ClHans

Ah, yes, the brutal regimes of modern-day Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and others in Northern Europe!

where people aren't routinely bankrupted by medical debt, and don't enter adult life or the adult workforce straddled by terrible student loan debt, and workers have rights!

Obviously, the sort of inequality we have in the U.S.--now greater than that of imperial Rome--obviously that's the right way to be, and the only way society (or at least a tiny fraction of it) can thrive. Right? That's what you're saying, right?

Again, is the food comment--a very small part of what I said--the only thing you're quibbling with?

If I could retract that one small part of my original comment, what would you have to say about the rest? Anything good?

Is that your only quibble?

This was above the fold on a ddg search:

http://www.christianpost.com/news/1-in-4-u-s-children-at-ris...

Aaand... "gluttony rather than hunger seems to be the predominant problem of the poor." - citation desperately needed!

Of course we do.

There's a substantial and growing body of social science research that indicates that inequality leads to a whole host of social ills--see Wilkinson and Pickett.

There's also an intuited sense that when so very many people (1 in 4 children now!) are underfed, and so very many have no real access to medical care (1 on 6 americans), when education is becoming ever more inaccessible, and when the few institutions that have successfully defended workers from a hardscrabble life of hopeless poverty are virtually destroyed, AND there are a few people who don't really work harder (and certainly NOT billions of times harder!) than the rest of us, but enjoy quirks of market, law, and birth to amass vast wealth, that something might be wrong with the system that allows them to do that.

We're trapped in an economic system that concentrates resources and power, whose foundations we have been so thoroughly indoctrinated to accept that we treat them as immutable laws of nature, rather than inventions to serve us--all of us, not just the ultra-wealthy. Laws of nature, we might be stuck with. Inventions of our own making, we might could improve upon.

Yeah, we'd like a more equal country.

Good luck. That looks like a terrible idea, but good luck all the same.

Please share whatever lessons you learn in marketing and promoting, of course--I know we could always use another perspective on that side of the challenge.

I'm wary of anyone who uses terms like "state-coerced" - it suggests that the author has bought into an ideology that is decidedly not reality-based. Too often, phrases like that run in packs with ideas like "taxation is theft" (it isn't, of course).

We used to have real pensions from companies, too. It used to be that, by working for a company, part of your benefit was that they'd pay four your retirement. Of course, this is bad for the bottom line, so they cut that.

Of course, the social safety net isn't generous. I'm not sure why you think that. Social security pays out enough to keep _some_ old people from abject poverty. For some unfathomable reason, you think that reintroducing that kind of suffering is a solution?

Oh, wait, I caught it - "if you want any sort of public assistance, you have to ___". On rereading what you wrote, I don't think you're interested in proposing honest solutions to solvable social problems (i.e. you're trolling).

(And...your second-paragraph rant suggests that you think that people are, by default, totally immune from advertising and group pressure. Do you really think that this is so, or is this also trolling?)

No less an extremist as Thomas Jefferson supported the estate tax, and we still have it for many good reasons. This article talks about it better than I could:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/lexington/2010/10/estate_tax_...

> This Is What A Computer Scientist Looks Like" is exactly the wrong way to "empower". It's a photo.

Fine, don't put yourself on the list. How others feel empowered and make community is not your call.

I note that he claims to have 29 sites, but hasn't listed them. A simple list of the 29 super-duper money-making sites...that shouldn't be so hard to provide...

My "privilege" rhetoric?

What exactly are you trying to say?

I'd upvote you a thousand times if I could. You've just modeled the kind of humility and maturity that can actually make the world a better place. Thank you for this..it hasn't gone unnoticed.

Cultural marxism?

Is that an attempt to discredit someone just by tossing out a scary-sounding label? What if we haven't been programmed to fear Marxism, and "cultural marxism" just makes you sound like an ignant fool?

In other, politer words, what exactly are you trying to say here?

Have you asked the women involved if they think it's patronizing?

Or is it just something you think?

I'm sorry, maybe you can explain it like I'm five.

What does the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the public or private sector have to do with a centrally-planned economy?

Or, let me be charitable (because I think I know what you were getting at...) and instead put it to you this way:

Let's say government-financed or government-run health care is more efficient or more cost-effective than privately-run health care, because there's no privately-run insurance company that exists to extract a bit of dosh from every doctor-patient transaction.

(And safe money's on government-financed/run health care buying better health care for its citizens, dollar for dollar and measuring on a variety of health outcomes. I've seen a lot of arguments from theory that "more free markets, less regulation" would do as good a job, or better, but I haven't seen evidence of that, just arguments from theory.)

Does this mean that a country that adopts a single-payer or government-run health care system for its citizens has _also_ adopted a centrally planned--or in your words, "government-directed"--economy?

I didn't say anything about a Soviet-style centrally-planned economy, either.

... Hey, I discovered a great site the other day:

http://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman

Ah, but maybe he's not overlooking, for one example, the broadband monopoly or (essentially non-competitive) duopoly that exists in contemporary American society.

Compare what we've got with countries where the government owns the physical medium and leases it to a variety of bit-carriers--it's tough to argue against that kind of observable evidence.

There are plenty of cases where government stewardship of the playing field--with private companies competing on that playing field--works out for the great benefit of the citizenry.

"Generally government is poor at picking winners, and inefficient" [citation needed]

"Often the government people end up on the side of workers in the field rather than the public that they're meant to be serving." [citation needed]

Oh, it was all opinion.

That's fine.

In my opinion, government is as efficient as the private sector (ever seen the waste and mismanagement going on in these huge megacorps? it's insane!), and by definition can be _more_ cost-effective than the private sector because there is no need to turn a profit. Private businesses have, built in, a bit of skimming off the top for the owners (and there's nothing wrong with that, of course--that's part of why people start businesses), and government-run services by definition do not. They're not profit-seeking services. They're public services.

(You may disagree on what ought to be a public service, but once we're all on the same page that the government ought to do some things, it's just a matter of hashing out what those ought to be...)

Also...wait... NASA has grown into an organization that works for the glory of its leadership? what? sorry...again...what?

Dear HNers,

Gender bias is a touchy subject in these tech blogs and the responses to this (yet another) article are, predictably, dismissive. It was one person's fault, there's no widespread gender bias, the instructor should have things differently, someone has seen women be jerks too, etc.

So while there really does seem to be a measurable, observable difference in gender involvement in computing (e.g. in CS enrollments, in working in the industry, etc), these anecdotes always get tossed as not significant.

So what I'm wondering, and this is an open question to everyone here: would anything convince you, personally, that gender bias is real, or has a significant measurable effect, or is a problem? Would it take a certain kind of experiment? Some kind of data or analysis? (Or is the answer, "it's not a problem"?) Like, what sorts of articles would people _not_ jump on the bandwagon to tear to shreds?

best,

I think you mean: There has never been less hyperbole in a headline, in all the history of the world.

You, as an individual, may not care. Unfortunately, historical evidence and social science evidence suggests that (bearing in mind that you as an individual may not care) when income inequality grows too great, other parts of society begin to suffer and eventually break down. This even affects things like the average health outcomes for the people living in the unequal the society.

There's a strong correlation that indicates that poorer health outcomes, higher crime, poorer standard of living all go hand in hand with greater income inequality.

Again, you may not care, for your own sake, but the country is a fair bit larger than you, and this problem does affect us all, whether we care or not.

Whether rich people use roads, public education, or food safety is beside the point. (And, frankly speaking, I'd venture to guess that rich people do use roads more, because poor people are more likely to ride the bus or walk.)

They pay more because, if we taxed everyone at the same rate, we wouldn't have anywhere near enough money we needed to maintain even the somewhat shoddy state of civilization in the country.

You may not like the idea that the government has to pay for all of the things it does, and that's a fair response, but it doesn't really address the bigger picture: what kind of quality of life do we want in this country?

Just to play into the "low taxes for all" thought experiment, say we slash taxes across the board and have to cut a ton of stuff from our budget. Well, I can think of what I'd cut, and I'm sure you can do the same, and I'd bet there's some overlap, and some contention. But how would these cuts make life harder for your average American (who, mind you, is poor and sick and works their ass off week after week for very little wages)? If we don't care about them--if we throw them to the wolves of fate--is this the kind of country we want to live in, one we will take pride in? How would history view us, at the dawn of the 21st century?

And, to be wise students of history, and reflect on how we got here, rather than assume our forebears were idiots who didn't know what they were doing, why do we have the regulations on business that we do? Why do we have food safety? Why do we have regulations on overtime pay? (And whose bright idea was it to exempt IT workers from that?) Why do we have regulations on medicine, or laws that dictate how and where we drive our cars?

I'm not trying to ask a bunch of leading questions. I don't have the answers here. I just think it's useful to think more broadly than "a flat tax is a fair tax is a just tax is the right thing to do", both historically and ethically.

enjoy,

Actually, that's a rather severe simplification of "what taxes are," but for the sake of discussion, let's roll with it. (or roll it out..and shape it in a pan, and fill it with apples, and bake it..yum!)

Do I personally want free pie, which my neighbor baked? No, I don't think so, and I think that very few people engaged in our ongoing policy debates want that--just like I'd guess that very few people engaged in policy debates are actually advocating a zero-tax policy.

But.. that's not really what taxation is (taking your neighbor's pie for free, outside the confines of the larger social contract, for no purpose but your own greed and with no recompense). What I would propose for the pie-taking exercise, and what has generally been considered ethical, and within the confines of social contracts that do uphold human rights and dignity, takes on, I'd say, a different character:

I have a pie. My neighbor has a pie. There's about five or six more houses all around us, all with a pie. We need a road in front of our houses, so we can go visit the internet cafe, but none of us has the road-making expertise. So let's all take a slice of our pies and give them to the guy with the paving machine.

We also need to make sure the roads stay in good shape, so we've got to give him another slice of pie every year.

We also (and this, I think, is where it gets uncomfortable for some people) need a way to make sure we all always give up a slice of our pie, so we all give another small slice to the guy who's going to go around and make sure we all give some pie.

We saw what happened that one year when it was entirely voluntary, how everyone figured the others would chip in, and no one did, and the road fell into disrepair.

So we not only need to pay for things collectively that none of us could realistically pay for on our own (one big part of the social contract), we also need to account for human nature and hire an enforcer (another big part of the social contract, and the one that makes people uncomfortable) to keep everyone accountable to that same social contract.

Do I want your pie? No. Do I want us all to chip in and pay with our pies for necessary services? Yes.

Very few people, I think, would argue with the need to pay for necessary services collectively. What constitutes a necessary service changes over time, though, and that's why we have an ongoing political dialogue. If these problems were so simple to solve that the answers could fit on bumper stickers, we'd have solved them long ago. But they're not, and that's why we'll never stop having these discussions, and rolling these ideas around in our heads.

best,

I assume someone downvoted me for the typo (sorry! the name is supposed to be Wilkinson), and not because they find it uncomfortable when science supports ideas that run counter to their own.

Here's another good resource, this time from Stanford - http://www.stanford.edu/group/scspi/

enjoy!

You don't need to suspect it. You can read the social science literature and have some confidence that hard-working researchers have confirmed your suspicion.

Here's a good place to start: Income Inequality and Social Dysfunction by Wilkerson and Pickett.

Downvoted for what? For pointing out that all taxes redistribute wealth, and with this redistributed wealth we buy roads, food safety, police and fire, public education, a largely functioning justice system, and in fact the safety and security of a generally-free market...in another word...civilization?

Or downvoted for pointing out that the observable evidence suggests that we, as a society, would be better off in a number of measurable ways (e.g. reduced crime rates, greater social mobility, better overall health), in a society with greater money equality?

It may be a challenging idea if all one's ever heard is, "don't take my slice, just grow the pie," but there is, unfortunately, no evidence--historical or contemporary--that "just grow the pie" actually works in the real world.

One quick aside: all taxes redistribute wealth, and the consequences of doing so are well-known and positive. There's simply nothing wrong with the "redistribution of wealth" as you seem to suggest.

Now, onto the larger point. We care because unequal societies have a whole host of social ills: higher crime, lower social mobility, poorer health outcomes. There is, in fact, a wide and deep body of scientific literature about this. You are, of course, free to disagree with the science on income inequality, but that places the burden on you to say, "the science is wrong!", or to say, "high crime and poor health doesn't matter!"

Good luck with that.

... Free him, and he'll remain a slave ...

reminds me a bit about the way we're (mostly) taught life ought to go in the U.S.. go to school, work hard, get a good job (working for someone else).. get a car (now you have a car payment..now you need that job!).. start a family, get a house (now you can't even THINK about quitting that job!).. and if you come close to paying off any of your indebtedness.. BUY BIGGER!

Are we free in the U.S.? Nominally, yes. Culturally? Culturally, it seems like we're encouraged to indenture ourselves right from the get-go. The mindset is probably a lot less common on places like HN, where people are paid significantly better than median, admire the entrepreneur, and so on, but out in the rest of the world it is prevalent.

Perhaps the positive consequence could be the simple matter of having done something because it is right.

Perhaps he could look back on that period of time and reflect that, rather than watch it happen, he took action. Even if it accomplished nothing, he could at least say "I saw something wrong and I worked to right it."

What can he say now? "I saw something wrong, watched it happen, and vacationed in Europe until I felt better."

One of these is morally praiseworthy. The other is not.