zeroname

You made a simple If-this-then-that claim that was a non-sequitur, that's my only point.

> we strive everyday to provide new mitigations and defense in depth to prevent its exploitation.

I'm fairly confident that even if you didn't do that it wouldn't make much of a difference, because the likelihood of anyone attempting to exploit your particular niche program are quite low.

> But you go ahead and believe it's because of dumb luck if you like.

I didn't say it was dumb luck. The fact of the matter is that most software isn't hardened in the way you describe, for simple economical reasons.

TLDR; When the numbers don't fit the narrative, you need to pick out different numbers.

"Here are a few points to keep in mind. Using the $1.90 line shows that only 700 million people live in poverty."

It shows that "only" 700 million people live in extreme poverty as defined by the World Bank.

"If $1.90 is inadequate to achieve basic nutrition and sustain normal human activity, then it’s too low – period."

Yeah, no shit. Extreme Poverty is extremely bad.

"Remember: $1.90 is the equivalent of what that amount of money could buy in the US in 2011."

Yes, it's bad. Really really bad. Let's drive that point home some more.

"If we use $7.40 per day, we see a decline in the proportion of people living in poverty, but it’s not nearly as dramatic as your rosy narrative would have it. In 1981 a staggering 71% lived in poverty. Today it hovers at 58% (for 2013, the most recent data). Suddenly your grand story of progress seems tepid, mediocre, and – in a world that’s as fabulously rich as ours – completely obscene."

No it doesn't! The fact that the number of people that used to live in extreme poverty has gone down means that these people don't live in extreme poverty anymore. That's actually much more significant than the number of generally poor people that are now slightly less poor.

For 10,000$ you can make a lot of "feel good" things happen in the real world.

https://watsi.org/

https://kiva.org/

https://zidisha.org/

https://milaap.org/

That is entirely fallacious reasoning. Your programs could be full of exploitable bugs (and they probably are) yet nobody knows or cares enough to exploit them. OpenSSL had trivial errors unchecked and presumably unexploited for years.

That doesn't seem like a common term and I'm not sure that's what the parent was referring to. Either way, my argument stands.

There's no "consumer class". Every person is a consumer, including those who are entrepreneurial. Being entrepreneurial simply means you are in charge of what gets produced. The market then decides whether what you are producing is actually needed. If it isn't, you go out of business. Resources get re-allocated.

The efficiency of this process is the whole argument on why capitalism is superior to other systems.

Subsidies and other special favors distort this process, to the point of overproducing things that are not needed and underproducing things that are. The danger I see is that UBI is exactly such a subsidy.

No, the comfort zone is staying with your low-paying job that couldn't even sustain you if it wasn't for that extra paycheck.

It's not really clear from the video, but neither of these people could possibly be living off of 560€ alone. The man even said that his financial situation didn't change significantly, so there has to be some other source of income.

I don't think the woman slacked, she did get a job, but she was living above her means when it was clear that the program would end at some point.

I also think that this is exactly what this kind of UBI will do: Subsidize low-paying jobs.

The man on the other hand seems to have this outlook that since he used to be a journalist, if he doesn't get another job as a journalist, he'll get to collect unemployment benefits indefinitely.

I wonder if that's him gaming the system or if that's really how the system in Finland works.

TLDR: Two unemployed people are shown, each receiving 560€ a month with no strings attached. For comparison, median income in Finland is 2900€.

The woman doesn't seem to have learned any trade (at least it's not mentioned) and has only ever worked briefly at a factory. She took a job as a telemarketer that she liked. As the program ends, her financial situation will be unsustainable.

The man used to be a journalist and has been unemployed for five years. He's still unemployed after the program ends and will now have to "deal with bureaucracy again".

I'm not sure that's a fair comparison though, Presto didn't support HTML as thoroughly and it has since dropped out of the race entirely.

We can't be piling more and more high-level crap onto the standard and expect Moore's law to keep up with it.

> Web browsers are faster than ever before

That's not true at all, browser used to be much faster when HTML was simpler.

> ...but web sites are bloatier than ever before, eating up all the hardware and software capabilities.

Actually, even a rather simple website can very slow to render, if it does a significant amount of dynamic updates. DOM performance is an absolute disaster, hence all these "virtual dom" implementations like React. CSS Layouting is incredibly expensive. That has nothing to do with website bloat in and of itself, it's the platform coming bloated out of the box.

Statists will downvote this post, they believe regulation can solve the issue.

Libertarians will upvote this post, they believe the market can solve the issue.

Comparative advantage shows that production in either countries is improved, increasing supply and therefore putting pressure on prices, increasing the purchasing power. This simply isn't redistribution of income.

An individual worker, whose livelihood is destroyed and who is unable to perform any other form of work (unlikely, but conceivable) will of course have less than before. I don't see anybody making the argument that every single individual will be better off (that's obviously wrong), but the purchasing power of every individual income will increase.

You can make an argument that such inequalities should be mitigated by some income-redistributing measure or another, but that's orthogonal to comparative advantage itself.

> Have you tried producing and assembling electronics in the west?

Of course not, U.S. labor is far too expensive to do the kind of menial work required to assemble electronics, unless maybe it's a repair shop for certain products.

> You don't have shops to buy parts anymore, you don't have assembly lines anymore, you don't have people trained in this anymore.

You don't need "local shops" to purchase parts for assembly lines. Ask Elon Musk if the biggest challenge in building an assembly line is procuring the parts, he will say: No. You have a worldwide integrated economy where you can buy basically anything. The number one challenge is labor cost.

In any event, training people for electronics assembly is trivial. If you can take apart an iPhone and put it back together, you're good.

> If China decided tomorrow to increase the costs of the electronics they export, you'd have to accept that.

"China" doesn't decide the costs of electronics, individual businesses do. But even if China was dumb enough to slap tariffs on their own exports, there are plenty of alternatives. There is no monopoly. In fact, China is doing the exact opposite: They are artificially lowering the value of their currency to stay competitive.

You should also really look into how electronics are actually produced, there are numerous countries involved in it, each specialized into particular parts:

http://www.worldstopexports.com/electronic-circuit-component...

> It's not just a single monopoly, the problem is that entire industries are gone, and it'd take decades to train workers and regain the institutional knowledge.

Actually, a lot of institutional knowledge remains with the companies that just use labor abroad. However, it also leaks into the domestic industry, that's why you have a lot of companies complaining about "IP theft" from China.

The broader point remains: There is no monopoly. There is plenty of competition. Even if for a "relatively" short period of time (decades) there where to exist a monopoly, it could only sustain its higher prices for so long as it stays unprofitable to rebuild that infrastructure. At that point the "monopoly pricing" becomes "fair pricing".

> In our household, we're now spending 71% of our budget on rent and utilities.

You should probably look into what building regulation (artificial scarcity) does to the price of rent. You can't blame free trade for that.

> Under more protectionist policies, I might pay 20% more for products, but I'd also be making 20% more wages — and as result, I'd be better off (in fact, my disposable income after rent, utilities and food would almost triple)

First of all, why do you assume that rent and utilities would not rise in tandem with the cost of goods? Why do you believe rent in Silicon Valley is so high? It's the scarcity combined with the high wages of the tech workers.

Secondly, you are losing your competitive advantage. You are worse off.

What about the "deep personal losses" suffered in the garment industry, in electronics, in agriculture?

What about all the people that lost their jobs as a result of technological progress? What of those poor ice pickers, who lost their livelihood to the invention of the refrigerator?

I don't know where you got this idea, but the argument for comparative advantage has nothing to do with the redistribution of income, nor is there a claim of "fairness" towards each and every individual or interest group.

To understand why comparative advantage is an advantage, you must consider the alternative: Economic protectionism. It results in inefficient allocation of labor, because everyone's job is protected. Everyone pays more for everyone else's labor, everyone is less productive. This affects the poor the most, because they spent the biggest share of their income on basic goods and services.

Of course there are economic winners and losers, but by attempting to fully protect everyone, everyone becomes a loser, as evidenced by the countless failed attempts at socialism.

First of all, where's the evidence of these supposed high-entry monopolies? Seems more like a thought experiment to me.

Secondly, you're only looking at the negative consequences for some workers. You're not looking at the benefit to all workers, who pay lower prices as result of cheaper labor from abroad.

Suppose workers had been guaranteed their jobs for life because of protectionist policies. This is called mercantilism. Everybody pays more for everyone else's labor and nobody can benefit from comparative advantage. As a result, everyone is poorer. This has been known for centuries and it has been accepted by economists across the political spectrum. Yet politically, protectionism never ceases to lose appeal.

Of course not. One could give any number of examples where a benefit for society takes precedence over that of the individual.

That's basically the fallacy of predatory pricing. It doesn't work. Sure, you can raise prices after killing the competition, but only so far as to not revive the competition. Your price ends up as the fair market price. Cost of entry is irrelevant here, it's a cost like any other.

Tariffs worth a billion, what a joke. EU tariffs were already low for the most part. The real trade barriers that the EU imposes are its regulations that are favoring local business.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/2453204/Be...

> Free trade is great when applied evenly.

Free trade is great even when applied unevenly.

> Mostly not.

Doesn't matter. Your claim, as written, was wrong.

> The reality shows the opposite. See the UK: nuclear power does not finance themselves by market mechanisms.

Again, I didn't say that it would. I said that anything that is economically sensible finances itself, pretty much by definition. I didn't say nuclear power is sensible and I didn't say that it finances itself.

> What does it have do with France what the US does?

If your explanation doesn't generalize to the US, then it is wrong. You might as well say France builds nuclear reactors because it is France. You only need a single reactor to build a nuclear arsenal, so having an interest in nuclear weapons is no explanation for why France (or any other country) would invest in building out lots of civil nuclear infrastructure.

> They are not bankrupt while they get more government money.

You are supporting my thesis. Go back and read it. It's about a private company, contrary to a state, being able to relieve itself of the bill. That's exactly what's happening here, whether Tepco is formally bankrupt or not.

> There is lots of money spend on research in Germany ...

Way to miss the point...

> The Energiewende is not about short-term CO2 reductions. It's a broad long-term project to switch the energy landscape to renewable energy.

What's the point of switching electricity to renewables if not CO2 reduction? There's enough coal for hundreds of years.

> Coal is next.

Good Luck with that.

> Flexbox is a layout system for 1D content.

An individual flexbox container is one dimensional. To get a 2D layout, you nest rows and columns.

> ...doing a responsive layout in explicitly 2D terms is a very weird thing to be doing and usually isn't what you actually want.

I have no idea how you would come to that conclusion. To me, a "responsive" layout is one that adapts to the viewport size. The viewport is 2D. This is a 2D layouting problem.

A subset of that problem is concerned with fitting content of a fixed viewport width to a variable height, i.e. your classic web site. That's what you may call "1D content". Once you're trying to get a layout that adapts to both viewport width and height (i.e. an ordinary application), CSS can get quite ugly.

Flow-like layout is just a sub-problem of 2D Layouting. Having it as the only way to do layouting (besides tables) has proven a nightmare to work with. That's why you got Flexbox (and now Grid).

> It's such a mess that no one can attach a decent GUI to it.

A very good point. My guess is that we could let designers do a lot more and developers do a lot less, if it wasn't for that impedance mismatch.

> Your Autodesk comparison belies a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of the DOM - it is, to its great advantage, a 1D space which flows into a 2D shape.

What's the advantage? The screen is 2D space. Layouting is a 2D problem. Images are two-dimensional. It's simpler to start from 2D and make 1D content fit that space than the other way around.

> The web is 1D because text is 1D.

That made sense in the very early days of the web, now it's just a historical crutch. I fully understand why things are the way they are, but that's orthogonal.

> It is implied here that the product must have issues which are so complicated that you need experts to solve them.

No it isn't. It's orthogonal. If there aren't any issues requiring experts, that's great. If there are issues that require experts, there better be some experts available.

> I think it's often the case that hype is not correlated with quality...

Hype isn't the same as popularity. Hype helps popularity. I'm not saying you should jump on the hype train right away. Let the hype do its job, wait for some critical mass to form.

The parent wants a broad picture. Noise evens out with more samples. Old jobs can be filtered out.

> Anyone know of a tool that does that?

Just type in the names of the languages/frameworks into a job search engine with "London" as the location. It'll show up in their hiring ads. If they aren't hiring, they're irrelevant.