zeroname

That's only true if all biases cancel each other out perfectly.

There is no labor shortage. There's a bunch of growers whining about having to raise wages to attract workers. Even 25$/hour isn't that great if you factor in the opportunity cost of seasonal work.

Raising prices and going out of business are valid options for entrepreneurs. That's how the market allocates resources. Unprofitable work is inefficient.

> He pays his workers between $10 and $14 hourly. They’re mostly local folks.

> “A lot of Americans have become lazy,” Carrigan said. “They want a paycheck. They don’t want a job.”

More like a lot of Americans have better things to do than doing seasonal work for 10$ to 14$ an hour. Good for them!

I can show you "this site requires Javascript" instead, but let's just say you're not part of the target audience and that's fine.

> I don't think supporting noscript version is costly because for me that's how it supposed to be by default.

That highly depends on the site, of course.

> 90% sites that are currently on the internet would work just fine without any js and 95% would work with as little as hackernews has.

99.9% of websites are not actually businesses that employ developers. If that's your standard, I agree. A simple webpage does not require Javascript.

Which human right, specifically? Humans have the "right" to install a modern browser and enable Javascript.

> "Javascript" is costly too - but maybe not your concern since it's not a business cost.

Indeed, the cost you pay to run Javascript does not show up in my budget, just like I don't pay your ISP to serve my site to you.

Supporting "no Javascript" can be costly. It's possible with server-side React and careful engineering, but why bother? What's the impact on the business?

No we haven't. If you need to sew on a button and you can't figure out how to do it from looking at a piece of thread, a needle, and the other buttons, then go spend fifteen minutes on a Youtube tutorial. It's easy.

If the task is more complicated any you really like the piece, consider the fact that in terms of opportunity cost, it's almost certainly cheaper for you to send the piece across the country (or the globe) and back than having it fixed by yourself.

They take the few people that had some form of heart disease (37 out of 1104 over ten years) and noted that none of them except one could do 40 pushups. By some magic, this is translated into a 96% reduction in chance of a heart attack.

If that's really the reasoning, could I not just pick any metric (i.e. words typed per minute over 120, or IQ over 130) which is likely to eliminate almost all of the participants and conclude that it is reducing risk of heart disease?

Am I missing something? Is this kind of reasoning not complete bogus?

First of all, I agree that raising minimum wage without a proper social safety net is completely irresponsible.

However, if you look at countries like France with "free" education, relatively high minimum wage, lots of labor protection and a strong social safety net, you will find massive youth unemployment. The social safety net is supposed to catch you from falling off the rope. If you're never allowed to get on that rope because you're not employable even at minimum wage, you're likely to stay in the net forever. Soon enough most people around you rely on the safety net and it becomes the social norm.

In reality, people in urban areas earn more than federal minimum wage, they spend more than 30% of their income on rent and they don't necessarily live alone in one-bedroom apartments, which is always disproportionately expensive. They're also not working 2.5 jobs, unless it's part time jobs.

I agree that interest rates have a huge impact on overpriced houses, but it's not such a direct correlation to rent prices. In SF there basically is no construction but there is huge demand for rent. In other areas there is demand for expensive construction for "investment", but nobody actually rents there. In China this has led to entire ghost cities full of empty highrises. Investors are speculating that rising prices will take care of the missing rent income - and they will, at least until the next bust comes.

The situation where rent competition exists alongside building investment can only exist when both of these factors are eliminated. Interests rates need to rates. Zoning and NIMBY must go.

The effect of not ever getting into the workforce at all is devastating to those few that don't make the cut. Meanwhile, the effect of a couple of dollars extra to those already in the workforce is comparably small.

Consider that minimum wage could be raised arbitrarily. If 10$ is too low and 15$ is better why isn't 20$ even better? Why not 30$? The argument for which cutoff to choose can't be based on some basket on what people need to live a certain standard (i.e. a one-bedroom apartment in some urban area).

> Do you really think Subway franchises are running on such razor thin margins that they'd be forced to shutter stores if they had to pay their workforce marginally more?

Some of them certainly do. Subway is in decline:

https://www.businessinsider.de/subway-closes-over-900-us-loc...

Lots of low to minimum wage employers indeed do have razor thin margins. For example, Wal-Mart only has about 4000$ of profit per employee. Companies like Amazon only lose money on their fulfillment centers.

> The business and industrial world largely still runs on excel spreadsheets, emails and word docs.

Why assume that changing this hasn't been "attempted 10 times"? Perhaps the reason for that is simply opaque to you and as a software developer you think in terms of software solutions. However, getting these solutions sold is the real problem.

Wow. Some of the stuff this guy has supposedly written sounds like an Anders Breivik in the making. Certainly pushing free speech to the limits (and beyond).

> ...Since men are now being assaulted as thanks for their ceaseless decades-long work on opensource by people who did not put in the time, men should /support sexism/ by revoking license to their gratis licensed copyrighted code from any project that adds a "Code of Conduct".

Basically, this guy is spinning the oppression narrative, just from the opposite angle.

We probably shouldn't be focusing so much on who is fighting this matter and for which ideological reasons, because we're talking about a legal framework. Those who challenge that framework may well be trolls, but the fact that they are troll is orthogonal to the legal outcome. That is, you may well consider Oracle to be trolls, but they're still winning (parts of) their case against Google.

> I agree that you can't just take back source code

But your "agreement" is irrelevant! I "agree" that the GPL shouldn't be revocable, but that's also irrelevant to the question.

There are actually quite a few clauses in the GPL that do revoke the license grant, if they are not followed.

Arguments that the GPL itself is revocable are quite old and far predates the whole CoC kerfuffle:

https://lwn.net/Articles/347236/

That's completely irrelevant to the point I am making. I'm using it as a counterexample to your reasoning that if code for (your) critical infrastructure was published, any obvious flaws in it would almost immediately be discovered and exploited. That's completely orthogonal to how old or poorly written the codebase is.

> Ok. I'll tell my customer we don't need all the firewalls, IDS, code inspection, risk assessment and hardening because zeroname on HN told me it was OK.

Well, I didn't. You're clearly not only unwilling to engage in logical reasoning, you also seem to lack basic reading comprehension.

> I'm not at all offended by your ridiculous insults...

I don't mean it as an insult, but I'm really losing my patience here. Your ego is so tied to being right that you can't admit to having made a little logical blunder there. Logical fallacies are actually really common, there's no shame in them. In fact, I'm prone to arguing the same If-this-then-that fallacies myself.

Either way, if you really care to be right, it doesn't matter what your job is or who gave it to you and how smart and diligent your team is. You just have to get your propositional logic correct.

Simple example:

False: If I leave the door unlocked, people will come and steal my stuff. (Non Sequitur)

True: If I leave the door unlocked, a thief will have it much easier to come in and steal my stuff.

You just keep going with the non-sequitur, but now you're also moving the goalpost. Your original statement didn't contain anything about "directly accessible from a public network" (which I assume isn't the case) or "source code known and published" (which you said wasn't the case).

And it is still a non-sequitur. Why would anybody expend non-trivial resources to find exploitable flaw in an open-source codebase to actually bring down emergency service? There's no reasonable way to profit from that. If you're some foreign hacker, you might want to find the exploit, but you wouldn't attack right away. Again, I'm not saying nobody would possibly do it, but one does not automatically follow from the other.

Heartbleed really is the best example on how a critical piece of software infrastructure (including a lot of government regulated infrastructure) had a publicly visible flaw that went undetected (and presumably unexploited) for several years.

> That is how employment works in the wider world of Internet Widgets etc. but not in critical government regulated infrastructure like emergency services.

I don't know man, I'm here arguing with this guy who doesn't seem to grasp a basic concept in logical reasoning, yet he's working on critical government infrastructure.

I've only asked a single question: What is wrong with what Bill Gates actually said? Hickel doesn't deal with what Bill Gates actually said, he talks a great deal about things that he didn't say. Indeed I am ignoring a lot of these points because they are irrelevant to whether "poverty" or "extreme poverty" is actually going down.

> Hickel isn't contradicting whether the trend is down or up, and indeed it's somewhat irrelevant whether the trend is down.

It isn't irrelevant at all! The title of Hickel's article is "Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong."

There really are only three possibilities here: Poverty is decreasing, increasing, or stagnating. The data says poverty is decreasing. So how can Bill Gates possibly be wrong? Answer: He isn't wrong, Hickel just wants to talk about how neoliberalism and globalization is bad, i.e. not actually anything that either Gates nor Pinker claimed.

Let's say I point to improved cancer mortality (on average, of course) as a result of human progress, are you going to argue that it's all irrelevant since some people still die from cancer? You're simply straying from the topic.

> And how useful is the "global average is getting better" to people who want to raise kids well-fed but currently cannot?

Not useful at all, obviously. Kids can't eat statistics. They also can't eat your HN comments, for that matter.

You're mixing up maternal mortality (the mother dies) with infant mortality (the child dies).

It would be quite remarkable indeed if somehow medicine in Sweden today achieved a slightly worse infant mortality than at the beginning of the previous century.

The point isn't that things aren't awful, but that used to be more awful and continue to be less awful, despite popular perception to the contrary.

> You just prefer the cozy illusion that it's all getting better.

It is getting better.

> Statistical averages mean nothing to the millions of family barely making ends meet and not being able to pay for the kids' gyms and proper nutrition.

Again, that's not the point.

> But sure, "on average things are better" -- and even this outlandish claim is proven wrong by this article, with hard data.

No it isn't. The article actually cites data showing that poverty is going down, just not as fast as "extreme poverty". On average, things are getting better. It's not an outlandish claim. By almost any measure of human welfare, things are getting better, on the average.

Hickel's issue isn't so even so much arguing that poverty isn't going down, but that "neoliberalism" had nothing to do with it. Make of that what you want, but that's Hickel's pet peeve, not Pinker's.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DxSZ58_XQAAoxM8.jpg:large

It does show a 75% in extreme poverty. That happens to be a straight down trend. Nobody even disputes this. It also shows a number of other things, such that "democracy" is actually stagnating. Bill Gates' actual remark on it is that people underestimate how much things have improved over the last two hundred years.

Hickel picks that one graph and turns it into the "Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing, he couldn't be more wrong" headline:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-g...

That's dishonest. First of all, extreme poverty is decreasing. That's the actual claim and it is true. Secondly, poverty even by Hickel's standards is also decreasing. It may not have been decreasing consistently over every single past decade, but indeed is decreasing today and for the past decade. Hickel then goes on to say that "the number of people living in poverty" has increased. Indeed it has, as has the number of people living. The actual percentage of people living in poverty has gone down.

So what exactly is the problem with what Bill Gates actually said? He never claimed that poverty is solved, nor did he endorse "neoliberalism" as the solution.

It is in your original statement (abbreviated):

If there were easily exploited buffer overflow in <our program>, ambulances and fire engines <for our customers> would never be called to their destinations nor arrive on time.

One doesn't follow from the other. Your statement implies there are bad actors in existence that would actually exploit such flaws in order to disrupt the service. That may or may not be true, therefore it does not follow.

> The previous poster purported that I mustn't have much "real world" experience in coding, and I responded that I and my team wouldn't be entrusted to successfully maintain a program and network that coordinates emergency services first responders over a large land mass and number of people if that was the case.

That's not what I actually replied to, but it's also a non-sequitur. It would be entirely plausible that you could be a reckless band of cowboy coders that happens to be able to produce a working product that is nevertheless full of theoretically exploitable flaws that just happen to not get exploited, because nobody cares. Also, whoever "entrusted" you may themselves be entirely reckless or incompetent.

I'm not saying that any of this is the case, I'm simply saying you can't logically deduce one from the other. Therefore it doesn't really work as an argument.

However, for anyone considered poor by any reasonable standard, my guess is that the global trend is down, otherwise Hickel could've come up with that data. So in that sense the cutoff is irrelevant.

Note that Pinker in his letter talks exclusively about extreme poverty. In a free market, of course it's easier to lift people out of extreme poverty than ordinary poverty, so it should come as no surprise that the trend is even steeper there.

However, the difference between outright starving to death, being extremely poor and simply "being poor" is staggering. You wouldn't argue that a million people saved from starvation looks "rather drab when considering that the average poor person still can't afford to drive a car".

You may say "1.90$ is ridiculous", but hundreds of millions of people actually do have to live on that. It's not like it's a fantasy number that nobody actually lives off.