indubitable

I'd like to see numbers here. There are huge industries that have been built around entertainment and recreation forever: sports, hunting, movies, television, books, music, etc. I expect, as a ratio, we're collectively spending far less on e.g. baseballs and far more on video games. It'd be interesting to see the net real change in society's total non-essential expenditures. I would be quite surprised if it was all that large especially if we do not consider ultra-high end recreation to account for the fact that there are far more upper class and rich individuals now a days, so their recreational spending could make it look like all of society is spending that much more - when that's certainly not your hypothesis.

And Facebook complicates the matter even more. They do not make money by "building things for the entertainment of others". They make money by building one of the most effective datamining and human profiling systems in existence, enabling companies to pay money access the product of this by precisely targeting individuals to compel them to either buy things or be influenced by their brand. It doesn't really answer the question of where money is being spent. Those companies are giving Facebook money because you give those companies your money. What is the distribution and gross effect of that spending?

What you're probably referring to with 1973 is probably something like the increasingly lopsided share of income on the top of society. To put some exact numbers to your intuition in 1979 the middle class controlled 46% of all income, and the upper/rich classes controlled 30%. Today (as of 2014) the rich and upper class control 63% with the middle class left with 26%. [1] There's even been a chiseling out of the middle class as a whole declining from 38.8% of society to 32% of society. I also find these topics fascinating. But that paper also has another datum in it that was completely eye opening to me. This is the change in the size of each economic group as measured by share of total income from 1979 to 2014.

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- Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8%

- Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4%

- Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32%

- Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1%

- Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8%

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That's a very positive and rapid change. As another example China is experiencing something similar on a very rapid scale. They've gone from a relatively egalitarian society, to one where you have billionaires alongside people putting together $1000 iPhones living in on-site dormitories with suicide nets lining the building, working for a couple of bucks an hour. The contrast is stark, yet at the same time their overall population is starting to benefit from unprecedented opportunity and a gradual upward push. And what's left out of that picture is that even there those workers are striving for greater things, taking that money and then using it to return to their villages and open businesses of their own hoping to get their own piece of the pie. As an extreme example there Jack Ma, now one of the richest people in the world, spent years manually biking, what would have been from his perspective, 'rich' tourists around in China from international hotels.

Maybe the biggest point about the $52k figure is how shockingly small it really is. That's with all these crazy motivations for people to earn and generate as much as they possibly can, and then some. At times it might seem that post-scarcity is just a matter of logistics and benevolence, but that's just not justified by the actual numbers. So in the mean time, rather than dream of utopia, we need to create systems that enable people with sufficient drive to get as far as they can. And while our system has an immense number of flaws, I think you'd be hard pressed to come up with a robust alternative. Social systems have a strong allure, but I think this conflict of reality and ideology is really the fundamental reason that these systems collapse, in brief order, time and again - often with extreme consequences. China's inequality may be off putting now, but it wasn't 60 years ago that Chinese were dying and starving to death by the tens of millions in their execution of a so-called 'Great Leap Forward' to a full on social system. Ultimately you need to keep perspective in mind.

[1] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-...

For some interesting context on "Amazon's dominance", in 2017 they managed a total marketshare of 4% of retail. Surprisingly even if we restrict it to e-commerce only, they 'only' achieved 44%. [1]

[1] - http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-captured-4-of-us-retai...

It's very easy to agree with what you say, but something that I think is difficult to answer is breaking it down into real numbers. How much do you think somebody should be paid for moving boxes? Again you'd probably like to respond with a phrase like a 'livable wage', but I'm curious about an exact number with a natural understanding that it'd be higher for workers in e.g. San Francisco and lower for workers in the middle of Idaho.

To avoid making this a trap question, I'll give you my response to any number ahead of time. The US GDP/capita is $52k. So if each and every person received a perfectly equal share of every penny created, that'd be a total of $52k. And society certainly sees value in creating a much stronger economic incentive for e.g. being a doctor or an engineer than for moving boxes. So where would you put the number? It's not easy to answer when you consider that the current average salary for our box movers is already about $26k, or 50% of a perfectly equal share of all wealth generated in the nation.

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And I have one other entirely separate question for you, due to the phrasing of your question. Would you have been happier with Amazon had these jobs simply not existed? There's many possibilities there. In the future these jobs will likely be eliminated through automation. Other business situations, such as Apple's, enable them to avoid US blue collar labor by shipping the jobs off to factories in China where conditions and lifestyles are substantially worse than low wage jobs stateside.

I could not care less about downvotes, but I enjoy discussion. And I certainly think people would like to disagree with me, but it seems none are really able or willing to form coherent counter points - which I think puts a very sad frame on the disagreement. So I thank you for changing that, though I think there's something you may not have considered in your logic.

At the most basic level we can view a company's profitability as a price vs demand curve. If your price is too low then you're leaving money on the table. If it's too high then you're also losing money since you could earn more by charging less to more people. And I'm sure you'd agree that all companies are really trying to maximize that curve.

But the thing here is that competition is not some tertiary element not considered in our basic price vs demand curve. It's in most cases the single biggest driving factor of the demand function. When there's no real competition, you can increase your prices quite recklessly - see Time Warner or Comcast. But the amount that Amazon can increase their prices is strictly limited due to competition. If you're going to buy an electronic component do you buy it at e.g. New Egg or Amazon? It doesn't really matter if its the same thing - you're just going to go with wherever is cheaper in net (e.g. factoring in rewards/shipping/etc), even if that price difference is really quite small. The point here is that while you may think that Amazon could raise their prices let's say 5% and see a 1-2% growth in profit, but this is a question that they are undoubtedly constantly researching - and they disagree.

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And in any case this is literally the case for most all small margin businesses. For instance WalMart has 2.3 million employees and $13.6 billion net. Our $1k/year raise costs them $2.3 billion, or 1/6th of their entire available income. The only companies that are truly lush with money are companies that sell their product at extremely high markups, or companies whose product enables the minimize labor, such as software. For instance Apple, as an example of the former, nets $48.4 billion with 123,000 employees. A $1000/year raise there would work out to 1/400th of their available revenue. Google/Alphabet, as an example of the latter, had a bad year last year, but generally net around $20 billion on 72,000 employees. Their $1k raise works out to about 1/278th of their available revenue. It creates an ironic result that few people would complain about the wages Google or Apple offer, yet they actually offer their employees a far less 'fair' share of revenues than do the companies that people consider greedy.

I sometimes think our views might be to 'current-centric' when considering a post automation era.

In my mind one of the most distinguishing features of the labor world today is the growth of complete independence. You have solitary people start software companies and independently design, develop, and publish products that go on to earn billions. I think a big part of this is the efficiency created by current systems. The economic systems to handle payments are almost entirely automated. The system of publication processes payments and delivers product in an entirely automated fashion. And consumers can learn about and purchase your product also using fully automated systems. Compare that to times when software was sold exclusively in retail outlets. For that matter you don't even have to go that far back to times when computers themselves were outside the reach of all except the most elite of society rendering such economic possibilities moot.

And I think this trend of independence is something that will likely continue going forward. Imagine in a post automation world where things like industrial level machining and eventually even things like semiconductor fabrications become as accessible as PCs were let's say 30 years ago. This is a game changer that I think is going to be extremely difficult to predict the implications of. For that matter imagine automated construction bots capable of executing building designs all the way from ground clearance on up.

Let's get more agrarian. Consider things like automated micro-farms. People could use these for their own nourishment, but then there's also the possibility of automated delivery systems enabling user-to-user distribution systems where people could even make a living off of their land in an autonomous fashion. Right there are vast amounts of great arable land in the US that's for sale for next to nothing. In some cases you can get land literally for free. But without automation it's not so straight forward to monetize this. What would be the implications, if it did become possible? 4 acres and a bot?

The whole point here is that I think by focusing on training as a means of contributing to a large company as a means of earning a living is not necessarily something that will be a given in the future. These large companies are the ones that have the means and motivation to eliminate these jobs. The present already rewards independence vastly more than dependent labor and this is a trend I think we'll see grow exponentially in the era of automation. And that has very difficult to even imagine implications.

A reasonable litmus test for monopoly is whether they would fail if they started exploiting their customers.

Time Warner and Comcast pass this test. They refuse to compete and then aggressively raise prices, seemingly to no end, knowing full well their customers have no choice. Microsoft's Windows 10 also passes this test with extreme anti-customer behavior that relies exclusively on consumers tolerating only due to a lack of choice.

Now back to Amazon. If they started ramping up their prices they would fail, fail hard, and fail practically overnight. There's a difference between a company being incredibly efficient and passing, with great success, that efficiency onto consumers and monopolies. Another general trend in monopolies is that they generally rely on tertiary forces to prevent competition. For the telecoms, this is the lack of access to wiring or even simply poles. For Windows, it's native execution of decades of third party software as well as the vast majority of all consumer software written today. There's no barrier to competing with Amazon, you're just not going to do it as well as them. It's the same reason WalMarts destroy small local businesses.

I think many people tend to grossly overestimate the profit levels of large companies. Let's take Amazon since they're arguably the reason for the failure here and a company I think many perceive to be lush with money largely because of 'greed.' It also hits on notions from this paper like companies just not hiring enough employees, even if only at certain times.

Amazon currently grosses $178 billion. However, their net income is what matters. That's what's left over after paying cost of goods, salaries, rent, taxes, and so on. Basically what's left over after the mandatory expenses to keep your company running. And that's only $3 billion. 'Only' sounds funny preceding $3,000,000,000 and is undoubtedly what leads to complaints against Amazon (and here as well) that they're just being greedy, not paying employees enough, and so on.

But that's not really accurate. Amazon has 566,000 employees. If they gave each employee a $1000 raise. For those working your average 2000+ hour year that's a whopping $0.50/hour raise. Yet that marginal raise amounts to $0.56billion, or 1/6th of their entire remaining revenue. Interestingly enough 1 executive earning $1million in compensation is, by contrast, only 1/3000th of their remaining revenue. This critical calculation on the number of workers to fill any given role is why compensation and things can seem so lopsided. The sheer magnitude of the number of workers at many of these companies is very counter intuitive.

And this is the case for most large small margin companies. Back to Barnes and Noble, in 2016 they had a net income of -$24.5 million with 26,000 employees. Try to keep those figures in mind when considering this. I think the post that described any real solution for them as akin to 'shuffling chairs on the Titanic' is very apt.

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If anybody has a counter point here, I'd love to hear it. From my perspective it seems people are replacing reality with ideology, whether intentionally or not. We want to blame companies for being greedy, even when in reality the numbers don't really support such views. All jobs are disappearing, when we have 4.1% unemployment (even the U6 is down to 8.2%!), etc. I used to feel very similarly, but the numbers simply don't support these incredibly cynical views.

I believe his point with 'hostile' is to choose nations where they would be both likely and able to say 'no' should the host nation of an individual request sensitive information on the individual in question.

For instance Switzerland had some of the most secure and private banking in the world. It was actually a criminal act in Switzerland to reveal the name of an account holder - to anybody, including governments. And so if the US were to request information on a possible US account holder, they would be likely to say no. But given the influence of the US on both Switzerland and on the nations it most heavily depends upon, they've proven themselves unable to say no, and ended up passing all sorts of special laws, just to bend over to US requests that infringed their nation laws and more generally their sovereignty.

Another interesting example with Switzerland is Champagne. Champagne, Switzerland has been making a local wine known as Champagne since the 9th century. Many centuries before the champagne of France even existed. In 2004 the EU told them to stop using the name. And again even if they were likely to say no, they would be unable to do so. As another interesting aside Champagne, using the ubiquitous méthode champenoise, was not invented in France. It was created by an Englishman. What a sordid tale that little drink has!

Would Finland be likely to say no? I don't know - I have very little knowledge of the security arrangements between Finland and the US. Would they be able to say no to the US? Not a chance.

I do not think there's very much diversity of bias in today's publications. It mostly breaks down into a very binary partisan split. You have 'liberal outlets' that mostly sound identical and 'conservative outlets' that mostly sound identical.

In the past there was less child-like black and white conflict, but there was vastly more disagreement on views and papers willing to publish things that fell outside the expected grain. The New York Times was a real leader in this regard. My favorite example is probably from an article from 1920. The NYT ran a featured editorial arguing that rockets could not actually work in a vacuum, like space, since 'there would be nothing for its thrust to push back against.'

They were obviously very wrong, but nonetheless were willing to consider views that ran against the grain even for the time. And that is a good thing. Many of the things they were right on were also equally 'out there' at some point, but I'm not mentioning those as we have the bias of 'well that really happened' so the truth doesn't seem as bizarre as it really is.

The problem we have now a days is that the media has become so collusive and incestuous that they rarely publicly disagree, again beyond the partisan split which I can only describe as child-like. And, in my opinion, this is likely intentionally done under a belief that having a unified front would increase their apparent integrity or confidence. Collusive groups like JournoList turned CabaList would work as some evidence towards this. However, at the same time it also completely destroys any notion of competence when everybody gets something so completely wrong. A very recent example of this would be the so-called 'sonic weapons' used 'against' US diplomats in Cuba. In spite of the media going into a unified frenzy of speculation and finger pointing, literally no major outlet took the logical, even if outsider, position that this probably was not even an attack in the first place. And now that it seems like that it indeed was not, it leaves the entire media system looking like a joke. Even when there are only two options (is a weapon, or not a weapon), nobody managed to get it right. That's sadly impressive and again something that was far less frequent an occasion in the past.

Thanks for the article. Let's look over this since I see it rather differently.

The article states, "there are hundreds if not thousands of contract soldiers in Syria whom the Russian government has never acknowledged." According to whom and why? And if their estimate is so unreliable as to have an error margin on the order of magnitudes would it not be more accurate to state an unknown number? Anyhow, they not only take their controversial statement as a given, but then go on to offer a completely bizarre explanation for why they were deployed. According to the article, "They were deployed both to help keep the official cost down and to avoid reports of casualties, especially with a March presidential election in Russia fast approaching.". Again according to who? And idea that these secret soldiers are because of an election seems dubious, at best. Putin's approval rating is around 75% with 0 substantial opposition. His reelection is little more than a formality regardless of what happens in Syria.

Let's now look at some of their named sources for which you reference "lots of evidence." One bit of evidence was literally what a source, described only as "a woman from central Russia", said in "a brief online chat." And then they reference what they, again literally, describe as "investigative bloggers." And on top of all of this the article originally stated Russians were killed in the airstrike, when the source actually said Syrians. Regardless of whether or not that was a genuine mistake, it really should make you question their editorial standards for such a key fact to be night and day wrong.

There are many other such issues throughout the article, but let's stop there since I think the point is more or less clear. Look at it this way. Imagine this article was discussing an issue for which you had less personal biases, and from an outlet you also had no biases of brand recognition and trust towards. You would consider it to be dubious, at best. When we read things from sources we trust or that confirm our own biases, we turn off our ability to think critically.

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Granted the above is a tangential issue to bias - reporting quality. But the two tend to be strongly connected. When you want to push a story but the data to support such a tale isn't there, you have a choice of either moving on or turning to lower levels of support for your view. And in times past I think the choice there would have been dead obvious for the New York Times. Citing what somebody, who is again literally described as "a woman from Russia", wrote online is insulting the intelligence of your readers and instills a sense of incredulity for the article in the mind of anybody who's not taking what you write as beyond reproach. Nonetheless, they chose (and have regularly chosen now a days) to go down this path. And this is something new.

There's a difference between news and editorial that has been increasingly lost. To give an exaggerated example:

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- Air strikes in the US killed 15 targets in Mideastland. Representatives for the US armed forces stated the targets were high priority leaders of Al Boom Boom. Domestic news in Mideastland claims that the strike was on a hospital. There has been no definitive identification of the victims yet.

- The never ending war machine of the US continues to ravage Mideastland as a brutal attack on a hospital where many women and children were being treated has been destroyed with mass casualties reported. Here's a sad picture of a baby by some rubble that's not related to this incident.

- An elite fleet of aerial forces unleashed a precision surgical strike in Mideastland decapitating important parts of the leadership of the extremist terrorist organization Al Boom Boom. Locals were reportedly seen celebrating and toppling a statue of the fascist organization while waving US flags and singing the US national anthem.

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There will, of course, be an unavoidable bias in what is covered since not it's literally impossible to cover everything. But in how things are covered, removing bias is not difficult and it's also testable. If an average reader can, with reasonable accuracy, state the biases and inclinings of the author of a news piece then it is biased.

The extreme bias in the news today is very much a contemporary thing. Here [1] are a list of online newspaper archives. Most are free and some go all the way back to the 1800s. Compare then and now, and the difference is quite extreme. I expect we're going through a time today that people will look back on with some degree of bewilderment, not dissimilar to how we might think of things like the two red scares we've gone through. We, collectively, seem to lose our ability to think coherently and impartially quite easily, but at least historically it tends to right itself quickly enough.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_online_newsp...

You're putting your head in the sand here. Independent restaurants in the US are dying. This is not based on anecdotal evidence, but national data. And your entire hypothesis that chains thrive on a lack of regulations is similarly completely unsupported by data. Look at the ratios of chains:independent restaurants in countries with extensive rules and regulations on food and then compare that to countries without. If your hypothesis was correct, we'd see domination of chains in countries with minimal rules and regulations, instead it's the unambiguously exact opposite.

Arguably the biggest issue with the regulations is that they're overreaching and extensive to the point that if somebody wants to find a violation, they probably can. And many have very little positive effect. In California the 'CalCode' [1] for food regulations alone is 188 pages of random rules, which regularly change. And that is not an all inclusive document. It regularly references not only itself but also other sources. If you actually put all the rules in their verbose and clear form together, it would likely exceed a thousand pages. And you get these dense rules like:

"FOOD prepackaged in a FOOD FACILITY shall bear a label that complies with the labeling requirements prescribed by the Sherman Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Law (Part 5 (commencing with Section 109875)), 21 C.F.R. 101-Food Labeling, 9 C.F.R. 317-Labeling, Marking Devices, and Containers, and 9 C.F.R. 381-Subpart N Labeling and Containers, and as specified under Sections 114039 and 114039.1. [...Skipping several more lines of rules, this for this single rule...] Except as exempted in the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act Section 403(Q)(3)-(5) (21 U.S.C. Sec. 343(q)(3)-(5), incl.), nutrition labeling as specified in 21 C.F.R. 101-Food Labeling and 9 C.F.R. 317 Subpart B Nutrition Labeling."

And that's just one segment of the regulations. If by some miracle you manage to obey every single rule down to the dime in the Calcode, there's then hundreds of other pages of rules and regulations you need to obey. And as mentioned many of these things are completely arbitrary. How deep a sink do you think you need to wash the utensils in a food cart? Would 9 inches do? Obviously that'd be way more than enough, yet that'd be a violation of CalCode giving them sufficient cause to find and/or shut down your business. Some politician somewhere at some time decided all sinks must be at least 10 inches deep. Why? No good reason. Instead of creating common sense regulation, rules and regulations inevitably converge on these obtuse rules. Instead it could be that all utensils and instruments used in food preparation need to be able to be fully cleaned on site. But that'd be too logical.

This is all an enormous burden on individuals starting businesses and serves little purpose other than ensuring we're left with chains and perhaps your 'bold' restaurants, which I assume boils down to a euphemism for overpriced outlets primarily targeting yuppies. It's much easier to afford the full size legal team necessary to navigate all this mess when you have a 4 figure markup on your product!

[1] - http://www.emd.saccounty.net/EH/Documents/Calcode2017.pdf

This is an interesting conversation to have as I used to feel very similarly, until getting to experience a nation where there are really no rules or regulations on food at all. It's actually what started reshaping my general view towards regulations in general. Think about the implication of your statement/belief. You're implying that the primary reason restaurants aren't making people sick, en masse, is because of rules and regulations.

The restaurant industry is one place where self regulation works surprisingly well. Think about your own experience, as it's true for just about everybody. When you choose to go out you most often go to one of a handful of the same restaurants. What happens if you get sick at a place? You're probably not going back there. And you're also probably going to tell your friends. If you're particularly upset you might even post some less than friendly reviews of the restaurant. That restaurant, with one mistake, converts a high value customer into a one man image destruction machine. And now let's imagine it wasn't a one off, but this restaurant actually makes a significant number of people sick - even if on just one a single day. They're pretty much dead.

All the rules and regulations make it much harder for people to start new restaurants. In most states you're looking at several permits and associated educational courses just to be able to even call yourself a restaurant. And then don't forget to fact in the fees for the permits, the fees for the classes, and plenty of more fees on top of that. Basically you end up having to pay the government a whole lot of money just to be able to sell the food you've probably already been making your friends and family for years if not decades.

And this leads to utterly ridiculous scenes like this [1]. How dare a man try to sell some hotdogs without asking the government for permission. Time to take all the money out of his wallet, fine him, and probably schedule a court date too. By contrast, you can be completely certain that 100% of McDonald's franchises have every single government fee and permit covered inside out. But that does little to stop people ending up with their food being mishandled, and in some cases intentionally. The big thing you'll see in industries with heavy regulation is a trends towards centralization. Here [2] are some actual data on this 'golden age of restaurants', though the ridiculous number of chains itself is more indicative of the issue than a recent slump.

[1] - https://streamable.com/3dvge

[2] - https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/20...

It's 'controversial' only in the sense that most people don't understand this. Many people seem to think that the only reason companies aren't giving great salaries to people, and 'letting' everybody earn a very good living doing most of anything, is greed. The person I was responding to went so far as to call these companies "villains." Or look at the other poster's response to this very topic. In reality, what people want is impossible, and but very few understand that. And I think the nature of this fact is often met with cognitive dissonance of some sort or another, which is sad. We are definitely becoming a nation that has an increasingly tenuous relationship with facts.

Let's talk about terminology now. First is households. A household in the US is a bit more than 2.5 people. You can go ahead and bump up your costs to $41k a year on transport alone. The next is wealth. Let's hit on two points:

- Wealth is not renewable, which is why income is vastly more important. If you have $100 of wealth and you only spend 10% of it a year. You're completely broke a decade. 'Only' spending 5% of your total wealth on transport per year is a path to very rapid ruin.

- There's nowhere near the amount of 'real' wealth as there is 'paper' wealth, which is the number you're indirectly citing. Most wealth is tied up in the form of various investments, stocks, and so on. When you liquidate these assets, it results in a decline in their value. If you were to liquidate large amounts of market assets into spendable money, simultaneously, you would find the total wealth in the US to be a very small fraction of the numbers stated.

There seem to be a couple of major similarities between software development and other jobs with bimodal incomes:

- You do a job that is, in many cases, a company itself. Lawyers, doctors, and developers can all start independent operations since the product of their work, or the service they provide, is monetizable in and of itself.

- There is a very significant skill gap, often driven by enthusiasm at least as much as intelligence, that people rarely transition between.

Compare these fields against something like electrical engineering. There the skill itself is generally a part of a product, rather than a marketable skill in and of itself making independent work difficult. And I don't know that many electrical engineers, but I'm unsure how big of a skill gap there is and, more importantly, what percent of engineers manage to transition upwards in it. If one electrical engineer is, more or less, the same as another - then you're going to see that reflected in income distributions which I would expect look more bell curvy weighted mostly by just years of experience.

Let's think about money for a minute. Money itself of course has no meaning. But we apply meaning to it. It essentially works as a proxy for the value we assign to labor and materials - both of which are finite in reality. So obviously you'd prefer drivers make more money, so they could live a better life. Well how much? I imagine you think a ballpark for a 'fair' wage would be somewhere around $15/ride. Now let's consider your person that relies on taxi type services for transportation. We'll say they go out and return to their house once a day. And every other day they also go in/out again for entertainment, essentials, and so on. For a 30 day month that's a total of 30 x 2 + (30/2) x 2 = 90 trips. And 90 x 15 = $1350. On a yearly basis that's 365.25 x 3 x 15 = $16,436.

Well that's a lot of money. Of course I expect you'd probably say that that's because the 'bourgeois' are holding back the 'proletariat.' Okay. Let's go full on social system economics. Let's just pretend the entire GDP in the US is spread completely evenly between each and every person. And that's quite unreasonable as our GDP would decrease dramatically under such a system, but for arguments sake I'll give you that. Okay, that's easy. That's the GDP/capita or $52k. The total value of all annual goods and services in the US produced works out to $52k/person/year. But we can't forget about taxes now. To sustain our social utopia we'd need quite a high tax rate. But again, I'm going to let you have that and we'll just maintain current taxes. So we're each taking home about $42k. I'm also going to pretend that state and other taxes don't exist.

Now look at your $15/ride. If somebody was going to depend on that, they'd end up spending nearly 40% of their entire income just getting around even with a perfectly fair share of all income generated nationwide! And I gave you several unreasonably optimistic assumptions that makes that number a real lowball. The point here is that even in what I assume is your idealized system, this would not be a sustainable industry. It's very easy to see things through the lens of a victim complex because of the apparent inequality of our society. But these optics are in large part caused by inconceivably large population numbers. Imagine you earned just $1 from each person on this Earth. You'd be the 65th richest person in the world! Far from a 1%er, you'd be a 0.000000001%er. Earn $12 and you'd be the single richest person alive. Even if we just consider the USA. Imagine you took every penny Bill Gates, currently the richest person in the world, is worth and equally distributed it to each and every person in the US. That'd be a total of $275. Maybe you would say well do that to them all! By the time you're down to the 100 richest person you're only getting $17/person, and again that's for the US population only.

Of course you're right, but the review process is connected to the journal. PLoS journals are very accepting and so they end up being seen as a repository for publications that could not get published elsewhere. That's not to say nothing of value is published there, but rather that if you take a random paper from one of their journals, it's going to be of a different quality than a random paper from the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

And like others have mentioned, a supplement is a great idea because of publication bias against things like negative results. However, I would again see this as supplementing and supplanting when I think most people here are gunning for the latter.

Source on people eat out more when there are health inspections? I've lived and traveled to many countries where there are no meaningful food inspections whatsoever, and your statement there really does not pass the sniff test. And as an aside there also tend to be far more independent restaurants since if you can cook something well, then all you need do is plop out a table, put up a sign, and you're in business.

They just engaged in an action that substantially increases their monopoly over access to user information, which is their golden goose. And this action is going to result in some degree of backlash. People hosting information only static sites aren't going to be thrilled that Google is effectively coercing them into, at the minimum, setting up let's encrypt when they have no reason to do so. And of course, this can be seen through some lens as benefiting the public good. Do you really think Occam's Razor points to the second reason as the primary incentive?

Another example from Google would be them preventing you from running plugins on Chrome that were not from the Google store. Yeah, it can be spun to be about protecting users from malicious plugins but it also enhances their control over their users. Incidentally, they decided to ban evil things like Youtube Downloaders from their store as well, which is a far more impactful given their increased level of control 'for your safety.'

Can somebody explain the exact process for free access that people would propose? Most options seem to come with significant and foreseeable 'unforeseen consequences.'

For instance if the idea is that research is submitted to a private journal, as typical, but then the journal is not allowed to charge a fee then that is going to rather lower their prioritization of submissions from public research.

A far worse idea would be government covering the journal fees which would do the exact opposite and overly incentivize public research as companies could send their publication fees through the roof and still have them paid due to government price insensitivity.

Maybe another idea would to have a public government research journal where all research that received public funding is freely available. But this also runs into many problems. One would be that the fundamental point of a journal is to work as a filtering mechanism. We might argue that a lot of mediocre science gets published today, even in more reputable journals. And that's after some odd 80%+ of papers, for those more reputable journals, is rejected. A government clearing house would lose its purpose as a quality filter. And it would also run into the same problems as #1 if we then have the authors submit it in the private industry, where publishing rights/exclusivity are typically part of the model.

So what's the idea?

Without defending the current system of publication, many things that are government funded are not free. For instance, our ironically named freeways. And nearly all government offered services from postal to patents come with costs and fees, which can become quite obscene.

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@pwinnski - This is likely either a dialect or national language issue. In the US, at least the section where I am from, freeways are what you might call highways. They have no traffic lights, are high speed, and have toll booths for entry and spread along them at intervals. Hence the reason I stated their naming quite ironic! They are built by government, but are not freely available. Responding here since hacker news seems to stop you from replying in a thread once something you post has been mass downvoted.

I think that's improbable. You have to keep in mind that the US zeitgeist and even the Scandinavian zeitgeist are radically different, and diverging rapidly. For instance there was a 7 part television series published on regular television in Norway called Hjernevask, which translates to Brainwash. [1] (English subs are provided). It was primarily about the absurdities within gender studies and associated social 'sciences.'

If that was published in America, you'd have 'progressive' lynch mobs lining up with torches and pitchforks. Seriously, watch that video and imagine the reaction if that series aired on e.g. NBC in the US. In Scandinavia it instead simply led to an increased discussion of the issues mentioned. One of the major institutes studied, the Nordic Gender Institute', was also defunded shortly after the series ran. The government maintains that it was simply a coincidence. [2]

Speaking critically of systems which are ostensibly about progressive values, and "denigrating others just because you don't like their type" are not the same thing.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E577jhf25t4

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Gender_Institute#Impact...

Mono is a product of the open source nature of C#, not the cause. In general, I think its wise to go as close to the 'first party reason' as possible. But the nuance there makes it surprisingly intricate, and nuance is often lost in online discussion...

As for '4 years being a long time in software', there's a difference between considering the industry at large, and individual experience. I, like everybody, have anecdotal experience and opinions that run contrary to the norm. And in this case my personal view is that 4 years is not really a long time in terms of software, yet for the industry and people as a whole, I think that couldn't be further from the average truth.

Sure, been a fun discussion!

In general intuition is a tool that can be used to help uncover things, but should not be used as a basis for a view by itself. You might be inclined to call the following the most "obvious, tepid, noncontroversial statement" "It's self evident that you shouldn't expose people with bacterial infections to something that comes from the blue green mold that emerges on rot." Of course as you might know, I actually just described penicillin. Our tendency to think our knee jerk intuition is something that can stand alongside data is undoubtedly a big part of what caused it to take years for penicillin to come to be accepted, even after the results were published and shared.

In hindsight, something I think I should have emphasized in our discussion earlier is the exact state of Mono. Everything else is mostly tangential as 'the Mono question' essentially closes the discussion of whether C# was a 'mostly closed source Microsoft only thing.' And I think the evidence is bountiful and evident that Mono has long since been a very well developed production ready environment.

Just listing a few projects built on it should really suffice to make the point. The Sims 3 was built using Mono and launched in 2009, Second Life went live with it in early 2008, Unity swapped to it after their initial 'front end' language began, in their words, "proving to be too slow and unwieldy." Their original language, quite appropriate for this topic, was Python! There's really an infinite room for discussion about this, but I think it's all a subset of the 'The Mono Question.' For instance your issue on exactly what open source license is used is completely redundant given Mono.

As for your divergence on 4 years not being a long time. I personally do agree. But our agreement stands in contradiction to the standards of software today. Entire languages are born and die in this span, libraries that didn't exist become ubiquitous, and in general 4 years is certainly far longer than necessary to expect some reasonable evolution of adaptation and opinion. The fact it has not is a peculiarity I find bemusing, and fun to consider. If nothing else, it leads to enjoyable discussion - which I suppose is the ultimate point of these forums.

Something that's I've always found striking is how long lived ancient peoples were, if they made it to adulthood. Early life deaths is what really used to bring up mortality rates. If one out of 3 children make it 20, but the child that does lives to an average of 80 then you have an aggregate life expectancy of something like 30-40 years - but that's obviously quite misleading. When you look at those that did make it to adulthood and died of some natural cause (as opposed to human caused things like warfare or famine) the longevity of people does not seem to have really changed all that much.

The Ancient Greeks were pretty much clueless on medicine still viewing things through the lens of miasma theory, yet go search for any name you're familiar with and you'll find the distribution of ages to not be as low as you'd expect. Granted there is a bias in that people that died earlier in adulthood might not have had a chance to make their mark to the point that you'd know their name today, but I don't think that's the predominant issue. The names we know we'd still know even had they died much earlier. Aristotle was an outlier living to be only 61, yet he certainly made his name even well before that. Socrates - 71 (death by execution), Plato - 80, Eratosthenes - 82, Pythagorus - 75, Hippocrates - 90, etc, etc.

Modern medicine should certainly have enabled ancient civilizations to extend their lives substantially. What if it were possible to live the lifestyle of one such as the Ancient Greeks, yet given the availability of modern medicine in case of urgent need? And it's there that I completely agree with you. I think the goal should be to use modern medicine to supplement, not supplant, traditional life values.

There's certainly a concern of being a luddite, yet on the other hand I think people are at times too quick to forget that our level of understanding of things like human physiology is still quite superficial. We have no real causal understanding and while correlations can and do enable enormously beneficial breakthroughs, they are also subject to a never ending stream of unforeseen consequences. Decisions our species made for hundreds of thousands of years to survive were obviously not always optimal or ideal, but they did prove to be, if nothing else, sustainable and deterministic.

From my perspective here, you're shifting the goal posts. In particular this conversation began with you apparently thinking that Mono lacked full implementations of ASP/ADO/etc. And I think that might justify the original comment that Linux implementations have been treated as second class citizens. I say might since ADO/ASP are not really part of .NET, but rather independent projects built on top of .NET. But in any case, that hasn't been an issue for many years now.

You have now shifted into claiming that your issue is that the licenses Microsoft released their code under were insufficiently permissive. I could argue against this, because it's at best misleading -- different code was released under different licenses. You can see an archive of one of the CLI releases [1] with the license it came with. Or this [2] is a blog from the Mono founder expressing thanks for Microsoft and ECMA members releasing code under open source licenses. That blog was from the huge 2.0 release, in 2008.

But ultimately that feels like a red herring, even if a fun one! You seemed to believe (as did the person I was responding to) that C# was a Windows only thing. That hasn't been the case for a very long time, and it is completely ridiculous now a days. In either case, it might seem we agree if you think that people are basing their views on obsolete information. But that then rather begs the question of why is that so especially the case here. If I was discussing e.g. javascript frameworks from the perspective of somebody 4 years out, let alone a decade, I'd be quite justifiably skewered. In other fields, 4 years ago things like TensorFlow did not even exist as public projects. 4 years is a very long time in software, so why are people so particularly slow on the uptake in this instance? Bias, bad marketing, something else?

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20060421052106/http://www.micros...

[2] - http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Oct-06.html

Sure, here's an article from Microsoft describing how to access and view the source code for their library implementation, ASP/ADO/Forms/etc: https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/net-framework-library-source... That's from January 2008. This release is specifically what enabled Mono to really go to the next level, more than a decade ago. You can even see the little 'carve out' they made in the license to ensure Mono, in particular, could use the code down in the 'Reference License' section.

You're making a reasonable mistake of confusing .NET Core with the .NET Framework. They're different things. .NET Core is a new development that is not directly compatible with applications relying on the .NET Framework. As you can read on the blog post you linked to, .NET core was announced as open source before it was released -- which was 2015. Its implementation and technologies being open sourced is something altogether different.