Why Poor Countries Are Poor - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/archives/2006/03/01/why-poor-countries-are-poor/print

<comment><USER2> This article is (almost) accurate.

I live in Romania ... and of course, we are doing a lot better than Cameroon, the country got accepted in EU, and the average salary is something like $25-$30 / day (and people with college degrees do better than that).

But the corruption has reached unimaginable levels ... and it's not just the government, it's everyone.

For example, we have a public health system, and while I paid something like $15000 last year in taxes (a big amount for us), my wife got pregnant, she's having problems ... and we've had to bribe a doctor to even speak to us, not to mention they demand big bribes for doing a clean caesarean section, and my wife needs it. The poor souls that don't have money for bribes simply get fucked.

And for anything you'd want to do, like buying/selling property or starting a company, getting permits ... the bureaucracy is so awful that the only sane way of doing it is (you guest it) by bribing.

> _The roads, they have not been fixed for 19 years_

Well ... in Romania roads get fixed every year ... badly, so every year new repairs are needed, with millions of euros going down the drain. And the companies doing the repairs ... get contracted by nepotism. I guess Cameroon got lots to learn from us about misusing funds :-)

Our elections are mostly for real ... but it really doesn't matter. It's the people ... although everyone is blaming the government, instead of looking in the mirror.

<comment><USER3> Yes, sorry but as another EU citizen, I have to say I'm not sure we should have accepted Romania into the EU before this problem is fixed.

Do you think it's helping against corruption or is any incentive now gone? Do you think it's getting better with rising income? (this was not meant against romanians it's just that EU institutions are pretty far away from EU projects and are usually terrible at detecting corruption)

<comment><USER2> > _I'm not sure we should have accepted Romania into the EU before this > problem is fixed._

If I lived anywhere else, I'd have the same opinion :)

> _Do you think it's helping against corruption or is any incentive now gone?_

Actually, it's helping, since we are monitored and we get warnings and sanctions now and then ... one of the main concerns being corruption. I don't think that the end-result can be predicted though, we'll see ... although since we entered the EU, I can see things improving.

Unfortunately with this economic crisis, we're back to square one.

> _it's just that EU institutions are pretty far away from EU projects and are > usually terrible at detecting corruption_

My impression is that they are pretty good :-) ... I've heard of reports more accurate than what is published in our media.

<comment><USER4> I just saw something related in the news, apparently corruption in Afghanistan is on the scale of 23% of GDP. I can imagine that changing an economic system with that much corruption to something better is hard, since everyone depends on how things are now. Imagine what would happen if everyone's salary was suddenly cut to three quarters...

Actually, that's more or less what's happening in the Baltic countries now. The economic crisis has hit hard there, and the government is taking rather drastic measures to handle it.

Sources: [http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2010/01/20/Corruption- biggest...](http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2010/01/20/Corruption-biggest- concern-for-Afghans/UPI-61151263967760/) and <http://www.dw- world.de/dw/article/0,,4320882,00.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Fortunately honesty seems more prevalent in the Baltic countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm impressed this article basically explains why do I live in a poor country.

I live in Ecuador (South America). Our land is packed with high-quality oil, virtually unlimited food and impressive biodiversity (google "yasuni").

Although our country looks perfect, 15% of us live in extreme poverty (this means living out of less than 2 bucks a day). The other 60% is mid-low class with less than $1000 of annual income.

The only explanation I have is that our presidents had not been doing their homework. Corruption, organized crime, economic crime, you name it.

<comment><USER6> But then, how do poor countries end up getting day after day such lousy governments? Is the people/society a factor in that? (after all, they DO vote, at least in Ecuador)

<comment><USER7> Some poor countries are able to bootstrap themselves out of it though. The article cites China, Taiwan, South Korea, Botswana, Chile, India, Mauritius, and Singapore as countries which historically were chronically poor and now are some of the fastest growing economies in the world.

<comment><AUTHOR> And they all share relatively competent and honest government (to some extent) nowadays. Europe also picked itself up quite well after the second World War, perhaps because people there knew how to run a country with some efficiency?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Being Indian, this is a subject I think about a lot - I do mean a lot, almost as much as I think about our company (Zoho). I have also read a lot of literature on this subject - most recently the wonderful book Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, by Yasheng Huang. I follow China closely because Deng Xiaoping China's track record of lifting people from poverty is unequaled and will likely never be equaled - given that only India has those kinds of numbers, and India hasn't done anywhere as well as China in lifting people from poverty.

It is worth looking at Deng Xiaoping's early rural reforms in China, to see an example that lifted the most people out of poverty in the shortest amount of time.

I can summarize it with the biblical saying: don't give a man fish, teach a man how to fish.

China's record illustrates a few things: a) a society where there is some order and stability, so people can _focus_ on development. Way too many poor countries, including the poorest parts of India, have little or no stability on the ground. You have to be able to make a plan, and have a reasonable assurance that the overall environment around you is stable enough to execute the plan. This Deng provided.

b) Remove barriers to rural entrepreneurship, particularly light industry - shoes, textiles, everyday low tech household goods and the like. It should be possible for these ventures to be funded - they need fairly small amounts of capital, but the system has to be in place to provide access to that capital, and conversely, provide reasonable security to that capital. This is why order and stability matters - both sides on the capital equation have to be able to make a plan with some assurance.

c) Build roads in the countryside, so the rural entrepreneurs have market access, so they can get a higher price by selling to nearby urban areas (i.e they can get better terms of trade in exchange for other urban-made goods - this lifts both sides).

That is it. Note that I did not say anything about literacy, healthcare and so on. All of those things are important, but getting the first steps I listed above right would unleash a wave of human energy that would lift incomes on a massive scale. Even the poorest, most illiterate villages in India have a labor force that can produce these light goods _for their own consumption_ , and have enough talent to organize that production - that is the crucial part to remember. They can lift consumption only if they lift production.

Step back and think about this: what is poverty? At its rawest level, it is a) not enough food b) not enough simple material goods. Unleashing rural entrepreneurship allows a) more food to be grown b) allows that same population to produce the simple material goods that vastly improve the human condition. I am not talking here about iPhones here, I am talking about the shirt on your back, shoes, toothbrush and the like. Once people take that first step on the ladder, they move up pretty fast.

Fortunately, where our company is (in India) and our current position (doing well) allows us to experiment. But there is that crucial first step, stability and order, we cannot provide, which means we can only go where there is stability and order, which obtains relatively more in Southern India than in the North, though (or should I say "as a result") Northern states are poorer.

Deng's China is the existence proof that it can be done.

</comment><comment><USER9> Societies fail when individuals discover they can vote themselves money from everyone else. If there is no objective rule of law firmly establishing individual rights ( property rights and freedom to engage in commerce, essentially), a society will inevitably cannibalize itself, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER10> In older times a dysfunctional country would be quickly conquered and fixed by the nearest competent neighbor.

I don't even know what a solution could look like today?

<comment><USER11> That still holds. The problem is that it's been taken to its logical conclusion: all dysfunctional countries have been conquered by their competent neighbors, which means that there are large landmasses that contain exclusively competent nations (North America, Europe, Australia/Oceania, and soon Asia) and large landmasses that contain exclusively dysfunctional ones (Africa, Arabia, and South America).

There are natural barriers that prevent competent but distant nations from conquering dysfunctional ones. Colonialism was an attempt to ignore those, until people realized that it cost far more than it was worth to the colonizers.

I should probably mention that much of the reasoning behind the Bush invasion of Iraq was along these lines. It was hoped that Iraq would become a "beacon of democracy" in the Mideast. Then, all of its neighbors would either adopt Western institutions to maintain their relative positions, or they would be conquered by a U.S-supported Iraq.

Somebody forgot to factor in the effect of an 8000-mile supply line, or the reluctance of a people to give up deeply-entrenched customs.

<comment><USER3> maybe one of you could show at least one example of a "competent" nation conquering disfunctional ones before building your complete world view on it.

<comment><USER11> The first that comes to mind is the Ottoman empire. World power in the 1600-1700s, but it failed to develop the institutions mentioned in this article and fell to Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Britain over the latter half of the 1800s.

Lithuania. Largest country in Europe in the 14th century. Lost large sections of its territory to Sweden and Russia in the late 1600s and 1700s.

All of the Native American nations that were swept aside by the United States. Much of that was because of disease, but a lot was also because the U.S. was better organized and could pick off individual tribes one-by-one.

Mongolia. Genghis Khan's empire, once one of the largest on earth. Great fighters, poor administrators. Eventually overshadowed by China.

<comment><USER12> Agree with you on all but the last example; I think the Mongol Empire was one of the marvels of human history, in terms of sheer size and coordination. It succeeded in uniting friendly tribes and warring tribes alike by allowing them to retain their cultural traditions and self-administrate, so long as it didn't violate Mongol law.

Unfortunately, the government that developed was mostly a dictatorship, and as usual it was relatively short-lived once some key family members died off and left an opportunity for others to squabble.

<comment><USER13> I think the other thing is that governments rot: almost every state begins cohesive and ends decadent. The Mongols went from cohesive to decadent in less than a generation; the North African groups that ibn Khaldun lived among tended to last 2-3 generations; the western Roman Empire lasted somewhere around 1400 years.

The history of the rulers of Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul also illustrates this cycle. The Byzantines began dynamic and powerful, then they became self-seeking and were conquered by the fiercely cohesive Ottoman Turks (omitting the history of the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople, which went through this cycle almost as quickly as the Mongols did), then the Ottoman Turks went from fiercely cohesive to fiercely self-interested (look up the Auspicious Incident) and collapsed in turn.

Now, the collapse part of the cycle is slowed down by a world peace that will last until/unless the United States disintegrates (and it's in trouble; look at the self-serving corruption of groups as unlike each other as the Pentagon and the labor unions) -- but I discussed both the merits and the problems of this situation in another post on this subject.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been thinking about this for a few years. Like the author said, once you start thinking about it, it's hard to think about anything else.

Not all poor countries are poor in the same way. Although there are clear correlations between crime and poverty -- and corruption -- there are also countries like Thailand, which are poor but with relatively little crime or corruption.

So, let's say culture is one factor. If you reduce the education of the people down to what can be passed by word of mouth from one generation to the next, then if that culture's "story" is largely one of war or self-interest, then it's more likely to be reinforced by the next generation. On the other hand, if a culture's history includes a somewhat recent spell of relative peace -- even under a dictatorship -- then it's more likely that the next generation will work towards establishing stability.

Resources is certainly another factor. It is simply impossible for a country to make roads, high technology, and infrastructure materialize from nothing. It must have natural resources available, either to directly build infrastructure or to trade with other countries for raw materials.

Education is another factor -- or, maybe more specifically, the _value_ of education. This is one of the things that concerns me about anti- intellectualism in the U.S.; when education becomes devalued, citizens lose the perspective of history, the opportunity to learn from other countries' mistakes, and the notions of what might be possible in the future.

Poverty and corruption are self-reinforcing, too. You can see this even in the poorer communities in "wealthy" countries: homes that are in disrepair, common spaces that are mismanaged and poorly kept. I'm sometimes tempted to wonder why people in those communities don't spend a few dollars on paint, or a few hours here and there working on a few repairs, and bring their community out of poverty. Then, I remember how I felt when I was poor: exhausted. There is a tremendous spiritual toll taken by abject poverty; it defeats you the moment you wake up. Your day will likely be a struggle, and if it isn't, then it becomes a rare and valuable rest day. It's a difficult catch-22 to understand if you haven't been in such a situation, but if you're constantly struggling to survive, the last thing you want to do is spend effort to improve your situation.

Cameroon at this point isn't likely to change soon, because its poverty and corruption has become cultural. Changing its situation will probably require first a massive sea-change in the government; the death of the current ruler and replacement by someone less politically savvy, or less self-interested. Or, direct intervention by other governments.

Then, it will take time. Someone will have to find the energy to build infrastructure while the rest of the citizens learn what it can be like not to struggle every day.

<comment><USER14> I don't know much about Thailand, but I think last year they had civil war, or were on the brink of it. I remember one Thai waitress telling me that she worries about her family back home. So not everything is peachy there, either.

As for public spaces, having lived in a student hall puts things into perspective. It is VERY demotivating to repeatedly clean up other people's dirt, if they don't care.

I once visited a home for asylum seekers and was a bit shocked about the dirt (for example in the kitchen). But there were lots of different nationalities there, who might not even understand each other. When I moved in the student hall and saw that even people with equal backgrounds have problems to cooperate, I understood why the conditions for asylum seekers were so poor...

Likewise for run down neighbourhoods: what is the point in replacing your windows, if other people will just smash them again within days? Besides I suspect the worse it gets the more people think about moving away rather than improving things. Once you have decided you want to move away eventually, you are even less likely to invest into improving things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It sounds like government in Cameroon is effectively organized crime, but I imagine most criminal organizations would run the country more efficiently and more profitably. Would the government do a better job if it stopped mimicking the institutions of high-functioning countries and was frankly exploitative?

<comment><USER16> You'd think. But actual organized criminals like bootleggers are/were generally not terribly efficient either.

Here's one way to look at it: very, very smart criminals should do much less damage to their victims than they seem to, just for reasons of self-interest. This is primarily because the first world has made it more individually profitable for very, very smart criminals to go legit, either in business or politics. This leaves actual visible criminal activity to those not smart enough, or not disciplined enough, to take that route.

Don't shake your head at how awful it is when a high-up executive at a major corporation turns out to be a complete sociopath. Marvel that society has gotten so much good out of that clever, ambitious sociopath. And be glad that crime is emphatically not as good a career path for him.

<comment><USER15> You have to assume Cameroon has as many clever, ambitious sociopaths as any other country. Why aren't they providing basic services? The article explains why long-term investment doesn't take place, but it doesn't explain why simple for-profit services don't crop up in competition with the official ones. For instance, if it costs too much to get a contract enforced legally, then there is a market for enforcing contracts illegally. This is obviously bad news for the government officials profiting from the legal enforcement of contracts -- _unless_ they are the ones running the illegal service, and they structure it as an inferior, low-end alternative to their legal service. (Corrupt government officials have an advantage over the mafia: corrupt government officials don't have to worry about getting shut down by the authorities. They just have to share the loot with their superiors.)

The article also doesn't explain why government officials, even corrupt ones, fail to make cheap investments that pay off over a few years. For instance, a kleptocrat should want a reliable supply of clean water to ensure that the farmers are healthy enough to plant and harvest crops, so he can steal the profits. If an epidemic means the crops rot in the fields, that's money out of his pocket. Money is readily converted to power, via bribes, weapons, or propaganda. Losing money means losing power. Why wouldn't a kleptocrat spend money on sanitation, especially if that means getting good marks from foreign governments and NGOs and qualifying for more aid?

<comment><USER16> All of that looks like a good investment _if_ you have sufficient stability (including cooperation from fellow kleptocrats) to have a serious chance at harvesting what you sowed.

It's probably simply too unstable to do so right now, and a lot of that comes from the top.

And _that_ would be a lot of the difference between Cameroon and a poor-ish but more culturally Western country.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> More discussion here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=382899>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I suspected I posted a duplicate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Corruption is the degree to which a government prioritizes its needs over its people's needs.

An early example of an anti-corruption measure would be the Magna Carta, which established limits on what an English monarch could do to his subjects. Anglo / American history is essentially one long struggle against corruption. It eventually manifested itself in the form of a government that by definition serves it's people rather than a group of subjects who serve a monarch. Hundreds of years of war, revolution, writings, beheadings and torture eventually eroded the power of government to where it is today. There are very few shortcuts around that. In order to stop corruption people need to be willing to risk their lives, freedom or well being.

<comment><AUTHOR> > [...] form of a government that by definition serves it's people rather than > a group of subjects who serve a monarch.

There is quite an interesting argument claiming that the German Kaiserreich (1871-1914) served its people better than the modern federal republic of Germany.

<comment><USER18> Interesting... Link?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a German book called "Preußen und die Marktwirtschaft" ("Prussia and Capitalism") by Ehrhardt Bödecker. ([http://www.amazon.de/Preußen-die- Marktwirtschaft-Ehrhardt-Bö...](http://www.amazon.de/Preußen-die- Marktwirtschaft-Ehrhardt-Bödecker/dp/3789281875))

It cites a lot of statistics showing how the public sector swelled in the federal republic compared to the Kaiserreich. (Prussia made up the vast majority of the Reich.) Alas, it seems to be only available offline and in German.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've read the book about this: _War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires_, by Peter Turchin. ([http://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Rise-Fall- Empires/dp/0452288...](http://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Rise-Fall- Empires/dp/0452288193/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1264020585&sr=8-1) )

Turchin's model of asabiya is much more developed than the article's, but goes in exactly the same direction. He emphasizes the importance of frontiers and warfare -- the civilizational counterpart to Darwinian selection pressure, and a reminder that there are worse enemies than one's neighbor and higher causes than one's checkbook -- for asabiya development and, thus, the cohesion of societies. All this is borne out with some very impressive styles of measurement; he's the founder of a new discipline called "cliodynamics," taking its approaches from ecological population modeling.

On the other hand, before we embrace war as the road to prosperity, we need to remember what commentors here observed -- that most civilizations wage war lawlessly, to the point of torture and genocide; so some sort of authority to control the intensity and severity of warfare would be a good idea. I don't think the United Nations will cut it; but Chesterton thought that the Pope would have, had the medieval project been taken to its conclusion...

</comment><comment><USER19> Cameroon only had independence for 50 years, which is as much experience as they have in running two nation-states (later became one). When people look at the developing world, they see what is going on but rarely its history. Prosperity happens gradually through an osmosis of many factors, and you have to start somewhere. The level of social stability Cameroon is able to achieve within only 50 years is fairly impressive for a western African country, or any country for that matter.

</comment><comment><USER20> Here's an older article which basically says the same thing from someone who lived in Africa.

<http://www.theothersideofkim.com/index.php/essays/36/>

</comment><comment><USER21> One conclusion to be drawn is that many countries were better off under colonial rule.

<comment><USER22> "One conclusion to be drawn is that many countries were better off under colonial rule"

Umm no. That depends on defining "better off" as "ruled by invaders from another country but with some economic or social benefits(probably)".

Just try offering colonial rule to former colonies, who have experience of being "better off". People might _joke_ about that, but an independent country's citizens would fight to the death against any attempt at colonization. Which means they do think they are better off without colonial rule. Unless you think millions of people don't know what is "better off" for them, your notion is hard to sustain logically.

Unless you want to volunteer to be colonized by China (say)? They seem to be good at economic development, which seems to be your metric for "better off".

<comment><USER21> I agree. I would not choose to trade freedom and self governance for economic benefit. I was however pointing out that when you look at things from a purely utilitarian perspective, you often end up with strange conclusions.

The other thing I find interesting is that we seem to be left with no options for solving the problems of these struggling post-colonial nations. Some certainly prospered economically after the ruling colonial powers left. Some suffered immensely. If one accepts that institutional order is a prerequisite for economic prosperity, then one might conclude that an outside power should take over and institute order, but the obvious moral problems prevents this. Not to mention the historically supported unlikelihood that the country would actually benefit. The only solution appears to be institutional order that grows organically from within the country. Outside aid doesn't seem to help much. This leaves very few options for the Haiti's and the Camaroon's of the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a chapter in _The Undercover Economist_ , a book that I just finished reading last week: [http://www.amazon.com/Undercover-Economist-Exposing-Poor- Dec...](http://www.amazon.com/Undercover-Economist-Exposing-Poor- Decent/dp/0195189779/)

It's a great introductory economics book for the layman.

<comment><USER24> I was going to point out the same. The author, Tim Harford, has a blog in the Financial Times:

<http://blogs.ft.com/undercover/>

I still believe Freakonomics to be a better read :) but the Undercover Economist book was pretty good too (I read it because I was looking for similar style books)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Those interested in the topic might pick up a copy of Robert Bates' _Markets and States in Sub-Saharan Africa_ which details some of the political- institutional points of failure for developing economies in Africa.

</comment><comment><USER26> 'Of course, it is hard to describe what an "institution" really is. It is even harder to convert a bad institution into a good one.'

How does the government keep from eating itself in corruption? We assume this government has reached a steady state by taking only half but not all. However, as the article cites the more corruption you do the more your supporters will do, and the only way to stay in power is to let your supporters be corrupt. Since you're not really building any value, or letting value take root it seems like a prolonged history of this will eventually eat itself without fresh infusions of capital from outside parties. The article hints at this, but it's hard to control it because your supporters are doing it too and might not realize you can't take too much. Plus when outside markets go down I doubt corruption wants to take less in those times. It seems like it will lead to eventual erosion because rebuilding value when markets come back are less likely to happen.

</comment><comment><USER27> The article is a bit too much of a case study to justify the generalization in its title...

<comment><USER28> Especially when there are a variety of similar countries in the vicinity with a variety of governments but with similar levels of poverty.

<comment><USER23> Gabon is nearby and is relatively wealthy.

<comment><USER28> Gabon:Cameroon::Oman:Yemen. Oil.

No, really, the author is saying nothing. Wealth is just one part of a society. Effective government is another part. They are both effects of other causes. And they themselves feed back. It's not hard to point out the essentially gangster-like attributes of almost any government. The USA seizes its citizens' property and kills people all across the world. Oddly, since it steals so much more from a wealthier population, the theft isn't as painful. It requires infrastructure to efficiently transfer taxes up and back down to government parasites, rather than have the parasites take it by hand, as in Cameroon. So people rarely think of the USA as a gangster demanding protection money.

This guy is just another reductionist sociologist trying to come up with that one...one...one...reason why an extremely complicated situation is perpetually botched.

<comment><USER29> I don't think it's that complicated. And I think that various reasons might explain portions of the problem. For example, maybe this reason explains 70% of the problem. We can use science, mathematics, and statistics to test hypothesis about this, and journalism to publicize the results of our tests, as this guy and the people he cites have done. But I don't think calling someone a reductionist sociologist without providing significant refutation is among the useful possible responses to the article.

<comment><USER28> To respond to techiferous quickly, I'll just point out that the author is basically advertising the fact that he is reductionist by heading sections with "The Missing Jigsaw Piece", etc. Maybe the book is different, okay.

 _We can use science, mathematics, and statistics to test hypothesis_

You can't, though. It's really hard to make the world a laboratory, though it does _sometimes_ happen by accident. The differences between N and S Korea, E and W Germany, China and Taiwan, I think, settled the question of Communism vs. Capitalism. But good luck in getting the grant money to set up such an experiment. I've pointed out that the USA itself is really a quite corrupt, thieving, murderous entity, but this hasn't really mattered that much. Another example? Nazi Germany. They had a ridiculous war economy, they sent all their young men to butcher people, they imprisoned millions of citizens and foreigners, they had brutal police and internal security, etc, etc. All the worst possible things. Worse than Cameroon could possibly aspire to. And yet the country was prosperous almost to the end of the regime. And this was coming off the heels of the worst historical instances of hyperinflation, depression, and world war. All of which were _also_ caused by politicians.

That's a _lot_ of bad government but it ultimately didn't matter at all.

<comment><USER23> "It's really hard to make the world a laboratory"

I agree completely. The sort of thing we're discussing isn't amenable to repeatable, controlled experiments. And it's very complex.

<comment><USER30> That doesn't completely defeat empiricism though. Controlled experiments are best, then uncontrolled experiments (checking that the theories are backed up by real data), then pure reason (non-reductionism) is a cop-out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think the first step in overcoming poverty is for all of us to propagate a value system where citizens are held responsible for their countries.

For example, if India is poor and backward, then I am responsible for contributing to its poverty and backwardness, and so are all other Indians.

<comment><USER14> I strongly disagree, I think it is more important to look at the system that brings about the results (poverty). Not everybody is in a position to change the system - for example not everybody has the skills to become elected as president to be able to change the laws.

Maybe everybody could do something to change things, but it certainly isn't obvious WHAT to do. Therefore I can't blame people, if they don't know any better.

<comment><USER31> > Therefore I can't blame people, if they don't know any better.

This sounds to me as patronizing. I refuse to think that Cameroonians "don't know any better".

I was not really speaking for Cameroon anyway. My main target was India, where you'll see the most demeaning, wretched kind of poverties. I am responsible for it, and if I choose not to do anything about it, then it's my deliberate choice. That's all I am saying.

> for example not everybody has the skills to become elected as president to > be able to change the laws

We are not all born with the tools required for the things we need done. We _acquire_ them over time.

Waiting for a messiah to materialize is what I'd call the Kalki-complex. Kalkis (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalki>) are myths. If there's to be change, it must come from us. And that sense of responsibility is what would inspire each of us to strive to be mini-Kalkis, and with any luck, some of us might even become major-Kalkis.

<comment><USER14> "I am responsible for it, and if I choose not to do anything about it, then it's my deliberate choice."

What could you do about it? Granted, you could somehow dedicate your life to trying to end it. But even then, you'd need a starting point. Suppose you are extremely poor, how to you start? If you have to spend 20 hours/day to find food, you don't have time to practice becoming a good speaker to rouse the masses.

I don't mean it as patronizing, quite the opposite. I think it is patronizing to say it is the people's own fault for not doing anything about it.

If you were a Cameronian, what would you do? If you chose to work against poverty in India, what would you do?

I wouldn't know what to do as a Cameronian. As the article says, if you try to start a business to improve economics and infrastructure, thieves will take it apart. If you go into politics to try to change the situation, I suppose you will be murdered or something like that. If you start a revolution, there will be lots of bloodshed. I don't see an easy solution.

<comment><USER31> > If you chose to work against poverty in India, what would you do?

:-)

See, my version of your question is: What would Gandhi (or Nehru, Bose, Azad, Bhagat, Savarkar, et. al.) do?

I don't have an answer to that _right now_ , I am afraid.

<comment><USER14> I am not fully convinced that everybody could be a Gandhi. Wasn't he from a wealthy family and got sent to England to study?

Probably everybody could do fasting (although even that might require a certain amount of dediction). But to come of with the psychological strength and dedication would be another matter.

Maybe for everybody there is a path of possible actions that would lead him to become like Ghandhi. But that is what I was saying: it certainly isn't obvious what actions that would be. Therefore I think a certain amount of luck is involved.

If you don't have an answer to my question, then why do you disagree with me? How is the poverty in India your fault? I suppose you could at least decide to study and try to find an answer, but there is no guarantee that you would find one.

<comment><USER32> Not everybody can be a Gandhi, but here is a suggestion. You can light a room with a candle but not a City, you can help by helping in your 'little corner' and I don't mean charity. India has come a long way. I remember when every other year there was a 'Faminine' in India no more. Just by working hard and improving yourself and your family you are helping pull India out of poverty. Don't pay a bribe to no-one. Don't support the system this way. I have a couple of Indian acquaintances that I know made a lot of money out of bribes. Good luck to them. Give your children a good education and good moral support. Help others in indirect ways (ie, give a chance of a job to a kid from a poor family - if he deserves it). I believe education lifts people. If you can find a way to support education do it. Support the small trader rather than the big store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "how europe underdeveloped africa" by walter rodney goes into a decent discussion about this topic.

[http://www.amazon.com/Europe-Underdeveloped-Africa-Walter- Ro...](http://www.amazon.com/Europe-Underdeveloped-Africa-Walter- Rodney/dp/0882580965)

</comment><comment><USER34> Paul Romer has a possible fix for the problem of bad governance. It seems to have worked out OK for China:

<http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer.html>

</comment><comment><USER35> Another reason is that rich countries usually benefit from poor countries staying poor, so the try to keep them that way

<comment><USER36> That's obvious nonsense. Look what Japan, China and India have done for the world. First cheap fast-growing investments producing low cost goods (aka sweatshops), then a rich economy that can do its own investing. Even countries that get a smaller slice of the pie now still have cause to be glad that the whole pie is larger.

<comment><USER37> I don't follow. You don't think the US has interest in China labor being so cheap? What do you think would happen if standard of living for the average Chinese reached that of the average American and they had to be paid the same amount it would cost us to produce materials?

<comment><USER36> We've seen the answer to that - it already happened in Japan.

The search for cheap labor moves on to another poor country, and the newly rich country is an economic benefit to all as a trading partner.

<comment><USER37> And when we run out of poor countries? You could say that that can't happen because when the Chinas/Indias of the world get to our current standards we will be at a higher standard and they will still be poor relative to us, but this doesn't appear to be happening. The American middle class had a lot more money e.g. pre-Reagan than they do now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> What does "eight times poorer" mean?

<comment><USER39> I guess it means that average income (or whatever they are measuring) of X = 1/8 x Y. But is it a valid way to say this in English? In Finnish they use this sometimes in the newspapers and so, and I am thinking I need to get over it. But I still hate it.

It's kinda like "X is 8 times less expensive than Y", which I assume means X = 1/8 x X, but to me would make more sense as X = Y - 8Y = -7Y...

<comment><USER38> Interesting. In Russian and Polish this kind of phrase is quite common. In German it's not common, and I would consider it bad style. How about English?

<comment><USER3> achtmal ärmer ... yes doesn't work in german, weird

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> the government as bandit hypothesis makes a lot of sense to me. at the least it explains where money came from (did not arise naturally from barter, was originally a tally for taxes and looting).

the article was tl;dr. did they at least cite mancur olsen for the stationary bandit hypothesis? AFAIK it originated in his book the rise and decline of nations:

[http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation- Rigid...](http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation- Rigidities/dp/0300030797/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1263961437&sr=8-1)

</comment><comment><USER41> There is no difference in behaviour of two systems, when each element of the system behaves like corresponding element of the another system.

It will be much easier to understand what happen in Cameroon, if you imagine similar system you can understand.

Imagine, you have group of web-servers. You hire administrator to administrate your dedicated servers in dedicated data centre. He changed all locks, root passwords, identity information, and then installed his own servers in addition to your own. The only right you have now is to pay bills. His servers produces too much load on your system, his incompetent administration causes outages, so your own income is suffers down. There is no "provider" to complain to.

What you can do in that situation?

a) Pay more to administrator, so he will take some courses and will provide more competent service in future;

b) register new web-domain, create new, separate, data centre, hire new administrator;

c) hire a gang to kill old administrator, blow up doors, reformat hard drives, hire new administrator.

</comment><comment><USER42> There are two things which builds a person - genes and environment. In some places of the globe both of them are spoiled. Russia is the good example.

<comment><USER43> Would you care to elaborate on that?

If Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Kandinsky, Mayakovsky, Markov, Kolmogorov, Gelfand, Arnold, Gromov, Perelman have / had spoiled genes, then I wish such "spoiled genes" were more common in the West.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> So the reason that poor countries are poor is Corruption

<comment><USER7> This trend of reducing every HN story to a glib one-liner is really starting to be obnoxious.

The article is actually quite interesting in that it examines the motives a dictator has to foster stability and financial growth (so that there is more to plunder). But to achieve this growth the dictator needs help from the army or the police (any group of men with guns will do) and that comes in the form of letting them indulge in their own corruption. This leads to a national death spiral as the only way to get support for your corruptive endeavors is to let your subordinates pillage their subordinates. It is a toxic trifecta of mistrust/corruption/lack of institutions which leaves the country entirely dysfunctional.

It's a fascinating article. You should read it.

<comment><USER45> So what you're saying is that yes, the reason poor countries are poor is corruption? But for some reason that sticks in your craw?

A politician can win the support of the people, including the armed enforcers, by other means than threat of death. If it were possible to have a political group that, I don't know, laid out a plan for the countries future and won support that way. Then, winning support of thugs with guns, by allowing them to plunder, in order to subdue your population by force wouldn't be necessary. Then you could start to rebuild the pride and position of your country and its people and those people could work together to help build a nation.

Pipe dreams I suppose.</comment></comment></comment>


Patient capital, markets that work and ending the endless emergency of poverty - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/08/patient-capital-markets-that-work-and-ending-the-endless-emergency-of-poverty.html

<comment><USER2> "When two people trade, both win. No one buys a bar a soap unless the money they're spending for the soap is worth less to them than the soap itself."

Huge fail. People simply aren't rational actors. What about the case where an actor buys what he wants to buy, but that's not what he needs? You may want cigarettes and lottery tickets, but to say that you benefit from buying them, because otherwise you wouldn't buy them is stupidity.

To clarify, I'm distinguishing the transient benefit of "yay, I got what I wanted" from a productivity-enhancing benefit.

<comment><USER3> _What about the case where an actor buys what he wants to buy, but that's not what he needs?_

Who are you to say what he needs? Obviously by your values, the cigarettes aren't "correct", but it's really not your life to live.

Anyway, I think that Godin has it right as far as he goes. However, a market cannot function where there's no reasonable expectation of property rights. I mean, you're not going to risk investing in the drip irrigation system if you're afraid that the local warlord is going to just shake you down for any money you make, and maybe even rape your daughter in the process. And you're less likely to enter into a contract to partner with someone else if there's no court system to enforce the contract.

This is why so much of the aid to places like those in Africa, where there is no effective protection of property and no established system of enforcing contracts, at least for the little guy, is an abject failure. Much of it winds up being absorbed by the parties other than those for whom it was intended, and in fact makes the problem worse by strengthening those local bullies.

Godin is right, but before his solution can be pursued, we need to stop providing the sort of aid that so frequently perpetuates the bad system.

[EDIT: fix grammar error]

<comment><USER2> "Who are you to say what he needs? Obviously by your values, the cigarettes aren't "correct", but it's really not your life to live."

I'm not moralizing. Godin was talking specifically of getting further ahead financially, rather than falling further behind. There are many things that people want to spend money on that actually put them further behind.

To get further ahead financially, you either need to save your money now, or spend it on something that will pay off +ve, later (while not experiencing bad enough cash flow that you die before the expected benefit). This is simple arithmetic.

Many, many projects or expenditures fail to live up to their initially expected benefit. Beyond that, at any moment, we're not aware of all the investments we could make, nor are we certain of their outcomes. So, it's foolish to write, as Godin does:

"When someone in poverty buys a device that improves productivity, the device pays for itself (if it didn't, they wouldn't buy it.)"

I like the rest of the piece, I was just pointing out the obvious flaw in his uncritical, simplistic, free-market claims.

EDIT> You seem to be reacting emotionally to the smoking issue. What about this example instead?

Suppose someone offers to sell some poor sod a supposedly productivity- enhancing perpetual motion machine, and the potential buyer believes it will work.

Is it incorrect for me, as a third party, to say that this would be a foolish investment (from the perspective of increased finances/productivity)? After all, it's not my life to live. Who am I to interfere?

<comment><USER3> _Suppose someone offers to sell some poor sod a supposedly productivity- enhancing perpetual motion machine ... Is it incorrect for me, as a third party, to say that this would be a foolish investment_

Since you say "perpetual motion machine", I assume that you're saying that the purchaser is being defrauded, since we know that there's no such thing as perpetual motion.

But that's exactly the second point I was making in my first response. For a market to work, there needs to be some protection of the sanctity of a contract. When the buyer discovers that all he's got is snake oil, when he contracted for something real, he should be able to seek restitution. Without this, the market's not going to get off the ground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Free-market liberalism has been the dominant ideology for almost 200 years. If it hasn't solved poverty yet, there must be something wrong with the argument that it will inevitably solve poverty.

<comment><USER3> _If it hasn't solved poverty yet, there must be something wrong_

Or, perhaps it hasn't really been tried. I would challenge you to cite an area where the market really is free. I don't think there's any industry for which you could make this claim. But the areas that have come closest are also the ones that have shown the greatest advances, and the most productivity.

While I'm afraid of derailing off the topic of solving poverty, I think it's important to point out how the free-market fallacy is central in the current healthcare debate. Those in favor of universal healthcare argue that the free market system has failed. The funny thing is, the current healthcare industry is just about the _least_ free market in America. In particular, bizarre insurance regulations, following salary controls (put into place by FDR, but doesn't it sound familiar today?) set up an environment where it's virtually impossible for an _individual_ to obtain health insurance, with insurance now being almost entirely provided by either the employer or the government. This wasn't because of the free market -- it's because of meddling of government.</comment></comment>


The curious case of Croatian wikipedia - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2019-08-30/Opinion <comment><USER2> For those outside Croatia, the drama perfectly reflects the politics of the country. You have the left and right still bickering over WWII events and shaping the "conversation", while the moderate majority is apathetic about the whole thing ("don't use hr wikipedia" in this case, "emigrate" in real life).

Politics is getting extremely polarized in a lot of the western world. In Croatia, we never had non-polarized politics.

<comment><USER3> This makes me feel weird about the problem. It's one thing when a very small minority takes control of an open projects. But when it's simply a reflection of larger social dysfunction ... what then?

You can't expect an open project to be healthier than the culture that fosters it.

You either restrict it, shut it down, or live with the dysfunction. Or, if you have the time and resource, create tons of red tape and the illusion of openness (i.e. Reddit).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tbh that just sounds like the regular Wikipedia editing drama.

"Everyone can edit Wikipedia!" except almost every page has an editor or group of editors who feels it belongs to them and they will push their own agenda. This is not a unique situation at all. It's a deep rooted problem with Wikipedia almost from the very beginning.

<comment><USER5> Yes. So much narcissism, Dunning-Kruger and so little authoritative expertise/oral history. I had a _guitarist_ Wikipedia editor tell me that a niche science industry page update adding historical details of people and places "wasn't relevant" when it was an account of an important era for that industry. Smh. History lost forever.

<comment><USER6> I sympathize with your situation. People are fallible arbiters of truth and relevancy. But why was the fact that this editor was a guitarist have relevance? Was that his/her stated profession (and so by implication you're saying they overestimate their ability as an editor in this particular field of science industry ala Dunning-Kruger effect)?

<comment><USER7> I think they're saying the editor had expertise in, and had only edited, guitar related Wikipedia pages previously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As others have noted, I don't think this is an entirely unique situation. The decentralized nature of Wikipedia's editorship results in these kind of situations with fair frequency.

> Something can be factually true, but where there is a number of facts, > choosing the less important ones and omitting the more important ones tends > to lead to wrong conclusions. According to sources, Tito was both an > autocrat and a dictator, and stating only the milder qualification is an > unacceptable act, an act of vandalism.

I think the above quote from the article gets to the root of the problem - when it comes to politics and history (especially on Wikipedia), the game of framing can always be played where something can be made to look either good or bad by the accentuation of certain facts and the omission or downplaying of other facts.

<comment><USER8> It's the same game you play if you're a 'journalist' with a pre-decided narrative. Let that narrative filter what gets reported, and what gets emphasised, and you don't even have to lie.

<comment><USER9> Not sure why the parent is gray, except maybe the scare quotes around "journalist". You absolutely can influence the narrative with your choice of which 10 stories to run of the 100 you have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think I'd be suspicious of articles about a country edited by nationals of that country if Pew Research shows that country as having relatively high national pride. Usually, that manifests in an attempt to avoid shame by altering representations of reality rather than being secure enough to handle reality.

An example of something I encountered was that many articles on India in Wikipedia were written in a manner that is sort of child like, aiming at grandiose claims and conspiracy theories. It was obvious, reading from the outside, that it was nonsense.

Anyway, in general I find a English language Wikipedia pretty good where there is a lot of traffic but it looks like the rarer articles are where random people assert their propaganda.

</comment><comment><USER11> >There is no tangible evidence of mass executions [taking place in the Jasenovac concentration camp]

Shame that there are no links in the article pointing to the Croatian wiki articles in questions, the one on Ante Pavelić, for instance, states that the estimated number of victims in Jasenovac is 70 000 - 80 000 people. "Među ustaškom logorima najpoznatiji je Sabirni logor Jasenovac, gdje je, prema pretpostavkama, stradalo od 70 000 - 80 000 ljudi." [https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ante_Paveli%C4%87](https://hr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ante_Paveli%C4%87)

</comment><comment><USER12> Clearly the system is not working, and this isn't about editor/ideologues taking over the Wikipedia entry for a favorite game or public figure, but an entire nation. I'm Croatian, and while I've never used the site, I could see my kids going there for a school assignment and getting horrible ahistoric nonsense in the their heads.

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks like it's time to fork. And this seems to have already happened:

> Many editors, including some of the dissenting admins, have left Croatian > Wikipedia. Those who haven't abandoned Wikipedia altogether are resigned to > edit elsewhere, chiefly at Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia.

All that's left now is for Wikipedia to drop Croatian.

</comment><comment><USER5> Steering clear of the underlying, complicated regional politics:

The survivor (victim/perpetrator/some of both/neither) writes history, descendants rewrite it. (How else would we get _" Whalers on the Moon?")_ Yet, the web complicates it as a living organism of impermanence/bit-rot, fiefdom platforms and essentially unaccountable anonymity.

Further complicating reality, bias is as inescapable as the human condition, the unconscious variety being somewhat irreducible; while the integrity of the amateur copywriter (fairness, completeness, quality, accuracy and correctness) is implicitly (if not explicitly) socially-contracted to deliberately aspire to such ideals in each task.

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting, I mentioned this a few days ago in an HN comment. I'm a big fan of Wikipedia and donate regularly, but it's nearly unusable in my mother tongue.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21702939](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21702939)

</comment><comment><USER15> Wikipedia articles on any controversial topic are bound to be utterly useless, because they tend to attract admins with a strong opinion on the topic who proceed to ensure the article agrees with their POV. If there are admins with different POVs, they don't attempt to reach the consensus, but rather try to ensure the other one is banned or at least topic-banned.

</comment><comment><USER16> Makes me appreciate that tech-utopianism takes a lot of work. Technology alone seems to have no values.

<comment><USER13> To me, it often seems like technology does have a moral imperative it follows: It chooses transparency in all kinds of situations. That's not to say that technology consciously chooses to impart transparency. In reality it's just too damn expensive to erease traces in data. Which leads to transparency by default.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure if I'm convinced that technology leads to transparency by default. I don't think it would be too expensive to drop a particular record or table from a database if the incentive was there. Of course, when you consider distributed systems in which data for an entity or transaction is spread across many different systems and infrastructures, it would be too expensive to track down and eliminate all traces of the data.

But could you elaborate on what you mean by 'transparency by default'?

<comment><USER13> > I don't think it would be too expensive to drop a particular record or table > from a database if the incentive was there.

Copying is so cheap these days that it often becomes intractable to erease it all.

> But could you elaborate on what you mean by 'transparency by default'?

I often observe that we think that some things should be private but that we do not spend the effort to keep them that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There are always skirmishes between ideologies on Wikipedia.

</comment><comment><USER18> In Argentina we have the other problem: the right media accuses Wikipedia to be hijacked by leftists or peronists, because they don't like that biographies of genocides of our last dictatorship and their civil accomplices (now in politics) being exposed. The Right is the problem of our modern world.

</comment><comment><USER19> For some background on the history in English Wikipedia: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_Serbs_in_the_Ind...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_Serbs_in_the_Independent_State_of_Croatia)

</comment><comment><USER20> It's difficult to tell how pervasive this problem is in the Croatian edition as opposed to others (even this narrative may be "partisan", but I don't know how the cited sources lean or who owns those media outlets). In any case, there are some rather blatant examples in the English language version that demonstrate the phenomenon, or at least half-assed solutions to neo-Nazi distortions via special pleading (the article on Copernicus is a nice piece of revisionism; in every historical reference I have ever come across, Copernicus is referred to as a Polish astronomer, but because the editors where either too foolish, cowardly in the face of German nationalism, or count neo-Nazis among their ranks, they decided to remove the national adjective altogether. Most articles do not conform to this practice which is why it's a piece of special pleading and a pernicious concession. Shame on them.)

<comment><USER21> I've checked that page and it seems pretty balanced to me- though I don't know the subject and might be mistaken. As far as I understand, Copernicus was born in a mixed German and Polish speaking area that had joined the Kingdom of Poland only seven years before his birth. He was fluent in both German and Polish. So I'd say that calling him either German or Polish would be inappropriate.

<comment><USER22> > joined the Kingdom of Poland only seven years before his birth.

> I'd say that calling him either German or Polish would be inappropriate.

By the same logic, for Thomas Jefferson, born 1743 in a British colony, it would be even more inappropriate to call him American, as that country didn't exist until 1776.

What's true however is that, historically, the ideologies of current nation states didn't exist in 1473, and that some categorizations used today are really ahistorical. Still, people knew which language their ancestors and family spoke, and there is some information about that in Wikipedia regarding Copernicus. That's something that means something even to us today, where we could live in one country and mostly speak one language but still don't deny that our family speaks another, or that we don't speak the language of our ancestors. E.g.

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

"With an estimated size of approximately 44 million in 2016, German Americans are the largest of the self-reported ancestry groups by the US Census Bureau in its American Community Survey."</comment></comment></comment>


Can a Startup Solve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@erikbrodch/can-a-startup-solve-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict-75631744b211 <comment><USER2> Rifles as a Service?

<comment><AUTHOR> Haa... Was thinking about something else</comment></comment>


Walmart and Microsoft announce strategic partnership - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/07/18/walmart-cio-we-picked-microsoft-for-huge-cloud-deal-to-accelerate-digital-transformation/#1cd0db82491c <comment><USER2> To sell the Zune in Arkansas? ;-)</comment>


HEPCloud formation: handling troves of high-energy physics data - <AUTHOR> http://ascr-discovery.science.doe.gov/2016/11/hepcloud-formation/ <comment><USER2> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, and helped out with this effort.

We're hoping to provide some more "How Fermilab did it" later (maybe at NEXT?) but our blog post had a little more information [1]. End-to-end from "Let's do this!" to Supercomputing was about 3 weeks (including some bugfixes to the GCE support in HTCondor).

For people asking, Fermilab put up about 500T into a GCS Regional bucket (into us-central1). We have great peering at Google, so I think this was streaming at about 100 Gbps from Fermilab to us.

As surmised, the science that we ran was lots of individual tasks, each one needing about 2 GB of RAM per vCPU, so during Supercomputing we right-sized the VMs using Custom Machine Types [2]. IIRC, several tasks needed up to 20 GB per task, so we sized PD-HDD to 20 GB per vCPU. All of this was read from GCS in parallel via gcsfuse [3]; we chose the Regional bucket for GCS to minimize cost per byte, and to maximize throughput efficiency (no reason to replicate elsewhere for this processing).

All the data after processing went _straight_ back to Fermilab over that pipe. The output data size though was pretty small IIRC, and I don't think we were ever much over 10Gbps on output.

HTCondor was used to submit work from Fermilab onto GCE directly (the submission / schedd boxes were _at_ Fermilab). and spun up Preemptible VMs. We used a mix of custom-32vCPU-64GB in us-central1-b and us-central1-c, as well as custom-16vCPU-32GB in us-central1-a and us-central1-f. You can see a graph of Fermilab's monitoring here [4] when it was all setup. 160k vCPUs for $1400/hr!

[Edit: Newlines, I always forget two newlines]

[1] [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/Google-Cloud- HE...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/Google-Cloud-HEPCloud-and- probing-the-nature-of-Nature.html)

[2] [https://cloud.google.com/custom-machine- types/](https://cloud.google.com/custom-machine-types/)

[3] [https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gcsfuse](https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/gcsfuse)

[4] [https://twitter.com/googlecloud/status/798293201681457154](https://twitter.com/googlecloud/status/798293201681457154)

</comment><comment><USER3> DOE and CERN have done a really nice job with HEP, the jobs can basically flow to any compute backend without a lot of effort. Instead of saying "we have a private cloud" or "we use the public cloud", they just say "we use all the clouds".

<comment><USER2> Absolutely. Burt and the rest of the HEPCloud team are doing awesome work. And see above about how we went from 0 to 160k cores in just a few weeks. That's a testament to how prepared those guys were, and points the way to "Where's the best place for me to (re)run this experiment? At home, on Azure, on AWS, on Google?". Now they just have to solve the government budgeting problem! ;).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, and worked with Fermilab on the mentioned Google work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does the data get efficiently moved to the spun up cloud nodes? The article mentions parceling out jobs to nodes with independent storage, but how does that help data-intensive work? Are they doing something besides just copying data to the local storage of the cloud nodes? It seems like that would be a bottleneck.

<comment><USER2> See my note above, but we have great peering with Fermilab _and_ I failed to mention this above: us-central1 in Council Bluffs, Iowa is also quite close to Fermilab (less than 500 miles) so the latency was pretty good too.

[Edit: And I should add that by copying into GCS, they were able to grab compute anywhere in us-central1 without worrying about it. Similarly, on preemption, you don't need to transfer all the data from home, you just grab it from GCS again].

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud and helped with this effort.</comment></comment>