colefichter

The problem is so much bigger than that. Here in Edmonton, we have regular folks who campaign and crowd-source funding to install lights on bridges, buildings, just about anything for the sake of making things look 'nicer'. Which is unfortunate for those of us who want to see the sky.

Anyway, how's the light pollution been on your Africa trip? You must have been through some seriously dark remote areas by now.

Your post hits the nail on the head, but complicates things more than needed.

The whole idea of "middle class" is a fiction that supports the behaviours discussed in the article. In the real world, it doesn't actually exist in any meaningful way. You're either working class or you're not. If you can walk away from your job today and never look back, congrats! You're not working class. But for everyone else, you're stuck and putting a fancy label on things doesn't change much.

> 3. Invented async/await, by far the most ergonomic concurrency primitive yet created.

This feels like a bit of hyperbole. The actor model seems much more intuitive than async/await. Indeed, message passing between actors is how concurrency works in the real world (think about how people interact with each other).

What you describe sounds like a consequence of Erlang's dynamic type system, rather than its concurrency model. Besides, don't most languages have "opt-in" error handling? For example, I work mostly in C# and if you don't catch an exception, your program will crash. How is that different? At least in Erlang, my program might restart itself. Sadly that doesn't happen on most other platforms.

The quantitative easing FUD on HN is getting pretty tiresome. It gets blamed for everything from VC subsidies to house prices and just about everything in between.

All three rounds of QE in the USA focused on mortgage-backed securities and Treasury securities. Are you suggesting there were a bunch of VCs who were neck deep in the MBS or CDS/CDO rackets in the mid 00's?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing#US_QE1.2C_...

Don't forget another important point here: most lecturers at the post-secondary level are not teachers. That is, most of them have little to no formal training in how to educate others. It still kind of blows my mind that, to my knowledge, not one of my university instructors/professors, despite being subject matter experts, is credentialed to teach children - at any grade level - in a public school.

The reason is that Oprah operates in what's called a "winner take all market". There are thousands of baristas, servers, and (probably) garbage collectors with failed dreams of stardom in Hollywood, etc. But you don't hear about them.

Garbage collecting is not winner take all. No single garbage collector can corner the market because the role doesn't require unique talent in the same way that being a famous talk show host does. Oprah's value is her unique personality, brand, style, mannerisms, business savvy, etc rather than any sort of utility (like removing up your rotting trash) that she may or may not provide.

"On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

;)

Yeah, I have no idea. Just taking a guess at what the poster above was hinting at :)

> China creates their own debt free money as needed. The U.S government must borrow it. You ever notice how economic pundits have been predicting an economic crash in China for the last 30 years that never seems to come? It's because the government just endlessly bails out the economy in a debt-free way that never sticks the taxpayers with the bill.

That's.... not how it works. USA consumers purchase lots of imports from China, which causes massive flows of capital from the USA to China. China uses these capital flows to purchase treasuries from the USA which (in part) funds the federal deficit.

At no point is China just "creating debt-free money".

The exact same thing happens in other countries with large trade surpluses. Part of the reason for the Greek crisis was that Germany exports a lot of goods to Greece. This capital flow drives down the price of money (the interest rate) in Frankfurt and drives up the price of money in Athens. The Germans, seeing that they could get 1% at home or 7% in Greece (in the early 00's) then used the capital flows to purchase securities in Greece, such as bonds, CDOs and CDSs.

Sounds like a reference to quantitative easing.

> You think the interest rates will rebound?

It doesn't matter. If the bank pays you 10% on a savings account it's because inflation is high as well. In my opinion, bungie4 is giving you advice from a rather cynical world view. I understand it (sounds like bungie4 has taken some bumps and bruises in the market), but I don't agree with it.

A savings account will never give you more than about 1% real (inflation adjusted) returns because it's completely safe.

To both of you, I would say don't sell during a correction. You need to stick with the plan when times get tough. Paper losses are scary, but they are only on paper.

(Funnily enough, folks love volatility when it's in the right direction. Home equity is great, right? But for some reason paper losses send us into panic selling mode.)

> With software... when you write a program, the program is done. Most of your labor goes into R&D...

Not by a long shot! The vast majority of the lifetime cost of software is in the maintenance (daily operations, upgrades, new features, bug fixes, integrations, rewrites, etc).

This idea that local residents are more entitled to the street becomes problematic, though.

I live in a high-rise condo on a busy arterial road in the city centre. Should my enjoyment of the street override the needs of suburbanites to commute to work daily? I might think so, but somehow I don't think the suggestion that we should force thousands of people onto public transit or bicycles or whatever is going to wash.

So then the question becomes, why are people in certain neighbourhoods entitled to things that people in other neighbourhoods clearly are not entitled to? If others can use "my" street when they please, why can't I do the same on "their" street?

I think the idea is that capital gets broken up into smaller chunks. When we're talking about creating middle-class manufacturing jobs, you obviously need to build, say, a factory to create those jobs. That factory requires a very large investment of capital, which becomes less likely when you start breaking up large estates.

I've no idea if it actually plays out this way in the real world, but that seems to be implication here.

> Let's not forget the enormous in-built demand for fiat currencies via taxation.

I understand that the whole libertarian-hipster-goldbug thing is in vogue right now, but what does this even mean?

> Work somewhere where software is the main product and not just a cost center. > Doing elegant things is very difficult...

These are great! I would also add: be certain that the organization shares your values. If you really care about code quality, elegant solutions, etc, you'll have a frustrating time working at a company that doesn't prioritize those things.

You don't think advertisers want to market to children? I hope this was sarcasm and I'm just missing the joke.

Have you walked down the cereal aisle in a grocery store?

Doesn't the word "cash" imply that the money is not invested? If they bought factories or something else productive, we'd usually refer to that as "capital".

You make a really good point. HN seems to venerate startups that fail, which isn't very different from defaulting on a loan (and in many cases these startups are defaulting on loans as they shut down).

Yet, in any thread where Greece, Puerto Rico, etc come up there's this strong backlash against defaulting as being somehow immoral (as though it's not written into the lending agreements). What exactly is the difference between burning a bunch of VC money then shutting down and defaulting on a loan? In both cases we have an institution putting money at risk in the hopes of making a profit, and then losing it. I don't see the big moral difference here.

What a strange headline. In what way could anything about audio books be construed as a "reading trend"?

> ISPs won't sell information this granularly - not directly.

That's not for certain. And anyway, what stops a purchaser of bulk data from reselling individual records as a value-add?

> programming is a profession

We like to think that, but it's not really true. Professions tend to include some kind of guild, union, or association to represent the interests of practitioners and require/evaluate formal ongoing education (reading blogs doesn't count). There are typically barriers to entry. There's usually a licensing process as well as a disciplinary process that may revoke one's right to practice.

Programming has none of those things.

> Could it be that the distance between the top and bottom 20% is less in Canada

You're just describing the results of inequality: two things are further apart than two other things. It doesn't tell you anything about the cause of inequality, only the magnitude of one symptom.

It's like saying "a mile is longer than a kilometer". Well, yes that's an apt description but it doesn't tell you why that is the case.

> basic income is actually just a continuation of the same inflationary alchemy

This comes up in every BI thread, and I can't wrap my head around it. All the sensible proposals seem geared so that if you have income from a job, most of the BI amount will be recouped from your taxes. So, for most people their purchasing power would go up only slightly or not at all.

Think about the extremes: if you make a comfortable income (say, at least 2x the median) your taxes should increase to recoup most or all of the BI subsidy, so your purchasing power doesn't change. If you choose to leave your job and live off the BI, your purchasing power goes down (drastically!) and you won't be in a position to inflate prices on much of anything.

At the other end, if your income is zero and you receive BI, your purchasing power goes up, but you still won't have a huge amount of money to throw around. And in the developed economies, at any rate, we suffer from over-production of basic needs stuff, so I don't think demand would exceed supply for basic things like flour, rice, toiletries, etc.

Analyzing the middle few percentiles of the income distribution is tougher, but for any scheme that increases taxes along with BI it's hard to see how it could possibly cause inflation to increase by more than a point or two.

> to me, success is when you've managed to do something that a lot of people can't do.

> I just have a different perception on what it means to be successful.

Yep, I think these two things are the crux of the issue. The first is probably quite different to how lots of people view things. It can be really painful to evaluate your own worth/success relatively against others.

For many, I think, success is much less a relative issue than an absolute issue. Most who desire to be happy, loved, materially comfortable, and parenting probably do view success as achieving those things. Besides, if those things are what your peers aspire to as well, then you might even be doing better, relative to them, anyway!

> So being able to get through life with your basic needs and propagate is the definition of success now?

For a lot of people... yeah, that's true. When people say that HN is a bubble, they mean it.

I don't know anything about your background, but have any of your friends ever said something like "my biggest dream in life is to be a mom"? Here in Canada, I've heard that from several friends. For a lot of us on HN that might sound trivial, but we're a strange bunch in our own special ways :)

> Taxes should not be a means to redistribute wealth.

Isn't that more or less impossible? The whole point of a tax is that you take money from the broader population and spend it on something (a war, a road, libraries, public transit, food stamps, etc) that benefits only a subset of that population.

Taxation is, by definition, wealth redistribution.

Furthermore,

> Why is it ok to tax profitable businesses/people for the sake of equality?

This is a common misconception. Businesses don't pay taxes, people do. I don't mean " Apple doesn't pay it's fair share". I mean that the burden of the tax falls on the shareholders/owners of a business, even if the business is remitting the money. So, at the end of the day the question is not do we tax business versus individuals but rather a class issue: do we tax shareholders (who earn income from capital) versus labour (that is, people who earn their income through wages/salary).

Every town used to have their own local time based on the sun being at zenith at local noon. For example, a place like Oxford would be a few minutes behind London.

With the advent of railways, it became necessary to standardize things a bit. You can imagine the difficulty if each town a train stopped in had its own timezone!

There's an interesting podcast from BBC that covers this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/u6Qnc25jQ5OI...

It does seem strange, doesn't it?

I've heard that it's because the BBC is forbidden from showing adverts to UK citizens, and since they have a little "promoted content" box at the bottom of the page they have to block it from you.

Something along the lines of if they show you adverts, they lose that TV license funding, which would be catastrophic.

I have no idea if that's true, but it passes the sniff test.