' }).track(); });

It queues up any track calls and pushes them onto GA as soon as it loads.

<comment><USER4> That's fine if you only need _trackPageview. The Google solution provides more capabilities though. Also, be careful of using 3rd party solution. They don't always work correctly. The jQuery plugin for GA used to cache-bust every request to ga.js, which definitely slows down your page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> They've also moved away from document.write. Now we can use google analytics on pages served as XHTML without resorting to these types of hacks: [http://www.the-xavi.com/articles/operation-is-not- supported-...](http://www.the-xavi.com/articles/operation-is-not-supported- code-9)

</comment><comment><USER6> I notice something like this in the snippet:

(function() { ... })();

What's that all about?

<comment><USER7> That executes the code in a local scope, so that any variables defined within that block don't leak outside of its namespace.

<comment><USER6> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a good move, but I think jsHub's approach of separating the page meta- data and the JavaScript that reads it is better.

[http://jshub.org/blog/2009/10/17/universal_tag_or_universal_...](http://jshub.org/blog/2009/10/17/universal_tag_or_universal_data/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Jeez, finally...</comment>


Gentoo Ought to Be About Choice - <AUTHOR> https://rich0gentoo.wordpress.com/2016/02/27/gentoo-ought-to-be-about-choice/ <comment><USER2> Nobody in gentoo wants systemd. it's there in the handbook, and one step specifically adds two special flags when mounting disks, in order to shut systemd up. But you have to click another link in the handbook to install systemd, because it's _not default_ , and only a few of the default profiles use systemd. many specifically avoid it. If you ask how to install systemd in #gentoo, the first question is usually "why?"

Let's put it this way:

there are a few of us (including myself) in #gentoo with a file called "FuckLennartPoettering" residing within /etc/portage/package.mask/. in this file, you will find:

      sys-apps/systemd
      sys-fs/udev
      net-misc/networkmanager

Some of us have _switched distributions_ because our "choice" has been limited to Gentoo, in order to customize poettering and freedesktop.org's poisonous attack on the GPL and GNU out of our system. I've personally set up JACK, WPA_GUI, and eudev/OpenRC on all my corporate systems (running KDE Plasma 5.5 and Frameworks 5.18) so I can avoid the pain that comes from NetworkManager, PulseAudio and systemd. My life is better for it.

<comment><USER3> "nobody in gentoo wants systemd"

Hi I am nobody. Nice to meet you.

<comment><USER2> see, if you guys were just honest, and just openly stated "we're trying to replace GNU with freedesktop.org", it'd be one thing. But you're not. You're astroturfing, and artificially generating "demand" for systemd in Gentoo.

Your lifestyle choice of systemd is accepted by the rest of us. But don't pretend you'll ever be in the majority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am a Gentoo user, and I use systemd. I also feel like I am at an AA meeting or something every time I state this fact.

I have heard all the arguments against systemd and many are totally valid. Some of the implementations and management of the project leaves a lot to be desired.

That said, I have run Gentoo on my home desktop for over a decade, Arch on personal/work laptops, Debian on some personal development shell boxes, and CoreOS/Debian on the hundreds of servers I maintain between work/volunteer projects. I may touch all of these in a given day, and I can't tell you how great it is for my personal sanity to be able to run 'systemctl restart ...' or 'journalctl -fu someservice' on any of them. Having a common set of core system tools available across desktop/server distributions has huge advantages.

Also there are some real advantages of systemd design (bloated or not) a lot of people overlook. For one, I help maintain shell services for the general public. Giving users root is of course not sane, but at the same time users are constantly wanting to run their own databases, webservers, etc. Since migrating to systemd we can just tell them "create a unit file in ~/.config/systemd/units with whatever you want, and it will become a system daemon run as your user". This is a huge win for security, administration ease, and usability.

I have also used Gentoo to build base images for embedded systems with minimal resources, and systemd would of been a terrible choice for those use cases. It would of been a terrible choice for ChromeOS.

Choice is what Gentoo has always been about. Let's quit the zealotry and ensure Gentoo continues to be the Linux OS that offers the maximum choices to include the right tools for the problem you are solving.

I fully support the author here.

<comment><USER2> You're trying to tell us that, prior to systemd, Gentoo was a terrible choice for base images?

Embedded wants parallel startup gains, sure, but there are videos floating around youtube of embedded systems booting linux kernels and a full GNU base system _in less than a second_ using init scripts. Why the hell would you want a non-predictible bootup (which systemd does in the name of "speed in bootup") on an embedded system?

All my KVM/Qemu VM's are currently gentoo (and arch+OpenRC) based. most use less than 10MB _total_. systemd requires more than 5 times that amount _by default_. CoreOS _starts_ with gentoo and then _strips it further_ , and it doesn't use systemd at all.

Gentoo (minus systemd) is the base of ChromeOS and ChromiumOS. You had to have known that. I refuse to believe that you're one of the lucky 10,000 XKCD talks about.

Your post, and the main article, are just quiet astroturfing/zealotry. You guys have plenty of distributions. We heard Lennart's "wake-up call", and ignored it, because he was leading the march towards _a new operating system_. We like GNU. We don't particularly like/need/want the Violate-GPL-Over-RPC functionality system Poettering implemented in PID1.

Gentoo is not denying choice. We're denying you guys the right to have systemd be a default. The safest distros (Void, Gentoo, Calculate) are all avoiding systemd on purpose. You certainly have the choice to compromise your system and taint your GNU system, but don't expect your silly march off the cliff to become the default for those of us left with actual GNU systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Curious, are there any HN readers out there who use Gentoo? If so, how do you find that it differs from other linux distros?

I have been intimidated with the idea of 'building from source'. Recently I have been curious about trying Gentoo and BSD, but every time I do some research it is not encouraging.

<comment><USER2> Militant Gentoo user here with a fleet of Calculate/Gentoo-based chromebooks deployed. with quickpkg, I can flash and install a new chromebook in less than 5 minutes

Start with Calculate Linux. it's gentoo, but without the scary install, and most of the packages are binary-based. If your package isn't binary'd already, you'll have to wait for it to build. that'll take longer than you may expect. If you're testing new packages, you may have to make an ebuild. Ebuilds are surprisingly simple.

You _can_ use systemd if you enjoy that sort of massochism, but it's definitely _not_ (recommended) required.

<comment><USER4> Ok, thanks for the tip.</comment></comment></comment>


OpenID Needs to Start Getting Real - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/12/30/openid-needs-to-start-getting-real/ <comment><USER2> _Fellow blogger Allen Stern shares some of the same concerns about OpenID. "It's more likely that the average Internet user will understand the Facebook Connect process than the OpenID process. This is why OpenID must focus on marketing and usability more than technical standards at this time," he writes._

Yeah, all OpenID needs is some Ronco Spray-On Usability!

<http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability>

<comment><USER3> That particular problem is pretty well solved by spray on usability in the form of various configuration GUIs.

Open ID is probably a lot more tricky of course, so your point stands, even if I think your example is a bad one.</comment></comment>


BBC financial expert Alessio Rastani was a hoax - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8792829/BBC-financial-expert-Alessio-Rastani-Im-an-attention-seeker-not-a-trader.html

<comment><USER2> I don't understand why in the first place the BBC allowed him to go on TV. Rastani is an ignorant and does not understand the real implications and consequences of a recession. Everybody in the industry knew he wasn't a trader, unfortunately the general public couldn't tell.

<comment><USER3> proof or it's bullshit

<comment><USER2> (1) to be a trader (be it sole trader, partnership or other) in the UK one must be authorised by the Financial Services Authority. Rastani is not registered as one, and consequently not authorised, i.e. not a trader. (2) Rastani does not show up in either the Bloomberg or Reuters directory. ANY trader uses either a Bloomberg Terminal or 3000 Xtra. He does not use either. The general public does not have a way of checking these. Bottom line, Rastani is a hoax.

<comment><USER4> Yes, Rastani doesn't show up on the terminal, but if you look up his 'people' page, it lists his profession as "PROFESSIONAL SPEAKER" and there the only things associated with him are 3 news stories on 9/27.

EDIT: I'm agreeing with you :) Maybe this is a sales opportunity to sell to the BBC!

<comment><USER2> I am not denying that it is easy to find out about this guy on the internet, BUT he does present himself as a "trader" on national television. Quote from Rastani on the BBC: "... see I'm a trader... if I see an opportunity to make money I go with that...". That is just wrong, misleading the public, and disrespecting professional traders.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Clarence Thomas Uses Simple Words in His Opinions - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/02/why-clarence-thomas-uses-simple-words-in-his-opinions/273326/# <comment><USER2> Some of the best writers I know are ones whose style is deceptively clear and simple. When reading something poorly written, like this comment, you have to spend some some effort extracting the meaning from the words. These good writers are effective because they manage to minimize this--reading something simple and clear takes less mental effort and makes the content more approachable and appealing, largely subconsciously.

My favorite example of a writer like this is Stallman. Whether I agree with or disagree with any of his particular essays, they are always immensely _readable_. His arguments are completely unobfuscated and easy to follow. His work is worth reading if just to see how complicated legal and technical ideas and arguments can be beautifully decomposed.

Now, this is certainly not the only way to be a great writer. Perhaps it is not even a way to be the _greatest_ of writers. But it is very effective and, importantly, relatively _subtle_. It is so subtle, in fact, that I think many people do not recognize how much especial skill it takes and good it actually is.

This sort of skill is particularly important for something like the law which is inherently complex and tends to attract people very comfortable with such complexity. Exposing it simply is crucial. More relevantly for HN, this sort of skill is at least as useful for _technical_ topics. It's certainly something everybody here should think about when writing.

<comment><USER3> I recently finished reading the Handbook of Technical Writing, by Gerald J. Alred. It contains excellent advice on improving grammar, and avoiding jargon and affectation in technical writing. I can highly recommend it.

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1250004411/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1250004411/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1250004411&linkCode=as2&tag=blasday-20) (referral link)

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1250004411/> (non referral link)

<comment><USER4> offering a non referral link makes me way more likely to use your referral link. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure Thomas's opinions are the ones I'd hold up as paragons of clear thought and clear writing, though he certainly does have a succinct style. One of the things about legal writing is that you have to "show your work"--guide the reader from accepted premise to conclusion via accepted authority. This is necessarily a somewhat verbose process, and doing this thoroughly is somewhat in tension with doing it succinctly.

I personally think Scalia's opinions are amazing, notwithstanding his habit of writing very long inverted sentences. I'm not sure if they're the most approachable for lay people, but they are incisively clear. "Hand-wavey" is not a term that ever comes to mind reading Scalia's opinions (except when talking about drugs or gays).

Richard Posner (7th Circuit) and Alex Kozinzki (9th Circuit) are also known for their writing. I like this one from Kozinksi: <http://notabug.com/kozinski/kremen_v_netsol>

<comment><USER6> My favorite Kozinski work is the dissent in United States v. Pineda-Moreno: [http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2010/08/12/08...](http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2010/08/12/08-30385.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the link. That was a really fun read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yet, it's possible to obfuscate and confuse with only simple words, even unintentionally.

We're waiting on a Supreme Court ruling that could have significant impact on first-sale that hinges on two plausible interpretations of the phrase "made lawfully under this title."[1]

"First sale" itself is made up of two simple understandable words, but could mean be any one of the sales that occur in the creation of a work. The words themselves contain nothing that indicate whether it refers to the first sale of a book to a publisher, a publisher to a store, a store to a person or a person to another person.

"Assault" is a common word in every day usage, but in law it means something very specific, it doesn't even require physical contact.

Even if someone succeeds in writing a law that makes perfect sense to laypeople, it's possible that the apparent meaning will change or be lost in the future. For an example of this, wade just ankle-deep into discussions of the meaning of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.

Phrases like " _sine qua non_ "[2] are pretty inaccessible, in that you might need to look them up. However, being from a dead language, they may be less likely to morph in meaning over time.

[1] [http://www.volokh.com/2012/05/08/some-baffling-copyright- law...](http://www.volokh.com/2012/05/08/some-baffling-copyright-law/)

[2] Found in a Supreme Court opinion on copyright - Feist Pubs., Inc. v. Rural Tel. Svc. Co., Inc. - 499 U.S. 340 (1991) <http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/499/340/case.html>

<comment><USER9> > We're waiting on a Supreme Court ruling that could have significant impact > on first-sale that hinges on two plausible interpretations of the phrase > "made lawfully under this title."[1]

Not only that but Bowman v. Monsanto is another first sale case and it has to do with whether the first sale of a soybean seed reaches the sale of the soybean's offspring by sexual reproduction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is a movement in the legal community toward using _plain English_. Though, some think that doing so somehow reduces the quality of the legal writing.

I was recently struck by how Google's terms of service are written in plain English legal writing:

<https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/>

Compare a contract term like this, often referred to as a severability clause (from Google's ToS): "If it turns out that a particular term is not enforceable, this will not affect any other terms."

With this, in traditional legalese: "If any term or other provision of this Agreement is determined to be invalid, illegal or incapable of being enforced by any rule or law, or public policy, all other conditions and provisions of this Agreement shall nevertheless remain in full force and effect so long as the economic or legal substance of the transactions contemplated hereby is not affected in any manner materially adverse to any party."

Both have the exact same effect.

<comment><USER11> But legalese _is_ plain English. It's verbose in order to eliminate ambiguity and double meanings, not to be complex for complexity's sake.

<comment><USER12> Speaking as a lawyer, this is entirely false. The reason most legalese exists is because most lawyers are bad at writing, and reuse blocks of text from other lawyers who are bad at writing.

It is entirely possible to write plain and understandable english that is legally unambiguous. As someone mentioned above, there has been a huge movement towards this in law schools. It has had some impact, but it's still going to be a long time.

That said, even some of the older folks in the legal field hate legalese. When I clerked for an appeals court judge, we used to do two things: 1\. Read every single opinion out loud to all the clerks in order to make sure it sounded sane and was understandable to the other folks at the table, who had no idea what the case was about. 2\. Remove all unnecessary words and anachronisms. The judge used to pull out his copy of strunk and white and beat us over the head with it.

<comment><USER9> And yet I have never seen a legal opinion to use the words "see above" or "see below." They _always_ fall back on the Latin.

<comment><USER12> This is, AFAIK, because all of the standardized citation styles you could pick from require it.

<comment><USER9> Is there any case though of a Supreme Court justice facing any consequences for insisting on a non-standard citation style? What are they going to do, impeach for writing clearly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Clarence's decision and the decision of many other politicians is likely the product of Orwell's writing.

After reading Orwell's "Collection of Essays" I've been doing the same. In his essay, "Politics and the English Language." Orwell boils down good writing to:

1\. "Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."

2\. "Never use a long word where a short one will do."

3\. "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out."

4\. "Never use the passive where you can use the active."

5\. "Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."

6\. "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous." (170)

edit: removed words

[http://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2011/08/31/george- orwel...](http://law.marquette.edu/facultyblog/2011/08/31/george-orwell-on- writing-well/)

<comment><USER14> I love that Orwell collection.

An entire collection of Martin Amis essays and book reviews is called 'The War Against Cliché'[1] (your #1 above) because he too prioritizes resisting the all-too-easy tendency to rely on tired worn-out phrases. I have noticed that tabloid papers lean on this style of language more than traditional broadsheets - for me it is this (deliberate) literary lazy folksiness that sets them apart rather than mere content. Note Amis puts an elitist accent on cliché breaking Orwell's #5 but I like it because it reminds us that it is cleeshay rather than cleesh and I am not afraid of foreign tongues :)

Philosophy is another area (besides law) rife with jargon and, if I may say, prolixity. It is an area here care is rarely taken to express oneself plainly and simply. Schopenhauer has an essay called simply enough 'On Style'[2] which starts out "Style is the physiognomy of the mind, and a safer index to character than the face.". I use this as a guiding light. Some philosophers are too important to avoid regardless of style (Hegel, Kant, Luhmann) but I am always and everywhere suspicious of any who are too verbose and needlessly opaque (Quine springs to mind). This is why I love Nietzsche so much, whatever you may say about his ideas - my God - his turn of phrase is sublime.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Against_Clich%C3%A9>

[2] [http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/lit/cont...](http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/lit/contents.html)

<comment><USER13> I approach influential works of philosophy as being analogous to mathematical proofs. It requires precision of language and verbosity for rigor. But just like math you don't need to read the proof to get the idea. I understand the idea of an integral and derivative despite the fact I cannot fully understand the proofs deriving these ideas. I can talk your ear off on Hegel despite never fully reading his work. That just wouldn't be a good use of my time.

On the other hand thinkers like Derrida are obscure and practically require an understanding of Ancient Greek to say anything "authoritative". I think it leads to all sorts of hand-wavy interpretations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

\--William Strunk Jr., Elements of Style

<comment><USER16> Which has always struck me as hilarious advice considering that second and third sentences in the paragraph are unnecessary.

<comment><USER17> The second sentence explains and justifies the first. The third refines and clarifies. If you hold that it suffices to merely authoritatively assert a claim, then they are unnecessary, but the point of the third sentence is that, in fact, it doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think people are so intent on the style of their communication that sometimes forget that they are writing something in order to _communicate_.

Today I was discussing a reminder email ("You have an appointment coming up!") from my dentist - it had pretty pictures but lacked the date and time of the oppointment.

We've all seen web sites with flashy graphics but no contact info and/or how to buy what they are selling.

<comment><USER19> I really wish more lawyers would think this way. Every bill passed in Congress nowadays is hundreds or even thousands of pages long, and filled with incomprehensible legal language.

It's as if the text itself is intended to _obscure_ the meaning, rather than explain it.

<comment><USER16> It takes millions of lines of incomprehensible computer language to do something as trivial as "browse the web".

Now imagine the task is "defining the lives of 300 million people a significant fraction of which is actively engaged in attempting to find any loop hole" and think how many lines THAT would take.

<comment><USER20> So you imagine that the more text there is in a law, the less likely there is to be a loophole? Do you also think that longer programs have fewer bugs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It occurs to me that as members and professionals within the technical community, hackers have just as much of a responsibility to use plain English when communicating with stakeholders and laypeople as members of the law community.

Often, I find it extremely hard to distill a technical concept down to the basic takeaway. It's a skill I've been flexing for years now, and yet I still feel the need to drastically simplify my explanations. It often doesn't seem fair. To bear the burden of consolidating an ocean of understanding into a few word summary your stakeholder can grok sometimes seems impossible!

Nevertheless, I think Clarence Thomas sets an awesome example which really puts it in perspective for me. As people who are trying to deliver results to our stakeholders, we owe it them to explain what we're doing for them in as plain and simple language as we can muster.*

*note: I totally acknowledge that this is a difficult skill which can take a fair amount of practice. Not saying I am personally perfect or even great at this skill. I'm just saying it's an important one to work on!

<comment><USER9> What do you mean by plain english though? If I am talking to an accountant I use different words and levels of detail than if I am talking to the person in charge of network security, and very different still from if I am talking with a 10 year old.

The problem as I see it is that "plain English" doesn't really exist in any objective sense. We all speak different versions of the language depending on who we are talking to.

Indeed if you think about it, a lot of computing and programming terms are quite readily understandable to an imaginative layperson. Words like "stack" or "pipe" are pretty clear metaphors for existing every-day concepts and in fact when I introduce concepts like "heap" or "stack" I always use everyday example, like a stack of books....

> Nevertheless, I think Clarence Thomas sets an awesome example which really > puts it in perspective for me. As people who are trying to deliver results > to our stakeholders, we owe it them to explain what we're doing for them in > as plain and simple language as we can muster.*

Thomas is one of those justices who, whatever you think of his preferred views on jurisprudence, is both an impressive writer and an impressive speaker and someone I am happy to see on the court even when I disagree with him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Good article, but it's a bit of a straw man argument. Supreme Court opinions have a distinctive style that tends towards plain English. You can pick almost any opinion (majority or dissenting) at random and a layman will be able to follow along.

However, the Supreme Court is _sui generis_ ; basically almost all other legal opinions are written quickly and opaquely. There's little incentive for judges to write beautifully if only a handful of people are going to care about the decision--especially when those people have lawyers available to interpret the opinion for them.

</comment><comment><USER23> Many people recommend books that describe how to write using simple words. I recommend reading E. B. White's "Charlotte's Web". E. B. White is the White in Strunk and White. "Charlotte's Web" illustrates the ideas in Strunk and White while being an enjoyable story.

In the story Charlotte saves the pig's life by writing the words "Some Pig" in her web. I've always thought that sentence exemplified Strunk and White's suggestions. It's just two simple and short words.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was always under the assumption that plain english was avoided because being succinct can leave things open to interpretation. This would leaves legal documents up for debate and open to loopholes.

Am I wrong in this assumption?

I often find myself writing things that are too verbose in fear that I won't be interpreted as intended. I recognize that this is an inherent challenge in writing, but is there any intermediate solution? Can there not be a "plain language" version of a document? Or why can't legal documents be primarily written in plain language, with notes (like footnotes) for legal clarification?

<comment><USER25> You might be. Think of it in this way: the more you write, the more ideas are offered for your audience to interpret - and misinterpret. Shorter writing can be clearer, if written well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd like to plug the simple English Wikipedia <http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page> as it's helped me recently with a few math concepts that I couldn't quite understand from the normal Wikipedia.

<comment><USER22> Wikipedia is a great first stop for almost every subject under the sun--except for medical issues and mathematics. In both those cases, it seems like procrastinating medical students or math grad students try to out-do each other with more and more esoteric details and jargon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have a severe problem regarding this: my writing and indeed my explanation are often very verbose, and more often than not, filled with jargon.

I had been for a very long time, a believer that jargon simplifies communication because a lot of information is encapsulated in jargon. However I have come to believe, recently, that I could not have been more wrong.

Any idea how to simplify my communications? I'm starting to blog a bit more again, and I would really like to reach a wider audience on economic thinking

<comment><USER28> Two techniques that I've used: 1. Read good writing. 2. After writing your own work, force yourself to leave it for week. Only after that week, edit. (Blog posts are particularly suited to #2.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I picked up his autobiography

[http://www.amazon.com/My-Grandfathers-Son-A- Memoir/dp/B003H4...](http://www.amazon.com/My-Grandfathers-Son-A- Memoir/dp/B003H4RB8K)

on a whim.

...and was quite impressed by it, and by him. I don't agree with all of his political or legal stances, but I had no doubt after reading it that he has a first class mind, and thinks deeply and clearly about things

</comment><comment><USER30> What a fascinating chap. I wish I could write/speak with the sort of clarity he has, even in such short comments.

I realise he mentions that this clarity comes from heavy editing, but he also seems to have a very clear and organised way of thinking (perhaps from all those years of sifting through law...).

My favourite writer has always been Douglas Adams because he managed to combine effortlessly clear prose with comedy. I highly recommend "The Salmon of Doubt", a posthumously published collection of his short essays/articles.

My favourite is about Frank the electrician, in which rants in tandem about the his tangled mess of computer wires and his electrician, who has a delightful habit of destroying newly plastered walls and cutting the power off at inopportune moments.

As an example of stream of conciousness comedy writing (with an underlying, clear, message) it is peerless.

</comment><comment><USER31> Reading this, an earlier article on DC's laws being copyrighted by a private firm (link below) and Aaron Swartz's FBI file make me think how inaccessible our government really is. Not only is it hard to even find the relevant laws or even worse court decisions once you read them they are often incomprehensible.

Can't the government afford to put this on the web in an easily usable form? Perhaps annotated with at least their own interpretation of the meaning. Don't they need this to function?

Could there be some sort of open-source effort by lawyers to solve this problem?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5251797> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5247730>

</comment><comment><USER32> "...the genius is not to write a 5 cent idea in a ten dollar sentence. It's to put a ten dollar idea in a 5 cent sentence."

That 200:1 value to cost ratio is good advice.

You're going to make a killing if the customer perceived value to price ratio is 200:1, and if the retail price to cost ratio is also 200:1.

</comment><comment><USER33> In the mid-19th century, an author named Lucy Aikin (using the pen name Mary Godolphin) wrote a number of children's novels using words of just one syllable, including versions of "Robin Crusoe" and "Swiss Family Robinson". Every word, save for proper names, had only one syllable.

[http://collectingchildrensbooks.blogspot.com/2008/04/monosyl...](http://collectingchildrensbooks.blogspot.com/2008/04/monosyllabic- monographs-of-antediluvian.html)

For those interested in taking this challenge, here's a list of over 6000 monosyllabic English words. This is a surprisingly difficult exercise! Unfortunately, the writing style is very staccato.

<http://www.one-syllable-words.com/>

</comment><comment><USER34> John Ralston Saul has written extensively about the dictatorship of vocabulary and how it is important to write in clear everyday language instead of the technocratic babble of an expert. Voltaire didn't write crypto books only the elite could understand

</comment><comment><USER35> Many pivotal Supreme Court decisions are delightful to read in part due to their clear and elegantly straightforward language and reasoning. And always with extensive citations!

I can't say the same for the majority of web site usage and software licenses I've read, most of which will require tremendous effort for any court to interpret should there be a dispute.

I am a fan of Thomas' dissent in Kelo v New London. (<http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/04-108P.ZD1>)

</comment><comment><USER36> On a related note, I have read one line here a few times that is very similar.

I did not have time to write a shorter comment.

Far too many of us ramble, we do not take the time to focus our thoughts. This results in replies that just go on and on repeating the same thought in as many ways.

While I like Clarence Thomas, having read his books and some about him, I do not always like his decisions but at least I have a chance at understanding them

</comment><comment><USER37> From the article: "... With that fascinating segue, he explained the logic behind his writing ..."

From wikipedia: "A segue (i/ˈsɛɡweɪ/) is a smooth transition from one topic or section to the next. The term is derived from Italian segue, "it follows"; the pronunciation in English differs from the original Italian pronunciation."

Oh, the irony.

<comment><USER38> What's ironic in it? He took the story from a quadraplegiac friend who had trouble with a curb and "transitioned smoothly to another topic" about dense language being a curb-like barrier for some.

Or you refer to the word "segue" itself? Justice Thomas is claiming simplicity; The Atlantic author is not.

<comment><USER37> Yes, the word "segue" itself.

Not arguing about Justice Thomas, but the Atlantic author writing about that subject, then showing no empathy with Justice's POV? I found that a bit ironic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This is the most inspiring video I've seen all year. I continue to be amazed at how really decent people can "rub off" on the rest of us.

Thank you very much for sharing it.

</comment><comment><USER40> My dad likes to say "English is the most powerful programming language." (offhandedly, so "English" is shorthand for "spoken language")

</comment><comment><USER41> I thought it of great interest that he was open enough to share that he uses Goodreader on his iPad.

</comment><comment><USER42> I feel like I've heard Scalia give this exact answer...</comment>


Monkey-Patching, Single Responsibility Principle, and Scala Implicits - <AUTHOR> http://jamesgolick.com/2010/2/8/monkey-patching-single-responsibility-principle-and-scala-implicits.html

<comment><USER2> Implicit type conversion is often noted as a misfeature of C++ and PHP. I've never used them in Scala myself, but they are highlighted as a positive feature of Scala in this article, and I am inclined to believe the author when he says they are.

The insight here was just that implicit type conversion is very bad when you don't know it's happening. When you DO know it's happening -- because you imported the conversions -- and it's used to save brainstrokes ("codetree nodes"), then it can be very helpful.

</comment><comment><USER3> "The technique is known as monkey-patching. "

There seem to be two views of this among Rubyists. People who think this sort of practice is inherently suspect, and those who see it as no more unusual than reassigning to a variable.

The first group use the term "monkey patching"; with all of its underlying tone of ad-hoc-ery and last-resort duct tape coding.

The other group just refers to it as re-opening classes.

</comment><comment><USER4> In C# this is called extension methods: monkey-patching (for methods) without polluting the global scope.

</comment><comment><USER5> Like all powerful things, when used properly implicits add rather than detract from the code. In Scala's case, you can limit the scope of the implications which is just so nice. I'm not a fan-boy but it sure beats the heck out of Java.

</comment><comment><USER6> The advantage of implicit conversions over monkey patching seems solid, but I'm not an unqualified fan of implicit conversions either. As a Scala newcomer (i.e. never written a significant app in Scala myself), I find implicit conversions hinder reading code closely enough to be able to modify or extend it. Although the original author may know which import has added some implicit conversions, why, and what they do, this isn't easy to discover after the fact.

It seems that the Idea plugin will show the implicit conversions that are actually used, but it would also be nice to see all implicits in scope at any time.</comment>