Stay Gold, America | Hacker News Reader

Stay Gold, America

blog.codinghorror.com

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It's so so hard not to be cynical. I read posts like this and it gives me a glimmer of hope, and reminds me that there are good people of means out there trying to make humanity better. But then I also remember that there are much richer, more powerful ghouls out there whose seemingly sole purpose is to enrich themselves and their cronies at the expense of society.

The answer, of course, is to praise efforts like this one and not allow cynicism to undermine the effort. A groundswell of support begets a movement. "Apes together strong", and all that. Anyway, were I ever to come into significant wealth, I think and hope I would do the same. Until then, I'm simply working towards a decent retirement and intent on remaining in an ever-shrinking middle class.

"Apes together strong"

Even Koba learned to hate.

And, despite the last movie ending on uplifting note, the very end showed the humans in a bunker ready to attack again.

Nothing survives the fight for resources. In-Group/Out-Group.

It will take some real tragedy to bring Left/Right back together. Like a real (more severe) virus where Republicans are like "wow, we be dying, I'm all for distancing now, get away from me, where are the scientists, give me a mask".

It's funny in these political unity fantasies it's only the right making compromises even after their landslide victory

You can have a mass population be wrong. A 'small' margin victory doesn't mean they are correct about everything, like laws of physics can change because the population is delusional.

Covid was just harmless enough to allow them to perpetuate their delusions. But a more severe virus, where they can actually see people dying next to them, it couldn't be ignored, would wake them up.

>there are good people of means out there trying to make humanity better.

They are certainly good, but naive(In some sense I'm happy that they are naive).

The quality of our lives settles down to the lowest common denominator. Good, smart people do make a difference but generally these are blips of good times compared to vast stretches of bad times.

> It's so so hard not to be cynical.

Certainly would agree with that, however you'll have plenty who would suggest that helping others achieve the American dream isn't part of their worldview, or indeed their interpretation of that American dream.

And yet they benefitted by it. They seem to be fine pulling the ladder up behind them. That just shows poor character. If our society starts again to make character more important than wealth or charm, we might have a society worth saving.

Am I the only one who thinks that a country which admits only two parties cannot be called a democracy? Not an attack, just a thought starter

EDIT Thank everyone who answered, I have always been convinced that US doesn't have anymore parties other than Republicans and Democrats. Today I learned!

There are many more parties in the US though - they just don’t get really relevant in the bigger scheme of things.

In my country we also have 2 huge parties and a bunch of smaller ones - but the smaller ones have more impact and actually matter a bit.

Democracy is hard and there are so many details and complexities to consider.

But to answer your question I would say definitely the US is a democracy -

Also, our 2 huge parties aren't dissimilar to the coalitions of parties you see in other democracies. Over time the boundary lines between our 2 parties shifts as those coalitions are formed, disbanded, reformed, etc.

Yeah but in those countries the parties actually get to rep themselves in the legislature. You can’t literally masquerade as a member of another party here unless you want people to think you’re a mole or a turncoat.

> There are many more parties in the US though - they just don’t get really relevant in the bigger scheme of things.

Interesting! Can you please elaborate? I know nothing about this, I always thought they are forbidden somehow to have parties that are different from Conservatives and Democrats, otherwise I can't explain myself why they are never mentioned

There are tons of political parties in the US[0].

However the scale of financing for the primary parties, the infrastructure built around those parties and the deeply ingrained cultural norm of the US being a "two party" government means that for all intents and purposes none of those other parties matter.

The two most recent near-exceptions to this that I can think of are the Tea Party, which became a Republican proxy party and Ross Perot's reform party.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_t...

In a US election, you will find candidates from the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. You will also find candidates from the Constitution Party, the Communist Party (really!), the Green Party, and others.

It's just that nobody but the Democrats and Republicans win major races. Others could - it's allowed - but they don't. The "first past the post" system is at least partly responsible for the US settling into two overwhelmingly dominant parties.

They aren't forbidden. The voting system is set up so that any new party that enters will torpedo its allies. It's a winner-takes-all and first-past-the-post system, so if a new left party enters and takes 5% of the votes, the democrats will now lose everything. House. Senate. President. All of it.

That's what coalitions are for.

Again, that sounds great, but that's not how the US electoral system works. You can't transfer votes for your own party to another party in the coalition to gain the presidency. Or to win a district. Or a senate seat.

The Republican and Democrat parties are fundamentally coalitions though.

We pretend they represent some sort of Left vs Right split, but really that's a post facto justification or narrative around an arbitrary coalition of sub-factions.

There are a bunch of largely unrelated issues that people care about- immigration, cost of living, abortion, gun rights, crime/policing, foreign policy and various "culture war" issues around race, sexuality, religion.

There is really no reason we group them together as we do. There could be a parallel universe where a liberal "unborn rights movement" grew out of the prior women's rights, black rights, LGBT rights etc and saw abortion as an exploitation of the most vulnerable human rights and said they deserved protection.

There could be a parallel universe where pro-business, pro-market based solution conservatives want completely open borders to allow workers to freely move to work or start businesses where they want.

The parties themselves change over time too. The populist Trump/MAGA faction that has taken over the Republican party has little in common with the "Religious Right" Christian faction or the neo-conservative factions that were influential to the Republicans in the 90s and 2000s.

I can't explain myself why they are never mentioned

They're never mentioned in the headline news because they don't stand a chance of winning. But they're actually discussed quite a bit every presidential election, not in terms of if they'll win or not, but if they'll 'take' enough votes from one party to have an effect on a close election.

The Democrats sometimes accuse the Green Party of spoiling their chances by competing for the same voters. This presidential election there was a fair bit of talk about RFK Jr and his presidential run, with lots of speculation that he might take enough votes from Trump to cause the Democrats to win. Republicans are still convinced that the only reason Bill Clinton won was that Ross Perot, a third party candidate who got 19% of the votes, split the Republican vote.

We have two major parties, and several smaller ones- the Libertarian Party and the Green Party are the two largest third parties generally. However, there are also sub factions within the major political parties, so that they in fact makeup a sort of coalition of sub factions, similar to the coalitions of parties you see in other countries. This means that primaries are a super important part of the election cycle in the USA. The Primaries are like the first round of a two round system.

You need to factor in member’s ability to “cross the aisle” and the power of the party whip. In the U.S. members can vote against their party’s legislation without instantly being thrown out of the party.

Lessig in books and talks explained it very well, why reliance on money - people and corps funding parties and candidates - in elections keep the elections elitist and undemocratic. It needed reform and it still needs reform, more than ever.

I naively hoped that his well laid out arguments would make a difference, but here we are much later and it didn't help a single bit.

See other comment for a link to his talk https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645492

There are many parties, generally referred to as "third parties", but there are also many systems working to ensure that only the two parties everyone knows about have any power. First-past-the-post is a big part of the problem, and both parties campaign against alternatives like instant-runoff and ranked-choice voting. The "Big Two" also control televised debates, and have consistently raised requirements for participation in order to exclude other parties. The big parties, big corporations and the big media are all aligned in this, refusing the discuss third parties except in terms of spoilers. People who might vote for a third party are routinely reprimanded for helping the other big party win.

The other option is to try to change a party through the primary process, but the Democratic party in particular has a process very well insulated against public influence. "Super Delegates" (party insiders) until very recently had open and official votes that could easily override a choice by primary voters. In a lawsuit filed after the Democratic Party fought to ensure Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders, a leading member the Democratic Party argued, in court and under oath, the that party was a private organization and had NO OBLIGATION to use any kind of democratic process to chose its nominee. In this last election they didn't even have a primary.

I live in the U.S., I vote, at best I consider it a very flawed, or perhaps well controlled, democracy. In many cases a majority of voters prefer policy changes that are simply off the table for both major parties. Examples are things like winding down the war on drugs, ensuring abortion access, and raising the minimum wage. Neither party will do anything about these issues at the national level, and any progress being made is at the state level - largely in states that have a ballot initiative process where voters can (in some ways) bypass the usual party-controlled political process.

If the parties were static sure, but they ebb and flow with the voters. Trumpism came out of seemingly nowhere now the entire GOP is all aboard, it’s effectively a completely different party compared to 10 Years ago.

>admits only two parties cannot be called a democracy

'Democracy' itself is a charade to pacify the masses.

I always think what's the actual benefit now of living in a "rich country" if everything is just more expensive? So if you live in the USA you'll maybe have a nicer car and nicer computer than someone in Poland, but otherwise it's all a wash and probably nicer in Poland. All the things that actually matter to quality of life are pretty much the same or even nicer in a poorer country?

Poland is a wrong example, it had almost 30 years on uninterrupted growth and has better infrastructure and services than the nearby Germany.

Trains are cheaper, better run and more comfortable. Highways are better than German. Even gas stations. I often find myself waiting to cross the border so I can get to the loo in the first Orlen on the Polish side.

And don't let me start on housing and taxes.

Polish economy even benefitted from the Russo-Ukrainian war:

1. 36 mln-strong Poland welcomed 1mln of mostly well-educated, hardworking Ukrainians.

2. Its military expenses are now double what the US spends in relative terms, giving a non-negligible boost to civil economy.

Gosh, it's been a few years I dress exclusively in Helikon-Tex, instead of Patagonia )

>Gosh, it's been a few years I dress exclusively in Helikon-Tex, instead of Patagonia )

Ok this may have been the best sales pitch for Helikon-Tex :)

> Poland is a wrong example, it had almost 30 years on uninterrupted growth and has better infrastructure and services than the nearby Germany.

Not wrong, but I think that when you're growing and building things tend to be "easy(-ier)" than later on when you're maintaining. When you don't have anything it's easy to say "We need X.", but it's harder to justify to folks "We need to maintain X."—there's not as much ribbon cutting for maintenance projects:

If there's no highway bridge over some chasm, building the bridge can be obvious. When there's a bridge already there spending (tens/hundreds of) millions to rehabilitate or rebuild it will get more pushback.

China had little infrastructure and has built a whole bunch (e.g., high speed rail) over the last few decades: I'll be curious to see how things are in fifty or so years when they have to rebuild things.

Could this have anything to do with the differences in the two country’s migration policies?

First off, Poland benefitted immensely from EU funds. Better infrastructure is better in Poland for the same reason it is better in Spain, Spain just had those funds earlier.

As for the migration policies, I think you are pointing in the right direction but the reality is more subtle.

Old European countries consider work to be a privilege, Poles, having lived in the Warsaw Pact country, still perceive work to be an obligation.

A refugee arriving in Germany can't start working and lives off welfare while his case is settled, which may take years.

A similar refugee arriving in Poland has to find a job both to survive and to obtain legal residency.

This has the downside of driving down wages but the upside of creating even more jobs.

Amazon, Lidl, Zalando and many other labor-intensive businesses set shops just across the border for a reason.

It depends what matters to you in quality of life. For me the most important things are having purpose and love in my life - and you can find that pretty much anywhere.

A bit unrelated but US citizens decided that healthcare doesn’t really matter to them much but going everywhere with a nice car does - so it depends what the priorities are

Most US citizens are for socialized health care. However, t seems that both parties are bought by the health care industry and prevent the change the people want.

This doesn’t make sense to me though. If the majority of the population is for something it __will__ be implemented. If a party fucks over the peoples will repeatedly like this, why would they still be voted into power?

The votes that matter are in Congress, not among the general population.

But the general population votes on who will be in congress right?

Edit: so if I vote for John Smith and then I find out he voted against this healthcare issue I care about; I will for sure not vote for him again, instead for a candidate that keeps their promises.

At least that’s how it works in my country, all the votes in congress are public, you can even listen in to most of their sittings.

If both of the major parties are against something, you can only vote for some independent third party, which in the foreseeable future will never even have a single seat in Congress (not to mention a ruling majority). In countries without winner-takes-all electoral system (everybody except UK and USA) it's much easier for smaller countries to gain ground and hence they have a wider selection of viable parties, but in the UK and USA people are pretty much screwed.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/654101/health-coverage-governme...

Everything is more expensive in the USA is quite an exaggeration. Being able to afford (better) consumer goods/services/experiences is quite nice in itself not to mention the quality of opportunities present. I don't see many people emigrating from rich countries either.

This is such a good point, i've had similar thoughts before. That basically after the "middle income" level countries don't really get "better" they just get more expensive and more developed (which to be sure does have some positive impacts)

I’d be very careful with this kind of comparison: Often the differences show up in weird places.

For example, I travel between two countries with similar lifestyles and consistently notice lower quality of goods in the country with the lesser-valued currency. It’s subtle enough that you might not notice: Smaller quantities, not quite as good as, fully assembled versus some assembly, etc. Modern industry has gotten really good at masking these changes, and local consumers just don’t know that it can be better.

Poland is perhaps not the best example, by GDP PPP per capita standards they're not much poorer than the US. I would expect life to be comparable.

Given that the original article is criticizing the unequal wealth in the USA, a GDP PPP (which is an average) but higher concentration of wealth would imply that most people in the USA are much worse off.

House prices in Poland can be higher than in the US (for a comparable size and location).

If you work in a high-paying profession, you'll probably be able to retire faster (off your savings) in US than in Poland. On the other hand, in the US you'll have to work harder and more hours.

Depends on the profession. As a software engineer in Eastern Europe, you can work for a Western company remotely and make kind of insane money.

I lived like a king in Warsaw (renting a small apartment in the historical centre, eating out often) spending about 1/20th of my income.

These days I work for peanuts for my friend back from kindergarten and am enjoying it tremendously!

That's what I was doing as well (only in Bytom lol, to have even lower life expenses), till I retired at 41 years old. But, software engineers are an exception. Everybody else is pretty much making local salaries, which are lower than american ones in terms of purchasing power.

Poland is a rich country compared to most of the rest of the world (my country included). Your reference point is way off.

> The costs of housing, healthcare, and education

This is the “list of modern miseries,” and needs child care and eldercare on it to be complete. This is the list of those things that, for all our prowess, we’ve broken and just can’t seem to fix. Until we manage, our system will always have the legitimacy problem whose consequences we can see all around us right now.

How can housing prices drop if most people invest most of their wealth into their house and they expect a return on the investment?

Housing wasn't an investment until it was turned into an investment in the 80s. Housing was always thought of as housing before that. It is the same as renting, but at some point, you stop paying rent and instead just pay your wealth tax on it's value.

In the US we treat it as not only an investment we expect to appreciate, but then turn around and treat it as a depreciating asset for taxation purposes if you are buying it to rent to people. It is a double standard that lets corporate landlords buy a property, collect rent, write off the mortgage interest, write off the "depreciation" of the property, all the while the property appreciates in value, creating multiple revenue streams (lower tax bill + higher leverage-able assets + rental income). THIS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED!

You should not be allowed to "depreciate" an appreciating asset on your taxes and get to lower your bill. If you want to write off depreciation, it should be appraised at a lower value first. Otherwise its book value remains constant (or adjusts for inflation?), and then just capital gains on the sale if someone wants to pay more than book value. This would make it less attractive to investors, prices would actually fall a bit (or a lot, IDK).

Yea it shouldn’t but home owners are in the majority so what are you gonna do about it?

Also both of the parties are fully behind the interests of homeowners, with one of them being really obsessed with helping high-wealth individuals not pay taxes.

I wouldn’t expect anything to change.

Densifying can allow individual homeowners to gain wealth while housing as a whole becomes cheaper. Single family home values can increase due to the land under them at the same time as condo values go down if we just stop building single family homes and build condos instead.

Realistically, apartment prices will just scale up to whatever people can afford. So yes, house prices will go up, but apartments won’t become cheaper than the houses originally were.

Empirically I just dont think this is true. I have lived in chicago my entire life and rent prices doubled in the last decade after being stagnant for 2 decades. Its not that people are making more money, the economy here is middling. Prices are going up because we stopped building new housing. I recently bought a second home in SLC, prices there are down 10% this year even though wages in the region are up. Housing values can and do go down.

Nonprofits aren't going to get the US out of this. They are a bandaid on a broken leg.

We're using GoFundMe as a bandaid for healthcare, to the degree that the CEO went to beg Congress to pass more government assistance in COVID-laden 2021.

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/538399-gof...

What would fix the problem? And what is the root cause?

Lessig founded "Rootstrikers" to strike at what he thought was a fundamental root of the problem of politics in the US. I don't even know if that organization is active anymore. Their thesis is that special interest money, political corruption, and the reliance on money to even get to be a candidate in elections is a root of the problem.

He did this TED talk long time ago (and several other talks) and it made a big impression on me, but it didn't catch on(?)

https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_...

I wouldn't be working in software if I knew that.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42620278 (2 days ago, 229 comments)

>34% of adults in America did not exercise their right to vote.

Or basically 34% of adults in America exercise their right not to vote. If we force everyone to vote like Australia, may be there should be an option of voting blank?

Basically I believe not voting for something is also a right. It is a vote to say ( may be ) I dislike both parties.

Out of curiosity I decided to look up historical turn out rate [1], and was supervised to learn 2024 has the second highest rate in history, or at least since 1932. Highest was actually last election.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States...

> Or basically 34% of adults in America exercise their right not to vote.

Maybe. Or they were unable to for any number of reasons, like not being able to get the time off work, for example. Compulsory voting does not mean you can't abstain, or shouldn't, but it does eliminate the people who want to vote, but for legal/logistical reasons, were unable to.

Here in Brazil voting is mandatory, but indeed, you can vote for no one. In fact, there are two ways to do so, interestingly enough: you can cast a "blank vote", literally just not picking anyone, or a "null vote", where you input a candidate that doesn't actually exist.

In my view that's the ideal setup. Turnouts is always very high, even though the fine for not voting is laughably small (3.51 reais, literally less than a dollar). Good example of the power of defaults.

>34% of adults in America did not exercise their right to vote. Why? Is it voter suppression, gerrymandering causing indifference, or people who felt their vote didn't matter? The 7.6% that are ineligible to vote are mostly adults living in America who have not managed to attain citizenship, or people convicted of a felony. Whatever the reasons, 42% of adults living in America had no say in the 2024 election. The vote failed to represent everyone.

I have some choice criticism for this view.

Firstly: The inelligible people are inelligible for a proper reason which are even stated by him. It is not a failure to not represent people who should not be represented in the first place. You want to vote? Become an American national and don't commit crimes, very basic and reasonable demands.

Secondly and more significantly: Americans who don't vote explicitly decide to have no say in elections; not voting is itself a vote. It is not a failure to represent people who have no opinions on matters. The notion that everyone must have opinions on everything at all times is absurd.

In short: The vote represented everyone meant to be represented, including those who didn't vote.

Is it me or is it ironic they're talking about wealth concentration then immediately following how they've donated $8 million and plan to donate half their remaining wealth in the next 5 years?

It’s the opposite of ironic. He’s against the concentration of wealth, so he’s given away much of his wealth and is pledging to continue to do so.

But he wouldn't have a pile to donate if he hadn't been collecting it all this time. The donation part is good and I'm all for it.

He “collected” it by co-founding Stack Overflow, which sold in 2021. He’s only had this level of wealth a few years.

I feel like not a single one of these organization actually deal with the problems. They're super good stuff, but not dealing with the issues the article starts out with.

Can you suggest an organisation that does?

[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42620278

The wealth inequality is the one I have been paying the most attention to. Having constantly lowered the taxes on the wealthiest it seems to be the one that is the most self-inflicted.

We could lapse into an era much like the Great Depression (where I suppose we will celebrate bank robbers?). Our future could look more like "Soylent Green" - most of us piled into tenement houses with armed guards on the stairs, braving the streets only for our weekly rations while the wealthy live secluded in high-rise luxury.

I worry too we'll become like I perceive Russia to have become — more or less an oligarchy run country where the proletariat merely grumble and get about their thread-bare existence. (I suppose, from the charts, we'll have our toys and TVs though!)

With 1/3 of the country having not even voted I would probably be more surprised if we end up with a French Revolution style future.

Feel free to set me straight, IANAH (not a historian) nor am I an economist or political scientist. Just a layman.

> where I suppose we will celebrate bank robbers?)

The popularity of Luigi Mangione might be a (arguably sickening) sign that the pitchforks are coming (and, remember, it's always very presumptuous to assume you will be on the right side of the pitchforks.)

But also, if history is to be followed, some form of self correction is always possible.

It's going to be popular to run on a "tax the ultra-ultra-rich" platform. The trick is to be very careful on every other topic, to avoid being trapped in culture war. Basically, someone might run on the single issue of "tax the right", and strive to avoid anything radical on every hot-button subject (as in, be extremely centrist and borderline conservative on gender, immigration, culture, free speech, etc....). When in doubt, shut up and remind everyone you're going to tax the ultra-ultra-ultra rich, purely appealing to the inner sense of justice.

This would work better in countries where the press is not too concentrated. And I am actually curious to see how social media would handle that (it would create engagement, so maybe the merely ultra-ultra rich would play along ?)

> French Revolution style future.

Careful what you wish for - it took us a century to get to a stable place.

> Careful what you wish for…

Agree. We may be weighing shitty options though at some point.

If I had to pick which fictional world our future looks most like it would be Elysium. Maybe not a space station, but we're quickly bifurcating into a world where a top elite of billionaires live in absolute luxury, safely segregated away from the rest of the world who scrapes by in misery and poverty. There was no middle class in Elysium. So many people who will be in the misery group support this future because somehow they've been convinced they'll be in the elite group.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42620278

You must be amazing person. I do however doubt that giving money to funds will fix anything. That upper 1% and their politicians purchased wholesale will fuck it up regardless. They've accumulated insane wealth and power. I doubt they are in any mood to share either.

I'd be interested to see Atwood and Ballmer in a room to discuss this (given Ballmer's Billionaire status and what he's working on recently).

The problem I have is that I want to be generous but I doubt I will still have a career after the age of 55, and I'm scared of being 60 years old and not able to afford health care or a comfortable life, and so I squirrel away as much money as I can now.

Rather than rely on individuals to save everyone else we should be living in a socialist utopia by now. I'd happily pay more tax for that.

But instead we have an incoming Trump / Musk administration and probably WW3 and well you all voted for this so fuck you and your shitty Teslas.

At this point, stop encouraging people to vote. It doesn't seem to work in the US anymore, if the current state of matters is anything to go by. It's almost like encouraging the Thomas Matthew Crooks and the Luigi Mangione types to deal with the problems right at the root would be a better way to go.

You need to take the money out of politics, and advertising out of, well, everything. If not, things will just continue to get worse and worse.

Here’s a short list of meaningful causes which have been advanced in my lifetime by groups of single issue voters at the local and state levels:

  * making gay marriage broadly available
  * making concealed carry (and Constitutional carry) broadly available
  * removing barriers to housing construction in cities across the land (the Yimby movement)
  * making the Idaho stop law applicable to 10 states
  * changing the voting method from plurality to approval or IRV in several cities and states

Voting is one of the important ways our government is steered, cynicism in this area is self-defeating. Instead, band with a group of single issue voters who elevate one issue over all others, and vote for whomever aligns with that issue, if their election prospects are threatened, they will support you, as with my favorite quote from a politician: “when I feel the heat, I see the light.”

>At this point, stop encouraging people to vote. It doesn't work in the US anymore.

"Democracy doesn't work if the result doesn't suit me; stop voting against my wishes."?

Sincerely, please fuck off into whatever other country seems more to your liking. Arguments like yours truly make me wonder if democracy is, in fact, merely a more plausibly deniable excuse to obtain and maintain power like in other more directly authoritarian forms of governance.

> Luigi Mangione

Yeah, the Stack Overflow network really doesn't like that guy

If Trump was killed, it could have started a civil war in the US. Be careful what you wish for.

Global Refuge directly sponsors illegal immigration, which absolutely destroys low and middle income families in America by lifting housing costs.

Giving $1,000,000 to a charity working to undermine literally the first problem you mention 'the costs of housing' seems either ill-advised or ill-informed.

Immigration has been shown to skyrocket housing costs, and this exact situation has led to a political upheaval in Canada. He's accelerating that process in America, and I don't think he'll like where it'll take us.

55% of Americans want immigration reduced, the highest rate in two decades and climbing. We're barreling down to the same political upheaval that's happening in Canada. He's throwing gas on the flames.

"Programmers all over the world helped make an American Dream happen in 2008 when we built Stack Overflow, a Q&A website for programmers creating a shared > Creative Commons knowledge base for the world. We did it democratically, because that's the American way. We voted to rank questions and answers, and held elections for community moderators using ranked choice voting. We built a digital democracy – of the programmers, by the programmers, for the programmers. It worked."

I don't know if StackOverflow should be his legacy. The site has become very heavy handed in moderation. The satellite sites are better (not SuperUser or the other one).

Nothing's perfect, but I do not wish back the alternatives we had (Experts Exchange, Quora, a myriad of forums where the first response was - did you use the search function, endless discussions that don't answer the original question, and so on).

It saved me so much time as a developer who just wants to get no-nonsense answers to my questions. The platform could not work without good moderation, or the site would drown in duplicates and low-quality content.

You may not like the site, but it works (sorta, kinda, not perfectly).

I'm not a big fan of the price graph in the article.

Are TVs really 90% cheaper since 2020 than they were in 2000? The product seems to me to be one of those that always costs the same, you just get more for a similar amount of money as time progresses (like laptops).

What does it mean for the average hourly wage line to show a 100% increase? Like it shows clothing to be a constant cost. But that's before a 100% increase in hourly wages, so has effective clothing cost halved? And food and beverage tracks the wage increase, so is it the same effective cost?

And you get artefacts like the 90% drop in TV price looking to be the same scale as an 80% increase in food and beverage cost. I can buy 10 times as many TVs, but half as much food.

Why is is More expensive vs more affordable? Seems odd to mix terms of affordable and expense when the graph isn't corrected for earnings.

I suppose it may work for some.

> Are TVs really 90% cheaper since 2020 than they were in 2000? The product seems to me to be one of those that always costs the same, you just get more for a similar amount of money as time progresses (like laptops).

Yes, unambiguously so. In the early 2000s, a high definition 38 inch TV cost three thousand dollars (https://archive.org/details/Circuit-City-Ad-2001-04-29/page/...), and "high definition" then would have meant 1080i if not 720p.

I bought 3 TVs in the last 15 or so years. Each time I spent less than the last and got a much better (and lighter!!) tv.

Before that I couldn't afford a TV and had a used 13 inch tube TV someone gave me.

I know it was nearly 2 decades ago, but in 2006 or 2007 my siblings camped out at Best Buy all night to buy laptops for $300.

That does sound right. But imagine we're plotting the cost of a laptop from 2015 to 2025. We're getting say 4x the memory and 4x better speed (if not more), but would we show a graph that indicates laptops are 4x cheaper in 2025 than 2015? I wouldn't.

The average price of what is considered a good TV in any given year has gone down over the years. While the GP did get a better TV each time, absolute price also went down each time, likely without even factoring inflation in.

I’m being downvoted for each comment I make on the topic but anyway …

I found a source article [0] about how the Bureau adjusts the cost for features with a “hedonic” score. So yes, a new feature (a Netflix app? AI? Voice recognition? Soundbar?) is counted as an improvement with value and that in turn affects a prior.

On another BLS page: “if a television in the CPI is replaced by one with a larger screen and higher price, the BLS can make an adjustment to the price difference by estimating what the old television would have cost had it had the larger screen size.”

I bought a 42” mid range TV in 2012 for 900, a 55” mid range in 2017 for 900, and a 55” mid range in 2024 for £1200. Although this is a 30% or so discount (in inflation adjusted terms) the BLS can call it 80% because it has Smart Features like OLED and internet connectivity and so forth.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-ans...

4x is an enormous understatement of the gains in computers the last 10 years.

And I don't see why you wouldn't. You can get used computers for basically free that are faster than a 2015 top-of-the-line computers. People upgrade and the old computers are often literally thrown away.

Anecdote: I purchased a Samsung 46” mid-range DLP (rear projection) TV in 2005 for $2500. It was 720p and had one hdmi port. IIRC there were some plasma and perhaps early LCDs available for 2-3x the cost or more. So, I’d say the cost has gone down by at least 90%, if not more.

So by pixel math alone, a 4K TV of equivalent size gets you 8x TV these days. :P

Heh, yeah, and if you're not buying a high-end OLED or something like that, you're likely paying 90+% less than I paid in 2005 for my TV, for 8x the pixels. Plus you don't have to deal with the damned light engine crapping out after a few thousand hours of use :)

> Are TVs really 90% cheaper since 2020 than they were in 2000?

This prompted me to look at my TV purchases. My last two TV purchases were both Samsung 55" TVs, one in 2009 for $2400 and one in 2017 for $1000, both bought at Best Buy. In both cases they were a tier down from the top of the line models.

Suppose TVs really did get 90% cheaper over 2000 to 2020. If we work out the average annual decline in price and apply that to my 2009 TV we get that in 2017 an equivalent TV should be around $1000, so that matches.

If we assume the decline continued at the same average rate after 2000, and apply that to those two purchases we get that today they should be around $440.

Looking at Samsung 55" TVs on Best Buy, it looks like $440 today would be around the top of the tier below the top tier (e.g., regular LED instead of QLED).

They’re probably comparing like items—so maybe a decent mid-range tv is the same price, but the same tv would be much cheaper. I paid $1k for a decent tv in 2009, and then bought a new decent tv this year for the same $1k, but it’s a much nicer tv than before.

But I agree with you about the essential meaningless of that number. People buy a tv every X years (for me 15, apparently), but they buy food almost every day.

Right, but imagine that with cars not TVs. To show the cost change of a car from 2000 to 2020 I wouldn't show the cost of a 2000-quality car in 2020. I'd show the actual median cost of a car in 2020.

It's more complicated for cars, because you often can't get a 2000s-quality car even if you want to. There just aren't any cars on the market today with the size and (lack of) features my current car has; whenever I need a new one, I'll have to either buy another ancient car from the 2000s or pay more for extra features and dimensions I don't need.

With TVs, though, Best Buy sells 2000s-quality TVs for like 60 bucks. I don't think it makes sense to say that TVs haven't really decreased in price just because most people would prefer to buy the fancier ones.

They still make small and normal sized cars (for now), they just aren't as popular anymore.

I just did a check of the msrp for a cheaper Toyota Corolla near San Francisco and it's MSRP is almost exactly the same as the base 2000 Corolla when adjusted for inflation.

I got my Samsung 64-inch plasma on sale for $2800 (or was it $2100?) somewhere around 2010 or earlier. Best TV I've ever owned and I still use it.

Per inch and resolution, a 90% drop in cost sounds right to me.

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