Why do people post and upvote webpages that are behind a paywall? I wish there was a “no paywall or gdpr wall” rule for hackernews, or at least a [paywall] “flair”-like thing so I don’t have to waste time loading the page.
1 point by wanderingstan 0 minutes ago | edit | delete [-]
I concur. It's hard to have a discussion about an article that only a few people can read. The flair idea is a good one. We already require post titles on old articles to contain the year, seems natural to require disclaimers of paywalls.
What I want is the ability to screen out paywall content just like I can screen out shadowbanned people. If someone wants to see paywalled content, then they could just turn it on.
Best idea is if someone who can read it copies and pastes it into several pastebin, dpaste, bpaste, etc. sites and links them in the comments. By the time DMCA hits the paste sites it'll be a few days later and everyone on HN will have read it.
Make your mind up HN, one minute it's "I hate all advertising and would be more than willing to pay for content if only I had the option" and the next it's "ban anything that's behind a paywall". ;)
Paywalled, but the taster paragraph gives a strong hint:
> Near the end of 2006 Mitch Daniels, then governor of Indiana, announced a plan to give the state's “neediest people a better chance to escape welfare for the world of work and dignity.” He signed a $1.16-billion contract with a consortium of companies, including IBM, that would automate and privatize eligibility processes for Indiana's welfare programs.
- Means testing frequently makes things worse, regardless of "algorithm"
- If you want to relieve poverty, don't give huge amounts of money to multinational mediocre consulting firms
The suffering classes, although having the greatest claim [to public welfare], will not always have the greatest success [to access it].
I think this is optimistic even. At some point one evolves into a society where what determines wealth is one's aptitude at obtaining social benefit. On the high end, say, a CEO of a defense contractor like Lockheed Martin or Airbus (or more disgustingly American Shipbuilding, which billed for ships it never built) and on the far end, say a veteran suffering from paranoia and PTSD that refuses to obtain government help for, understandable reasons.
The same goes for foreign aid. There is definitely immediate help warranted in the case natural disasters, and the outbreaks of war, and some longer-term help when displaced people are unable to return to their homes. However, a lot of foreign aid ends up being cases where taxpayers fund questionable projects spearheaded by politicians and run by multinationals, consultants, and contractors with dismal results. The main cause I see is that the local population being helped often has poor or skewed representation as a stakeholder in the decision-making process such that the outcome becomes unhelpful or doomed.
They say 90-95% of the aid contribution generally ends everywhere but the actual people in need. Most go to management of those aid orgs. Somebody please explain to me why the heck most of them need to have huge offices/HQ in Geneva, one of the most expensive places to live in whole world, having huge apartments/houses for free etc. If you want to help like that, first thing I would expect is to be frugal. Rest goes to bribes, corrupt local politicians/gangsters and so on.
I only contribute to Amnesty International, but that's my personal choice (and they are in Geneva too...)
USAID is also used as a foreign policy tool to pressure poor countries to adopt pro US stances. Happened to us in ZA but I believe we refused to comply with DJT’s new requirements and now no longer benefit from USAID
Means-testing has been around since the 70s or so, and it basically produces crap incentives.
What works somewhat better is to condition cash payments on some simple and verifiable prosocial behavior, such as keeping your kids in school with passing grade.
I question that this was "designed to fight poverty". It looks much more like it was designed to give money to powerful corporations with the claim that it will fight poverty tacked on to make it politically palatable.
Next time the politician reminds you you’re are under attack from those on welfare, think about the problems of the highly profitable businesses that administer it. 1 for you, and, 2 for me.
The only "algorithm" proven to fight poverty was discovered a long time ago and its really simple:
1. good jobs paying living wages (so parents have economic security)
2. decent, free education (so the children can have a future)
3. Well funded social welfare (because shit happens and people get sick)
Aka, "social mobility"
$1.16 billion is a lot of money to give to companies when it could pay for a good number of other things.
Usually the ruling class wants the masses to be content with whatever their predicament is. That's why the focus is always on making subsisting at your present level bearable (social safety nets, minimum wage, etc) and not on mobility.
Edit: I don't literally believe this. I'm just saying that most people who have made it are not interested in everyone else making it to their level (that would be impossible, economics aren't zero sum but we can't all be Bill Gates). They're interested in making everyone else content.
Usually the "ruling class" does not actually think of itself as the "ruling class". And even those that do consider their success correlated with that of the society they life in.
Just about nobody gets far in capitalism subscribing to the the sort of zero-sum theory you allude to[1]. And even if: it'd be idiotic for them to base their decisions on such a theory, considering the "ruling class" tends to be rather old, while social mobility only has effects over several generations.
If you require empirical proof, look no further than the super-rich' historically preferred mode of philanthropy: the scholarship.
Scholarships are pure social mobility: take promising young people with limited means and allow them to attend elite schools. Surely the Rhodes Scholarship, Gates Scholarship, Schwarzman Scholarship, New York Times Scholarship, or any of the thousands of these programs would not exist in the cynical world you describe.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzman_Scholars
[1]: I had a quip about current presidents being the exception here. But as it turns out, the Miss America Scholarship is among the largest in the US.
I actually think that the economy is sort of a zerosum game. I think previous economists upon whom we base these ideas subconciously bought into the idea that resources are practically unilimited. And until now we have managed to get everything we need from the earth and the sun. But I think that the limits are aproaching quickly and even things like becoming multiplanetary will not fix things in the short run. It might save is when the third world war breaks loose. Which is innevitability to me, because of the depleting resources. De west VS the east. Technologically the east will first catch up, but the power won't be yielded so easily by the west. Russia and China know this.
> Usually the ruling class wants the masses to be content with whatever their predicament is.
That conspiracy theory is immaterial to the discussion. The point is that social mobility and poverty are orthogonal concepts. You can have zero poverty but no social mobility, or high poverty and high social mobility. To put it differently, the reason why being born in a middle class family is a strong indicator that an individual will live a middle class life, with a low probability of becoming either upper class or lowe class, is not poverty.
> I'm just saying that most people who have made it are not interested in everyone else making it to their level (that would be impossible, economics aren't zero sum but we can't all be Bill Gates). They're interested in making everyone else content.
The assertion about "not being interested" is meaningless. I'm not interested in anyone winning the lottery, but that does not mean I don't want anyone to win or even that I intend to take any sort of action to stop anyone from ever having a chance of winning a prize. It just mean that I don't spend any time thinking about others winning lotteries because I have far more interesting and engaging things to do.
That's what we all do.
How much time do we collectively spend doing anything to actually tackle a hard problem such as hunger and war? Is that an indicator we want everyone to die from a combination of starvation and violence? Of course not. So, why is this vague notion of caring about somethong being conflated with being actively engaged in causing a problem?
I suspect one could find data that would say if you can receive an education, health care, and have supportive work, then at some point you don't need to be "rich" to be content with life. Thus social mobility is moot. Compare to the US, where the base quality of life difference is considerable between median income earners and the top ten %, to say nothing of the top 1%.
You forgot accessible healthcare, if unchecked it will result in clusterf*ck you can see in US. Even relatively well-off can be one rare long term sickness away from bankruptcy.
It doesn't have to be completely free, but set in a way that motivates people take care of their health, requires them participate a bit to not overwhelm the system with their petty/untreatable issues, but not ruin them.
Just say free. Say subsidized. Say something less meaningless than accessible. Technically in the USA healthcare is 'accessible' right now. Problem is after I access it I can't pay for it.
Can assure you I didn't! "because shit happens and people get sick)" - indeed a national health service which is free at the point of use is fundamental to eradicating poverty.
As someone who's family has benefited (and pays for via taxes) from a well funded national health service I believe it represents significant progress in a nation's development.
>Social mobility requires a lot of work and money and time.
I think you're conflating social mobility with income growth. all social mobility means is how easy it is to change your social status in terms of wealth. while it's true that randomly redistributing wealth will disincentivise hard work, it doesn't matter because the shuffling will still change everybody's social status.
"How would you get a mortgage on a house, or save for your kids' education if any wealth you accrue risks getting re-allocated?"
I think that's a legitimately interesting question.
Maybe the actors in that situation would attempt to build systems that don't rely on having outcomes based on individuals accruing wealth for themselves, but instead on collective assets that everyone has access to at all times.
Pragmatically, yeah, there are all kinds of problems with this concept, but for me your question does more to make radical, frequent, and random wealth reallocation interesting than it does to point out a flaw with the idea.
I wonder what the behavior would be, and all the loopholes, and how that would be if say one year you were a billionaire, the next not.... I'm guessing if you couldn't just buy stuff and take it with you to the next year everyone would just be buying experiences or something?
Interestingly enough, most people continue to work despite the fact that a simple mishap or bout with illness for themselves or a loved one can (and does) wipe out everything they've earned working.
It's been ~10 years since I looked at the numbers, but I remember it being something like 30% of bankruptcy filings are due to medical issues and associated costs.
Maybe systemetizing it a priori would have a different impact on people's perception about the mechanism though?
I've seen higher numbers elsewhere, something like 60+%, though I'm not sure where it stands with the 2008 housing crash. What's more concerning is that most people with medical bankruptcies had health insurance at the time they initially got sick. This bit[1] from the 2009 in the NYT says 3/4 had health insurance, but I just remember reading it was more than half in the last few years.
I'd certainly imagine a lot of people would resent having a person take away their stuff more than luck/nature doing so. If someone stole my phone, I'd be angrier than if it had fallen out of my hand and off a cliff; if someone stabbed me in the heart, I'd be angrier and more likely to entertain fantasies of revenge than if I had a heart attack.
Also, ceteris paribus, if you get ill and you've worked harder, you'll have more resources to help yourself, so you'll be less likely to be broke by the end of it. Under this system, how hard you worked doesn't increase your expected amount of money next year.
Also, all the rich would immediately flee the country.
I'm not sure if this is comparable but I feel like lots of people already live something like this. My visa has only been approved 1 year at a time. Each year about 3-4 months before I have to renew it I start to worry that it might not be renewed and end up postponing all major plans until it gets renewed. Last year wanted to move apartments before I had to renew my lease but didn't do it because I wasn't sure my visa would get renewed. Even if I had tried landlords might have looked at my expiration date and said "no". Similarly I planned to rent a new office/cube in a co-working space but needed to wait until after my visa was renewed.
Can you support your claim with some logic? If I worked hard for a decade and saved a million dollars and it gets reallocated this year, what is the motivation for me to work anymore? On the other end, if I spent a decade playing video games/sleeping and suddenly find myself with a bunch of money, what is the motivation for me to work?
That was true in the 50s/60s, but times change. Poverty today is triggered by a great many things. Today, a health crisis can destroy anyone's savings. A decent living wage means nothing should you or a member of your family get cancer. Either your have to sink all your savings into treatment and associated support or you have to stop work to take care of them yourself, mooting the wage issue. Retirement is also different today. With interest rates essentially zero, a decent wage during working years cannot provide sufficient savings for a multi-decade retirement. So people need either good pensions or ample investment opportunities. Today that is being funded by real estate but that cannot last forever.
Looking at someone's entire life and the likelihood that they will suffer poverty, their working wage is only one of many factors.
Very true, but I listed three points, the third one being a well funded social welfare system. As you say people suffer disaster - work place accidents, chronic health care problems, unemployment through no fault of their own.
You need well paying jobs, low unemployment, and a social safety net for economic security.
> The systems analysis community has a lot of lore about leverage points. Those of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have all absorbed one of his favorite stories. “People know intuitively where leverage points are,” he says. “Time after time I’ve done an analysis of a company, and I’ve figured out a leverage point — in inventory policy, maybe, or in the relationship between sales force and productive force, or in personnel policy. Then I’ve gone to the company and discovered that there’s already a lot of attention to that point. Everyone is trying very hard to push it IN THE WRONG DIRECTION!”
The author of this article is Virginia Eubanks [1], who has studied and written on this topic extensively, including a new book whose short title is 'Automating Inequality'. Although I can't be sure, I think it's reasonable to assume that the content in this article is along the lines expressed in this CityLab interview [2], and other media coverage the author highlights [3].
Eubanks presents the impact that rigid, opaque systems and processes can have on individuals, and does so by focusing on troubling policy implications, but also by highlighting the suffering experienced by named individuals whose unique personal circumstances are examined. This is not only an effective writing device, but also demonstrates the empathy gap of software, and how an impersonal process -- whether intentionally or not -- serves as a tool for bureaucrats and low-level decision-makers to offload difficult negative decisions to an amorphous entity like 'the process'. I feel that this is a key, if not always overt motivation of most bureaucracies, and has universal applicability.
There's also the notion that when ML is fed with raw data, it picks up correlations present in the data regardless of whether their presence is due to a lurking variable. Later, making use of such a model for decision-making perpetuates the bias, and a haphazardly chained sequence of such processes increases the likelihood that a cohort's observed outcomes will self-fulfill in the future. Conversation on this matter in recent years has tended towards the social justice implications more so than the lack of intellectual rigor that allows this to be possible -- the former is a compelling point, but it's unfortunate that there's not enough coverage of about the harm of giving complex tools to those who don't understand them.
This is a great summary, and that Citylab piece is well worth checking out.
I'm sometimes skeptical of human-narrative analyses, because they make it easy to launch equally-vivid attacks on a plan that fails 10 people and a plan that fails 10,000. But with rigor behind them, there's a lot to be said for them as existence proofs - especially when we're talking about the margins of a plan instead of its core. Knowing what the edge cases look like matters, and for that it's hard to beat talking to individuals with problems that don't fit on a form.
(As an aside, I think software often creates not only an empathy gap but a mechanical one. An analog system can often be forced to accommodate oddities like self-employment and unconventional address formats, but "the computer won't let me enter that address" is a brick wall. I've never found an investigation of this, but I suspect it's a major drawback of digitization.)
Your final point about ML is a vital one, and one I'm endlessly frustrated by. We're increasingly aware of issues like racial bias in parole-predictions systems, but there's alarmingly little focus on the fact that a system which does that is flawed in general, and might be making the same assumptions about e.g. low-income neighborhoods without anyone noticing. Unlike human bias, a flawed algorithm is equally happy to abuse any strange correlation it can find.
Err, so, this paywalled article is about how a Republican governor who ran on a platform of cutting welfare in the state of Indiana brought in some "algorithms", some "computers" of some sort, that ended up giving a lot of money to private companies, slashing welfare, and making people more poor?
68 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadbecause it's explicitly allowed by the rules. I like your flair idea though, seems like a nice middle ground.
I concur. It's hard to have a discussion about an article that only a few people can read. The flair idea is a good one. We already require post titles on old articles to contain the year, seems natural to require disclaimers of paywalls.
> Near the end of 2006 Mitch Daniels, then governor of Indiana, announced a plan to give the state's “neediest people a better chance to escape welfare for the world of work and dignity.” He signed a $1.16-billion contract with a consortium of companies, including IBM, that would automate and privatize eligibility processes for Indiana's welfare programs.
- Means testing frequently makes things worse, regardless of "algorithm"
- If you want to relieve poverty, don't give huge amounts of money to multinational mediocre consulting firms
I think this is optimistic even. At some point one evolves into a society where what determines wealth is one's aptitude at obtaining social benefit. On the high end, say, a CEO of a defense contractor like Lockheed Martin or Airbus (or more disgustingly American Shipbuilding, which billed for ships it never built) and on the far end, say a veteran suffering from paranoia and PTSD that refuses to obtain government help for, understandable reasons.
I only contribute to Amnesty International, but that's my personal choice (and they are in Geneva too...)
What works somewhat better is to condition cash payments on some simple and verifiable prosocial behavior, such as keeping your kids in school with passing grade.
Aka, "social mobility"
$1.16 billion is a lot of money to give to companies when it could pay for a good number of other things.
Edit: I don't literally believe this. I'm just saying that most people who have made it are not interested in everyone else making it to their level (that would be impossible, economics aren't zero sum but we can't all be Bill Gates). They're interested in making everyone else content.
Just about nobody gets far in capitalism subscribing to the the sort of zero-sum theory you allude to[1]. And even if: it'd be idiotic for them to base their decisions on such a theory, considering the "ruling class" tends to be rather old, while social mobility only has effects over several generations.
If you require empirical proof, look no further than the super-rich' historically preferred mode of philanthropy: the scholarship.
Scholarships are pure social mobility: take promising young people with limited means and allow them to attend elite schools. Surely the Rhodes Scholarship, Gates Scholarship, Schwarzman Scholarship, New York Times Scholarship, or any of the thousands of these programs would not exist in the cynical world you describe.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzman_Scholars [1]: I had a quip about current presidents being the exception here. But as it turns out, the Miss America Scholarship is among the largest in the US.
That conspiracy theory is immaterial to the discussion. The point is that social mobility and poverty are orthogonal concepts. You can have zero poverty but no social mobility, or high poverty and high social mobility. To put it differently, the reason why being born in a middle class family is a strong indicator that an individual will live a middle class life, with a low probability of becoming either upper class or lowe class, is not poverty.
> I'm just saying that most people who have made it are not interested in everyone else making it to their level (that would be impossible, economics aren't zero sum but we can't all be Bill Gates). They're interested in making everyone else content.
The assertion about "not being interested" is meaningless. I'm not interested in anyone winning the lottery, but that does not mean I don't want anyone to win or even that I intend to take any sort of action to stop anyone from ever having a chance of winning a prize. It just mean that I don't spend any time thinking about others winning lotteries because I have far more interesting and engaging things to do.
That's what we all do.
How much time do we collectively spend doing anything to actually tackle a hard problem such as hunger and war? Is that an indicator we want everyone to die from a combination of starvation and violence? Of course not. So, why is this vague notion of caring about somethong being conflated with being actively engaged in causing a problem?
It doesn't have to be completely free, but set in a way that motivates people take care of their health, requires them participate a bit to not overwhelm the system with their petty/untreatable issues, but not ruin them.
Just say free. Say subsidized. Say something less meaningless than accessible. Technically in the USA healthcare is 'accessible' right now. Problem is after I access it I can't pay for it.
As someone who's family has benefited (and pays for via taxes) from a well funded national health service I believe it represents significant progress in a nation's development.
How would you get a mortgage on a house, or save for your kids' education if any wealth you accrue risks getting re-allocated?
(Guess it depends on your value of X)
I think you're conflating social mobility with income growth. all social mobility means is how easy it is to change your social status in terms of wealth. while it's true that randomly redistributing wealth will disincentivise hard work, it doesn't matter because the shuffling will still change everybody's social status.
Otherwise the work, money, and time are going to be wasted.
As for the second part of your comment - what if you didn't need to go into debt, and education was free?
I think that's a legitimately interesting question.
Maybe the actors in that situation would attempt to build systems that don't rely on having outcomes based on individuals accruing wealth for themselves, but instead on collective assets that everyone has access to at all times.
Pragmatically, yeah, there are all kinds of problems with this concept, but for me your question does more to make radical, frequent, and random wealth reallocation interesting than it does to point out a flaw with the idea.
It's been ~10 years since I looked at the numbers, but I remember it being something like 30% of bankruptcy filings are due to medical issues and associated costs.
Maybe systemetizing it a priori would have a different impact on people's perception about the mechanism though?
According to this https://www.yourmoney.com/credit-cards-loans/living-beyond-m... circa 10% of bankruptcy proceedings were due to ill health.
I don't think much can be drawn from that though as there are too many legal and cultural differences in the application of bankrupsy.
[1]https://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/insured-b...
Also, ceteris paribus, if you get ill and you've worked harder, you'll have more resources to help yourself, so you'll be less likely to be broke by the end of it. Under this system, how hard you worked doesn't increase your expected amount of money next year.
Also, all the rich would immediately flee the country.
I was making a point about social engineering. Similarly: if you optimize for low inequality, you get Cuba.
Looking at someone's entire life and the likelihood that they will suffer poverty, their working wage is only one of many factors.
You need well paying jobs, low unemployment, and a social safety net for economic security.
http://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to...
Eubanks presents the impact that rigid, opaque systems and processes can have on individuals, and does so by focusing on troubling policy implications, but also by highlighting the suffering experienced by named individuals whose unique personal circumstances are examined. This is not only an effective writing device, but also demonstrates the empathy gap of software, and how an impersonal process -- whether intentionally or not -- serves as a tool for bureaucrats and low-level decision-makers to offload difficult negative decisions to an amorphous entity like 'the process'. I feel that this is a key, if not always overt motivation of most bureaucracies, and has universal applicability.
There's also the notion that when ML is fed with raw data, it picks up correlations present in the data regardless of whether their presence is due to a lurking variable. Later, making use of such a model for decision-making perpetuates the bias, and a haphazardly chained sequence of such processes increases the likelihood that a cohort's observed outcomes will self-fulfill in the future. Conversation on this matter in recent years has tended towards the social justice implications more so than the lack of intellectual rigor that allows this to be possible -- the former is a compelling point, but it's unfortunate that there's not enough coverage of about the harm of giving complex tools to those who don't understand them.
[1] https://virginia-eubanks.com/ [2] https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-of-digital-p... [3] https://virginia-eubanks.com/media/
I'm sometimes skeptical of human-narrative analyses, because they make it easy to launch equally-vivid attacks on a plan that fails 10 people and a plan that fails 10,000. But with rigor behind them, there's a lot to be said for them as existence proofs - especially when we're talking about the margins of a plan instead of its core. Knowing what the edge cases look like matters, and for that it's hard to beat talking to individuals with problems that don't fit on a form.
(As an aside, I think software often creates not only an empathy gap but a mechanical one. An analog system can often be forced to accommodate oddities like self-employment and unconventional address formats, but "the computer won't let me enter that address" is a brick wall. I've never found an investigation of this, but I suspect it's a major drawback of digitization.)
Your final point about ML is a vital one, and one I'm endlessly frustrated by. We're increasingly aware of issues like racial bias in parole-predictions systems, but there's alarmingly little focus on the fact that a system which does that is flawed in general, and might be making the same assumptions about e.g. low-income neighborhoods without anyone noticing. Unlike human bias, a flawed algorithm is equally happy to abuse any strange correlation it can find.
And the premise here is that this was unintended?
I think I found the problem: credulous writers.
Another (related) example would be access to mental health resources.
Waiting for someone to hit rock bottom before helping is obviously suboptimal.