So people mine bitcoin, which is really just validating the transactions on the network, and they get paid in bitcoin for doing so. However, they will receive fewer and fewer bitcoin over time because of the fixed supply. At some point doesn't mining become unprofitable, causing the network to crash. And if the price drops doesn't this exacerbate this problem? Would love some clarity here.
> However, they will receive fewer and fewer bitcoin over time because of the fixed supply. At some point doesn't mining become unprofitable, causing the network to crash.
This would actually cause the price of Bitcoin to increase, so that it keeps up with the cost of mining it. The miners won't sell their Bitcoin for less than the cost of electricity.
At some point, large mining operations will run their own power stations, and they'll just run on solar / hydro / geothermal power. They might even sell any surplus energy. Other miners might start paying for their electricity with Bitcoin, so the price of electricity might become directly related to the cost of mining Bitcoin.
I think once the 21 million (or whatever, too lazy to look up the actual number) coins are produced the mining fee will adjust to compensate for the utility of verifying blocks.
Probably won't be profitable to have a whole warehouse full of nodes but I'm sure there will still be folks willing to make a couple bucks to keep the network up and running.
Is inequality a feature or a bug of capitalism? Seems like the general thinking is that its a feature in-so-much as it encourages innovation, entrepreneurship, etc. It seems like it becomes a bug when it reaches a level in which it creates a positive feedback loop of more inequality.
As with anything, i've noticed the discussion is really about how much, not should it exist at all. Almost every debate in American politics is painted as black and white, whereas the actual debate is where we fall on a spectrum. It seems like everyone disagrees so much, but really I think we are haggling over a slight deviation to the right or to the left and because we have to talk about everything in such black and white terms, the real discussion gets lost. We all agree on much more than we disagree on.
"Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free." -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It's crazy to me how both capitalist authoritarians and state communist authoritarians will argue that "equal" means "the same". Communists argue this in order to convince you that in order to be equal you have to be equally subservient to the state. Capitalists will argue this to convince you that you can never expect equality since that would mean state communism.
Except all (positive) outcomes are opportunities in another context. It's a continuous process.
The most obvious place to see this is looking at parents' economic outcomes versus their kids' development opportunities, but it doesn't even have to be generational.
If you have a sack of money (outcome), you automatically have many more options (opportunity) for creating a larger stack of money. Imagine a fair and random gambling game: Insolvent players are removed from the game, so the player with the deepest pockets at the beginning has the best opportunity of winning everything.
Yes, and the big disconnect seems to be an inability to recognize that access to health care, education, child care, and even a poverty safety net are fantastic ways to give people opportunity. I really think the basic philosophical divides between conservative and liberal America is not as great as it seems- people are just really easily distracted by a media and political system that profits tremendously by making people hate and fear each other.
Respectfully, did you read the article? The article argues that it is not capitalism -- competition in a free market -- driving the gap between the top 1% and the rest. Rather it is the efforts on the part of the 1% to monopolize, to drive out competition and protect their position that is the cause.
Which is actually the typical end state of real capitalism as opposed to imaginary capitalist models. Cartel (explicit or implicit collusion) or monopoly. This is because for any single agent cooperation is beneficial even if it is not for the efficiency of the system as a whole. Bigger agents have more potential there. (Purchase removes an agent and competition from the system.) Agents collude on each transaction when they probe the market for expected price. Including for services and labour.
The other systems have this bug as well. Somme people have an intense drive to accumulate power, no matter the cost to others, or rationalize the cost away. Worst are those of them with bad ideas or totally irresponsible.
It's a feature, not of capitalism, but of human interactions in general. (It should not have escaped our attention that any time an "alternative to capitalism" is tried it inevitably winds up with wealth and power even more heavily concentrated, this time in the hands of the people whose job it was to ensure that wealth and power were shared fairly.)
And, to a large extent, of animals. I suppose there are some animal species where all members are more or less equal, but they're probably mostly solitary animals which rarely interact with each other. In social species, massive inequalities, particularly between males, are the norm.
One thing i've been shocked by over the years is how often even well educated, highly intelligent individuals have a very poor education in personal finance and make terrible decisions. Theres just so much noise out there and its still crazy how much of the investment management industry exists despite showing negative value. If I had to sum up personal finance advice for the average person in a few bullets it would be this.
1. Invest in a well diversified portfolio that pays very low fees (vanguard funds for instance)
2. Do not try to time the market
3. Save as much as you can as early as you can - maximize your 401k/ROTH contributions
4. Never carry a balance on your credit card from month to month
It's worth noting that there is a not insignificant number of people who are poor because they make (financially) poor decisions. I say this completely not in a way that's judgmental or dismissive of the issues poorer people have (in the US in particular). There are a number of reasons for this. Decision fatigue [1] is one of them.
So when you have anything from a moderate amount of wealth, you probably know that time, patience and a little financial discipline is all that's required to preserve and even grow that wealth.
Have you ever noticed that it's mostly poor people who buy lottery tickets [2]? Likewise it's the poor who disproportionately fall for "get rich quick" schemes. Some of this you can attribute to bad judgment but also desperation plays a part. I mean, if you have $1000, what does a 10% return net you? $100? Who cares? But what if it could turn into $100,000? Now that'd be something! I suspect this plays into the gullibility of many when it comes to scams.
So in the Steadman case I imagine there was some of that but I also suspect many (or even most) investors were just trying to invest in their future without the promise of 1000x returns and just got duped.
Don't discount the "get rich quick" mentality though. I've seen this first hand. My father and uncle spent their entire lives trying to get rich quick.
There are some weird biases on display here, and conflation of income and wealth. Plenty of high-income people have low wealth because they waste money. Obviously, the higher income you have, the more buffer you have against bad decisions, and the more growth opportunity you have.
It is sad on many levels, but it is also understandable. I've met people who consider their maxed out 401K savings as "meeting their savings goal" and so they spend excess income of frivolous things. Hardest thing in the world to explain to someone looking at an unexpected end of the year bonus of $50K that even though they saved the 'maximum' of the about $25K in their 401k they should also put at least half of that $50K into savings as well. Unless you have 10x your annual salary in a savings account you really can't say you have 'saved enough'. Even then there are so many things that can and do hit you in life that aren't part of the plan. Your house burns to the ground, your kid develops cancer, your wife decides she likes someone other than you better, Etc. It goes on and on.
My grandmother was a daughter of the depression and was really paranoid about future losses (when she passed we found vegetables and fruits she had canned 'just in case' in the cellar that were decades old!) But she also had an expression I liked. I would ask her what she was saving for and she would say "I don't know but I'm sure God will tell me what it is when the time is right."
Saving 10x your annual salary means saving half of your salary for twenty years. This is, to my mind, not very realistic.
You need to invest into something highly profitable to hit this goal without being so drastic, e.g. to have bought some Bay Area realty in 1980s, or some Apple stock around that time. This is not a common option, and it's mostly unavailable now.
This is absolutely true. Student loan debt is a huge burden. If you're burdened by debt then most financial advisers in a low inflation scenario suggest you pay it off as quickly as you can. If we suddenly get 8 - 12% annual inflation and your salary is tracking that, then by all means stretch out your repayment so that you can pay it off with inflated dollars.
It is important to consider that once you put something away it can start earning money on its own. So if you work backwards, lets assume you save your 25K/year in your 401k and you add 25K/year in just part of your income. That is 50K/year which when you are young is perhaps half your salary and 20 years later is perhaps 1/4th or 1/5th (assuming you go from making $100K / year early on and eventually get to $200K /year). If you look at the S&P500 [1] and no-load or zero load ETFs, you can get an average annualized rate of return of ~ 7%. Do the math (here is a convenient web site: https://www.budgetworksheets.org/invest/) and after 20 years you've got $2.1M saved. You started at 22 and you ended at 42 and now you have 10x your ending salary of $200K/year saved. When you are young and have no dependents you can save a ton of money, and the more you save, the earlier you save it, the more it piles up at the end when you need it. A couple of big signing bonuses when changing jobs, a bit of gain from the stock purchase plan. It isn't as far out of reach as you might imagine.
The other thing to be careful of is the who "bought real estate in the '80s, those days are long gone" kind of things. If you bought real estate in Denver in 2010 you're doing pretty well right now. If you bought 10,000 shares of Facebook stock when they IPO'd and held it (that was only 6 years ago) it would be worth over $1.75M today. I'm not trying to exploit my hindsight, I'm trying to share with you that large changes in investment value happen all the time, markets change. So you should not tell yourself that such opportunities are "mostly unavailable now" they are just as available now as they were then. Sometimes you will win and sometimes you won't but if you are reasonably diversified in your investment plan you can take advantage of a growing economy.
It's entirely possible for any household earning 2x median income. That means you can have the lifestyle of the median household (with 0% savings rate) and save 50% of your income.
Of course 2x median is quite high for most people; that's sort of baked into the definition of "median". I'd expect HN readers to be close to that because of higher tech salaries but acknowledge it's hard for everyone else.
Even with a salary 1.5x of median, you could live the lifestyle of someone making ~0.8x of median income i.e. a lower-income, but not poverty, lifestyle and save 50% (I think my math is right here). You can still lead a happy and fulfilling life at this spending level. There'll be no eating at nice restaurants, drinks at pubs with friends or annual foreign vacations. But plenty of weekend hiking, DVDs from the library, home-cooked meals, and boardgames with friends.
In a nutshell, it's possible but you'll have to change your entire way of living.
> 1. Invest in a well diversified portfolio that pays very low fees (vanguard funds for instance) 2. Do not try to time the market 3. Save as much as you can as early as you can - maximize your 401k/ROTH contributions 4. Never carry a balance on your credit card from month to month
I have to strongly second all of these; the issue becomes, once you've done them, what more can you do? You get to a certain age and realize you have most of your career behind you, or you'd like to have most of your career behind you so you can retire early - how do you get there? It's a problem that cuts across different aspects in life: what to eat, how to exercise, etc. Min/maxing, munchkining applied to real life. Is it any surprise that software engineers looking to squeeze the last possible cycle or byte out of their software do these sorts of things? But much like software, premature optimization is the root of all evil . . .
Finance isn't rigorous or fundamental in the way that somethings like math, physics, chemistry, etc are. In that way, it's a lot less interesting to many highly intelligent people, because it is after all, just bullshit which happens to be capable of making you rich in a narrow point in time. In another time and place, there would be nothing valuable or true about most of economics, finance, and the like. Meanwhile the hyperfine transitions of Hydrogen are, and will always be what they are, and be just as useful and fundamental in a thousand years (hopefully).
So, unless the highly intelligent, well educated person has a particular interest in finance, it's probably going to appear to be the crooked, black magic shitstorm it really is.
It may be less interesting to highly intelligent people, but finance employs an enormous number of them regardless. I assure you that plenty of highly intelligent people care just as much as anyone else about being rich. Your implication - that highly intelligent people are more likely to care about "useful and fundamental" scientific results than money - seems very naive.
It's not accurate to characterize finance as simply something that happens to be capable of making you rich in a narrow point in time. More than you know, I'm not a cheerleader of modern finance but it is the reason that most of the capital in the world exists and it's important for people to be aware of it as a fundamental part of our society. People ignore it at their own risk.
You're right that the problems of finance aren't fundamental to the natural world, and they're not as elegant as the problems in mathematics and the mathematical sciences.
However, there is some basic amount of financial knowledge that people should have as a basis of functioning in the world. And I think many intelligent people should be interested in establishing that knowledge base because it can enrich their life.
What's fortunate is that the amount of knowledge required to simply understand one's degrees of freedom and the outcomes is pretty basic. Even if you don't find it interesting, you should be able to slog through it in less than a day. And that's a good thing because it would take a lot longer than a day to get to the state of the art in finance but that's not critical to understanding why it's unfavorable to use a credit card to buy a car.
How do you get trustworthy information? I'm basically financially illiterate, but I'm not really happy about it. I'm interested in learning, but how? Everyone's trying to sell me something. I don't know how to establish credibility of a source. And I'm not keen to take financial advice from an arbitrary source, since there's often a distinct incentive to give bad advice.
The best resource I've found is Reddit's personal finance forum, and specifically their "How to Handle Money" guide - especially the flowchart and "simplified flowchart".
I think the best thing to do is look at each transaction separately, read a few sources, and reflect on what made sense, what the sources were all agreement about, and what seemed like a pitch.
Consumer advocacy agencies usually have excellent advice. Credit unions seem to have well-intentioned advice but the information can be incomplete.
E.g if you're about to buy a car, read a few articles about getting car loans, don't just take the dealership finance person at their word.
I've been meaning to get around to making a decision tree for technical people who never had to bother with this stuff but I don't know how much time I need to dedicate to "please don't buy a jetski if you're unemployed".
If nobody could get a home loan the housing prices would drop. But, loans don't create wealth so long term would be closer to break even than you might think.
Loans absolutely can fuel wealth creation by providing the capital to make purchases that increase productivity sooner than a person could afford otherwise.
Imagine that you're a farmer and you work your land by hand, or with the assistance of animals. You don't have enough capital to buy a tractor, which is very expensive. Only by working your land for 15 years will you save up enough money to afford a tractor.
However, if you could buy a tractor, then you could substantially improve your efficiency and grow way more crops. Perhaps with a tractor, you can grow 10 times as many crops or more. Ironically, if you already owned a tractor, then you could quickly earn enough to pay for one, but without one your earnings are too small to afford one.
So, someone comes along and loans you the capital to buy a tractor. It's not a huge risk for them, because if you default, they can repossess and resell the tractor. So you take the loan for a low interest rate and buy a tractor. With the tractor, you're so much more productive that you pay off the loan within a few years. Everyone is better off, both you and the person who provided the loan.
With this effect occurring all throughout society, everyone is better off in aggregate than they would be without loans. Without a loan, you might need to save for many years; with a loan, you can front-load the productivity benefit of a capital purchase. These loans fuel wealth creation.
Loans also enable people to achieve a higher quality of living. Imagine a young working professional has a stable job and a good income. If home loans were not available, the professional might need to save for 20 or 30 years before accumulating enough funds to be able to purchase a home in cash. Because home loans are available, the professional can purchase their home much sooner in their life, and therefore enjoy the benefits of home ownership throughout their life.
A society without any loans at all is a society in which people live as paupers during their 20s and 30s, before finally accumulating enough wealth to purchase a vehicle or housing or capital in their 40s or 50s. The gap between the rich (who have inherited money) and the poor would widen vastly in such a society. Loans are a vehicle for wealth creation, a vehicle for people to better themselves.
Lastly, these types of loans are not especially risky or bad. Home loans and auto loans are responsible and relatively low risk because the property can be repossessed in the event of default; this enables lenders to offer low interest rates, such that the "cost" of the loans is not very high.
Loans are critical to an economy working. Essentially it allows capital to flow from where it isn't needed to where it is. Take that away, and you've got a 3rd world economy.
The banks should only lend money to people who would be capable of saving for a house. But if you're capable of saving for a house, and someone has money they're not using, why not use their money to buy the house and pay them back?
If every party satisfies their self-interest, their transaction creates value (which is distinct from wealth).
Financial market problems are finance problems to the extent that North Korea's nuclear tests are physics problems. The body of knowledge exists, an actor uses it.
My personal estimation is that a lot of the good things in this world exist because of fractional banking and finance and that humanity is better for it. I think we can do better, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater is a recipe for disaster.
Replace 'finance industry' with 'airline industry'. Sure, the airlines pollute, and planes crash and that's unimaginably bad. But each time a plane crashes, all the subsequent trips get safer. We're never going to make it perfect, but we can make it easier to roll the dice. And people don't fly places and engage finance for no reason - they do so to improve their lives. We should focus on improving peoples lives, whether that's making it easier for them to find a place to live or transport themselves.
The problem IMO is by adding intermediaries to a transaction you also increase costs. Society pays a massive subsidy on home loans so many of these costs are also hidden. EX: Home ownership limits mobility reducing economic growth.
What happens without loans? Well, someone with capital to give out a home loan could just as easily buy then rent out a house. This would increase the pressure on home construction industry to build things to last. Further assuming there was no tax subsidy we would reach a different equilibrium.
I don't know if this would be 'better' but it would have different costs.
I agree. Due diligence is always important, but it often seems that a lot of financial advice seems to say "Don't have anything go wrong in your life, or in your family's life."
Yes, OP's advice is perhaps a good first approximation but a lot of people have a kid get sick, or some other disaster that could not be helped. Not everyone, for sure, but a lot.
There are problems with trackers and closet trackers I sthat you have to by the dog's
Some of my actively managed funds managed to avoid a lot of the loss on bank shares - a tracker would have had to keep holding risky bank stocks or say enron and take the loss
That's the fallacy of active management, though. Given enough time, these active funds make enough bad decisions to wipe out the good ones, especially when you factor in the fees. We've got plenty of data on this phenomenon.
Don't you think that when almost everyone is saying just chose trackers / index funds that that would not indicate - that's is a bad idea to follow the heard?
As one Wall street type said "when the shoe shine boy was giving you stock tips" he started to get worried
"You're following the herd" seems to be the latest bit of FUD pushed by active managers, but they're still not making a good case for their own ability to beat the herd.
> In the WSJ feature, the darts won 55 of the 142 contests, and the pros won 87. That 61% to 39% margin would be a blow in an election, but remember: this is not just any old human vs. darts. This is the best in the business against randomness.
> In their new book, Dubner and his coauthor Steven Levitt cite a study by CXO Advisory Group examining 6,000 stock market predictions by so-called experts over several years. Experts’ overall accuracy rate was 47.4%.
> Indeed, according to the Wall Street Journal’s online screening tool, only 71 of 17,785 funds—just 0.4%—outperformed the S&P over 10 years.
Also not a good example. Individual fund managers, financiers, etc. often make individual correct (or lucky, sometimes) decisions. It's their ability to do that continuously for decades that's very much in doubt.
That just moves the problem away from stock-picking to manager-picking. How do you pick a "good" manager as a retail investor? A winning track record could just be the result of survivorship bias.
Disclosure: I'm probably exposed to every stock in this comment.
Eh. If you're smart and in technology you can beat index funds pretty easily. I'm not even counting Bitcoin. I time the market too.
Your advice works for the median person, but if you're in the intellectual 1% or 0.1% beating the market is pretty easy.
1. You should have a really good reason for buying a high P/E or negative EPS stock. It should be grounded in unit economics and entrenchment, not marketing. Tesla is a good example, I knew it was just a matter of unit economics. The technology was solid. Made over 10x sans options. Apple is another good example: They had a low P/E and I thought they were well situated to make money from services if they could just figure out how to design better software. They did it.
Put two and two together and put everything in cash. Sure I missed out on two years of growth, but after the recession hit I bought back at half. Bought back in when things had stabalized and recently sold 85% of the portfolio because fundamentals look wacky. It might take a month it might take two years, but another recession is coming.
3. Research the damn thing. If you don't understand it well enough don't buy it. You're not losing money by failing to buy the next hot thing. I read the entire Bitcoin paper before buying to make sure it could handle different stresses. My only regret was not leaning harder into it when I bought it at $4 CAD / BTC. I was too sheepish about "internet monopoly money" even though I knew it could hit $10k or $50k a coin if it took off.
4. Don't necessarily max out your 401k / RRSP. Tax rates are going way, way, way up once the baby boomers hit the social safety net. If you aren't at the top marginal rate you're using up tax deferment that will be better once you are. Plus having money outside of these vehicles makes investing in your friends startup easier. The only exception is if you're buying a house and you can loan yourself money from it (since it's like buying the house tax free).
5. Bubbles can go on for way longer than you think. Just be fucking patient. Do I wish I mortgaged a house in Toronto in 2009? Sure. But the stock market has gone up too and housing at these levels is unsustainable. At the very least housing price growth will subside.
I'm sure you're being downvoted for going against orthodoxy by suggesting that one can "beat the market". I agree with you in that it can be done, and should not be attempted by most people (I personally would not put intelligence constraints on it; I think it's a factor of one's tolerance for looking at financial data, and an ability to keep emotion out of trading decisions). I don't try to time the market, however. My prime directive is to preserve capital, which I implement mostly through stops. I'm happy to leave money on the table, but I don't want to lose money.
But let's look at the fund in question: how did they stay funded? The same way a lot of bad funds stay funded: people put money in and never look at it again. And those people are not the ones updating stop limits, looking at charts, and basically making a hobby of their finances. Those people should be buying index funds. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. With the time I've spend reading books, tracking markets, etc., I could have learned a language, started a business, build my own house, whatever. Because after looking at returns over the last twenty years, yeah, I have demonstrated I can consistently beat the market (or more likely, can leverage opportunities of sheer luck), but not by enough to make the opportunity cost worth it if I didn't actually like doing it as a hobby.
And folks should completely ignore your point #4, especially the part about buying a house "tax-free". Eh, not quite.
I agree that it isn't really tax free since you got to pay it back eventually, but because mortgages generally require some minimum amount down (at least here in Canada) it's a real consideration for many people, though it does come at a cost later if you're going up tax brackets.
I also agree that it isn't just intelligence, but I do think you can't do much if you aren't at least in the top 5%, even with a whole hell of a lot of training. Much of investing is a zero sum game, and it's extremely competitive.
I also agree that most people should do broad basket, diversified ETFs and I also think your stop-loss strategy is above average, but I think you could probably do better if you were willing to take more risks on individual companies / technologies.
As for returns, I agree that it doesn't look good on paper for the first 20 years, but the difference compounds and building experience matters. I'm now at the point where I'm both better at it and I have more at my disposal to grow. Last time I checked, not counting crytpo-currencies, I'm averaging around 18% per year pre-inflation across a mix of bonds, stocks, and funds. Now, much of that has been a combination of timing / luck on currencies. So let's call it 15% to be safe. Doubling every 5 years, I'm 32 and I started this at around 15. I put maybe 200 hours into it a year and the family portfolio not counting housing or shares in hard-to-sell startups is almost $1m. Another 40 years of this is going to really make all this effort worth it, provided we don't have something catastrophic like a world war / economic collapse.
On getting downvoted:
I don't let it bother me. I try to remember that sometimes I see things I know are factually wrong get upvoted and that sometimes I'm getting upvoted despite being wrong. The votes aren't the truth, even if they do correlate.
Maybe we need more webs-of-trust on social networks that should influence how votes are counted. Because if you just judge thing by the words on their own, somethings can sound wrong or crazy at first blush even if they are right. For example, Facebook's Instagram acquisition was seen as dumb, but it was genius. Although maybe this idea is wrong. Maybe we already overweigh the opinions of the connected and powerful.
> My only regret was not leaning harder into it when I bought it at $4 CAD / BTC.
In another universe, you're commenting on HN, saying "investing in bitcoin was a complete waste of money, after it was abandoned en masse in 2015".
Hindsight is 20/20, that goes both for missing opportunities, and for losing money.
For every example of someone like you that says "it's easy, just time the market, and you'll make a bunch of money", there's several people that tried, and failed.
In the end day trading and timing the market are gambling. It's no different to betting on the result of a sports match, you have information and odds, but in the end, there is the random element. For every person that strikes it rich betting on horses, there's a lot of people who lose a lot of money.
The difference is when you write out your reasons and you find out 3 years later that you were right.
It can be gambling, but that's like saying dating is gambling because there is an element of chance involved with whether or not you get physical with someone.
No. It's not. There are people that are good at romance. There are people good at understanding and predicting technology. This whole mantra of "it's just gambling!" is by a bunch of people that didn't have an approach rooted in discipline and science.
This is a very irresponsible comment. It's the kind of thing you hear from someone selling a get rich quick scheme; it sounds plausible, but it has less to do with the reasons given then having a greater pool of suckers to build on. Even a gambler who wins the lottery can make a story about how he knew which numbers to pick and that it was based on "unit economics and entrenchment".
I could try to describe the fallacy in general terms but I don't have to because your reasoning is obviously bullshit. Tesla has not made any money yet - they are still burning through billions a year financed by junk bonds. The value of Bitcoin is also almost wholly speculation; how could it be otherwise when it's limited to 7 slow, public, expensive, wasteful transactions per second. Both those assets could crash to zero next year.
So, yeah, you managed to get in at the top of some major bubbles, which could be called "intellectual" except you can't even identify the real reasons for your success. And in general this is not a healthy approach to finance because these assets don't make money - they just transfer it from later investors to earlier investors.
The problem with pay transparency starts with the problem of determining compensation itself. If compensation could be a direct output of an algorithm that was highly accurate based on attributes of an individual that highly predict their market worth, pay transparency works well because people could agree that this person is being paid fairly. Also, if everyones pay could be dynamically determined it would help too. Basically, people get hired and get their salary set. Then new people are being recruited and market dynamics may have changed and now maybe a higher salary is required to attract this candidate.
I'm not being very articulate here, but i'd say the problem with pay transparency isn't the transparency part, but the actual process of determining fair/market-clearing wages for employees.
> If compensation could be a direct output of an algorithm ... people could agree that this person is being paid fairly
Nope. Then they would start accusing the algorithm of being racist, sexist, otherist. They would cite institutional bias - bias so pervasive everyone has it even while no individuals do - and demand the algorithm be tweaked for their favored lobbyists.
The problem with pay transparency is not that it doesn't work; the problem is that the entire concept is immoral and evil. How much money you make is, properly, strictly a conversation between the parties in the transaction. No one else should care about your income; they should focus on maximizing their own value and find those for whom their services are the most valuable. The kinds of benefits valuable to an individual are unique: everyone has a different in background, life choices, purpose, and capability. There is no way to account for the fact that person A values work that involves travel, while person B is interested in work with a predictable schedule; and it is improper for person B to look at person A's compensation and make judgements about their own compensation, not because it is impossible to analyze all of the factors, but because person B must decide their own purpose and work toward it.
>The problem with pay transparency is not that it doesn't work; the problem is that the entire concept is immoral and evil. How much money you make is, properly, strictly a conversation between the parties in the transaction.
so how does this differ from any other good/transaction where we DO share prices? Why is it not immoral and evil that I can compare prices between amazon and walmart?
All the problem you describe can be resolved by employers either justifying themselves to their employees like adults, paying more, or the employees quitting. All of which are free market actions, the first of which having the added bonus of humanising the relationship. The only downside: you can't just treat your employees like "human resources" and get away with it as easily. You need to treat them as people
The difference is that every individual is unique in their ability to create value and their compensation preferences.
A product on Amazon has a market price - the thing being exchanged is an objective, metaphysical fact and people assign it a value. In areas of labor where the uniqueness of individuals is less of a factor, you will generally find that pay transparency is the norm. This is often unskilled/low-skilled labor in jobs that cannot offer meaningful non-pecuniary compensation.
But most people do not work in such jobs, and even in most manual labor jobs there is a strong element of applying your mind to do good work. As such, your purpose as an individual is much more important.
Pay transparency detrimental to you, as an individual. To live a happy life, you must figure out your own purpose and use your mind to achieve it. Happiness is not the result of income, nor is money required to be happy. Your happiness is a function of the achievement of the values you have defined for yourself. If you allow the income of others to influence your decision making, you are only hurting yourself. You should not leave a job that is satisfying in its essentials - that is, it fits with your purpose, you do meaningful work - merely because you discover someone else makes more; that would only hurt you. You don't know - can't know - their purpose, their value, their preferences, that lead to their income and work environment.
> Pay transparency detrimental to you, as an individual. To live a happy life, you must figure out your own purpose and use your mind to achieve it. Happiness is not the result of income, nor is money required to be happy. Your happiness is a function of the achievement of the values you have defined for yourself.
Perhaps someday I'll be less cynical, but I'll go ahead and say it: money might not be happiness, but it sure goes a long way to helping. If you need to work 80 hours / week just to keep food on the table and a roof over your head, leaving no time for you to express you own desires and wishes (and no money to do so), how are you supposed to be happy?
Money isn't directly happiness, but it helps in that you can acquire things that make you happy. For example, if my dream is to become a great guitar player, money towards instruments, lessons, etc. greatly helps. What if I want to see the world? That will cost money and time, which is often even more valuable than money.
> If you allow the income of others to influence your decision making, you are only hurting yourself.
If I find out that I'm getting screwed by my employer, and that I should ask for $20k/year more (which I can only know if I know the salary distribution for people of my trade, in my location), I fail to see how that can harm me. By the very definition, I'm being harmed every day I remain ignorant.
(Certainly, there are individuals who will chase the number, and let their hubris get ahead of them. They're not the people I think such initiatives are attempting to benefit. And I think the argument is that while such initiatives might not be perfect, they do more good than harm.)
>Pay transparency detrimental to you, as an individual. To live a happy life, you must figure out your own purpose and use your mind to achieve it. Happiness is not the result of income, nor is money required to be happy. Your happiness is a function of the achievement of the values you have defined for yourself. If you allow the income of others to influence your decision making, you are only hurting yourself. You should not leave a job that is satisfying in its essentials - that is, it fits with your purpose, you do meaningful work - merely because you discover someone else makes more; that would only hurt you. You don't know - can't know - their purpose, their value, their preferences, that lead to their income and work environment.
How about we let people judge that themselves? It's everyones job not to hurt themselves, so how about we make sure everyone has as much information as the most powerful in the room. Otherwise, let's make the top 1% "happier" and impose a 100% tax on all income more than 3 standard deviations from the median eh?
//edit: I saw in another comment, you talked about pay transparency not making the wages rise. It might now. But then it will cause people to quit jobs where they are not valued, increasing their happiness.
//edit2: also, you sidestepped the question. Humans are not as unique as random numbers, amazon goods are not all the same. If there are 5 brands of battery, we don't say it is immoral to share the prices and compare because "each brand carries its unique and special history". It's a battery, 5V, X watt, Y $. Likewise, if I get hired to design a product, they don't care about my extensive research in japanese mud ball culture. I'm a project designer, education X, working hours Y, pay Z, expected outcome for the company Z*(1+some positive number).
I've known only one other person to share that view; a toxic as fuck manager. What he (and I can be very confident you) are saying is "fuck you got mine". Income opens a lot of doors and letting a company (and those leading it) ride high off of your work just because the employee should be "living a happy life with what they have" is fucking bullshit.
If you're paying your employees porportional to the value they bring to the company (and both of you agree on this) there are no downsides to having transparent salaries. The system breaks down when the employees find out that the managers telling them "you don't need income to be happy" are making 5-10x everyone else while complaining that budgets are tight.
> How much money you make is, properly, strictly a conversation between the parties in the transaction.
If one party in a negotiation has extensive knowledge of the market and the other has a deliberately obfuscated view of the market, there is no way to have an equal negotiation. Which is what companies have relied on for years to systematically underpay certain classes of people.
This is true in every negotiation in every part of your life. What does equality even mean in such a context?
Epistemologically, there is no way for you to have enough context about either the other party or the other party's other counter-parties to inform your negotiation in a meaningful way. The only facts available to help you price your services are what others will pay for it, but this is not the same as pay transparency. Pay transparency is the price of other people's services, not yours, and it doesn't take into account your context.
Ethically, only you can know the value of the transaction - which is not the same as the amount of money exchanging hands. By that standard, employers are nuts to ever employ anyone, since employees don't pay their employers (except in North Korea and some unions). Only the employer can know the value they get out of you, in the totality of benefit your provide - though even then their information is very limited. And only you can know the value you get from your employer - again in the total benefit they provide both in cash and non-pecuniary factors.
To put it another way, you wouldn't ask for the same income from, say, Pornhub, Phillip-Morris, Google, and Watsi. So why do you think those companies should treat their employees like an undifferentiated mass of goop?
>To put it another way, you wouldn't ask for the same income from, say, Pornhub, Phillip-Morris, Google, and Watsi
I don't think this is common. I would try to get the same income from all of them -- the absolute maximum they are willing to pay me. I'm certain most of the people I've talked to professionally about compensation would feel the same way.
I’d be surprised to find someone who doesn’t adjust compensation requirements based on the full context of the opportunity.
If a person starts a company and foregoes the full salary they could otherwise earn, they are making this kind of choice.
If a person is looking at two otherwise equal offers for similar work at Pornhub or Google, it is hard to imagine taking the pornhub offer without a significant risk premium. You couldn’t get me to work at such company for any amount of compensation.
Just about everyone I’ve met will discount the products and services for things they believe are a good cause. I once worked at a nonprofit focused on low income kids, and experienced professionals (lawyers, engineers, accountants, others) would contribute significant time at steeply discounted rates or for free.
The value of a compensation package is unique to the individual. There is no way to compare two people in the full context of their individual desire for straight salary, risk in the form of stock or options, scope of influence, prestige of the firm, rarity of type of work, work hours, flexibility of hours, retirement and health benefits, culture, geography, and on and on and on.
I agree with your first paragraph, but I'm not sure about the second one.
My instincts tell me that labor is something with a price like anything else, and (aside from claims of unfairness) more transparency is better. The end result over time would presumably be the price of labor (salaries) would more closely resemble actual market value.
But I also consider myself to be a high performer, and the last thing I want when negotiating a raise is my boss to have to think about how the rest of the team will feel about it. I want him to care only about whether or not my services are worth it for the price I'm asking. And that just won't happen if it's all transparent.
I think people believe that pay transparency will result in increasing wages.
This has never happened in economic history. You cannot make two people equal by raising the low producer, you can only cut down the high producer.
When train transport prices were regulated because local trains were more expensive than long haul trains, the result was the raising of long haul prices.
Ultimately, I feel your argument boils down to "the context of my peers in my profession is not entirely identical to my own, therefore I can't use any information (such as their salary) to inform my own context". This seems obviously false, so surely I must be misunderstanding?
Yes, I've been thinking a lot about value the last few months and this is similar to the conclusion I reached. No one is paid based on the value of their output because it is nigh impossible to actually determine for most people!
So we use a proxy for value that is much more closely tied to an employee's leverage in the market place. Does your profession have a government granted monopoly (law/medicine)? Certification to entry? Are you a better negotiator? Do you have another higher job offer? Do you have personal relationships with a business's customers (sales)? All of these things are correlated with increased leverage and thus increased compensation.
Output is largely not. It may set a ceiling for compensation, but it is not as related to compensation as a persons' leverage.
And it follows that people with high amounts of leverage and comparatively low amounts of output will be "screwed" by salary transparency. They will have to justify why their leverage is worth more than someone else's output and that will make them unhappy.
I was once in a plane crash in which the wing of our small plane hit the mast of a sailboat that was motoring in front of the runway and we didnt see it. We impacted the seawall and flipped over onto land and slid upside down a few hundred feet.
The author's description of both not feeling his injuries until he tried to move as well as his own recognition of not being dead were spot on. I would have described it exactly the same way myself. I ended up with a broken foot and leg, but overall no lasting damage which was extremely lucky. Looking back on that experience is always incredibly surreal.
It is amazing how little you feel immediately after an accident. Mine wasn't so death-defying, but I did shatter my shoulder in a bicycle accident, and called a friend to come get me and drive me and my bike home. I did not realize I was hurt until he got there, and could not stand up or move the left half of my body. Then we decided to go to the hospital instead of my home. But for about the first 10 minutes, I thought I just was just scraped up a bit...
Back in high school, my ear got cut nearly in half in a car accident. I didn't feel a thing until the paramedic jammed and taped a styrofoam restraint against my ear as a precaution for neck injuries. Apparently, the full range of pain free neck motion vs the gouts of blood gushing from my ear wasn't convincing enough.
I didn't break anything, but I'm amazed that I didn't when I had a bicycle accident several years back.
I was doing something real stupid - mid 30's, showing off to my wife, on a bike with Amerityres; I had just gotten those tires installed. They're great tires - solid tires, but feel like they are aired up. Well worth the price.
What I wasn't told was that you shouldn't do any kind of "jumps" with your bike...
So there I am showing off, and I decide to ramp off this one section of sidewalk (that actually made a good ramp). I landed, and that's when things went to hell.
Ya see, Amerityres don't deform like a regular tire does. Instead - they come off the rim. I went a$$-over-teakettle.
To this day I don't know all what or how I landed, but I do know my knee took the brunt for some reason. I came within inches of slamming my head into a concrete block retaining wall for the raised bed of the neighbor's lawn that was next to the sidewalk. The bike was totally mangled. My wife was horrified.
Now - I knew I had taken a good spill, but I thought "well, dust yerself off, laugh about it" - which I did. I told her I was fine, go home and grab my pickup so I can get home. As she biked off, I decided I would get up, and walk the bike home. I slung it up on my shoulder, and started to walk (note, this was a cheap walmart bike, and weighed a bit). Everything seemed ok. She eventually got to me, I put the bike in the back, then slumped in the passenger seat. We went home, then went inside.
We started to discuss what we were going to have for dinner (KFC, if I remember right), when I looked down at my knee...
...it was swollen to the size of softball! It didn't really feel that good, and I could barely walk on it.
We went to urgent care that night. They xray'd me and told me nothing was broken. Gave me a script for vicodin (yay), wrapped up my knee, and gave me a crutch. I hobbled around for a few weeks, and eventually all was better, with no problems in the leg since.
But in the immediate aftermath of the crash, I had no idea just how bad I was injured, nor the amount of pain I would feel. I was just walking along, carrying my bike on my shoulder, like no big deal.
I guess a lot of accidents are like that, if serious enough; probably some kind of survival holdover tactic to allow you to "get away" and to safety after an injury (or worse) a predator attack.
3 mins after, a ski medic was shuffling pieces of bone around in my shoulder and saying "i think its dislocated" all without any pain but feeling very badly winded. Adrenaline is impressive. Morphine is the best
Christ, what a mess of an accident. You'd think there would be a practical solution to this that didn't involve operators having to worry about each other behaving correctly. Like moving the airport or shipping lane somewhere else so they don't interfere. Or the tower handling this via automation like a laser bouncing across the waterline and triggering an alert if a boat is too close to the shore.
Have you developed a fear of flying over this? Curious about the long term aspects at play here. Who was found at fault here? I'm assuming the boat captain.
1. Regarding solutions: This airport does not have a tower, so its up to the pilots to use the radio to announce intentions etc. To me, the core problem is that this does not loop in the boats and so there is no way to communicate. I think having the boats or some third party announce when a crossing is occurring would help. I also think, in response to this accident they moved the runway a few hundred feet further from the channel.
2. Regarding blame the NTSB actually ruled it pilot error, but I think that is myopic and only because there wasn't really anything else they could say since their jurisdiction doesnt extend into the rules of boats. Technically it is pilot error, but there were other errors as well from each side that all combined.
3. In terms of fear of flying, im actually okay. I had to fly twice per week for work for many years following this. Sometimes i'd have some flashbacks or bad thoughts, but overall don't have an issue. I've also been back up in a small plane just to do it. That said, I view commercial airplanes as completely safe and have no real fear with them. With small planes theres just so much can go wrong. The planes are not the issue, they are safe themselves. However, because of many small airports not having a tower, the lack of safety comes from having to deal with many other factors at play. I want to fly again later in life, its amazing and I have a love of planes. At this point though I feel like it would be pushing my luck so don't really do it.
In what way do you (or drzaiusapelord, if you see this) think that the boat operator was in any way at fault? There doesn't seem to be any indication of that in the NTSB report[1], and the newspaper report states that the boat was in the channel.
I don't really place blame with any one thing, but a mix of a bunch of factors. For the boat, they were motoring much closer to the side with the runway, instead of the side further away. Its not technically wrong, but if they were exercising any caution at all would have been farther away and likely out of our glideslope. On our side, we should have checked more deliberately that nothing was in our path. On base, I saw nothing, but the time we were on final I guess the boat had moved and was then in the way of the runway and neither I nor the pilot in command saw it.
Mostly though, I think there just should have been much more regulation given the number of parties operating in the same space.
It seems that an exclusion zone could and should have been established in the vicinity of this approach, but to say that the boat operator was not "exercising any caution at all" is quite a stretch. Boats traveling in channels have a set of regulations to follow, which include keeping to the side when not crossing.
It's amazing how little governance there is in the sky for general avaiation - aka small planes flown by private pilot license holders. When I studied to get my PPL it was the one thing I learned that shocked me.
There are NOTAMs (Notice to Airmen) that tell us about new structures that have been erected that could be problematic. NOTAMs also tell us if parts of the sky are off limits, for example if an airshow is on.
Other than that, and I am generalising a lot, there is no air collision avoidance in the majority of private planes here in the UK. Your two best mechanisms of defence are your eyes, and keeping one ear on the radio to get a feel for where everybody else is. If they're not too busy air traffic control will warn you about other planes in your vicinity, but it is not mandatory. There are also TCAS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...) systems you can bolt on to your plane, or might come with new planes, but they're not mandatory and I've yet to fly a plane that comes with one.
As for finding fault. That doesn't happen in air accident investigations. Air Accident Investigation Reports (https://www.gov.uk/aaib-reports) are specifically engineered to focus on the problem, and find a solution to prevent a repeat of it. They are not designed to apportion blame, but instead learn from the mistake and build mechanisms for ensuring that the same outcome is mitigated. That's not to say you won't be prosecuted but that's a separate process.
So at this airport, there is a shipping channel you fly over right before the airport (the airport is on an island). However, this sailboat was motoring closer to the airport side and didnt have any sails up making it harder to see. Also, we were in an Extra 300, which is a tail dragging aircraft so we couldnt see over the front cowling. We impacted the boat at 40 feet, so gives you a sense of how close it was to the start of the runway. I didnt notice anything until all of a sudden I saw a pole whiz past the right side of my field of view and heard a bang. Next, thing I know we are rotating upside down, I feel an impact, then watch as the ground slides by a foot above my head (the aircraft has a glass canopy). Was conscious the whole time. Ended up pinned between the aircraft and the ground hanging upside down in my harness. Just typing this makes me think, oh yeah that actually happened.
I have seen bad car accidents happen and been in minor ones.
I am curious about how you remember your perception of time. This is a simple description, but it is "fast not fast" when it is happening to you. "Yep this is happening. Oh, they are going 25. Yep they are going to hit me, that is going to be scary, possibly hurt, and cost a lot to repair. I hope this doesn't hurt my neck. I should put my feet flat. Crunch. Okay, that didn't hurt. The airbag didn't deploy. ..." In about 1 second.
Watching the accidents it is sort of surreal, just sort of flat. Bang. Spin. Stop. Airbags deflate. I immediately check surroundings, move out of danger, call 911, try to recall safety things, keep people in place if their injuries seem serious and their vehicle isn't on fire, but it all feels "real time" watching things. It just doesn't register the same in my brain.
Yeah id say this is pretty accurate. My memory of the event is non-continuous, meaning it is composed of very matter of fact thoughts and images not a continuous video. Overall, id say it is real time, though probably drawn out given the amount of thoughts I remember from what was probably 5-10 seconds of real time.
My direct memory is basically as follows:
1. Whoosh of pole, bang noise.
2. "Was that a sailboat"
3. See/feel the world rotate
4. "I think we are going to crash"
5. "I could die"
6. I don't actually remember the impact just flipping and all of a sudden seeing the ground above my head upside down
7. "I'm still alive...but its not over yet"
8. The glass shatters and we come to a stop
9. My friend asks if I am okay. I respond yes.
10. I quickly feel my face as i'm not sure how injured I am, there is some blood on my hands, but not a large amount.
11. I start to feel a burning sensation as some jet fuel and other chemicals are reacting with my skin
12. I start to panic as I realize the gravity of the situation and begin to call for help.
13. Just as I am beginning to really panic, I feel a hand reach in and the plane lifts up.
14. I undo my harness, as my leg moves for the first time, I realize a sharp pain in my foot.
15. I am pulled from the plane and dragged from under my arms with my legs facing the plane. I watch the plane get farther away as im dragged.
16. I am layed down and am instructed not to move until the paramedics come.
Could have easily happened at Albert Whitted across the bay in St Pete, also. Usually just hear about planes running off the runway and into the water.
Yeah this is a very tricky thing to do well as it will always be abused. Glassdoor has been struggling (they've raised a bunch of flat rounds) and there are so many cases i've seen of bad reviews, followed by HR getting wind of it and burying them in a ton of fake positive reviews.
I run a site called TransparentCareer (https://www.transparentcareer.com) and we've tried to make all of this data quantitative and verify that the person actually worked at the organization and what role they were in. We are getting ready to release a qualitative type review/question answering system using the same verification method and you will be able to see what department within the company the review is in reference to.
I would love to hear how people think this could be done better as we are currently developing the product and would love if it could solve this need in the best way possible. Is employee verification the biggest problem or is it something else?
The company I left a few years ago did this in order to obfuscate the rampant issues that were being unaddressed.
The recipe was to hire in a bunch of college grads, and while they're still nervous about their first corporate gig, have the VP of Human Resources email a demand that they post a glowing review.
And, when the rating inevitably continues to be hammered by negatives, instead of addressing the patterns within the negative reviews, HR would send that review demand to the overseas team(s) where the jobs were even more tenuously-held.
While HR made glaringly obvious positive reviews, themselves, of course. Pretty insidious.
The site looks neat, but a few things off the top of my head - I have to sign in with LinkedIn, but it doesn't import any of my profile. And when adding a role, "Nearest City" has predefined values, none of which are even within a 3 hour drive. When I enter the city I'm actually in, I'm told it can't be empty.
One of the worst thing Glassdoor did was to make it mandatory for people to give reviews before reading reviews. You can see the low quality reviews people leave as a result of this.
Who assumes that hermits are insightful? Thats definitely not my connotation and the fact that the author goes in with this supposition is weird.
The general vibe of the assumptions feels like a bunch of privileged millennials going to become hermits for 6 months and then talk about all they learned from their solitude on their Harvard Business School essays and how it shaped them into a better leader.
The assumption that hermits are insightful is probably derived from an image of some experienced meditating wise soul, contemplating in solitude the meaning of life. While people who genuinely want to meditate upon life might sometimes wish to do so in solitude, the converse is not true and finding a hermit will definitely not guarantee finding some enlightened spirit. I'd bet on there being a larger probability of finding someone who is mentally unstable, whose condition was made more extreme by the solitude.
This is still an area of active research [1,2]. The basic hexagonal symmetry comes from the hexagonal lattice of bulk ice. What is more intriguing is the global symmetry between individual dendrites. From reading some recent papers, I think the mechanism is as follows. The snowflake is small enough that although the temperature and water pressure surrounding it can change quickly, all its dendrites are always exposed to almost identical conditions at a given time, leading to a largely deterministic growth, hence the symmetry.
First, the symmetry is not perfect with most snow flakes, if you look closely. Second, I guess there are asymmetric flakes, but they are probably rare. I’m sure though that no current model can explain the distribution of the degree of symmetry, perhaps not even an order-of-magnitude guess.
"This process is much like tiling a floor in accordance with a specific pattern: once the pattern is chosen and the first tiles are placed, then all the other tiles must go in predetermined spaces in order to maintain the pattern of symmetry. Water molecules simply arrange themselves to fit the spaces and maintain symmetry; in this way, the different arms of the snowflake are formed."
Nature actually loves hexagons. They are efficient and all over the place. If you blow a bunch of separate bubbles, even they will form into hexagons where they are surrounded by other bubbles.
Watch the NASA video linked towards the end. Explains the H2O bonds and how the crystals always form to 6 sides. Temperature, Pressure, etc... trigger different patterns.
Consider a single free water molecule. As it moves around randomly it will hit the growing snowflake on a random side and get stuck to it, jiggling around a bit until it is in a position that is hard to get unstuck from. This creates the basic hexagonal shape of the snowflake.
Because of the huge number of water molecules floating around, it should be statistically likely that all sides of the snowflake will be hit and grow evenly. But the tips of the hexagon will be slightly more likely to be hit since they are protuding a little bit. Thus the tips will grow outwards and will be even more likely to get water molecules stuck to them. Eventually the tips will get large enough that molecules will stick to their sides, creating new growing branches. And those branches will eventually grow other branches and so on in a fractal manner.
The saturation of water molecules and the temperature are the conditions for how often the snowflake is hitnby water molecules and how much they jiggle around before getting stuck. As the snowflake falls through the air, these conditions change, which creates all the varied forms of snowflakes.
Most snowflakes aren't, the vast majority of snowflakes are of the "irregular" type. And to answer another person's question above "Why are snowflakes 2d", the irregular ones aren't, and there's a lot of symmetric ones that aren't 2D either[1].
The ones people like to photograph are the symmetric 2D ones, so there's just a lot of selection bias going on. But, the ones that are symmetric, are that way because all of the branches experienced the same environment on the way down. Most of them are not perfectly symmetric, and differ quite a bit, but photographers tend to select only the most symmetric ones.
The website in [1] has an overview of how to get started in snowflake photography if you want to give it a try. I've done it quite a bit myself, but unfortunately I don't get the opportunity very often.
"Ice crystals are like a six-sided prism. This prism grows as more ice molecules stick to its faces. It turns out that under conditions found in common snowstorms, some facets in XY plane tend to grow much faster than the facets along the main axis of the crystal. As a result, snowflakes usually end up looking like flat pancakes with many finger-like branches"
The edges grow much faster because "molecularly flat regions... have fewer dangling chemical bonds and are thus less favorable attachment sites [for condensing molecules]." Also, snowflakes can take on 3D column shapes depending on humidity and temperature. See http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/publist/AmSci2007.pdf
If I start with the presupposition that Mr. McCarthy is an intelligent and broadly knowledgeable individual (given his corpus of work I think it's a safe place to start), I can chalk it up to one of two things:
1. It's a device to get the point across, though clumsy and innacurate to people familiar with an evolving area of study
2. He isn't up to date with the various studies that certainly show something akin to a type of consciousness. But I bet he'd be open to the notion...
It may be a tad early to say that the statement is wrong. It might be technically correct that plants don't have unconscious but they have something we'd classify differently.
I just chalk up to a kludgy device, I get the point he was trying to make- at least I think I do.
I don't think you answer the parent's concern, which I think is "why assume that all animals have a subconscious" instead of "why assume plants don't have one".
What about jellyfish or oysters? They don't have a brain and have very limited sensory and movement abilities. If they have an unconscious then why not carnivorous plants?
Yes exactly, I think its really the opposite though. Either the definition of unconscious is very loose and then I think plants would have it too, or its more related to have some sort of central nervous system of some level of complexity and in that case many animals wouldnt have an unconscious.
@Chris2048: "conscious[ness] is a disputed work, and things like "Have scientists discovered the secret of consciousness" etc all the time. Until the definition, and underlying semantic assumptions, are clear, don't build too many linguistic castles on top of it."
Modded into invisibility, looks like you violated one of the sacred tenets of Hacker News :)
Though I do notice a lot of innocuous comments get down-voted, for some reason. I wish there was more to hold down-voters to account for unreasonable mods..
So people mine bitcoin, which is really just validating the transactions on the network, and they get paid in bitcoin for doing so. However, they will receive fewer and fewer bitcoin over time because of the fixed supply. At some point doesn't mining become unprofitable, causing the network to crash. And if the price drops doesn't this exacerbate this problem? Would love some clarity here.