I would also like to move to another country where I've contributed nothing, and then have taxpayers in that country give me free stuff. Maybe next time I need medical work done I can stop in the Italy, have the Italian taxpayer pay for it, then fly off to a country where I'd actually like to live (e.g. a country which cares more about consumers than the taxi mafia).
In all seriousness, the Indian medical system is a shining example of how to be functional. You show up, find out what needs to be done, ask the price, pay and it gets done. I've had LASIK and 2 spine surgeries done in India, +1 will return for all my future medical needs.
> In all seriousness, the Indian medical system is a shining example of how to be functional. You show up, find out what needs to be done, ask the price, pay and it gets done. I've had LASIK and 2 spine surgeries done in India, +1 will return for all my future medical needs.
In Germany (and I guess pretty much any country) this is possible as well. You simply say you are a "Selbstzahler", and I assure you doctors in Germany will be thrilled to treat you (with an advance payment, of course).
I guess what you're meaning is that the Indian medical system is far cheaper, but that's another discussion...
I've only spent about 6 hours in Germany, so I can't speak about Germany. But in many places - the US and UK, for example - it's often quite difficult to get medical work done simply by paying money.
I've had similar difficulties in the UK - it's mostly NHS or get out of town. (My issues in the UK were minor, so I decided to just wait until I reached India to get them fixed.)
Interesting. I didn't think it was a problem to be treated when you put cash on the table. But maybe you have to be very rich. At least in Germany, some hospitals/doctors in Munich are pretty known for courting rich patients from the middle east, and those surely don't depend on some insurance...
Medicine is always wonderful if you are a petro-monarchy prince. I'm just a regular guy.
Anecdotally, I've been told that a lot of middle Eastern medicine is corrupt and low quality. I ran into a lot of gulf state medical tourists in India who told me this (obviously a biased sample).
I'd definitely say that Darcs failed to catch on because it didn't scale with the size of the repo, the larger your history was the more likely you were to run into performance issues, and there was little you could do about it because the underlying theory is flawed.
The scaling problem with Darcs wasn't about hosting, but in the implementation of their theory of patches and how it handled conflicts. See http://darcs.net/FAQ/ConflictsDarcs1#problems-with-conflicts for an overview of the issues in Darcs 1 and 2.
This seems to be also one of the driving forces behind the development of Pijul, which is also patch-based instead of snapshot-based, which makes it easier to understand and use, but all implementations so far had major performance issues once repositories grow.
For more on that, see https://pijul.org/faq.html
I was one of the early users of Darcs 1, back before Git existed. I wanted to use version control, but the alternatives were pretty hard to understand and use. While Darcs was really nice to use (, and fast on small repos, after a few years I had to convert everything to git because exponential times on most operations was just not sustainable, and fixing that required constant vigilance and altering history, not very friendly for new contributors.
There is no abuse problem on the platform, or rather any abuse problem on the platform is already a solved problem via existing techniques (e.g. standard ML classifiers).
Consider SMTP, which is a true peer-to-peer system. In SMTP, abuse is a solved problem - spam filters work great, and 33mail/mailcatch (disposable email) improves things tremendously. At most 1-2 recruiters/SAAS offering marketing automation/etc slip through my filters each week, forcing me to expend about 3-5 seconds/week clicking "report spam".
The "abuse" problem on twitter is similarly not really a filtering issue; if it were, then it could be easily solved by a moderately better twitter client or switching off notifications of @mentions.
No, the actual problem people face is that they want to stop others from speaking, and label the speech they wish to stop "abuse". What's scary to most (including me) about Twitter is that an angry mob may form and decide they hate me, and then use Twitter to coordinate real life actions against me.
That's not a problem of abuse on the platform; that's a problem that the platform enables people to speak among themselves in ways I dislike. Lets be clear that this is the problem some folks wish to solve. It's only by identifying the problem that we can properly solve it, or decide if it's a problem that should be solved.
> What's scary to most (including me) about Twitter is that an angry mob may form and decide they hate me, and then use Twitter to coordinate real life actions against me.
There's multiple things going on here. We've seen use of communications channel A to organise harrasment on channel B - which is hard for B to stop ("brigading", gamergate). Gamergate escalated into real-life death threats against its targets. We've seen on-platform organisation of harrasment of people on and off the platform (this is ultimately what got Milo banned from twitter). We've also seen "news" organisations get into finger-pointing and condemnation of random citizens (e.g. Daily Mail outing a teacher as trans, resulting in her suicide).
We've seen the legal system get involved clumsily. There's seemingly no middle ground between "joke in poor taste" and "arrested for bomb threats" (#twitterjoketrial). Occasionally people resort to libel law, and even more occasionally the less powerful, famous and obnoxious person wins (Katie Hopkins vs. Jack Monroe).
People are I hope aware of the ability of abuse reporting systems to themselves become channels of abuse. Facebook's real names policy is exploited by anti-trans campaigners to force people off the platform, for example. Anyone should be aware of the risks of automated threshold systems being abused: if all you have to do is get 100 accounts to press "report abuse", that will be abused very quickly.
Local standards also present problems. Do we really want to go along with e.g. Pakistan arresting people for blasphemy?
People are I hope aware of the ability of abuse reporting systems to themselves become channels of abuse. Facebook's real names policy is exploited by anti-trans campaigners to force people off the platform, for example. Anyone should be aware of the risks of automated threshold systems being abused: if all you have to do is get 100 accounts to press "report abuse", that will be abused very quickly.
Local standards also present problems. Do we really want to go along with e.g. Pakistan arresting people for blasphemy?
It's definitely true that anti-abuse systems can be themselves abused, though most of the systems that you're talking about are partly due to the anti-abuse systems being centralized, right? I also see a lot of comments here along the lines of "but that's censorship!" But the article is discussing decentralized anti-abuse systems which allow individuals to set up their own opt-in filters which apply to themselves and their communities (which means different people might have different filters). Do you think that's different?
Filters deal with the situation where A is sending to B something that B doesn't want to recieve.
The situation where A is sending to B something that's harmful to C cannot be dealt with by C's filtering and can only be addressed at a higher level in the system.
Those are the technical distinctions, but there's a lot of possible things covered by the second case: leaked nudes, lynch mob organisation, slander, leaked intelligence, compromised party documents, names of human rights activists being leaked to secret police, copyright infringement, child porn, fake news, real news in fake states, allegations that invitations to pizza are evidence of child porn, and so on.
Other things covered by this case include leaks identifying corrupt behaviors, allegations of sexual harassment such as Susan fowlers, and evidence of human rights violations that the authorities wish suppressed.
Or various right wing ideas now softly suppressed on Twitter/Reddit.
>The situation where A is sending to B something that's harmful to C cannot be dealt with by C's filtering and can only be addressed at a higher level in the system.
Huh? If C knows A's public key and the content is signed, why can't C filter A's content?
Gamergate, never allowed to speak for itself, never defined, never counted, but somehow, the people who invoke it as a boogieman know exactly who did what and why.
That should tell you what was going on, especially when what set it off was an abuse victim warning that his abuser was capable of anything for self aggrandizement.
Candace Owens / Social Autopsy found that out when she started getting threatening and hateful emails from "gamers" on an address she'd only given out to progressive "anti abuse" activists.
>"brigading", gamergate). Gamergate escalated into real-life death threats against its targets.
No it didn't. It really didn't. No more than Twitter normally is. 'I hope you die' and 'I hope you get shot' aren't death threats, they're horrible things to say. There's a difference.
(mind you, the whole question of #twitterjoketrial was whether "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!" constituted an offence against the Communications Act 2003 by being of a "menacing" character.)
What reason is there to believe that Wu (aka John Walker Flynt) and the businessinsider report are credible sources? There are financial interest at play here that I'm not being given sufficiently strong reasons to ignore.
You make it sound like speech hasn't always been a contest; nothing about the freedom from government censorship implies anything else either. All you get with "free speech", is the notion that the government can't thumb the scales with their immense power and influence (having the ability to create and enforce laws).
The problem does have a way to solve itself, but that probably involves the model we see here on HN, which admittedly is preferable to the model of a locale such as Reddit. That said, each platform is going to want to address the problem on a faster timeline, because the problem directly hits their bottom line.
I have no idea why you bring up the government - no one besides you is discussing government censorship. Are you attempting to steer the conversation towards a discussion of your libertarian principles?
Twitter took years to deploy notification syncing across clients (if I read a message on mobile, it gets marked as read on desktop). Is it really so hard to believe that deploying a "spam filter" for hate speech is difficult for them?
I agree that the technology exists (and plenty of other solutions mentioned in the article). But saying that because the technology exists and hasn't been deployed therefore there is no abuse problem is a hilariously bad non sequitir.
For anyone else looking into this, it's pretty hard to tell from this post how many people the source (Credit Suisse) estimates have negative net worth. Looking at this article https://www.credit-suisse.com/us/en/about-us/research/resear... they estimate that "an estimated 9 percent of adults globally are net debtors". Together with their claim "we disregard the relatively small amount of wealth owned by children on their own account, and frame our results in terms of the global adult population, which totaled 4.8 billion in 2016", that's ~425 million adults with net debt.
It's hard to determine for which p Credit Suisse believes that the poorest p proportion people/adults have zero net worth. I tried to compute the implications of these claims (from the full PDF form of the report linked to above): "According to our estimates, half of all adults in the world own less than USD 2,222, and the bottom 20% of adults own no more than USD 248. The average wealth of people in these slices of the distribution is correspondingly low: just USD 159 for the bottom 50% and minus USD 1,079 for the bottom 20%." I believe these claims imply 42% <= p <= 46.5% or so.
All in all, that means that they estimate the poorest 2 billion adults have combined zero net worth (in fact, slightly negative). If you combine that with their estimate of 2.7 billion children of "relatively small .. wealth", that's about 4.7 billion people with approximate combined zero net worth. It's unclear how to properly account for children (maybe you shouldn't!), but you can easily decrease the number of adults to compensate. I think it's safe to say that (the people behind) this Credit Suisse report believe that the poorest 4.5 billion people in the world have combined nonpositive net worth.
(Note that the "people" numbers are higher than Oxfam's because they include children. Oxfam's "3.5 billion poorest people" is a reference to half of the world's population, even though Credit Suisse was talking about half of the world's adult population.)
The authors themselves admit that NCLB was a mixed bag: "Specifically, we find that NCLB generated large and broad gains in the math achievement of 4th and (to a somewhat lesser extent) 8th graders. However, our results suggest that NCLB had no impact on reading achievement for 4th or 8th graders."
You'd think that you can employ drill practice to improve results in mathematics, but that approach won't work in English. American math instruction feels quite alien for foreigners, the emphasis is on the application of algorithms, not on understanding why and how they work. Equipped with plenty drill practice, an Amarican child can fill in the correct bubble on the test, no matter if or not it understands mathematics. Any understanding of mathematics gained in that system is purely incidental.
That's all a hypothesis and would require further testing.
After reading this article, do you think colleges overall are seeing a significant drop in international applicants, a significant increase, or it stayed about the same?
According to NYT: "half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit’s traditional public schools."
According to data from the cited study: Half the charters perform significantly better, around half no significant difference, a small percentage (1% in reading, 7% in math) perform significantly worse.
Give that a read and try to work out when and why Honduras became the most dangerous place on Earth. The entire piece overlooks the fact that the danger is a recent issue, and the American role in propping up the government that made it happen. It's less clear-cut than bad stats, but it got them called out by a bunch of neutral groups for white-washing a major coup.
What about these examples is indicative of damning bias on the NYTs part? And what are the countervailing data sources that you're cross referencing against to know that they're being misleading?
The countervailing data sources are the very sources cited by the articles.
For example, the actual study cited by the first article says 39% of colleges expect a decrease in international enrollments, 35% expect an increase, and the remainder expect it to be about the same. Weirdly the 35% doesn't appear in the article.
When the network goes down or the app backend has technical problems, the taxi fare meter will still work. It makes sure no-one gets ripped off (the passenger and the driver) and that taxes are paid correctly.
It's not fool-proof of course but I trust my local taxi's meter more than I trust Uber. This varies a lot by country and city, but I'm pretty sure that taxi meters are very reliable in Denmark.
This makes no sense. I open up Uber and tell my destination, and Uber tells me 87₹. I press confirm and that's it. If the network goes down it's still 87₹.
In contrast, a traditional taxi meter allows the cabbie to take a circuitous route with unsuspecting passengers. Before Uber I needed to constantly be on guard against autowales doing this to me (due to my ethnicity I'm prime ripoff target).
> I open up Uber and tell my destination, and Uber tells me 87₹.
If the network is down, your Uber isn't going to open. Yet you can hail a cab and pay with cash (or credit/debit).
Your taxi experiences are probably very different from mine, but getting scammed by a taxi driver is very unlikely where I'm from. And in my experience everything runs like clockwork in Denmark, I'd expect the situation to be very similar there.
Taxi services across the world are very different, so your experiences might be as valid as mine. But where I'm from, Uber doesn't provide anything that a normal taxi service wouldn't.
The network going down should not affect the fare. It's not like the city map changes by the minute, and the last known price per mile is a good approximation.
Smart phones should be fine for tracking fares, even if the network goes down (assuming they were well-programmed). Especially if the customer can run his own "meter app" on his own device to verify the fare.
My objection to Uber: I prefer drivers who have a track record of not being drunk and not on drugs. I don't need the government to regulate that, but I would be willing to pay a premium for drivers who are willing to undergo some kind of occasional testing program for drugs/alcohol.
An Uber driver who gets a single passenger complaint of not having been sober is reviewed. If there are police records such as a DUI ticket to confirm the complaint, he's excluded. This is better than occasional testing.
Nope - I'm not an expert. The point is that I can come up with these reasons, all of which are sensible in my opinion. I'm guessing if you want the actual reason, you'd have to speak to the officials in Denmark.
The other comment, however, gives an actual reason to require them.
If you think things are so bad, surely you can name a single good or service that westerners have less of today than they had in 1970. What is that good or service?
Housing: http://www.jparsons.net/housingbubble/ - compared to the rise in wages, this cost increase has been much more moderate, but it's still an increase.
Your second article says health care is more expensive than other countries, not that fewer people consume it than some past period. Looking at real resources (e.g. # of health care employees) suggests more people consume it, not less.
Your third source does not claim fewer people consume housing than at some past point. In fact, people consume more housing than ever before - houses have nearly doubled in size since 1973, even as # of people in the household decreased.
It takes a special kind of logic to look at rising prices, stagnant wages, and conclude that things are better.
Oh, no, wait, you didn't say better/worse, you said 'goods that we have less of'. So even if people bankrupt themselves over a broken leg, or go into decades of debt for a home or education, everything is just peachy! Even better, actually, since we can add credit availability to the list of things we have more of! http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-credit-card-...
There's also more jobs: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/images/2012/ted_20120731a.png ! Gone are the dreary days when you were set for life by your 2nd job - these days you could find yourself looking for a new job any moment - how exciting!
I guess I stand corrected, we have more of everything, and shouldn't complain, even if corporation's obscene wealth allows them to buy politicians and regulatory agencies. Who cares how concentrated power and wealth are, as long as there's enough bread and circuses.
Scroll up. You compared us to Somalia. In Somalia, they don't have all these things.
I'm not sure how you believe it's possible that consumption is up while compensation is stagnant and prices are higher. Could you explain - with numbers - how you propose that standard accounting identities are violated?
>I'm not sure how you believe it's possible that consumption is up while compensation is stagnant and prices are higher.
I cited sources with statistics, not my personal beliefs.
But to answer your question - the accounting is explained by an increase in debt (see the businessinsider article I linked earlier), and by the fact that what's spent on education/housing/healthcare, isn't spent elsewhere.
And I'm well aware we're better off than Somalia - that was my point. We don't have to wait until we're not before we start complaining. Should we do nothing but feel guilty we live in decent countries, until there's no-one who's worse off?
The fact that living conditions improving for people in the 3rd world makes you feel better maybe doesn't do as much for "rich westerners" whose jobs have moved overseas.
I think he means you're taking from one to give to another, which eventually results in the former being as worse off as the latter was, so the sum total of your "humanitarian effort" ultimately amounts to zero. But that's a guess.
Really, the only issue seems to be a loss of status (not goods and services) by some rich white westerners. (Non-white westerners seem to have improved their situation by quite a bit also.)
We haven't just lost status. We've lost leverage and loyalty too. Globalization has made the demand for lower class labor in the US drop to the point where the uneducated cannot do well anymore. In a balanced economy, there's a demand for everyone, yet in our outsourced service economy, only the highly educated do well. The opioid epidemic isn't here because of a loss of status.
> Really, the only issue seems to be a loss of status (not goods and services) by some rich white westerners.
You're saying there have been literally no negative effects from globalization? That unemployment in the rust belt has had no effect on standard of living?
The statistic you are citing doesn't say CEOs don't make 300x their workers. It says they make 300x the average worker.
Between 1978 and 2014, inflation-adjusted CEO pay increased by almost 1,000%, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute. Meanwhile, typical workers in the U.S. saw a pay raise of just 11% during that same period. Hmm.
Did all CEOs see this raise, or just the CEOs of the top corporations (who's workers also saw raises)?
None of the statistics you cite remotely contradict the claim that between-firm inequality is the primary driver of inequality.
I doubt any one but you thought I meant that CEOs make more money than 300x ALL their workers, but er, thanks for the clarification anyway.
I didn't say the statistics refute the claim, I said the article's claim is mostly based on a graph that fails to take extreme executive pay into account when discussing average worker pay. The statistics I cite back that up.
And the word you're looking for is 'whose'. Who's means ' who is'. Apostrophes can be tricky, I know, but hey - you got pedantic on me first.
I doubt any one but you thought I meant that CEOs make more money than 300x ALL their workers, but er, thanks for the clarification anyway.
You are completely misinterpreting me. I was not arguing against this claim at all.
The statistic you cite claims that a select set of CEOs make more than the average worker across all firms. I.e., the CEO of Goldman makes 300x more than the average worker at Goldman and Walmart combined.
It does not make any claims about inequality within forms - i.e., whether the CEO of Goldman makes 300x the average worker at Goldman.
I remain convinced that CEOs of Google and Goldman make hundreds of times more money than their average workers, and that if you're going to publish an article that makes such a large claim as this one, based almost entirely on average pay data, then that should be taken into account.
Did you know the CEO of Goldman made 54 million dollars in 2007? I don't know if you remember, but the next year there was a significant economic crash that caused immense hardship for a large portion of the world, and a huge amount of the blame for it was laid at Goldman's door. HBR had fuck all to say about that, or the massive global austerity protests. A few protesters yell at Google employees getting on the bus, and they're all over it drawing wild conclusions.
I point that out because it's ironic that you'd use Goldman to make that point, considering the effect they've had on inequality.
Let's be real - blaming the amount Google pays its employees for the extreme inequality in America is fucking absurd. It's misdirection, and apparently it works to an extent even on literate, mathematically educated populations, such as this one. This is deeply concerning to me.
In all seriousness, the Indian medical system is a shining example of how to be functional. You show up, find out what needs to be done, ask the price, pay and it gets done. I've had LASIK and 2 spine surgeries done in India, +1 will return for all my future medical needs.