john_b

If you want to argue general economic principles, then do so [1]. Just don't cherry pick examples to prop up your perspective. I don't think anyone, even Reagan or Thatcher, would have stood behind the assertion that a luxury phone and computer maker with a hoard of cash would benefit the poor. You're attacking a strawman here.

[1] Just keep in mind that "trickle-down economics" is a political philosophy, not an economic one: http://www.tsowell.com/images/Hoover%20Proof.pdf (footnote on page 2)

> "Unlike real serfs Uber drivers can set themselves free at anytime (i.e. quit)."

I'm certainly not on the Uber-hating bandwagon that's been doing laps around HN lately, but this isn't always true. Some people drive an Uber car because they need a paycheck and a flexible schedule, not because they want to. There may not be many (or any) other opportunities ready available.

A serf could quit too, as long as he was willing to abandon everything he knew and set out on the road going far away from his old master. But he knew he'd probably end up destitute and serving a new master in a strange place, so he stayed.

People are risk averse. Some people do jobs that pay bills because they need them, not because they want them. Freedom to walk away from something doesn't imply a desire for that something.

You've just treated the entire world economy as if every individual is fungible, all tasks are identical, and transaction costs are completely negligible.

The only thing that's failed here is your perspective. The world is a very complex place and the last thing it needs more of are people pondering half-thought "solutions" to problems they haven't given an iota of thought to.

> "I don't know what it is, but US companies seem to have a real issue with taking a "European" approach to this work-life balance matter."

Much of it is because US companies pay a higher proportion of the costs for things like parental leave (if they provide it at all) since the government does not pick up the bill. In some cases, the government mandates that companies pay for work-life benefits, but provides no funding to support them. If you are a large, stable company with predictable revenue, this may be ok. If you are a small company or a startup without significant outside investment, it is a different matter entirely.

The question of parental leave is easy when the government picks up the bill and that society as a whole has agreed to subsidize child production.

> "The economic argument would be that some of the benefits of creating new people are captured by the rest of society, not just the parents, and so to maximize efficiency, some of the costs should also be borne by society."

If you replace "new people" with "works of art" and "parents" by "artists" you have logic that applies equally to a universal subsidy for all artistic activities. This might be nice, but it's something that most people would recognize as impractical and idealistic. But when children enter the picture people lose all rationality and revert to a need-focused mindset instead of a resource-focused mindset.

An actual economic argument would be much simpler than the one your propose. The production of children must be subsidized if and only if it is an objectively valuable and necessary activity (which it is) but insufficient people are dedicated to the task (which is plainly not the case, as evidenced by the stable population of the US).

Reasoning based on who enjoys the benefits of an activity is not economics, it's philosophy.

> "if you forced companies to pay through their leave, that gives them an incentive to hire people who they don't believe are likely to have children soon"

This is already done, though it is never admitted for obvious reasons. A portion of the gender pay gap, especially in tech, is due to employer perception that hiring women who might have children is risky.

Federal law already allows employers to charge their employees higher health insurance rates if they are smokers [1]. And why not? Employers have an incentive to do this because they are required by law to provide health insurance to their full time workers (if they have > 50 employees, anyway). If you are paying for a significant portion of someone's healthcare, and they are making voluntary choices which will cost you more money, any kind of working market will lead to increased healthcare costs in such a situation.

Childcare, as you mentioned, is usually a voluntary decision. Maybe, as a society, we decide that we want to subsidize procreation as is done in many European countries and have the government foot the bill for parental leave, but if we decide to leave it up to employers (who don't care if you have kids or not) we shouldn't be surprised if parental leave is lacking.

The entire U.S. health and insurance system (I certainly wouldn't call it a "market") is rotten to the core. The bulk of the costs are typically paid by employers, so employers--whose incentives most definitely do not serve their employees' health--get to set the policies under which an individual's healthcare may be provided. It's absurd.

The only two sensible systems are a completely individualized system with no employers as middlemen, or a completely socialized one where the government accepts ultimate responsibility (and therefore control) for the health of the people. What we have is a monstrous catastrophe that would have already bankrupted other nations.

[1] http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/obamacare-penalty-could-...

You can use averages in your area as a baseline, weighing more heavily towards any startups of a similar nature.

You can also do a sensitivity analysis and determine what the room for error is in those quantities.

Startups are a form of speculation, you shouldn't expect the same sort of certainty that you'd get from wage labor.

> "Spying on European officials is a problem with oversight, not with capabilities."

Snowden has showed this to be absolutely false. "Oversight" has been the nominal preventative for spying on our allies for decades, and it has always failed because these are spy agencies we are talking about. Their nature (and job description) is to do things in secret. You cannot oversee what you cannot see. The NSA has a fundamental incentive to hide as much of its activities as possible, and American politicians have a fundamental incentive to look the other way lest they appear "soft on terrorism" or some such nonsense. What few laws constrain the behavior of the NSA, GCHQ, etc are routinely ignored or "interpreted" to their own favor.

You cannot let the technological genie out of the bottle and expect a close watch on the genie to keep it under control. Mass surveillance technology is a pandora's box that you can't control.

You may be technically and structurally correct, but I think most people care far more about how effective democratic checks and balances are being applied to the NSA (hint: not much) rather than classifying it as part of one type of system or the other.

> "At GE, we have stayed competitive for more than 130 years because of our relentless quest for progress on all fronts, including culture."

Does it count as a submarine [1] if it is obvious?

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

The fundamental reason is that most people see the state as a protective entity. People don't give their information to someone they don't trust (at least not for free). But they fundamentally trust the government as a whole, even if they may mistrust individual parts of it [1].

This is a hard notion to combat because the government is a protective entity. It's arguably the most important function of any government: protecting its citizens. Even corrupt and dysfunctional governments can still protect their citizens from external threats.

In Western nations, one of the biggest threats to the average citizen, particularly his or her rights, is the government itself. Separation of powers is supposed to keep it in check, but at least in the U.S., the slow and steady increase in the power of the executive branch in the past century combined with technological developments has meant that it now has the potential to exercise tyrannical levels of power over virtually any person or class of person.

People don't need to understand the web or even how the technology of mass surveillance works. Citizens as a whole don't make political decisions based on detailed information anyway. Surveillance reform can only be accomplished by getting a large enough people to distrust the government itself. Skepticism won't be enough--fear of being vulnerable to terrorists (or any of the other usual fears like child pornographers and such) will trump skepticism.

In the U.S., the constitution is a document which gives limited powers to the federal government and justifies each of them. People today generally think of government power in opposite terms: it gets power by default and only has to give it up if that power later proves to be unnecessary. This is the real change that needs to be made, one of mentality not just of laws. The laws will follow if the mentality of the citizenry as a whole changes. The great deal of skepticism that younger Americans show towards government compared to their elders is encouraging, but that will only lead to change in the long run. I'm not sure what the sitution in the UK is like.

The basic problem with the main media narratives surrounding surveillance is that most (but not all) look at mass surveillance by the government and only conclude (correctly) that mass surveillance is bad and that the government better have very good reasons for doing it. Government fearmongering follows, placating the skepticism.

Mass surveillance needs to be seen for what it really is: the signature of an embryonic tyranny. Even if we presently have saint-like politicians who will only use such power for good, our government was set up so that we would not, and indeed should not, need to trust it.

[1] The surveys that regularly show high public disapproval of Congress come to mind.

I was about to post the same thing. The research methodology is very careless here. It reminds me of how so much psychological research has been reexamined after psychologists stopped using college students as their exclusive sample group.

The Onion should really do a parody of studies like this. "100% of Americans Answer the Phone When Strangers Call" or something like that. As it is, dubious research like this just generates misleading headlines that then misinforms public debate about important issues.

Having said that, based on personal experience I don't doubt the basic results in terms of being for/against privacy, but the numbers and methodology are probably garbage.

I'd be very interested in any study that used different communication mediums to ask equal numbers of randomly chosen people the same questions. Phone, email, Facebook, etc. I think it would raise a lot more questions than answers.

I've found that objections to space exploration share a fundamental axiom with the more general objections to federal funding of scientific activities of any type. Namely, that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is an inherently worthless activity. If that knowledge happens to have some immediate positive impact on a problem affecting presently living people, then it may be worth pursuing if such a pursuit isn't "too expensive".

While it's trivially obvious that the value of unknown knowledge is unknowable, this doesn't often occur to such people, focused as they are on the limitations of the present instead of the possibilities of the future. Even if the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake were a completely useless activity which diverted resources away from more pressing problems, societies everywhere have accepted that their tax dollars inevitably fund certain things which are unnecessary. Clean parks, public support for the arts, city fireworks on holidays, etc. Yet people generally find these latter sinks of funding less objectionable than things like space exploration and federal support for science. Perhaps it's because the enormous scientific illiteracy afflicting the populace as a whole (which can be observed simply by reading any popular journalistic account of scientific developments) places scientific developments and scientific pursuits into some mental category of "abstract, probably useless stuff".

Capitalism as a system has many impersonal qualities, but capitalism per se does not value anything. It just provides mechanism (market prices, investment dollars, and so on) by which the value that people attribute to things can be known.

If "capitalism" values the "wrong" things it's because people at large have the "wrong" values. If that is a problem, it's probably not an economic one, but something deeper.

I can understand how Europeans are justifiably upset when Americans talk about reforming the American surveillance apparatus in terms of protecting the rights of Americans, but please understand that this does NOT imply an indifference to the rights of others.

It's simply a practical matter of being honest about the political incentives in the U.S. Enraged Europeans don't vote U.S. congressmen out of office. Enraged Americans do. Until U.S. congressmen feel pressure from those who ultimately employ them, nothing will change.

To quote Michael Jordan:

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

Willingness to fail is a precondition for learning and growth.

Recursion and unbounded loops are far too risky on their own, even ignoring the problems they cause for static analysis. The code that goes on NASA spacecraft is bombarded by cosmic rays on a daily basis, something a server sitting in a building at the bottom of the atmosphere doesn't have to worry about nearly as much. Even if the code is perfect, if a ray hits the right spot it's possible for it to flip a bit and then your perfect recursive function will do who knows what. [1]

They use error-correcting memory to combat this, but it's still better to be safe than sorry when your software controls a multimillion dollar space oasis with human beings inside who have no means of escape.

[1] http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Single_event-upset

From the OP:

> "We want to be sure we’re not discriminating against founders in our funding decisions at YC"

This is not an affirmative action program. YC is an accelerator, not a charity. It primarily seeks long term positive returns, and to do that you have to evaluate people and their ideas based on merit, not their gender. Having more female founders would probably be better for the startup ecosystem as a whole, but "actively preferring" a class of candidates based on attributes poorly correlated with their probability of success would be bad for YC.

The traditional approach in sensor fusion is to use high accuracy, high drift sensors like the phone's accelerometer to provide accurate short term data and then correct for the drift using less accurate but low drift sensors like GPS. Just integrating the accelerometers will work on short time spans, but you also double integrate the noise of the accelerometer, so that measurement of position blows up quickly unless you correct for it.

Austrian economists like to point out that human wants and needs are effectively infinite (mostly due to the "wants" part), so there is fundamentally no reason that our economy should cease functioning just because the "needs" portion becomes increasingly automated and efficient.

The problem is getting people to pay for the "wants" part. I'm worried that the internet has accustomed people to treating creative content as a free resource by nature of being on the internet. It's the most efficient distribution mechanism for a lot of creative works, but the economics of an ad-filled internet experience with the user as product is very disturbing on a grand scale.

The whole dream of economic progress since the Enlightenment was that our needs would become increasingly solved so that we could focus on what we really enjoy as human beings. To quote John Adams:

> "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

But we live in a world with an ever expanding supply of people and a rapidly diminishing set of "necessary" jobs. If we want to avoid the end game of that situation (revolution) we need to find ways to get the economics of the unnecessary-but-still-valuable to work.

> "Isn't their current economy significantly smaller than their current population"

I'm not sure what you mean. These are apples and oranges you are comparing here.

I think you need to check your dictionary for a proper definition of "administrative". Nobody has been bemoaning the exponential expansion of janitors and cafeteria ladies on university campuses.

> "Look at the nearby discussion: Instead of asking why Carmen Ortiz, who's been in her current job for nearly six years, is still there, we're debating the terms of use of the petition site. Instead of wondering why a law originally designed to protect NORAD was used to drive Aaron Swartz to suicide -- despite his JSTOR "victim" never asking for a criminal prosecution -- we're reminiscing about other, equally useless, petitions in the past."

As an interesting aside, I was reading the article about the internal communications of the Chinese communist party's propaganda machine (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8856218) and one of the internet commenters on the payroll for the Party had this to say:

> “When transferring the attention of netizens and blurring the public focus, going off the topic is very effective.”

I find the USG response to this petition laughably transparent in the same way, but it will still be effective in general.

> "The White House's non-response on the two-year anniversary of Aaron Swartz's death shows why these petitions are not only flawed, but should be avoided by people who actually care about political or policy change."

This has always been true; it's not just in this specific case or with respect to whitehouse.gov. A petition is a slightly more sophisticated form of the "like" button, invented in a pre-internet time. Intelligent, directed actions sustained over a period of time cause changes; a boolean expression of opinion without the threat of some undesirable (by those perpetuating the status quo) action behind it is just a way of venting.

...and incur great expense in constructing infrastructure [1] to replace the roads and parking areas which previously occupied those city centers.

[1] Buses, trains & tracks, bike rentals & bike paths, etc. Choose as you may, it still requires a redesign of the city center.

In economic theory this is fine, but much of economic theory is like string theory: consistent and rational, but utterly unmeasurable--and thus useless for anything outside of philosophy.

Your definition of "productive" requires subdefinitions for both "value" and "unit of labor". In a Taylorist environment natural definitions for these terms might be apparent and obvious, but for the average modern day office worker these terms are nearly impossible to define, much less compare across workers performing heterogeneous tasks in a complex environment where the final product or service is not simply the sum of its parts.

When confronted with exceedingly complex or impossible measurement problems, human intution has been and remains one of the best options we have. It may not be objectively accurate, especially at an individual level, but at least falling back to human intution when confronted with the unmeasurable allows correlations and changes over time to be observed.

The real question is how honest the source data is for this survey, not how precise or rigorous it is.

There is something better and it's called the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

This is all fine and I don't disagree with you, but how do you propose we fix the real problem (federal control over far too much) without first removing the endemic corruption favoring entrenched interests that our current campaign finance laws not only permit but encourage? Do you expect our current political class to vote for less power for themselves? Or for the corporate entities funding congressment to suggest to those congressmen that the regulations which protect them need to be lifted?

This is a predictable response to the nature of the product (education), the nature of the market (mostly clueless teenagers), and the uncertainty within that market of the eventual value of the product (chances of getting a job, how much it will pay, what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life, etc).

Colleges know that the target market of teenagers cannot come to a reasonable and calculated evaluation of the market value of the degree they are selling, so they bundle the product with anything and everything that makes prospective students and their parents feel more comfortable. Most Americans want their children to go to college, and most American teenagers have a vague understanding that it's something they should do, but there are too many unknowns for the target demographic to have any confidence in their investment, so those universities which succeed in alleviating the most fears and doubts have a competitive advantage.

This dynamic is a historical anomaly. Education has historically been trade-based, and later, a luxury of the rich who could afford to study less practical (but still important) matters. The former had a very predictable ROI that could be evaluated reasonably, and the market for the latter type of education wasn't typically concerned too much with the financial ROI of their investment, but with other types of value derived from it.

This is the fundamental problem of industrialized education, both state-controlled and private. A complete return to a trade-based system of education is impractical for many reasons, though it may help greatly in some smaller schools and regions, typically those with a dominant and stable large employer or two. On the other hand, most universities would collapse if education once again became the luxury of the elite.

MOOCs are not the answer either, at least not until the certifications they provide are widely accepted as predictable indicators of a good employee (and presently they are not). They may be a very attractive option for "continuing education" types of learning that the article references, however.

If your company is having that discussion in the context of full time employment, the indirect costs (i.e. non-salary things like health insurance, 401(k) matching, etc) are a significant factor in the equation. As salary drops, these (relatively fixed) indirect costs become a larger percentage of the cost of retaining someone.

If you measure the value of the employee by the salary you pay him or her, the ratio of total costs incurred by the company to value derived by the company for this one employee increases as that employee's salary drops. This is one of the major reasons that temporary jobs and part time work have become popular solutions to this problem: the indirect costs associated with these types of hires are lower.

What we really need, in an ideal world, is a set of personal benefit programs (health & life insurance are the big ones) which are completely uncorrelated with your employment status or location. Forcing employers to shoulder the burden for personal benefits leads down a dark and dysfunctional path where the programs are not controlled and managed by those who have an interest in them for what they provide, but by those who have an interest in minimizing the costs of such programs.

Outrage requires awareness as a first step. Our mainstream sources of journalism are often too preoccupied with party talking points when covering welfare programs to get to the real issues of corruption, fraud, and systemic brokenness underneath. It seems to be slowly changing, however. Articles like this one are a good start.