266 karma · joined September 27, 2013
Nobel never created a prize for economics, so Mises did not win a Nobel prize. The bank of Sweden gave Mises a prize.
> it's an incredible trap / attack against the middle class.
If your household is not making $150k you're not middle class though. You're working class. Middle class people don't have to run on a treadmill like that (unless they want to).
For about 25 years after World War II, an anomaly occurred where a young blue collar veteran could go on the GI bill, or alternatively get a unionized job at the factory, and buy a car and a house in the suburbs with a stay-at-home wife who took care of the kids whose college tuition was affordable, along with long-distance one week vacations every year, a solid pension etc. Some people even extended the term middle class to these people, which had previously meant professionals. Because they were living the lifestyle of middle class people.
If anything is clear, it's the eradication over the past 40 years of the idea of extending the term middle class downward from professional households to those making less than $150k a year. This was the working class before World War II and it is the working class now. Even if nowadays it's banging out PHP code or putting Visual Basic widgets together or wiring Cisco switches together instead of going into the mines or soldering parts on an assembly line.
The article talks about uniqueness, but being in a group does not affect uniqueness. You could almost compare it to all the Hacker News advice to not do a startup solo, as you need companions to talk to on the long slog. A hacker in a group can brag to them about his achievements (he could tell the whole world, but then he'd be arrested). He can also brag to other hackers about being in an elite group. It socially enhances them as an individual, it doesn't take away from their individuality.
They say the French revolution was formed in the salons of Paris. What were the salons of this bygone hacker scene? The BBS's running on the Apple ]['s and Commodore 64's that were sitting in the bedrooms of teenage boys. That the means of communication were completely controlled by teenage boys (through a mostly oblivious Bell) affected things in a whole host of ways. Any kid with a phone line in his room and $200 for a Commodore 64 could host a node on this communication network in the mid-1980s.
Two forces destroyed the scene - the carrot and the stick. The stick was the government beginning to notice their existence. The 414's were busted in 1983. There were a series of raids in 1987. In 1990 MoD was busted and Operation Sun Devil happened. This didn't really kill the scene though. A complete free-for-all changed into more careful hackers, not making calls from their house but using acoustic couplers on payphones or (modded) cell phones. They also were quieter about laws they may be breaking. They also became more sophisticated, really understanding the phone system, how Internet hosts and security worked etc. In some ways, attacks by law enforcement made them more dangerous.
The real death knell of the groups was the carrot. The Internet became more widespread, and these people began to get jobs. They formed companies, which they sold for millions of dollars to billions of dollars. Which is not hyperbole. When the guy you knew, who was not all that smarter than you, creates a billion dollar company, wardialing or sniffing the traffic of some host seems less important. Idle hands are the devil's workshop. The closed off world of mainframes on x.25 networks run by Computer Science Phds from top universities, counterposed to another network of working class mischievous teenage boys with their Commodore 64 BBSs in their bedrooms - this is a ripe ground for a hacker scene. A network where you hear stories of teenagers making millions on the hit app they wrote - opportunities like this put a damper on hacker scenes.
Then she associates this with changes in political positions. This is something else, it may be connected for people like her, but not others. There are plenty of people in their fifties with "radical" positions who are writing essays, organizing voter drives, walking picket lines, volunteering at a community radio station and so forth. They are in it for the long haul, and usually getting more done. Going to a demonstration and yelling at a cop might give someone an adrenaline rush. However, long-term efforts to work with others on seemingly minor changes to attain a broader goal is usually what gets more done.
She seems to think there is some connection between wanting the NDP elected, or for US cabinet officials to not be former Wall Street CEOs, to young people ranting and raving in the street. There isn't. She has little to say about the left - she was not part of it, then she became a Fox News caricature of what an organizer is (scratch that, she probably thought of herself as an "activist", not an organizer), then is unhappy and renounces it all. She was never really on the left at all. They're really scraping the bottom of the barrel for this "God that failed" stuff nowadays. "I was a teenage agitator"
The real New Republic purge happened in 1974. Goodbye articles on Ralph Nader and consumer auto safety, hello articles supporting Contra attacks on the elected left-wing Nicaraguan government etc.
This magazine has fallen to 50,000 paid subscribers. The New Republic had become a sinecure for self-important blowhards with no name recognition, and Hughes is clearing the decks. I mean, people like Michael Moore write for The Nation, Mother Jones broke the Romney 47% comments, what has the New Republic been known for in past decades other than Stephen Glass scandals or Bell Curve black/white genetic intelligence articles?
Hughes is reversing a decline which began 40 years ago. These bloviating fossils are not good for much other than biting the hand which fed their sinecures, and getting their sour grapes into rival publications.
Of course it is about cost. Because if he kept upping his offer, he would get someone (if the office is a normal place). He simply does not want to pay the going rate for the skill set he needs. I'd like to hire lots of people on HN for minimum wage as well - I know that's not reasonable though and I don't whine about it.
That's a bit inaccurate as well. Reagan and his administration were fairly open that they were not going to enforce sections of law as well, and in the same area, labor law. Particularly with directives sent to the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/09/opinion/looking-for-loopho...
The idea that Reagan was enforcing OSHA labor laws, but that Obama is not enforcing immigration labor laws, is a bit hard to swallow.
https://twitter.com/alexia/status/522517041983393793
> I've seen bits and pieces of that, but they always strike me as kind of superficial and conspiranoid-tinged
The main left-wing, non-superficial analysis of the 2008 financial crisis that I know of is this -
http://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and-...
It has plenty of data, as well as an analysis of the data from their viewpoint.
Eleven years after Marx died, Engels published the third volume of Capital from Marx's draft and notes. In it he lays out the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in capitalism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_... ), and other such things.
The Monthly Review article links to the US government's Bureau of Economic Analysis of US GDP growth. In the 1960s it was 4.4% a year, in the "stagnant" 1970s it was 3.3% a year, in the 1980s it was 3.1% a year, in the 1990s it was also 3.1% a year, and from 2000-2007 it was 2.6% a year (if it has been extended to 2008 and 2009 it would have been lower).
But that is not the case. If you compare the top 10% of PISA scores in Japan, Singapore, South Korea etc. - or Finland, Switzerland, Holland - to the top 10% in the US, the US top 10% is below their top 10% as well.
http://educationbythenumbers.org/content/top-us-students-far...
So now you have underpaid people creating a housing bubble in Tokyo and going into debt. This does succeed in kicking the can down the road for a few years. But when the music stops in this game of musical chairs, the crisis is actually worse.
You mean like Budapest in 1956? Prague in 1968? Riots like those? Or are those rioters worthy of their aspirations, while the rioters in Ferguson are unworthy of their aspirations?
> Try looking at photographs of city streets taken during a normal working day, and note the absence of APCs and riot police.
There weren't many riot police regularly tromping around Moscow or Bucharest or Kiev or Sofia during the 1970s either.
Who know what political uses the information stored in the Utah Data Center will be used for in the future?
> Forget about living condition, corruption or censorship, let's talk about police state.
Here's a recent photo taken in Ferguson, Missouri:
http://static6.businessinsider.com/image/53f10e8decad046f3d4...
Not to mention if you've been at a company for a long time and they have you in charge of the legacy systems, which are moving farther and farther away from the profit center systems with all their shiny new bells and whistles. Again and again and again I have seen people punished and let go due to their "loyalty" in maintaining the legacy systems, as opposed to working on the systems with constant new features that are where the business growth and revenue is.
Why should labor cooperate with these parasite heirs who suck off of their wealth-creating ability? Labor hasn't historically, and doubtless will in the future. Capitalism is the fourth major economic system the world has seen, and a rather unstable one. Marx said crises like 2008's $700 billion TARP bailout were harbingers of an eventual total economic collapse, and I for one believe that - one day the economy will go into the ditch and no bailout, New Deal or libertarian type solution will get it going again.
This entire discussion is about that class of people that fill out their tax form in the income tax box, not the capital gains one. You seem oblivious to that particular discrete distinction which is the whole point of this article.
This of course implicitly assumes that the economy is an unplanned one. Yet the investor class is who fights tooth and nail with political donations and so forth to keep the economy unplanned. They fight tooth and nail to keep an unplanned economy, and then say they are deserving because they have to suffer the vicissitudes of an unplanned economy.
You're talking about entrusting a government organization which has already repeatedly betrayed that trust to not interfere with political affairs in this country. They've already over-extended themselves in terms of what they can investigate, now you want them to have control of everyone's lives so they can't have any privacy if they wish.
The interview question on stages nowadays seems to be what does someone believe in that is not commonly believed, and I supposed the out idea now is the people who control production, the people who own capital are not interested in economy growing as fast as it sustainably can. They want a slower rate of growth in order to maintain more control of the system. This idea not only goes against current economic thinking, and investor's chasing of maximum returns, it's an anti-Marxist idea as well. It seems to be happening though. It's why people like Paul Allen and Nathan Myhrvold pour money into patent companies. It's why the joint chiefs of staff beg the Congress to cut funding for old Cold War tank factories every time the military budget comes up, but the billions for useless tanks, or the hundreds of billions for the designed by committee F-35 boondoggle etc.
As Marx notes, something like a "war on poverty" is a joke, since people are not only purposefully kept poor but purposefully thrown into poverty, like during the enclosure of the commons in Europe. A surplus army of labor is a major tool to keep workers from keeping more of the wealth they create.
Sooner or later, the good ship USS Wall Street will inevitably run aground, and the economy will grind to a halt in a way that will make modern Greece or 1930s USA look good. Then it will just be a question of what working class people and professionals do in their new situation. It's not really the working class people, who are familiar enough with reality, who one has to wonder about, it's more the US professional classes, who are more highly indoctrinated than probably any group of people in the world. I hold my mouth in awe as I hear US professionals pontificating about things going on half-way around the world in which they know absolutely nothing about. NPR is ultimately a heavier propaganda outlet than Der Stürmer, Правда or Fox News.
Who is the "our" in our companies? I never owned a company in Cuba.
The site as it is built after 9600 BC (the date mentioned in the article) would be normal. A less sophisticated human settlement prior to 9600 BC would be normal.
If the pyramid was built some millennia before 9600 BC as the article speculates, that would be groundbreaking anthropological news. There isn't that much evidence that that is the case though. The jury is still out, although this speculation is a bit of hype. The Indonesian press will run with it somewhat as it would affirm national pride to be one of the first civilizations.
The speculation that this site was Atlantis is obviously even more far out.
Lots of interesting archaeological sites have been found in the Indonesia jungles, such as the more recently created Borobudur ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borobudur ).
What you're saying is a calumny against VC's. VC's have helped create plenty of businesses and assets that investors value and have poured money into - like the whole Bitcoin ecosphere. Why, I have heard the top VC's, angels, and even YCombinator high mucky mucks raving about Bitcoin. If people listened to you, they might not pour their money into such valuable assets like Bitcoins.
I don't find being questioned during an interview hostile, although I do feel I need to be prepared to be tested.
The most bothersome part for me is companies asking for me to list several references, often specifically asking for previous managers. I am usually given a standard application form to write their names, phone numbers, e-mails etc. before I've even talked to anyone about the position.
An interview is just something I'm involved in. Since I have to hand over contact details of several former managers/coworkers before I even talk to anyone, I have to call up and ask a number of people for the favor of giving me a reference before applying for a job.
Due to this, I almost never apply for one job in a one-off sense. I usually work a few years, then decide I definitely am going to get a new job. I line up my references then apply to jobs until I get one. Then I'm completely off the market for another few years.
I could just not hand over the references until later in the interview process, even though they're requesting them from me before I meet anyone, but that starts things off on the wrong foot. As if I had something to hide.
Of course, there may be legal reasons for companies to ask for everything up front. Asking for references too early is the biggest thing that puts me off from looking around. I'm not going to ask several former managers/co-workers for a favor unless I am seriously looking.
When I went to Catholic schools from the late 1970s to the 1980s, about half the teachers were in religious orders, half lay people.
My cousin goes to Catholic schools right now. None of his teachers thus far have been religious, all have been lay people.
Such a shift in the past half century, along with other trends, is bound to affect religious devotion.
The Internet probably has an effect. I think the effect it has is one of degree. Years ago, people seemed to be divided into fundamentalists, and those who might doubt, say, that Joshua made the sun stand still in order to prevent sundown so that the Israelis could defeat the Amorites, or that the pope as Vicar of Christ speaks infallibly on matters of faith, and so forth. On say Reddit's /r/atheism there are so many secular people, that doubting people become complete atheists as opposed to moderate or liberal Christians. Those who doubt stop believing things completely, whereas in the old days they may have stuck around and been part of a church's liberal/moderate wing.
There also seems to be a counter-trend where those who stay in the church become even more fundamentalist. Michael Harrington wrote about this in "The Politics at God's Funeral". It creates a cyclical effect - as the moderates leave, the fundamentalists make the churches more and more fundamental and fanatic, driving out the moderates still left, which gives the fundamentalists even more power and the church drives out those moderates still left and so on.
Good riddance.
For most guys in the bay area, the beautiful girl crunch is a bigger problem than the Series A crunch (this somewhat applies to designers as well). The difference in difficulty between dating a beautiful girl and an unattractive one is remarkable--I frequently hear guys say that for unattractive girls they can find multiple great candidates without really looking but can't find a single beautiful girl for a dating role no matter how hard they look.
First, of all the canonical terrible advice advisors give, being cheap is among the worst. I have never seen a hardup guy regret being generous.
For most beautiful girls, this is as much about fairness and feeling valued as it is about the money. And of course, if girls are going to turn down the certainty of dating a handsome, confident sales guy, they should get a reward for taking that risk.
If you’re going to look outside of your network of friends from your Defense of the Ancients guild (usually a mistake, but sometimes there are truly no other options), focus on recruiting girls outside of the valley.
Finally, most engineers are not willing to spend the time it takes to develop a normal social life with regular non-technical people whereas they might develop normal personality traits and meet someone nice. You can't outsource this though--you have to do it yourself.
Footnote: * Every time someone from the government asks me what they can do to help hard-up engineers, I always say a version of "The only thing you need to do is fix immigration for beautiful girls." We need more beautiful, financially desperate girls from third world countries whose standards are not as high as American ones.