CleanedStar

The conspiracy buffs are too busy howling in protest at the thought that their government could uncover how long they spent on the phone with their dear aunt. Let me break this to you gently. The government is not interested in your conversations with your aunt, unless, of course, she is a key terrorist leader.

Let me break this to you gently. The president of the United States would never send burglars into the opposing political parties national headquarters to ransack the place and conduct espionage, in addition to many other covert and illegal actions, in an attempt to force the next presidental election his way. If the FBI and press began uncovering this, he would never abuse executive powers to strongarm the FBI, have congressmen of the same party attack television media licenses of the media companies reporting this etc. Oh yaa, this actually did happen. Within my lifetime.

It's good to hear the CIA can be trusted. In the 1980s, Congress banned the US from sending money to terrorists who were fighting to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua. Terrorists who killed Americans like Ben Linder. Oliver North joined the National Security Council and began secretly funding these terrorists in violation of Congressional mandate. When it became public he was doing this and Congress began investigating, North testified CIA director William Casey shred all documents pertaining to his illegal activity, so that Congress could not find out what had happened.

The average American has no idea what it means when it leaks out that fibre optic beam splitters are making records of our conversations and data connections, or how something like XKeyscore work. We have a better idea of what is actually happening in this respect, which is why we have some extra concern. And a more realistic view of what is happening, despite what this former-CIA Rand Corp. apparatchik says.

But capitalism works based not just on what you can produce, but what you can withhold. It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem: if anyone can hit a "clone chair" button for zero cost, few would pay to sustain enough professional chair makers.

You contradict yourself once here. You say capitalism is based on what can be withheld. Another word for that might be scarcity. In 1932 Lionel Robbins said "Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." This is still the modern mainstram definition of capitalism.

Then you say: > if anyone can hit a 'clone chair' button for zero cost, few would pay to sustain enough professional chair makers

The idea that value comes from the labor of chair makers is a Marxist idea. You are making a Marxist argument here. It also contradicts your first argument. You say value comes from scarcity (modern mainstream economists agree), then you say value comes from labor (which is what Marx said) which contradicts the first argument.

You're trying to make a Marxist argument for capitalism (Actually Marx did make an argument for capitalism - he said it was better than feudalism and slavery, but that's not what I mean here).

You should go on the web and read about the subjective theory of value, and then about the labor theory of value. You argue STV in the first sentence and then LTV in the second. They can not both be right, their definition of value is contradictory.

I should note you're not the first person I see making this error. As things become digital they lose their scarcity. I see all kinds of odd statements come out of this. You're not alone in this. But across the entire political spectrum, from far left to far right, all serious students of the economy agree only one side can be right, value comes from either subjective marginal/scarce/utility reasons or from a certain type of labor, but it is either one or the other. You flip back and forth between a capitalist-supporting argument and a Marxist argument. A Marxist argument for capitalism. I see this more and more, and I find it odd.

A century and a half ago, Karl Marx said the only force outside of nature which could create value was labor. This was not a new concept, but in line with what economists before such as Adam Smith had thought.

A counter-argument arose from what he may have called the "capitalist hegemons" that value arose through supply and demand and marginal utility. That if there was enough demand for something, prices would rise and a supply would come into being.

Yet nowadays these hegemons seem to be saying something different. There is a demand for IT talent. There are billions of people in the world, so it seems obvious that if you set hours at 40 a week and then raise the salary enough, eventually the demand will be filled.

The bottom line is they don't want to raise the salary.

It is possible other factors are in the way. If, to take one example, Pell Grants were higher and easier to get, maybe there would be more CS graduates. The opposite is happening with Pell Grants - they have been cut back, and are covering less college costs than they have in history.

This means less CS graduates. This means you'll have to pay more for the ones who come out, because less are coming out.

It's a strange contradictory thinking. Employers preach supply and demand, yet think it does not apply to their desire for engineers. Set hours at 40 a week and pay for them. If you want people to work more, you'll have to pay more.

There is not a shortage of engineers. There's just a flood of people who want a very accomplished, knowledgeable engineer, and want them to work on boring, brain-dead projects for 60 hours a week, and to pay them nothing and treat them like junk.

I have 10,000 jobs open right now. I need experts in Java, Python etc. I'll pay you minimum wage. You need to work 12 hours a day. See, I just added 10,000 new job openings to the shortage. How come I can't find anyone to fill these jobs?

Absolutely.

Several years ago I was at a company and we were hiring for a position. One guy came in, who was maybe in his mid-50s. His technical skills were excellent, he could answer any question thrown at him in detail. Aside from that he was a normal, genial guy with a solid resume - we has passed on another guy with good tech knowledge but who did not act normal. I was desperate to have the position filled as people had quit and I was handling a large load.

Two managers said they didn't want to hire him. I really protested this - we had interviewed so many people and had finally found someone decent. I said he was perfect, what more could they want, what was wrong with him? I asked that last question repeatedly. Finally one said, "I think if we called him up in the middle of the night to fix a problem, he would be unhappy with that". Months later we hired a guy in his 20s, who had less technical talent.

That's the position companies are in. They pass over perfect candidates like this guy in his 50s, and then bemoan they can't find candidates.

These companies fund think tanks who have economists who tell us that value is determined by supply and demand, that if there is enough demand for something, the price for it will rise until a supply comes about. This is their philosophy, yet now they're saying there is a shortage of engineers. It is total BS. Engineers are being overworked and underpaid. People talk about high engineer salaries, they don't talk about how engineers have to pay for their own college degrees, do all that studying, then go to work, make a starting salary, then have death marches on projects etc.

Engineers are usually undercompensated for the work they do. The only exceptions to this are during tech bubbles (say 1999), but those only last for a short while. They're also made up for on the other side by tech slumps, where IT workers employable during normal times, but perhaps without a college degree, are out of work.

First world problems...right now the US is arming Syrian rebels so more Syrians can get blown to bits. You're surprised that the culture perpetrating atrocities around the world like that would also hurt the feelings of some upper middle class white "creative type"? Let me break out my violin. What happened, you opened up the window of your ivory tower and didn't like what wafted in? Take off your rose-colored glasses and take a look around you.

It is little surprise then that Western liberals no longer breed above replacement rates. Denigrating motherhood is not the way for a people to last the aeons of time. I believe the future of the West is profoundly more conservative than the present, because Darwin. Liberalism is a suicidal ideology.

It doesn't really work like that. India has over 1 billion people, and I'm sure "traditional" lower caste women there "breed above replacement rates" as you put it.

On the other side you might have an upper middle class, white, historically mainline Protestant couple living in the US. Both have a sibling, both have advanced degrees, both have parents who went to college. Their families have slowly been acquiring wealth for generations. The couple will have two "replacement rate" kids.

On the other hand, the lower caste Indian woman has more than one child die in infancy. The family does not always have enough food to eat every day.

Yet in your mind, the Indian family is a winner because of "Darwin", because the western liberals have a "suicidal ideology". But who would doubt the upper middle class American son would not want to trade places with the Indian kid, and there's a much more significant chance that the Indian kid would trade places with the white kid.

You seem to see some "contempt" and a "misogynist" tone in the parent which I do not. You're advocating a way of life and morality and such that belongs to history, and to rural farmers in that history. The US is losing its industrial jobs never mind its agricultural jobs. Traditional life in the US is Michael Moore's "Roger & Me" vision of 1950s blue collar unionized industrial workers driving their cars back to the suburbs. A way of life going away with Detroit's bankruptcy. Your vision of women only raising kids, and more than two as you say, is not traditional, it's almost ancient tradition. It's like, Pennsylvania farmers circa late 17th century. The Amish and Mennonites in Pennyslvania live like you're talking. But most of America considers it rather antiquated.

I'm an American, and my e-mails, text messages, phone calls, and I guess even this post I am making right now is being eavesdropped on by the NSA. Snowden informed me of this.

The fourth Amendment to the Constitution is: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

When I was young, there was a president named Richard Nixon. It's probable he sent a bunch of burglars to the Democratic National Committee campaign headquarters at the Watergate hotel to do some espionage to try to fix the election his way. It's known he tried to illegally cover up this break-in - there's an audio tape of him doing this. He also was involved in a more extensive and illegal effort to fix the election and eavesdrop and conduct espionage on his political opponents. Later revelations showed the FBI was going beyond its mandate as well, sometimes to the ignorance of the Congress (such as an FBI-run political campaign against Martin Luther King Jr.) This happened in my lifetime, so fears of such things are not out of place. The tyrannical English king acted the same way in the 18th century, it's probably why fresh in the founding fathers midns they put such things in the Constitution.

Chomsky praises Snowden, and opposes bureaucratic attacks on the fourth amendment consitutional rights of Americans. For this you call him "un-American". Supporting the fourth amendment constitutional rights of innocent Americans to not have their fourth amendment rights violated is anti-American?

Here is what Chomsky says about the charge of "anti-American":

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20021209.htm

Chomsky: The concept "anti-American" is an interesting one. The counterpart is used only in totalitarian states or military dictatorships, something I wrote about many years ago (see my book Letters from Lexington). Thus, in the old Soviet Union, dissidents were condemned as "anti-Soviet." That's a natural usage among people with deeply rooted totalitarian instincts, which identify state policy with the society, the people, the culture. In contrast, people with even the slightest concept of democracy treat such notions with ridicule and contempt. Suppose someone in Italy who criticizes Italian state policy were condemned as "anti-Italian." It would be regarded as too ridiculous even to merit laughter. Maybe under Mussolini, but surely not otherwise.

Actually the concept has earlier origins. It was used in the Bible by King Ahab, the epitome of evil, to condemn those who sought justice as "anti-Israel" ("ocher Yisrael," in the original Hebrew, roughly "hater of Israel," or "disturber of Israel"). His specific target was Elijah.

It's interesting to see the tradition in which the people you refer to choose to place themselves. The idea of leaving America because one opposes state policy is another reflection of deep totalitarian commitments. Solzhenitsyn, for example, was forced to leave Russia, against his will, by people with beliefs very much like those you are quoting.

you can't train people to be stars Just like you can't train people to be star athletes. Except you can. Star athletes get free college tuition. Star college athletes get sent to training camps and minor leagues where they get paid and are trained on their game so they can make it to the professionals. They go through training there as well.

A tuition free university, University of Helsinki, is what Linux came out of. Free CS classes. A star was trained there.

The mentality of "you can't train stars" is bogus...it's more "we don't want to invest anything and want everything handed to us free and easy, and if we don't get it that way we'll complain about a shortage of stars"

It's great that it's been deduced that organizer labor is behind this article, and thus it's not neutral and has a hidden agenda. I'm sure someone who takes a 6% stake of high-growth companies for $14,000 is completely neutral with no hidden agenda. Also it's false that "none of these programmers are unionized". Programmers are represented by unions such as the IAMAW, CWA etc. It's possible 3 person startups have no union representation, but that's not out of the norm.

During the twentieth century, US economists promoting the values of those controlling production talked about how production was fundamentally controlled by laws of supply and demand, and economic theories thinking otherwise were silly.

Yet flying in the face of that is this idea of a "high tech worker shortage". If there really could be a shortage of high tech workers for longer than a short period, than the bedrock idea of supply and demand are bogus. Even miniscule hurdles like visas would mean nothing - if there is a mass of talent in India and a worldwide demand for that talent, then if visas were a problem, multinationals and trans-continental consulting firms would just set up there.

There is no high-tech worker shortage. There's a bunch of "idea guys" sitting around who think how much money they could make if they could hire a bunch of rock-star programmers on the cheap.

Economists don't like protectionist unions.

He who pays the piper calls the tune.

Relying on Neumanns Behemoth, which depicted modern capitalism as Nazisms main basis, they argued that the revitalization of German democracy depended on a socialist overhaul of the countrys economy, failing to anticipate the possibility of a fresh recalibration of capitalism with liberal democracy, along the lines that emerged after the war in the Federal Republic of Germany...

Huh? First off, Germany was divided in two after WWII, something almost no one anticipated. There was no German renewal because there was no Germany.

As far as the FRG being capitalism with liberal democracy...capitalism - the FRG was dominated by works councils, Mitbestimmungsgesetz and the like since World War II, and to some extent still is. How the economy worked in the FRG after World War II is closer to how it worked in Yugoslavia than how it worked in the United States. Although even in the US how the US economy ran under the New Deal/Square Deal/Great Society into the 1960s is different than how it is now.

As far as liberal democracy...the FRG reinstated the Nazi ban on voting for the communist party...some democracy - you're OK, as long as you vote for a pro-capitalist party. This was a time when French and Italian workers almost voted in communist governments, something American's today tend to forget. The FRG's federal Intelligence service was run by Reinhard Gehlen and his crew, the Confederation of German Employers' Associations and Confederation of German Employers' Association were run by former SS officer Hanns-Martin Schleyer (later kidnapped and killed by the Red Army Faction). Not all that much changed in western Germany after 1945.

In a 2001 story, the New York Times reported that there were 23,068 reported pickpocketing incidents in the city in 1990, amounting to nearly $10 million in losses. Five years later, the number of reported incidents had fallen by half, and by the turn of the millennium, there were less than 5,000. Today, the NYPD doesn't even maintain individual numbers on pickpocketing.

NYPD crime statistics become more and more bogus every year. Just Google "NYPD statistics" and read the articles which pop up on the front page. Every mayor and police chief wants to point to statistics showing that crime is falling, and promotions and such are all related to statistics looking good, so naturally enough, the statistics are being fudged all over the place.

There may be more or less pickpockets now than in decades past, but NYPD statistics are nothing to go by.

what professionalism means. It's less about the neckties and watercooler politics he imagines and more about treating your peers with basic respect and human dignity

What planet did you just descend from? And what are these "peers" that exist in our profession? In my profession I have a team lead who doles out work, with a manager over him, with a manager over him and so on. The basic structure is no different than that of a dictatorship.

What's this "basic respect and human dignity" you find in your corporation which you can't find on lkml? Steve Ballmer throwing a chair across the room when a developer says he's leaving because he is going to "fucking kill Google?" Who are we to look to for these examples of professionalism and basic respect and human dignity - Steve Jobs? Larry Ellison? Who is the one with the vivid imagination? I hope you never have to keep the network and desktops of a Wall Street trading floor running.

Back in 1999, when VC was handed out like candy and blockbuster IPOs happened every day and companies were desperate to hire even middling IT workers, I suppose a veneer of theoretical collegiality seemed to hang over dot-com's for a moment. When 2000 and 2001 rolled around, and a lord of the flies atmosphere appeared at these same startups, it was a different story.

[Sarah Lacy] said the BART strike exacerbated what she sees as a philosophical divide in the Bay Area. People in the tech industry feel like life is a meritocracy. You work really hard, you build something and you create something, which is sort of directly opposite to unions.

I'm a programmer in the tech industry, and I feel that life is an aristocracy - we the workers, whether being at our desks 10 PM on a Saturday, or doing a night shift on BART are the ones building and creating something. The money goes to the heirs - the VC limited partners, the rentiers who get dividend checks from Apple, Microsoft, Qualcomm etc. They do not work, they create nothing, they're parasites off of us who do work.

It's the emperor has no clothes. VC limited partner heirs who've never worked a day in their life hand her a big, fat check. Then she claims the BART workers out on the job at 11 PM, being hassled by crazies are not hard workers. Shuttling people back and forth to where they need to go, they're not part of the wealth creation process apparently.

Up is down, black is white. It's amazing what these parasites and their myrmidons like Lacy spew out. People who do work are accused of not working hard enough, by those who never do any work and their paid lackeys. Saying workers don't work is hegemonically acceptable and normal, saying it's nuts like I am is radical. Too non-normative. What a load of bullshit.

If technically Poland was under Soviet occupation, then technically Italy was under US occupation.

There's much more of a case for Italy being a US satellite state than Poland being and independent state under foreign occupation. There was no independent Poland in the century before World War I. Only the two decades of upheaval between World War I and II allowed for some Polish independence.

US troops occupied Italy and are still in Italy today. Not that those who ran the US economy disapproved of what Mussolini had been doing. As Fortune magazine memorably said in 1934: "The wops are unwopping themselves". Plenty of US investor money went to Italy, and Mussolini even had some support in US liberal circles. Then World War II happens. Northern Italy, which the fascists had to work to keep down, mostly liberated itself in the days and weeks before Allied troops even arrived there. Then in 1948 the US very openly rigged elections so the Christian Democrats would win. Gladio was set up as a secret government in case the left was voted to power. As late as 1976, Italian voters voted 34.4% for the communists, 9.6% for the socialists (who still had the hammer and sickle emblem), 1.5% for the ultra-left Proletarian Democracy etc. Secret P2 lodges pulled strings at high levels, strategia della tensione was put into effect with bombings by the far right blamed on the left, with leads back to the highest levels of government. US intelligence had a massive involvement in Italy. It was no less a "satellite state" than any eastern European country.

Hungary was called a satellite state of the USSR even though it had had an independent communist revolution after World War I, put down by foreign intervention. Hungary was independent of the USSR until 1956, when the right took over and announced its desire to join NATO. England and France were invading Egypt around this time.

Yes.

One must remember that pre-colonization India, say, the Mughal empire, included not only India, but modern Pakistan and Bangladesh of course. Not a central point, but an important one.

In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith goes on about "the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies". Acts of Parliament in 1700 and 1720 forbid import of fabric from India. Later on, England began forcing English textiles in India itself with various laws. England purposefully destroyed the thriving textile market of India (again India being India/Pakistan/Bangladesh in the time before and during the British occupation).

Yes, a VC is looking to unshackle the middle class, thank you! Someone is looking out for the US middle class, Scott Kupor, managing partner Andreessen Horowitz apparently.

Barf. Who is dumb enough to swallow this? Sounds like an echo of Bill O'Reilly's "I look out for the little guy".

You tend to hear this term "middle class" from on high a lot, as it means absolutely nothing. What is the middle class in the middle of? Apparently people with income of $200k or over, or assets of $1 million+ are not middle class in his definition. Excluding worth of primary residence of course, which he neglected to mention. I guess this means doctors are not middle class. They must be in the upper class - a doctor is in the same class as Alice Walton, who inherited $26 billion. What is the dividing line between the middle class and the class under it? What class are janitors in, middle, lower? Class used to mean ones relation to production, but that doesn't fit into the kind of babble people like to put out.

To the big point of why this is nonsense. If you look at the Survey of Consumer Finances done by the Federal Reserve, that 4% of Americans he speaks of are the ones who hold the majority of stocks, the majority of bonds and whatnot. Just look through one of these Federal Reserve papers and you'll see that, other than primary residences, this top 4% own almost everything. Outside of primary residences, the next 5% to 20% swallow up pretty much everything the top 4% does not get. Which is not much, relatively. The bottom 80% have virtually no wealth outside of primary residences.

The idea that the median American will benefit from investing in VC is ludicrous. The median American does not have the money to invest and benefit from this. Stocks, dividends and profits are a weapon against the median American. They are dependent on the stock owners, the small top minority, getting the lion's share of the wealth created by the median American. If American workers had strong unions and most of the created wealth in corporations went to wages, not dividends, this would hurt the owners of stocks. The weaker the median American is in this equation, the better the stock does. The median American is all about wages, the crumbs of VC he might pick up are almost nothing. He has no money to invest, so even if his shares go up 20% a year, it amounts to very little.

Obviously, this is yet another thing to benefit the very wealthy. But to sell it, people have to say it's for the middle class. Whereas the middle class, whatever that means, is actually hurt when the wealth they create at companies goes to profit and not wages. It is coming out of their pockets - they create the wealth, then it goes out to heirs like Alice Walton in the form of dividends. Or payments to limited partners from VC. And the like.

Obviously there is very little rational analysis or response on HN to this article or the issues it covers. It's obvious from the wording of the replies of those who are more sympathetic and those who are less sympathetic to those mentioned in the article. Look at the wording:

"poor choices...empathy...choices have consequences...we make mistakes...morality of altruism", "The country I grew up in....Jobs are the result of innovation and entrepreneurship", "morally competent", "how much of your income would YOU like to give to the heroes"

Not much rational analysis. Just a sermon, or morality tale, or an abbreviated Ayn Rand screed against altruism, which might as well be a religious sermon.

Poverty is an essential cornerstone of the current economic system.

There have been many economic systems over the millenia - hunter-gather societies, then slave societies, then feudal societies, then capitalist societies. From the philosopher Hegel to Francis Fukuyama we've had intellectuals say our current economic system is the last one. From the 19th century on, some have said other economic systems might become predominant in the future, particularly socialist ones.

Capitalism is the only economic system where poverty is necessary. When a company's revenues exceeds its capital expenses, the money has only two places to go - profit or wages. If there was full employment, strong unions, no laws banning secondary strikes like Taft-Hartley etc., workers would get more and more in wages until profits disappeared. When companies have the lever to send workers into poverty, they become happy "just to have a job". This allows for companies to make workers work longer hours for less money, or to put in a more strenuous effort during the time worked.

Everything can be discussed rationaly, but when discussing how poverty exists in capitalism in a manner it did not in feudalism, or prior economic systems (or possible future ones), words like "morality" are brought out. People can rationally discuss VCs and valuations and options. But rationality has to go out the window when discussing how poverty exists in the current economic system, we have to get a sermon, rational discussions of the topic are not allowed.

Also a look at history is not allowed. That our economic system is just one in a chain of systems, and that "socialism" is still a bugaboo of the people moving the levers of our economic system is a sign of this. Capitalism is new historically as a dominating system, and has very shaky elements, so you want to make people forget that...in Europe countries are still under feudal trappings. That in the the 1930s, the capitalist west had its factories lying dormant while the USSR couldn't build factories fast enough. And so forth. You want to forget that the property in the US was stolen from Indians, or even the property in Poland or Ireland stole from the Polish and Irish. You want to forget Africans were dragged to the US in chains and set to work in stolen Indian property. That even the property accumulated from the profit made off these people after is similary ill-gained. And that this all happened historically recent, relatively. History has to be forgotten to, even fairly recent history. It's a topic which can't bare rational analysis or a look at recent history. Some type of moral sermon is all that's called for. Not just the "heartless conservatives" but the "bleeding-heart liberals". Mawkish calls for the poor to be fed for moral reasons is just as silly as moralistic claims that the poor are lazy.

This piece is so awful, no wonder it's a Wall Street Journal op-ed...the WSJ is a good paper, but its editorial page was always screwy, even before Rupert Murdoch bought the Journal.

Woolsey of course does what you'd expect - when caught in government/corporate espionage, he throws up whatever dirt was found out to change the subject. His examples are a laugh. Bribing Brazilian officials? Woolsey and his cronies had been working to keep Brazil a dictatorship until 15 years before he wrote this piece. Saudi corruption? Woolsey had worked it along with his companions so that the US had its army occupying Saudi Arabia in 2000 against the will of most Saudis, who lived and still live under a US-backed dictatorship. It took a plane through the Pentagon and two through the WTC to get the US occupation out of Saudi Arabia.

Then he has contempt for the "statist" Airbus. How is Airbus more statist than Boeing, which is completely dependent on the government dole, to manufacture aircraft which most strategic planners say are not of much use in the modern type guerrilla wars the US is now working to counter?

Europe has always been a laboratory for innovative technology - Linux, MySQL, SuSE, QT, Rovio, SAP, Siemens, CERN and the world wide web. Eastern Europe is a treasure trove of technical talent, if not established technical companies. It's possible the Bay Area is the ultimate destination for much tech monetization - even US cities bemoan this. But plenty of technology gets invented in Europe.

The whole essay is rife with upper class Panglossian obliviousness. Right before he talks about economic inequality he says "When I graduated from college in 1986, there were essentially two options: get a job or go to grad school". Only 8% of over-25 Americans have a graduate degree today, and that percentage was even lower 27 years ago. From this view of the world, people going to night school to get their Bachelors don't exist, because these people didn't go to the $40k a year college you went to. For most people in the world, someone at 21 with Bachelors in hand deciding on either grad school or a professional career, is already someone who is living the life of Riley.

There's nothing incorrect in his statement, although it does give an idea of the bubble of the world he lives in. Income inequality clearly all is at the level of VCs and founders in his world - even the upper middle class programming minions don't come into consideration. Income inequality connections clearly do not come to mind in the case of, say, the US army marching into Los Angeles in 1992 to restore order among the poor and working poor there. It's a kind of solipsism you can read about in the unofficial minutes of the councils of the Czar's ministers in 1916. The earthquake in class relations coming is not in minor percentage differences between enormously wealthy VC limited partners and upper middle class founders. It's what happens when the world economy comes to a stop like it did in the late 1920s. We got a small preview of it in 2007 and 2008. In the years and decades ahead, financial shenanigans on Wall Street will eventually lead to an economy that will not start up again, no matter how much priming. THEN is when we will start seeing real shifts in the relations of production.

"This trend is one of the main causes of the increase in economic inequality in the US since the mid twentieth century. The person who would in 1950 have been the general manager of the x division of Megacorp is now the founder of the x company, and owns significant equity in it."

Boy, is this a load of bollocks. I guess the 20th century war against socialism ("the means of production in the hands of those who work it") and worker's organizations and parties doesn't come much into play into these analyses. Up to the bickering a few months ago in Wisconsin with Walker - although we're so far down the road, that example isn't very useful as a specific case.

Yes, the entrepreneurial middle manager starting his own business, this is the source of income inequality! Meanwhile, half the Forbes 400 inherited their way onto the list. Where's the plucky entrepreneur in that equation? Even "self-made" people like Warren Buffett had a congressman father and a grandfather with a chain of stores. Not exactly a guy pulling himself up by his bootstraps.

I mean, the fact that this speech was made to investors is a signal. Not the tone, but the fact that it's investors who are the ones who sit and hear these things. The programmer in the trenches, working 50-60 hours a week creating wealth is not a part of these decisions on production.

There's a good documentary called "Born Rich" that is on Youtube right now. I would recommend people watch it. This is who the money goes to, not the plucky, hard-working entrepreneur. Blogs are filled with stories of angels and VCs backstabbing founders. As is HN. And the founders usually get the best deal in the company, far better than schlub programmers. Even hackers of the caliber of Jamie Zawinski have attested to this.

This idea of income inequality happening because some hard-working founder gets all of the money is a complete farce. Propaganda even.

If we want to really get into a discussion of this - just who are the "limited partners" the VCs are raising money from, and where did they get their money? We always see a fresh-faced Mark Zuckerberg or Drew Houston, or a Paul Graham or even a Ron Conway, or John Doerr or Michael Moritz. But who are the limited partners they're raising money from? Who is calling the shots on how money gets spent?

"The shift is occurring so quickly, and the potential costs are so high, that some fear rural China is once again the site of radical social engineering."

Yesterday Detroit announced it would be defaulting on billions of debt - just the latest chapter of what is happening in that city, in that state, in the entire old Steel Belt. In the 1960s, Detriot was the center of US innovation and the economic engine of the country - we all know what it is nowadays.

Why is this not "radical social engineering?" The US unemployment rate is currently at a level that has not been seen since five months in 1992, and before that not since 1984. Why is that not radical social engineering? The amount of hypocrisy and double standards in the US media is mindblowing...

The Wikipedia article is correct and covers most of it. Technically it is correct the current list is from 1982. But really the list surfaced in 1950.

Another Wikipedia article to check out is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarran_Internal_Security_Act#... . The provisions of that act are more-or-less the same thing - a reversal of the idea of habeas corpus. It grants the executive branch power to indefinitely detain masses of political dissenters without trial. The provision that allows this was proposed by the champion of US liberalism at the time, Hubert Humphrey.

That 1950 list is the 1982 list and is also the current list. Of course the names change as times go by, but the purpose is the same. For the government it is a good idea - it worked pretty well for Germany and Italy - you get rid of troublesome nationalities and political dissenters. It works well and makes a lot of sense for them. Of course I myself don't condone it.

It's obvious you've been little involved in "activism", and thus know little about it. Many things bely this, including usage of the word activism - most serious "activists" I know call themselves organizers, not activists. Activist is a word used by detractors and the media - it gives an image of a solitary person, maybe on some ego trip, while organizer implies a group effort. An example being Obama who, rightly or wrongly, caleld himself a community organizer, not a community activist.

The most common view I come across in people working in organizing is that abandoning your job and going to work in organizing full time is almost always a bad idea. It's considered a bad idea on so many different levels, I wouldn't know where to start.

It's not egalitarian - you create a division between "activists" and regular working people who are not, in the OP's opinion, the real deal since they don't work on activism 100% of the time.

It's more constricted - when your paycheck depends on some government agency, or some NGO, or some union or the like, you're more constrained. You have to obey the hierarchy and your behavior affects your paycheck. This changes your behavior to where you're thinking less of the work and more on your paycheck and the desires of the hierarchy giving you your paycheck. If the EPA gets massive budget cuts someone working there is out of luck - but not someone with a solid job who does environmental work in their spare time.

It's more sustainable - during upsurges of social change, positions open up to work for causes. As the zeitgeist changes, most of these positions dry up. Someone with a decent job can be in things for the long haul.

It's a way of turning off activism - it's the armchair people who aren't even armchair activists who say you have to be 100% devoted 24/7 or it doesn't count. It's a way to discourage organizing efforts, and a way to allay the fact that they themselves are part of the problem. It's the oldest circular reasoning of the lazy person - they want to do absolutely nothing, so they invent the bogus idea that they have to do it 24/7 or it doesn't count, and since this is unreasonable they do nothing. This isn't reality, it's a lazy person's circular reasoning, and this is fairly obvious to all.

You're talking about something you seem to know little about. Is Noam Chomsky not a real activist since he studies computer and human language at MIT? Was Edward Said not an activist since he was a professor of English literature at Columbia? Virtually everything you said is obviously bogus to anyone who has actually been involved in activism.

"betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed."

Actually, if you look at the Constitution, it says - "The Congress shall have power...To declare War...To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years...To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions...To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia"

If the US was going to have a permanent standing army, an intelligence service monitoring its citizens and so forth, why specifically limit appropriations to two years? Why place power in Congress's hands? Why have citizen's militias repelling foreign invasions?

The US has a professional army more akin to Czarist Russia than anything the founder's imagined.

I never really thought that much about Ai Weiwei, but what he just said is right. There's really no fundamental difference between the kinds of monitoring the government of China does and what the US is doing with things like PRISM.

Particular qualifications to address economic theory? What is this, quantum mechanics?

There is a fight and a struggle over how the pie is divided up. To call the arguments around this "theories" which one must be "qualified" to discuss, is a laugh. It's more akin to theologians arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Most economic "theories" boil down to who the money should go to. In your world, only people with "particular qualifications" are allowed to have a say on this topic. Also, what a surprise, the "qualified" people always say that what should be done is what is good for the heirs who bankroll their think tanks, endow their chair at their schools and whatnot.

There hasn't been any mainstream study of economics for well over a century. There has never been actually. In the time of Adam Smith, there was an area of study called political economy in which, right or wrong, there was an honest attempt to study the topic. Although honest mainstream inquiry stopped before it happened, when "political economy" was tossed and "econom-ics" (like phys-ics? mathemat-ics? genet-ics?) came into being, the field had already been completely overrun by BS.

Read Adam Smith, Ricardo, Say, Mill etc. if you're interested. There is no living mainstream "economist" who is not a complete BS artist.

Wikipedia doesn't have an emergency. Jimbo Wales had large ideological axes from the beginning, including topics such as who started Wikipedia. As Wales once said that conservative "[Friedrich von] Hayek's work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project". Wales went from running an Ayn Rand mailing list to running Wikipedia...but he's totally neutral of course.

As an example of this bias, Wales appointed the rabid editor JayJG to the highest authority, the ArbCom in mid-2005. He was voted out in early 2006 - but Wales used his power to reappoint him any how. Most of Wales's political position pushing has been behind the scenes, but here it was blatantly obvious.

I got tired of this sort of thing and pulled back from Wikipedia around that time. I'm very skeptical of the idea that everything has changed since Wales has less power now though. It's kind of like when the military takes over in a coup, kills off or exiles the opposition, and then holds an election. Once you have sculpted the infrastructure enough to your advantage, you don't need to be as heavy-handed any more. I guess I would be one of the exiles (and some excellent editors threw in the towel over this sort of thing - very educated people who could write well).

People can take note of this - Stalin fought the Nazis and liberated Auschwitz and other concentration camps, with over ten million Russian soldiers sacrificing their lives in the process. So who does this person say Jews hate? Stalin. Reflect on this gratitude the next time you hear someone lamenting that the world did not care when the German right began mistreating Jews...

In another context, ask any Palestinian what he thinks of the foreigners who invaded his home in the 1940s, and massacred his kin and are continuing to increase the bloody settlement of his land...

From your post, I'm fairly confident that you are young enough to not have visceral memories of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis .

Look at the picture of that line for gas on that web page. I can assure you that that was not an anomaly. It looked like that all over the country. There were probably cars in that gas line which did not fit into the picture. Those cars I'm sure were moving very slowly. At some point the gas station would run out of gas. Then cars would race to the next gas station.

Americans are used to turning on the water faucet, and always having warm, clean water come out of it. They are used to flipping a light on, and if the switch is not flipped again, that bulb burning for weeks on end until it burns out. Once you travel outside the US, especially if it is not somewhere like western Europe or Japan, you begin to see that this is not the case in much of the world. And I'm not talking about the poorest slum in Bangladesh or deep in the Amazon, I'm talking in large cities, in locally middle class surroundings in much of the world. It gives one perspective on such things. Warm, clean water does not consistently pour out of faucets by magic, it requires an infrastructure which a great deal of the world does not have. In the same manner, political troubles, wars, natural disasters and the like have a way of stopping oil shipments. It is not until this stops unexpectedly that most people realize the fragility of such things.

Engineers are underpaid. It is obvious to all of us in this respect. I'm not going to get paid $120k a year, unless my being there is generating $130k, or $140k, or more for the company. They're not hiring me to lose money. This is obvious.

As to your theoretical example of starting a company, here is where that falls apart logically. Several hundred families own trillions in capital. They make 20% a year profit on each engineer they employ. Say I own $50 million. I am a nice guy, so I only make 15% a year profit off each engineer, and give the engineers the other 5%.

Several things arise from this. For one, the dozens of people I employ are only a drop in the bucket to everyone else. So the dent in the whole economy is negligible. More importantly, my already relatively small pile of money is growing slower than everyone else's. Compound returns and all that. Now they get even more economies of scale. I can't even maintain my small niche, my small piece of the economy becomes ever smaller over time.

I don't want to go into every detail of your messages...anti-competitive? Look into the documents on the anti-poaching case which has hit Apple, Google, Intel etc. Also, there's a well known way for companies to make excessive profits - monopoly. Something the government is currently investigating in the case of Google.