strlen

The catch is we already have several terrible systems of poorly and expensively providing basic income: abuse of SSDI and using food-stamps to buy goods to use as a de-facto currency (in West Virginia, it happens to be soda bottles, for example)

Oops, fixed! "Just desserts" would be a great cafe to have in an econ department building :-)

Friedman did have some role in pushing EITC forward, although it still falls short of his negative income tax idea.

Basic income or negative income tax are great ideas: they're cheaper to administer than the current welfare state, are more humane (people are treated as adults and allowed to spend the basic income on whatever they wish), and avoid perverse incentives. With the current system, getting a job easily has the same impact as a 100% tax -- all benefits go away, all income goes goes to deal with lost benefits (and free time goes to -- given this is an entry-level and menial/service job -- an activity that's not intrinsically rewarding).

Yet, people have (initially surprising to me) visceral reactions against these proposals -- despite these proposals coming from all over the political map -- as unfair.

Jonathan Haidt has an excellent article on morality of fairness:

http://www.democracyjournal.org/28/of-freedom-and-fairness.p...

In short, individuals see fairness on a scale -- from "what people receive should be proportional to what they contribute" to "from each according to his ability, to each according their means".

It also makes sense to add a slightly more nuanced pole to this, namely "just desserts": "people should be able to keep everything that they earn, with the exception of fees for services they use and externalities they impose on others"; in other words, fairness concerns should also be balanced against negative liberty.

This could explain why there's such strong opposition to a basic income: significant chunk of the population people see it as less fair as opposed to more fair, another chunk views it as just another form of theft. It's also why many aren't easily bothered by supposed excesses of idleness of the rich, as long as the wealth was acquired legitimately. This isn't to endorse these views, but to acknowledge that these positions are sincerely held by individuals of all races, genders, and incomes.

This is also why many of the wealthy vote for politicians that (on paper) promise to reduce wealth inequality and one of the reasons why many of the poor vote for candidates that don't think inequality is a problem. In short, these are moral views as opposed to matters of rational self-interest.

Contrary to Marx not everyone is fighting for their class interests, contrary to popular view of economics (which is different from how economists actually see it) not everyone is trying to maximize their own net worth by any means possible. Economists say individuals try to maximize their utility, which to nearly all means -- to some extent -- wanting to see good in the world, but with their own definition of what is good.

So here's a proposal: when speaking on inequality and social justice, let's identify who the audience is, and justify policy proposals according to their values. If someone is a libertarian, address the negative effect concentration of wealth (which often begets political power) has on liberty (e.g., politicians buying their way into office to push Nanny state policies, wealthy funding campaigns that lead to criminalization of vice, etc...)

Likewise, if someone cares about proportionality, point out that labour theory of value is false: law of supply and demand means it's inevitable that people will get rich as result of sheer luck or doing something that seems trivial. That's not to mention that many of the wealthy are wealthy as result of rent-seeking -- and fight both rent-seeking and the inequality it leads to.

Otherwise, quite frankly, these ideas will remain dead in the water politically.

Edit: one thing that should be noted is that it's unlikely that in a free market (which is generally a good thing) wealth distribution will be anything other than power law (which isn't to say we can't smooth it out, but we can't turn it to a normal probability distribution). However, wealth isn't everything: why not divorce wealth from status (to the extent, we already do this)? For example, Silicon Valley (it's getting hard to use that term non-ironically, unfortunately) does tend to praise the value of individual contributors as well as that of entrepreneurs and managers, yet there's disconnect in mainstream culture -- where remaining an individual contributor (or even a mid-tier manager) is _not_ considered a successful outcome. This change will have to happen organically, of course.

I think gold's real utility is that it's useful for things other than currency: jewelry, electronics, alloys, etc...

Neither a six figure salary nor a sports car require winning the startup lottery or overwork. Nor do sports cars require six figure salaries: case-in-point, a good condition used Honda S2000 can be had for under $10,000 if not under $5,000 these days.

Nor are startups lottery tickets: people tend to overvalue equity at early startups, but tend to undervalue it at mature and well established ones (the equity percentage may be smaller, but the chance of that equity becoming liquid and appreciating is higher).

> I have absolutely no problem with big salaries for people with a balanced mindset and life.

First, saying that Silicon Valley's housing and inequality is caused by technologists "getting rich or dying trying" seems gravely wrong.

Second, many professionals find their work intrinsically fulfilling and enjoyable. Not everyone works just for money or to fill an some kind of an unhealthy addiction. Postdocs and graduate students often work a great deal harder for a lot less.

You're also assuming an even more atomized society than anything Rand could imagine: most people understand that for them alone utility of wealth is a step function, they don't need to be told that. Yet, they want their kids to attend good schools, which means means paying outlandish prices for a tiny home in a good school district (in most of Bay Area counties schools are assigned by residence) or even more for a private school. They also don't want to jeopardize their families with the kind of pay-check to pay-check existence that leads to disaster when one of the dual earners loses their income. Is this morally right? No, Silicon Valley has deep housing problems (geography, failure to build upwards, zoning, and other regulations) and the entire state's education system is a nightmare. Yet as much as we'd like these problems to go away, this is the reality and we can't avoid it for the time being.

It's also great that folks like Bill Gates exist, for whom achievement is not a step function. As a Linux/BSD user I hated his guts as Microsoft CEO, but his non-profit work has been nothing short of amazing. He could have easily taken "f u money" decades ago and retired to a middle-class lifestyle with some angel investing on the side. Yet he amassed a fortune long after it ceased to bring him any _personal_ benefit: he chose to use it to pursue even more ambitious projects that benefit everyone.

I'm not in any way saying that private non-profits make government investment un-needed -- the Internet, immense achievements in aerospace, etc... are but a few examples of public sphere producing great things. Even Peter Thiel has admitted as much in recent interviews. Yet, public investment in hard problems is obviously not mutually exclusive with private enterprise either.

Indeed. What I see happening is young and liberal Ukrainians (whethers Russian, Ukranian, Tatar, and others) simply want their state to be like many other European countries: free, prosperous, democratic, but still multi-ethnic. In fact, they're actually asking for surrender of some aspects of national sovereignty by joining the EU.

It is definitely one sided and propaganda, but it's better than absolute lack of information I am seeing in the West. I think scenario you mention here will happen only if the rest of Europe chooses to ignore and waive their hands.

Thanks, I'll tell this to my friends in Ukraine! This will make them feel very warm and fuzzy and reassured, that indeed, is US launching missiles from drones (which is a completely new fact to them and something they've never heard of before!).

Similarly, I was going to write my congress-critters to oppose NSA surveillance and drone strikes, but you've taught me wonderful logical insights: see, demonstrators are kidnapped and tortured in Ukraine, so that makes my point invalid and refutes any arguments I had against drone strikes and NSA surveillance.

Politics of foreign drone strikes (which I oppose, but don't equate to whole-sale domestic political repression) aside, this is a logical fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

In other words, it's not simply not a valid argument.

> I think this misconception stems from the fact that Ukrainian speakers often reply in Ukrainian when spoken to in Russian, because they assume you know both languages, but they will switch to Russian if necessary. This freaks out Russian speakers from outside of Ukraine.

This is interesting way to think of it. Since I'm from Belarus and visited Ukraine a few times, I thought absolutely nothing of this. I even remember going to a Polish-owned cafe in Minsk where the owners spoke Polish, but customers spoke Russian. In Belarus children were taught Belarusian from kindergarten on and while Belarusian language, literature, and history classes were in Belarusian -- other classes were in Russian. Afaik, some of the Belarusian writers (can't remember if Yakub Kolas, Yanka Kupala or both...) even changed languages within their books: within the same story, some characters spoke Russian others spoke Belarusian. Of course Ukrainian speakers form a much larger part of population of Ukraine than Belarusian speakers in Belarus (Belarusian seems to be heading the way of Irish Gaelic, unfortunately).

It helps that the languages are in the same language group. In any case, other European countries deal with this all the time (Flemish and French are much further apart for example than Russian and Ukranian). I can't see how joining the EU would make this worse for anyone!

For the same reason David Duke winning the Republican primary would be in Democrats' interest and for the same interest Russia's Duma includes very few liberals but lots of communists and "red-browns". Given a choice between corrupt pro-Russian parties and ultra-nationalists/un-reformed communists/fascists/etc..., vast majority of Ukranians would vote for pro-Russian parties ("lesser of the two evils").

Think logically: if you're a corrupt stooge, would you rather run a less corrupt stooge (I don't have any illusions here -- Yuschenko/Timoshenko/Klichko are no saints, they are just better than the alternative) or against an ultranationalist?

The politics here, however, is far older than two months. Participation by my Russian-speaking Jewish friend is current as of today and the Russian language message I mentioned is from January 23rd (four day old).

I see what you're you're trying to say, but as a man (who was introduced to this term by a girlfriend who caught me 'splaining myself) I personally find the term to be both hilarious and -- most importantly to -- somewhat more explicit in what it is (explaining away while lacking context) as opposed to the term patronizing. Then again English is not my native language, so perhaps I'm reading the word "patronizing" too literally here.

Not to mention Yuschenko (the former Yanukovich opponent) himself spoke Russian at home and was Orthodox.

> No, I am not Ukranian, nor Russian. Also I don't support either side. I think either regime is equally corrupted.

I am sorry, but as an ethnically Jewish, Belarusian-born, Russian-speaker residing in US, I have to say what you're engaging in is the equivalent of "mansplaining" (EDIT: or "patronizing" if you prefer).

To wit, on my Facebook, the only person who is presently in Ukraine (who attended school and a university in US before moving back to Ukraine after graduation) is also Jewish, takes his Jewish roots far more seriously than I do (he had his icons set to the Israeli flag a multiple times), and is posting protest related pictures, and reposting _Russian language_ messages like "My dad was seized by Berkut. Are there any lawyers here that can help out?"

In terms of Ukrainian-Americans posting on this that I know none shown any signs of ultra nationalism and have plenty of Jewish, Russian, and other former-USSR friends in US, and in terms of religion happen to include agnostic, Orthodox (Western Ukraine has a larger Catholic presence as it was part of Poland and Austro-Hungarian Empire), and a Muslim.

Here's an article on this, by the way, about Jewish community's view of this: http://www.jta.org/2013/12/08/news-opinion/world/young-jews-...

(I tend to note that Passionate Americans That Know Everything Because They Read it On the Internet Somehow are going to likely 'splain this way with a Zionist conspiracy -- in a language very similar to what ultranationalists themselves use, ironically -- but Israel itself generally takes a "realpolitik" approach to these kinds of situations and the Israeli _government_ has made no statements).

My personal view of this is the extent to which the Western Media is under-reporting this story (and in my view they are: this has rarely, for example, come up on my Yahoo News pager which is generally syndicated from mainstream sources) is playing into the hands of ultra-nationalists. Keep in mind that Ukraine is far from the only country in Europe to have ultra-nationalist voted in as part genuine views and part protest votes: Golden Dawn in Greece had far greater electoral results and is far scarier, there's also Jobbik in Hungary, BNP in UK, National Front in France, and so on...

It is very much in Russia's interest to make sure ultra-nationalists become the dominant party in this: should the leader of Svoboda run against Yanukovich, the result would be a land-slide for Yanukovich. The best analogue for this is actually probably when David Duke (a KKK leader, anti-Semite, the full nine yards) ran for governor of Lousiana against a known crook (the bumper stickers were "vote for the crook, it's important"). He received many votes as a protest, but it would be insane to think his views represented the mainstream conservative US politics (he ran as a republican party candidate, but his opponent was endorsed by the republican party).

I should also note that generally in former USSR "right" doesn't mean what it means in US: the political spectrum there is best describes as a circle: mix of left-wing and right-wing liberals on one end (a spectrum between those who favour a Scandanvian-style welfare state and those leaning towards classical liberalism -- essentially the entire US/UK/Canada would simply be called "liberalism" in former USSR) and a "red-brown alliance" on the other.

I'd also add that Svoboda is actually very much anti-EU (again not much different from other far-right morons in Europe) and realistically speaking, should they come to power in any shape or form (they will never win a democratic election), they'll be overthrown far quicker than you can say "faster than Morsi/Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt". Since anti-Nazism is a very strong unifying theme between Russia and Western Europe, no one will actually tolerate a neo-Nazi state in Europe.

> about how computers and the Internet catalyze harm, by shielding people who cause harm from the impact of their action

In general distance from a victim shields people from experiencing the impact of their actions. My late grandfather was an artillerist on the Soviet side in World War 2: he talked about how soldiers would vomit, fall ill, and cry after visibly killing enemy soldiers for the first time with short-range handheld arms (i.e., grenades, rifles, submachine guns, bayonets, or pistols). Yet, himself, when shelling remote positions with full understanding the shells -- in addition to killing much larger groups of enemy soldiers than bullets -- may have also killed civilians (which for most of the war generally meant Soviet or other allied civilians).

This isn't about moral rationalization -- obviously resisting Nazis and winning World War II was a good thing -- but emotional reaction. To get back on topic, what I think happens here isn't someone thinking that somehow committing one crime electronically vs. physically is less severe; it's that one's disgust with what they're doing is less, which makes a various rationalizations (whether correct or incorrect) for one's actions easier to accept.

> I don't know what you do about the guy who fed his admin credentials to Anonymous to help them deface a newspaper.

I am trying to draw a comparison here with someone either letting an unauthorized person enter the printing rooms of a newspaper (and as a result something other than a newspaper was printed and delivered). Yet that isn't quite right: someone with physical access to printing room of a newspaper could have done even greater damage.

Another comparison could be with a newspaper boy agreeing to deliver a sarcastic parody of a paper in place of the actual paper. Yet that too isn't quite right, as it's far easier for the newspaper to recover promptly, and the damage is localized.

All of those things are hard to answer.

First, we already have such 'free income' in forms of various welfare programs and SSDI. This creates a whole number of issues, however.

The problem to the perverse incentive problem, however, is not to remove the income when they get another source of income (as effectively it ammounts to a 100% tax!) -- while this may prove difficult to pass through any legislature, another approach could be to frame it as a progressive negative income tax.

That said, this is a different problem than homelessness: the two causes are usually extremely expensive housing and mental illness rather than lack of work. Mental illness means the jobs aren't stable, but extremely expensive housing means that even if they have a job, they won't be able to have a normal home: I've noticed this pattern a lot in San Jose, there are many cases of people living in their cars, used RVs, using work/gym to shower, and so on... They actually have jobs but are unable to go through a credit check and come up with an initial deposit.

This kind of housing solves both problems: the mentally ill have a stable address which makes it easier to follow through with a treatment problem; those who don't earn enough to get a place, can stay long enough to be able to save more, get a better paying job, and/or find roommates.

Problem is demand is increasing at a far greater rate than the supply. In fact, I think this is -- among several other factors -- one of the primary causes of this migration.

The money an individual or a family has to spend is limited. For most, the rent is their single biggest expense: the less one makes, the more one has to give up (in terms of money that would go to savings, basic necessities, or food/entertainment) to live in a more desirable place.

Given that income distributions even with some amount of redistribution will still follow a power curve, it is quite possible that certain highly desirable areas -- themselves on a power curve of desirability -- might see great population growth, but -- on the whole -- the movement would not be to those areas. That is, unless, the supply of housing in those ares can keep up with the demand.

> Google have many [...] buildable and deployable things, which have very different release schedules. Facebook don’t as they substantially have the PHP web-app, and apps for iOS and Android in different repos.

At least when I was there, the first sentence was true for Facebook. There was/is a separate repo for Thrift services (largely C++, but also Java, Python, and more), each Thrift service is a deployable. The deployables could be pushed at separate times and were usually pushed by teams themselves on their own schedules. The process was still frictionless and trunk-based: only difference was having to type a few well documented commands to push the service yourself. This may changed since, however.

> Clusters of stateless web servers + single master. This is definitely a common setup, but you need very little if any distributed systems research to implement it.

First, define "stateless"? I would not characterized such a system as stateless at all. Even if you're not using sticky sessions (with cache servers/load balancers talking to each other for failover using fairly involved protocols), there's still state that's ephemeral (sessions) in your application server, as well as bulk of the persistent state that's provided with essentially "faith based consistency" (consider typical memcached cluster with client doing consistent hashing -- asynchronously replicated MySQL with failover, etc... -- in case of a failure, neither availability nor consistency are guaranteed).

On the level of protocols design, the whole idea of stateless protocols (REST) vs. stateful ones (sticky load balancers + SOAP, CORBA, RMI, etc...) is by itself a big distributed systems topic.

A web browser talking to a web server is by definition a distributed system. I am typing this as fast as I can, praying not to get the "your link is invalid" error from HN right now -- this a real example of distributed system and cache coherence/consistency/atomicity. Here's one paper that deals with just these sorts of question (in context of NFS): ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/ucb/sprite/papers/state.ps‎

> Re: Chubby and GFS

Original GFS doesn't rely on Chubby, BigTable does however (for metadata). I believe newer versions (Collosus) by extension rely on Chubby as they rely on BigTable.

F1/Spanner, however, use consensus and transactions far more than others and is very interesting in this sense.

[Edit: more elaboration on distributed systems issues in a "stateless" cluster of web servers].

> It goes even beyond that. A lot of other very important, fundamental topics belong under the umbrella of distributed systems, starting with routing. The Internet is, after all, a giant distributed routing system.

Yes! DNS is also fascinating as far as distributed databases and consistency go:

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~akella/CS740/S08/740-Papers/MD88.p...

Couple of suggestions:

1) I'd avoid mentioning CAP and FLP impossibility result much further in, this is like starting a discussion of mathematical logic or Computer Science with Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.

I'd definitely cover vector clocks and causality before: you really need this background in order to understand CAP/FLP. You may want to take a look at the approach Vijay Garg takes in his book:

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Distributed-Computing-Vijay-G...

(E.g., use of vector clocks for proofs)

2) Don't over-focus on "webscale" (using the term only semi-ironically here) projects (I say this having contributed to multiple such projects). NFS, AFS, and CodaFS all raised very interesting questions about distributed state and disconnected operations. You may also note how some of the authors on the Plan9 (9fs, 9p, fossil) papers overlap with authors of some of the Google papers. "Mobile sensor networks" have been essentially an excuse to build distributed systems. Chord, Pastry, and Kademelia (sp? The System that Bittorrent uses) -- are actually far more truly "distributed" than many webscale systems (consistent hashing is a very simple DHT). Finally, don't forget that the Internet itself is a distributed system: the most successful eventually consistent, highly available distributed database is DNS.

I'd actually cover the web-giant infrastructure paper stuff a bit later on. While the Dynamo paper did have some novel contributions (regarding Gossip and anti-entropy), it's not what it's notable for: what's far more interesting in that paper is the way these concepts fit together.

I'd even hold my nose and cover CORBA: it's an interesting example in that it handled everything by the textbook, but failed due to complexity costs it had to incur in order do that. Far simpler RPC protocols and Web Services prevailed at the end by promising less. JINI may also be interesting to cover -- excellent system, far too ahead of its time -- Java VM and ecosystem were immature (anyone else remember Blackdown JDK on Linux?), marketed incorrectly (driver architecture?) to a market that wasn't ready for it (this is when dot-com startups could suffice on buying a couple of E10Ks or high-end Alphas).

3) This is an enormous and highly ambitious project and I commend you from embarking on it (I just re-read http://paulgraham.com/hs.html -- see the part about hard problems and ambition). Nonetheless, if you're serious about this, be sure to get plenty of editors -- there's a lot of room to make subtle mistakes (which I've done all the time). A lot of this can be genuinely confusing -- e.g., partitions aren't just due to networks, but at the same time not every type of a failure or a stop is a partition (I used to site GC pauses an example of a partition, but now I'm not so sure).

I'd help, but I've neither the cycles nor the habit of academic rigor; if you're still in touch with any profs from your uni, they could either help themselves or point you to others.

That's why I'm a capitalist: if an American computer firm told their best employees "we're scraping this project you love and are building IBM 360 clone", the employees have had the option of going elsewhere. Indeed, exactly this happened many times.

On the other hand, I've heard many horror stories of similar goings happening with regards to technology at NASA/JPL and other tech-heavy government agencies: a great project gets built in house, it gets scraped because it isn't "up to WS-management standards and best practices and uses customized open source and not off-the-shelf commercial software". I call this the "not-invented-elsewhere syndrome", which can be just as pernicious as the more familiar NIH. am hoping recent debacles like healthcare.gov failure will get governments to revisit the way they look at building software.

Thanks for sharing this! Very interesting.

Reminds me somewhat of the Minsk- series of indigeneously developed Soviet mainframes -- stack architecture, RISC-like ISA, far ahead of its time. Due to pressure from the higher ups -- or as my parents bluntly put it, "комуняки" (the commies) -- it was abandoned in favour of reverse engineering and cloning the IBM 360 (an enormous feat of engineering) an inferior architecture (my dad called this a setback for Computer Science[1] -- not just in USSR, but in general).

Read more here: http://www.computer-museum.ru/english/minsk0.htm

I guess "no one got fired for choosing IBM" held true not only under capitalism, but under communism as well.

(In a "small world coincidence", I happened to work with the son of the designer of the Minsk-32 -- the most advanced machine in the series -- at Yahoo. Belarus was one Soviet Union's Silicon Valleys, and incidentally the Belarusian State University Institute's Radio Technical Institute still has an excellent EE/CS program (hint: I think you'll have a lot less competition recruiting there than at Stanford!)

[1] Personally I'm a bit skeptical of stack architectures despite their huge popularity (JVM, CLR, Forth, etc...):I understand the cachet, but (to also quote my dad...) "programs can play chess very well", i.e., register windowing is one of the most well understood and mature algorithms, let the compiler handle that job. LLVM's use of a register-based IR is a good step in that direction.

Yep, it's a personal decision to make. It would be simple for me to get a non-resident CCW permit in number of shall-issue states I visit, but I've chosen not to. That's, however, my choice based on my own circumstances. I don't think I can "objectively" decide this for others.

> If you want to carry a gun with you, I support your right to do so. But it's the objectively wrong play.

Have you lived in SoMa or Oakland?

Some of Google's internal architecture is inspired by plan9, e.g., gfs. Plan9 also included a language called Aleph which has today evolved into golang.

Union mounts have been particularly interesting: something plan9 implemented, but no one else has successfully.